The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  This mission easily marked NASA’s worst emergency in space yet. Engineers subsequently diagnosed the cause: after suffering an electrical short-circuit, a thruster found itself permanently in the “on” position. Without a symmetric thruster fighting it, the broken one madly increased the spin of the ship.

  “I was surprised at that one,” Pohl said. “Back in that day and time, our transistors weren’t very good.” He still recalls the diagnosis, stepping through how a crack allowed some of the caustic, hypergolic fuel to leak into the electronics, causing the short-circuit. Engineers working in Henry Pohl’s group redesigned the electrical connections so that any future short-circuit would leave a thruster set to “off.”17 But those thrusters had another problem lurking, as yet unfound, and this one could destroy spacecraft in an instant.

  By 1966, Pohl managed an increasing number of people and projects. He recalls when Max Faget’s right-hand man approached him about increasing his responsibilities. “I said, . . . ‘I don’t know how to manage people,’ and he said, ‘Yes you do. I have been watching you.’ ” Now Pohl oversaw several systems on each module for the Apollo program and he’d also taken on problem areas of the more immediate Gemini program, like the thrusters.

  The hours were incredibly long, and Henry never got to spend the time on his parents’ south Texas ranch that he’d planned. He recalls evening work dinners with engineers from various companies charged with perfecting different hunks of the spacecraft. “I could learn more over the dinner meal than I could all day in those formal meetings,” he said. The engineers left decorum at their offices and started solving problems on napkins. “We always had Happy Hour before dinner.” Most of the assembled opted for cocktails or beer, but not Pohl. “I would order a big glass of half and half. That was half coffee cream and half milk, because I wanted to keep my brain clear, and we would discuss the problems.”18

  Pohl, over several interviews, returned to a 1966 test again and again. “The one that really haunted me,” he said. “I still shudder when I think about it. That almost got by.” At issue were some titanium tanks that, much like a gas tank in a car, stored an explosive fuel for the Apollo control thrusters (and those for the Gemini capsule as well). These tanks were modest cylinders, about half the size of your arm. Pohl’s team ran a long duration test for three of the tanks filled with pressurized fuel and placed in a vacuum chamber. “Twenty-eight days in to that thirty-day test, one of those tanks developed just a little leak,” he said. “It was just bubbling out a little bit through a crack.” It didn’t seem like a disaster. The tank manufacturer quickly diagnosed it; one of their workers hadn’t been using gloves, and they believed the natural oil of his fingerprint led to a chemical reaction inside the titanium tank. Pohl was satisfied, but two of his youngest engineers kept coming to see him. They told him the company had to be wrong—there was no way a fingerprint caused it.

  “Why not?”

  “It would take a monkey to get his hand in there!” they said. The tanks were too small to have a human hand working inside them.

  Pohl initially told them to calm down. They had a million things to worry about and the tank explanation looked good enough; the company building it had the right expertise. But the junior engineers wouldn’t let it go, and finally Pohl asked the tank maker for further tests. The company collectively rolled their eyes, but they wanted to keep Pohl and NASA happy. This time, they ran ten of their fuel tanks, under vacuum, for a long test. And their workers used gloves throughout the construction of those tanks.

  “I think about seventy-two hours into the test, one of those tanks . . . just busted wide open,” Pohl said. They had their answer now—there was a major problem. They called off the test, but “before we could get the pressure down . . . two more of them blew up. That was three out of the ten.” In an actual Apollo mission, seventy-two hours would have had the spacecraft sidling up to the Moon. If Pohl had not ordered the extra test, one of those tanks probably would have killed three astronauts. That he almost didn’t listen to his junior engineers still troubles him.

  The actual cause of the problem was an obscure and cruel trick of chemistry. The fuel producer had innovated a new processing step to make the fuel incredibly uniform and, ideally, more reliable—each ounce would be like the one before. But the process left excess hydrogen dissolved in the mix, which in turn degraded the titanium tanks.

  This very technical example is illustrative of two things one encounters over and over in talking with Apollo engineers. First, they still feel deep responsibility for their parts of the missions and suffer the mistakes or near misses fifty years later. Next, the culture, by all accounts, encouraged anyone of any rank to speak up if they saw a problem or had a different take for improving the project. As one engineer put it, they were all equals at some basic intellectual level: “If you could communicate it, then that day you wore a suit and you presented it.”19

  While no fuel tanks blew apart in space, America’s second spacewalk nearly claimed a life that summer. Unlike its first spacewalk, which amounted to blissful floating, NASA now asked an astronaut to work: to exit the capsule, climb to the back of the craft, adjust a few instruments, and then clamber slowly back to safety. Simple. But (as the Soviets had already learned and kept to themselves) the pressurized suit became a rigid balloon once in space. The astronaut later compared it to hardened plaster of Paris. “It did not want to bend at all, anywhere.” Every movement took Herculean effort. His heart rate leapt, he soaked his inner clothing with sweat, and his quickening breath fogged his facemask. He floated as if mummified, blind and clawing at the Gemini capsule’s hull. When he yanked on his umbilical tether, it started a horrible physics experiment. Instead of just pulling him toward the ship, it caused him to start spinning, and the tug started the spacecraft slowly tumbling as well.

  The astronaut, with his last energies, somehow made it back into the capsule with the help of his fellow astronaut.v He later compared it to “putting a champagne cork back in the bottle.” He’d lost over twelve pounds in two hours of exhausting space activity, mainly trying to bend the fingers, elbows, and knees of his suit. His visor was completely fogged over, and pints of sweat sloshed around in his suit. He told his fellow astronaut that his back felt like it was on fire. The Gemini spacesuit (not made by the Latex Corporation) had started to tear in back, and the unshielded sun had branded him with a second-degree burn.20

  None of this boded well for the notion of an astronaut descending a ladder and walking on the Moon. Engineers began designing a thin layer of circulating water that could sooth extreme temperatures in the Apollo suits.

  Unfortunately, everyone understood that worrying about a Moon suit was a luxury of sorts. As with so many Apollo projects, it required one four-hundred-foot-tall leap of faith. None of NASA’s preparations meant a thing if they didn’t have a rocket that could propel Apollo to the Moon.

  In 1966, the Huntsville team hustled toward a maiden, unmanned launch of the full Saturn V rocket, slated for early 1967. A new test facility for von Braun’s empire had sprouted along the Mississippi River. After relocating some 850 families from the rural swamplands, and with no major cities nearby, the engineers hoped loud rocket tests wouldn’t cause much trouble, and a barge could easily haul hunks of a Saturn rocket downriver, to the Gulf of Mexico and on to Florida. A chief administrator of the new Mississippi test facility said the pace of work was like “riding with one foot on each of two galloping horses.”

  In April, the new facility had enjoyed one of the few successful tests of the troublesome second stage of the Saturn V, where a hydrogen engine ran for a clean fifteen seconds. But just a month later, a sloppy shift change led to disaster. One crew of technicians turned off pressure sensors to the fuel tank, but they failed to inform the next shift. The incoming technicians put helium gas into the fuel tank to check for leaks, and, with no warnings from dormant sensors, the pressure kept building until the enormous tank exploded, injuring five employees.
In the tank’s post-mortem, engineers found tiny cracks that predated the explosion. Checking other, similar tanks, they found these filigree flaws to be widespread. The calendar showed only so many days to keep making these trips to the drawing board.21

  Engineers continued scrutinizing the Saturn V’s weight like a ballet choreographer narrowing eyes at his principal dancers. Every pound engineers could remove from the rocket helped them get a few extra ounces headed for the Moon. In the never-ending pursuit of weight loss, engineers now turned to the already skinny second stage. Trimming gristle here was more efficient than trimming the first stage. Since the second stage spent more time on the mission than the first (even just a few extra minutes during launch), the accounting of multi-stage rockets meant every pound from the second stage was worth more than a pound trimmed from the first.22

  Making the stage’s walls as thin as possible exacerbated the ongoing troubles with the very long, precisely welded seams. Sensing urgency, Wernher von Braun pulled together a select engineering group to figure out a more reliable welding process. With super-cold hydrogen fuel and persnickety metals in ever-thinner sheets, the problem looked nearly impossible. After deliberating, the engineers recommended changes to the welding workshop’s environment. Decreasing the humidity in the manufacturing facility would help, and workers also needed to remove any chance of airborne impurities, like dust motes, lighting on the metals before welding.

  The resulting solution was a so-called “clean room” environment, made more famous in modern times in microchip processing and nanotechnology, with workers in surgeon-like suits, masks, and booties. Engineers reworked the manufacture of the second stage, conditioning the air to cut humidity in half, and having workers submit to ultra-clean standards as they moved into the facility. They passed through an airlock to minimize whatever unclean puff of air might enter with them through a traditional door. They wore gloves and smocks designed to minimize lint. They ran their shoes through a special scrubber on their way into the airlock. Once inside, they found squeaky-clean epoxy floors, mopped obsessively. The bright white walls and their garments made them look like extras for George Lucas’s early science fiction dystopia, THX 1138. Though problems persisted, these careful steps began to pay off by the end of 1966, with stronger, more reliable seams on the second stage. There was little time to spare if they wanted to launch in early 1967.23

  Pieces made their ponderous way to the Cape. Like a bizarre religious rite, a barge floated the first stage, under an enormous shroud, down the Mississippi, through the Gulf of Mexico, and around the tip of Florida. The second stage shipped from California and through the Panama Canal. The third stage made its way from southern California by air. To maneuver it to the airport, engineers commandeered entire roads and employed an eleven-ton transport vehicle. In one case, they had to wait for local utility companies to bury some power lines that otherwise would have snagged the rocket segment. And despite moving just a few miles per hour, the transporter ran over an even-slower skunk, perfuming the truck but leaving the rocket stage unscented. Despite being the smallest of the three, the third stage still required extreme measures for air transport; enter the “Super Guppy,” a cavernous plane that could swing open its head, like some sort of outsized Pez dispenser, to allow rocket stages on board (see Figure 9.2).24

  figure 9.2 A “Super Guppy” open for loading in 1965. This custom jet transported the third stage of Saturn V rockets and various Apollo modules to Florida. Once aloft, it resembled a flying sperm whale. (NASA photograph.)

  Wernher von Braun’s time in Huntsville had been meteoric. The city had grown from about 16,000 souls in 1950 to nearly 150,000 in 1966. He wanted his program and the surging Rocket City to continue. The heavens were so vast that they required armadas of spaceships and the rockets to lift them. Yet, even as he watched his ultimate rocket slowly come together, he was more worried about the future than ever. His visions would require seas of money, and by 1966 he sensed the momentum slipping. After years of work and advocacy to build a lasting space program, he watched tepid politicians and worried voters start to avert their eyes. In their nervous shifting, he recognized an existential threat. America might stop at the Moon, if it even got that far.

  That year, he became especially blunt when speaking in public. “Our main effort today is busily destroying the very capability that we have built up to put a man on the Moon,” he said. He wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times that summer, telling readers “to make a one night stand on the Moon, and go there no more, would be as senseless as building a locomotive and a transcontinental railroad, and then making one trip from New York to Los Angeles.”25

  Lyndon Johnson had started squirming over funding. The war in Vietnam showed a growing monetary appetite, and his domestic programs put a new strain on the federal budget as well. Many of his advisors told him cuts must be made and taxes would have to creep up at some point. By the end of 1966, he agreed to cut about $1.5 billion from his next budget. Meanwhile, in Congress, more and more members looked skeptically at NASA’s funding. Congressional representative Donald Rumsfeld of Illinois tried to cut Faget’s lunar receiving laboratory, since it looked like an attempt to perpetuate space exploration. Its $9 million survived deliberations, but soon Congress reduced a post-Apollo program called “Apollo Applications.” The nation’s vision turned increasingly earthward.26

  Humanity’s troubles could now visit any living room via live satellite broadcast or quickly prepared clips from around the world. At home, where cities once wondered if a “systems engineering” approach could cure urban ills, decaying city centers fumed. Confidence in the nation’s path, in the federal government, and in space-age technology began to ebb.

  Presumptions of a united ramp of national progress splintered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a cornerstone of the Civil Rights movement, with its logo of white and black hands joined in solidarity, voted in late 1966 to bar white members. Martin Luther King Jr. now sometimes found his nonviolent speeches greeted with public boos. Voices fed up with the lack of progress toward racial equality shouted “black power!”27 Watching a confusing war abroad and racial tensions rising at home, some youth began wondering about more than government. Maybe the way society pieced things together was outdated or even rotten from the roots. In the rising “Crisis of Authority,” youth considered that even their parents and churches might be wrong about things. Time magazine published its infamous “Is God Dead?” cover in the spring of 1966.28

  The engineers of Apollo granted themselves little time to worry about these shifts and movements. In a rocket’s ivory tower, tanks could leak, computers could fail, hulls could crumple, and engines could shake to pieces. When the engineers awoke in the wee hours, they stewed over these technical problems rather than societal ones.

  Having four hundred thousand human beings join a multi-faceted, ambitious project, with dozens of question marks blocking the finish line, created an understandable babble of voices, from all levels, all facilities, and from scores of contracting companies. Many voices expressed worries, but conflicting opinions were plentiful for most any subtopic. Well-informed warnings, along with intelligent rebuttals, were commonplace. And some nagging problems faced dire predictions no matter which way NASA chose to solve them.

  Floating through this noisy storm, a couple of late-1966 voices worried about the interior of the main Apollo spacecraft. Henry Pohl visited the craft’s California production plant that year. He “crawled in that Command Module just to look in there,” but was struck by all the doo-dads that were added to support the astronauts. “I had absolutely no responsibility in that area at all, but I says . . . ‘You can’t put all of that stuff in there. It’ll burn.’ . . . [T]hey had it full of what I thought was combustible stuff.” He did make a phone call the next day, but let it drop. “There was another one of those instances where a light bulb lit up, and I didn’t follow up on it.”29

  But Pohl wasn’t alone. A NASA administra
tor named Joe Shea received a September letter from an executive at General Electric. The letter set out serious concerns for the 100-percent oxygen atmosphere. It acknowledged that using pure oxygen in the capsules for Phase I (Mercury) and Phase II (Gemini) had worked fine so far, but they were just one spark short of a disaster. “The first fire in space,” read the letter, “may well be fatal.” Shea asked one of NASA’s test divisions to review the amount of flammable material within the capsule, but they didn’t reply for seven weeks. The issue was just one of thousands of concerns. Here, engineers were trying to put three men on top of the most powerful, complex, and explosive rocket ever conceived. And some administrator was worried about Velcro straps in oxygen. But they did eventually review the cabin and reply to Shea, saying hazards of fire within the Apollo craft were “low.” Shea forwarded their report to the executive at GE, and he hand-penned a little post-script. “The problem is sticky—we think we have enough margin to keep fire from starting—if one ever does, we do have problems.”30

  By the end of 1966, the world had a true glimpse of wonder, with NASA’s second remote probe entering lunar orbit. The robotic craft dropped to just thirty miles above the lunar surface, as it tried to understand the precise nature of the Moon’s gravity. NASA probes had found evidence by now that the Moon was lumpy under its surface, with some very heavy areas, or “mass concentrations,” creating regions of stronger gravitational pull. These clumps complicated any Moon mission, since an orbiting spacecraft would find the Moon tugging harder in some stretches of the orbit than others.