The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  In America, spacesuit activity reached a kind of Olympic pinnacle in 1965, as NASA hosted an Apollo competition between three rival manufacturers, including the decidedly non-space-age International Latex Corporation. A veritable track meet, the competition included twenty-two diverse events. How mobile were humans in the suits? How did the suits handle extreme temperatures? Pressures? How exhausted would an astronaut be trying to move within the suit? How easily could an astronaut fold a suit when it wasn’t needed? How wide were the shoulders?

  The helmet popped off one of the suits when it was pressurized. A different suit got stuck in the entrance to an Apollo mock-up craft. At the end of the day, the supple, multi-layered, seamstress-powered suit from the Latex Corporation won twelve of the twenty-two events. NASA officials ranked them in first place, and according to their official report, “there [was] no second place.” The other suits were disqualified.10

  Meanwhile, NASA enjoyed a rare media victory and a spacesuit success as the first American astronaut floated in space that summer.i Much less secretive than the Soviet program, NASA shared live audio of the event, including astronaut voices, with the world. (They did not yet have television cameras in the missions.) The astronaut’s umbilical cord included a little tube for oxygen, a few electrical wires, and a steel cable. Everything held together, and the astronaut described a kind of euphoria. Not needing to move in any specific way, he did not encounter the problems of Leonov.

  On Earth, activity in Houston, Huntsville, and Cape Canaveral reached an absurd pace. Test facilities came online, with varying success, and systems in every case needed debugging.

  One especially ambitious laboratory aimed to create the vacuum and the wild temperatures of space. It’s one thing for scientists to create a Moon-like vacuum within a metallic chamber the size of a kitchen oven—it’s possible but takes weeks of fussing with clamps, cleaning every fingerprint or grease smudge from the chamber, and then patiently finding and fixing the leaks. But NASA’s new environmental chamber held the volume of a gymnasium: a cylindrical chamber over one hundred feet tall and about two hundred feet in circumference. To move spaceships in and out, the chamber featured a front door about forty feet across. When closed, it had to become leak tight. Not only had humankind never built a vacuum chamber so large, with no air leaking in, but engineers also wanted the room to feel the chill of space. The walls of the chamber contained jackets of liquefied helium, just a few degrees above absolute zero. After several years of careful design and construction, the engineers felt confident enough to give the chamber a try in the spring of 1965, and they gradually pumped the air out of it. But well before achieving the vacuum of space, the large door crumpled inward, essentially imploding.11

  Nearby, one of Max Faget’s busy workshops stuck to basics. “We had this damned plywood mock-up [of the Apollo’s main command module] sitting there in the shop, and it had a door that would open and a mattress on the floor,” said Faget’s longtime collaborator Caldwell Johnson. They were testing practical matters. For instance, could an astronaut actually crawl out of this Apollo craft if need be? A volunteer tried climbing from the cone-shaped wooden model of a space ship, while engineers took notes and timed him. “Well, it was made out of three-quarter-inch plywood, and you know how the edges were,” said Johnson. “And that guy was blood from bottom to top at times. . . . [H]e’d banged against the side and missed the mattress and done all these things and skinned up [both] arms. They’d say, ‘Just one more time, John, and let’s try it this way.’ ”12

  But Apollo wasn’t the only game in town. The space program’s second phase, a kind of interstitial program to work out the kinks of spaceflight, shifted into full speed, aiming for a mission every other month. The engineers express a surprising range of feelings on Gemini. Some detractors believed it stretched NASA too thin or was simply a ploy to stay in the headlines while Apollo preparations progressed behind the scenes. Others saw it as absolutely necessary, teaching an adolescent agency critical lessons on life in space.

  Marlowe Cassetti found himself straddling two programs at once. In his first years in Houston, he’d gone from a man in his late twenties managing six older engineers to the leader of about thirty-five, including at least a few new hires mercifully younger than him. Now NASA charged him with both helping guide Gemini launches from the Cape and leading a team in planning trajectories for Apollo test missions. As he routinely abandoned his Houston team to attend launches at the Cape, he had a difficult time keeping both programs happy. “I was getting a lot of heat,” he says, “because I was spending so much time on Gemini.” Some engineers didn’t try to hide their competitive feelings. Cassetti was initially surprised to hear a Gemini colleague claim, “We’re going to beat Apollo to the Moon.” He describes a “fall-back position” that his colleagues wanted to present to NASA leadership: If Apollo kept falling behind schedule, their two-seater Gemini craft could find a way to take a spin around the Moon, even if it couldn’t land.13

  One of Gemini’s more accepted goals involved testing a human’s ability to stay in space for increasingly long stretches. In 1965, NASA finally felt comfortable enough to move forward with longer manned missions in orbit thanks to a more obscure project called Pegasus.

  Apart from whether the human body could withstand so much time away from Earth, scientists had another significant worry. Small, undetectable space pebbles, moving tens of thousands of miles per hour, could potentially perforate the hull of NASA’s spaceships. The transplanted German physicist Ernst Stuhlinger recalled that “von Braun told me one day we should know more about the meteorites in orbit. . . . Do we have to expect hits and damage? How many are there, and how big are they?” Stuhlinger’s small team had set out to find answers and devised the Pegasus satellite. “Pegasus was a winged system,” he said. “And these wings were only sensors for meteorites.” (See Figure 8.3.)

  figure 8.3 Personnel test the Pegasus micrometeoroid detector array, which unfurled to a width of ninety-six feet in space. (NASA photograph.)

  Stuhlinger had worked with von Braun from the early V-2 days and provided a leading light for pure space science in Huntsville. Beyond his many contributions to Apollo and several unmanned programs, he toured the country to talk with astronomers about the idea of observing the universe from the open clarity of orbit, laying the groundwork for the eventual Hubble Space Telescope.

  In Pegasus, Stuhlinger’s team created a micrometeor detector of beautiful simplicity. The wings were sandwiches: two sheets of thin metal separated by a non-metallic layer that could not pass electricity. When struck by a speeding space pebble, the incredible momentary heat briefly created a pocket of hot gaseous leftovers amenable to electric current.ii For less than one-millionth of a second, the two layers of metal could communicate, and the satellite would record this blip. Once the gas quickly dispersed, the two sheets of metal went back to chilly separation, awaiting the next impact. The size of the electrical discharge in each impact directly described the size of the meteor.

  The large, unfolded wings of Pegasus, with more than fifty times the profile of an Apollo mission, recorded only seventy impacts in three months, and the vast majority were not of a size that would threaten Apollo. By 1965, NASA could cross the hurtling-space-gravel worry off its list, and Gemini moved full steam ahead.14

  They decided that the fifth Gemini flight would aim for an unprecedented week in space. Engineers could test an astronaut’s ability to endure the time needed for a full Moon mission, but America could also gain bragging rights over the Soviets in the space duration category. In the end, this mission demonstrated that all of NASA had significant work to do, with only half a decade to go. First, the launch experienced a version of the “pogo” stuttering so severe that the astronauts briefly lost their vision. Once in orbit, the mission tested a newer technology: Fuel cells combined oxygen and hydrogen, liberating energy and creating clean water as a byproduct. But on this trip, the fuel cells hummed along too efficiently
and the astronauts had more water than they could drink. Soon, they started filling plastic bags with all the extra water, which littered the spacecraft’s cabin, floating about like so many carnival bags missing their goldfish.

  Next, the ship’s planned maneuvers in orbit became impossible, as first one and then other little thrusters malfunctioned. Instead of running through a series of tests to alter their orbit, the astronauts had to float idly in space, letting their ship just drift and slowly tumble along its original path.

  Even the mission planners and data analysts contributed problems. When coming in for landing, the Gemini capsule badly missed its intended ocean target, splashing down well short of the recovery ships. Why? A clutch of mortified engineers confessed: In calculating the ship’s path back to Earth, they had neglected to account for Earth’s continued spinning as the capsule descended.15

  But “Gemini V” was far from a disaster, and America finally held a temporary space record: the longest manned mission, at nearly eight days. NASA recovered their astronauts, and doctors vented a long sigh of relief when the astronauts’ bodies still functioned. Some had wondered if so many hours in weightless orbit would be too much for a body evolved for the constant pull of gravity; they even worried that the astronauts might collapse and die upon their return. Doctors had already noted that astronauts came back to Earth with higher heart rates and lower blood pressure. So, they were ready to give CPR to astronauts in the rescue rafts that plucked them from their capsule. None of that was necessary. The astronauts were a little wobbly and a little smelly but otherwise fine.16

  At the same time, a key NASA engineer and manager graced the cover of Time magazine in a dramatically painted portrait. Christopher Kraft had become a minor NASA celebrity, especially rare for a non-astronaut. He and his team in the Mission Control center were now familiar to Americans. Kraft had been part of the program since the beginning at Langley, and in the earliest days, he had led the dreaming, design, and eventual function of the control center. America seemed to eat it up: the banks of lights, phones, and monitors; white-shirted engineers absorbing data, finding patterns, and debugging the unexpected; the key decisions made and distributed in a complex, ever-changing environment.

  The Austrian Henry Koerner painted Kraft’s face in wide strokes and many shades of beige. In one sense, the portrait actually spoke to a deep truth of NASA at the time: homogeneity. Most of agency looked a whole lot like Kraft. From Faget and von Braun to Pohl, Cassetti, and Brown, NASA had grown quickly from deep 1950s roots as masculine as they were white.

  Those hiring and filling the ranks probably had little intent to keep replicating themselves. The educational pipeline for young scientists, mathematicians, and engineers had filtered the applicants before they showed up to interviews. For women and people of color, technical education included extra hurdles beyond equations and circuits.

  Later in the Apollo era, my father hired a skilled young engineer named Cynthia Wells. But in 1965, she was surviving life in a large lecture hall of fellow students. “I was the only female in the engineering majors,” she says. In an advanced calculus class, her professor often addressed her directly. “They think the females are less bright. He would ask, ‘What don’t you understand today?’ ” The professor calibrated his course by measuring her: Surely if she understood it, all the men had mastered it as well. Or, more charitably, perhaps he also noted a fearless confidence in Wells. In any case, his routine became something of a joke among the students. Wells aced her classes, and in the moments before that calculus class, desperate boys would beg her to ask their questions.

  When she eventually started her twenty-year run at NASA, she felt “protected” by her male colleagues and even enjoyed the added attention of being the only woman in many of her meetings. She recalls being deployed strategically for certain negotiations, where rival engineers—from Huntsville, for instance—would grill her less harshly than they would have a male colleague. In the end, was she one of the guys? Not exactly. “My husband did stuff with them,” she says, speaking of softball games and after-work bottles of Lone Star beer. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed that stuff anyway.”17

  Many pioneering female and minority engineers of this generation emphasize the positive at NASA. Retired engineer Wesley Ratcliff says he definitely benefited from 1964’s Civil Rights Act. “Being African American and a male,” he says, “I had a lot of companies that were in interested in me.” A 1965 interview at NASA impressed him; he spoke at length with three very different groups, and he was especially drawn to the idea of rendezvous, directing one spaceship to grab another while damaging neither.

  Born and raised in a poor town in the piney woods north of Houston, he recalls the generosity of a white rancher who’d hired him during the summers, helping Ratcliff earn a little money. And he still appreciates the efforts of his high school physics teacher in their segregated school. When Sputnik went up, the teacher set aside his lesson plans and taught the students how the satellite worked, and when America later got Explorer 1 into orbit, the teacher spent another class going over the differences between the two satellites. This kept a keen boy’s mind simmering.

  Ratcliff’s friends and family encouraged him to go into medicine in college. “But I didn’t get past the frogs,” he says. “I didn’t care what was in there next to what.” He opted for something different. “In physics, I didn’t have to memorize what went where. I could prove things. Could move this equation over here, and boom—it works out.” He earned a physics degree from Prairie View A&M, a historically black college, and as an ROTC student, he followed graduation with four years in the army. He emerged in 1965—just in time for the new affirmative action policies—and he accepted the offer from NASA.

  With no complaints, Ratcliff straightforwardly describes the bias he encountered. Many engineers assumed he couldn’t do the work. “You had to prove yourself, and that’s what I did, frequently.” He fondly recalls one colleague who gave him the benefit of the doubt from his first day forward. “Immediately,” he says, emphasizing each syllable. “That makes a big difference.” As an employee in the math-heavy mission planning efforts, he once helped a fellow engineer correct some orbital calculations on a chalkboard—they worked for most of an entire day together. “Where did you learn that?” his white colleague asked.

  “I went to A&M too,” Ratcliff replied. “Just not your A&M.” In the retelling, he makes sure to add that “we went on to be good friends.”

  Ratcliff stayed on through the bulk of the Apollo program and now credits NASA for his own growth. “Those years gave me—how do I want to say it . . . the knowledge that I wasn’t as stupid and dumb as I thought I was.” He faced the bias and the occasional, offensive “vernacular” but the organization focused on solutions, and in what he calls his “small way,” he owned and solved a series of problems.18

  While Ratcliff, my father, and others busily computed trajectories, orbits, safety parameters, and fuel supplies, others in Houston tried to simulate two colliding spacecraft that could somehow dock with one another. Since Phase II of manned spaceflight sought to prove that a rendezvous could work in space, engineers built a docking dress rehearsal that greatly improved on the ice-rink version. They designed a full-scale simulation, with all possible motions and rotations, for the lunar lander and the main Apollo spaceship, the ones that would need to come apart and then dock again while orbiting the Moon. NASA contracted a machine company from Pennsylvania. “They were noted for bowling alleys, for having the equipment to set the pins,” engineer Tom Moser recalls. “They had that kind of robotic capability.” Instead of having full models of the lander and the Apollo module, this replica would just have the pieces from each ship that would have to mate for successful docking—one would have a “probe,” the more male part by analogy, and the other had a “drogue,” the more female part. Computers would eventually control both of the dancing pieces, running various speeds and angles to see when exactly the probe and the d
rogue could come together and mate versus when they would bounce away, thwarted by geometry or physics.

  Engineers eventually had the parts moving through the large vacuum chamber, using a choreographed ballet of hydraulic pistons and servo motors to practice the motions of ships circling the Moon. These trials included the temperatures and pressures of outer space. But the intense vacuum introduced new problems. Most materials in low pressures tend to “outgas,” or slowly release loose atoms. As materials outgas, they essentially ruin the vacuum, since the chamber always has an “atmosphere” of these pollutants seeping from the materials. (It’s a common problem for any scientist using a vacuum system.) Stainless steel offers one of the few surfaces that does not outgas much. “The test device—it was huge—it was mounted on a stainless-steel plate,” Moser says. “It was the largest stainless steel plate ever produced because you put the whole thing in the vacuum chamber.” How big? “Five inches thick, and fifteen feet by ten to twelve feet wide probably.”19

  To prove this joining could work in space, however, NASA had an even larger problem. Could they really persuade two ships, launched separately and moving at tens of thousands of miles per hour, to achieve nearly the same orbit and then to have them gently approach one another? Rendezvous requires three things.iii First, the two ships must maneuver to be perfectly “coplanar,” or orbiting within the same mathematical plane. Picture cutting a globe in half and inserting a wide, stiff piece of paper between the two halves. A satellite orbiting Earth will move in a loop that you could draw on such a sheet (or plane). But we could have chosen an infinite number of ways to make that original slice of the globe. The paper could have bisected the North and South Poles, or it could have cut through the equator, or it could have come through at any particular angle, like one including Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean and Botswana in southern Africa.