The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  My father also worried about the lander but less like a doctor and more like a parent prepping a child to leave the house, making sure to pack the lander’s lunch box. He worked non-stop on mission planning after a recent promotion. “I headed the ‘consumables’ effort,” he says. “We had to calculate the use of oxygen, water, carbon dioxide counters, propellant, and so on. . . . [W]e flew simulated missions [using computers] and used these to calculate the requirements” of each consumable. He remembers the long workdays well. “We had meetings that would end after 8:00 p.m. and that wasn’t unusual.”

  In 1967, dire calculation results had bubbled up from mission planners to the top ranks of NASA. Worries about the lander’s weight forced Marlowe Cassetti into special service. By this time, Cassetti, just like Pohl, led several organizational sections, and he supervised several dozen mission planners. “So, if you looked at all the numbers,” he said, “it looked like we couldn’t get there from here.” The lander measured too heavy, the rockets too weak, and the subsequent requirements for fuel and liquid oxygen too overwhelming. “So we did something rather unique,” he said. “We’re talking about a time in computing history that was still [the] Stone Age. The late sixties were no better than the early sixties.” Cassetti and his team needed to double-check every possible flight to the Moon and precisely report the degree of trouble—how many pounds overweight, how many ounces of fuel too short, and so on. And Cassetti started pulling at a thread that nagged him: hundreds of subcontracting companies had parts of Apollo to build, and each of them then passed a target weight number for their part to the main contracting companies, and the larger companies then passed their target weight for a whole space craft module on to NASA. As of 1967, it looked as though nobody could be absolutely sure of the weight of any of the three Apollo modules. Cassetti and his team would need to track down each exact weight like a retriever patrolling tall grass for birds.

  Even with their new, sprawling center, mission planners still ran low on computing time. “One run a day is all you got,” said Cassetti. “I happened to be over in another area of our building, and somebody had brought in a teletype machine. . . . I started looking over this thing and said, ‘Boy what a great device.’ . . . This was something that just absolutely blew me away.” Within a month, he had one for his team. “It was a tabletop model,” he said. The teletype used a revolutionary communications link, a modem. By nestling a phone’s handset into the teletype, engineers could call and share computers, for instance, at the University of Houston (all at a dizzying thirty bits per second). This opened up the possibility of more than one run per day.

  For these early computer users, glitches took on many forms. One particular project ran docking simulations routinely at midnight. Computers in one building controlled two model spacecraft bumping about in another building, but run after run came out garbled. After rounds of debugging, in both buildings, engineers finally located the problem somewhere in between: Late night janitors, innocently running a vacuum cleaner just inches over the sub-floor cables, created enough electrical noise to foul the signals.15

  But with a new teletype machine up and running, Cassetti’s team made progress. They inched closer to the elusive measure of Apollo’s actual heft.

  Whatever the weight of the craft nestled on top, was the Saturn V ready for actual liftoff? The year started with a definite no and moved to a strong maybe.

  In late January, a test of the third stage ended in pyrotechnics in California. An explosion ripped the entire stage to threads of charred metal, while nearby buildings lost windows and even roofs—such was the power of hydrogen fuel. A supplier had provided a not-quite-right version of metal required for the welded seams. And the repeated rounds of testing had finally weakened one seam until it ruptured.16

  When the Cape received new versions of all three stages in March, engineers found a total of 1,200 problems (many of them minor, like a bolt being slightly loose, but more than a thousand problems all the same). And while those engineers stacked the first Saturn V, others located new weld-line problems for stages still in production. Technicians scurried about the stacked second stage and grimaced as they found those same problems on their rocket—it was time to take Saturn apart again.

  In August, the restacked rocket looked more or less ready to go. The crawler carried forth a full Saturn V from the yawning assembly building. Slowly, tread by tread, the crawler took its balanced totem to the launch pad.17

  Countdown starts, countdown stops, tests, alarms, pauses, much scratching of heads, and more starts and stops filled the following months. In October, problematic test results meant a new delay, and NASA slowly sucked all the fuel from the rocket. Some wondered if it would ever actually launch or whether it might just sit there as a sort of monument to hubris. Meanwhile, more and more Americans assumed the Soviets would reach the Moon first. Approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution, the world awaited a new dramatic achievement. And cosmonauts had started telling cheering Soviet crowds that when Americans finally got to the Moon, “we will be there to greet them.”18

  But a November window for the first Saturn V launch began to look promising, holding up against various minor delays and concerns. Finally, NASA would start using their mobile launch towers in succession. While one neared its launch date, the other two held rockets prepping for future dates with the heavens. Each tower could be moved about by one of the crawlers, with or without a Saturn V rocket. The towers included a fat, square base, where four enormous clamps held the rocket in place, and a tower of some 450 feet, topped by a crane and decorated with the nine swinging arms to nourish the rocket.19 One engineer recalled standing near the top of the tower, as it embraced that first Saturn V rocket. He thought to himself, “No way in the world for that thing to lift off.”20 It was just too huge and contained too many systems, too many parts, wires, and seams. Even the more optimistic engineers had an attitude best expressed by one: “I hope it holds glued together long enough for us to get into orbit.”21 (See Figure 10.2.)

  figure 10.2 Aerial view of a fully stacked Saturn V and its launch tower moving toward the launch pad via a crawler hidden underneath. For scale, you may be able to make out a man in a white shirt and black pants walking across the platform to the right of the “USA” insignia. Apollo 15 is pictured here. (NASA photograph.)

  One of the last things engineers did before the approaching launch attempt was to carefully calibrate the rocket’s sense of balance, a twenty-pound gyroscope spinning within the rocket’s brain.22 That brain, labeled simply the “instrument unit,” sat near the top like a high-tech dog collar. It was just three feet thick, but fully twenty-five feet across, nestled between the top (third) stage of the Saturn V and its passenger, the Apollo spacecraft. The brain kept track of scores of sensors before and during a launch: temperatures, angles, flow rates, accelerations, and pressure readings, all streaming to and rendered by the brain. If the rocket started tilting out of line during flight, the instrument unit automatically ordered one or two of the F-1 engines to shift slightly this way or that to push it upright. The brain triggered the carefully set lines of explosives, separating the depleted stages one by one and letting them fall to the ocean. And, like a polite child taking a parent’s car for a first drive, it sent rapid-fire updates to the engineers on the ground (see Figure 10.3).23

  figure 10.3 The Saturn V’s instrument unit on display in Huntsville. (Photograph by author and printed with permission of the United States Space and Rocket Center.)

  Meanwhile, America bit its lip and wrinkled its collective brow, but not anticipating a launch. The nation continued backing away from the promise of gleaming technology. Books offering readers mysticism, spirituality, or instructions for extra-sensory perception sold like never before. For every such purchased book, a neighbor might pass it along. I’ve had experiences like this—haven’t you? Meanwhile, some young Americans showed their rejection of early 1960s technocracy by embracing clothing referenc
ing aboriginal Americans, with deerskin vests and fringe. NASA may have wanted to poke the night skies with rockets and capsules, but some of these hippies embraced “old ways” that would humbly leave the heavens alone.24

  If Cape Canaveral engineers could have turned their attention from the marvelous heights of their stacked rocket, they would have heard ever more divergent voices screaming about anything but Apollo. Race riots flared into 1967, turning especially deadly in Detroit. And when fifty thousand antiwar protestors surrounded the Pentagon one October night, government troops chased them down, beat any resistors, and made mass arrests. Many Americans wondered if we shouldn’t have our sights set firmly on earthly problems. Through no fault of their own, NASA’s white-robed technicians swarming Saturn’s launch tower were like so many priests on a modern Tower of Babel.

  November saw the breathing of hundreds of engineers grow shallower. They were taking a risk with the first Saturn V. In order to speed things up, NASA’s leadership had opted to skip testing each stage of the rocket individually. They’d try their first “all up” test on the most public stage, a sort of unpracticed high wire act that could end in a fireball. On the morning of November 9, they loaded it up: twenty-seven rail cars’ worth of kerosene; twenty-eight trailer truck loads’ worth of liquefied hydrogen; and finally, eighty-nine truckloads of liquid oxygen. NASA cleared all humans within a three-and-a-half-mile circle around the launch pad. (Snakes and sand fleas were on their own, as usual.) The capsule, for this launch, sat empty of astronauts. Engineers needed to see if this rocket, the most powerful ever built, could hold together, and then see if Apollo’s command and service modules survived the launch and the rigors of space. Saturn’s own brain would control the first minutes of the launch, with oversight from some 450 engineers in a “firing room.” If they didn’t like any of the signals coming from the rocket, or if it veered dangerously off course, they could abort the mission or even send a destruct signal to their beloved baby. Squinting from a remove of four miles were a press room and a viewing stand for dignitaries, NASA employees, and some NASA families.25

  An intense fire marked the first many seconds of ignition. Smoke rushed from the pad as if it was possessed, but the assembled guests noted an oddly silent scene. Were they too far away to hear anything? The sound waves labored across the scrub land a full quarter-minute, but then they hit the crowds and buildings like a hammer. Spectators later shared a common experience, feeling vibrations yanking their sternums and ribs forward and backward, as if a rope connected them directly to the pulsing rocket. In the press room, Walter Cronkite, without breaking narration, watched engineers raise their arms and hold the windows overhead, trying to calm the undulating glass. “No one anticipated the true power of that rocket,” engineer Chris Kraft wrote. “Ceiling tiles fell on television reporters at their anchor desks. The corrugated metal sheets covering the press viewing stands came loose and flapped dangerously.”26

  The first stage did its work, exhausting its fuel and oxygen in less than three minutes. The second stage, with five hydrogen-burning engines, took over and ran for the next six minutes. By the time it emptied and fell away, the remaining stage and its vacant Apollo ship were 118 miles above Earth.

  “You could almost feel the will,” one NASA official said later. Wernher von Braun shouted, “Go, baby, go!” Moments later he turned to a colleague, dumbfounded, and said he “never would have believed it possible.” Indeed, as authors Murray and Cox later summarized it, “in its first trial, they had launched a rocket the size and weight of a navy destroyer, carrying eleven new engines [by stage, five plus five plus one] . . . new technology of all kinds, and had done it perfectly. There was simply no way to explain it.”27

  The launch was a stunning success. Not only had the incredible Saturn V aced its all-stages-at-once test, but the main Apollo modules had shrugged off the intense temperatures and vacuum in space. Compared to the crushing accident of January, the program’s fortunes had turned completely. But the test still had its hiccups. Overlooked in the excitement, Saturn’s main engines went into their guttering pogo like crazy—the old nemesis was back. The company building the engines admitted that, after years of full-time research, with an all-star team pulled from NASA, aerospace companies, and elite universities, they still failed to understand all the causes. A careless error also blemished the launch. An overeager controller working in the Australian station sent a command to the Apollo spacecraft which the on-board computer had already handled; in such a circumstance, the computer had orders to throw up its hands. Okay, fine, humans. Do what you want. It shut down its control of the engines, and by the time engineers figured out what had happened, the returning command module was moving a little too quickly. Impressively, a re-engaged computer made adjustments and brought the empty capsule down in the vast North Pacific Ocean, just two miles from its target coordinates.28

  In the maiden voyage of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun reached a sort of pinnacle for his long arc. Starting from the dreams of a kid, who had once strapped rocket motors to his wagon, to building a feared weapon for Nazi Germany and then hustling parts of it to America, he’d always hoped to build a rocket powerful enough to lift a real spaceship.

  He returned to Huntsville, a town that had truly become home to so many Germans. Thanksgiving that year brought the successful engineers to their families, for at least a day. The 1967 Huntsville Heritage Cookbook compiled favorite recipes from local housewives. Mrs. Wernher von Braun led off the “Foreign Foods” section, setting down her nut cake recipe, with pecans and lemon icing, and her “Food of the Gods,” a rum-soaked whipped cream with chocolate shavings. Whether or not the von Braun family passed these around their Thanksgiving table, Wernher faced very earthly and mortal matters back at work. On November 29, he gathered his adoring troops in an auditorium. Far from taking a victory lap, he relayed the sorry news: given a new set of NASA budget cuts, he would be forced to eliminate seven hundred positions by year’s end.29

  * * *

  i Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The tragic test became memorialized as the first official program mission, Apollo 1.

  ii Vladimir Komarov died on impact on April 24, 1967.

  iii During these months, one young engineer named Larry Moran died from, as best as anyone could tell, overwork and poor nutrition. Coworker and chief lander designer Tom Kelly blamed it on the man’s workload and obsessive dedication.

  11

  1968—Of Timeless Views and New Perspectives

  Many Apollo engineers admit they didn’t see the late 1960s coming, and they hardly experienced these turbulent years. “I watched no television, read no newspapers, came to work at six in the morning and worked until nightfall, six or seven days a week for years,” said one engineer, voicing the memories of many. Yet, their spouses, their parents, and, for some, their kids had to be worrying aloud. My father recalls requesting a draft furlough for one of his young engineers, and my parents together describe stomachs knotted while helplessly hearing the news in these years: mass protests, riots, protests, and sad lists of soldiers. Henry Pohl’s son Karl recalls Vietnam updates filling the early calm of the family home. “Every morning my mother would have the radio on as she was making breakfast,” he says. “Every morning, to hear the body count.”1

  In mid-March, U.S. deaths in Vietnam surpassed five hundred in a single week, and the nightly news announced that Vietnam had now moved past the Korean conflict in American losses. The year would be the deadliest of the war. As the nation wobbled its way toward an ominous-feeling presidential election, radical activist Eldridge Cleaver wrote from prison that America was surely scaring the people of the world. “They must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat.”2

  By this time, Martin Luther King Jr. had turned his nonviolent focus to poverty, but his efforts felt increasingly futile. Associates
later recalled him falling into a depression by 1968. “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here,” he told one close friend. “And maybe we have to just give up and let violence take its course.” King then watched an attempted peaceful Memphis march fall to chaos on March 28, with protestors battling police and shattering store windows. In early April, he began to prepare a somber sermon. As Apollo engineers thought only of taking the nation upward and outward, King titled his draft “America May Go to Hell.”

  In the midst of these anxieties and despite ebbing enthusiasm for technology, space still offered Americans a fascinating escape. In 1968, many more tourists visited NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston than the Grand Canyon.3 But outside the agency, the nation’s space fascination shifted from bold and exploratory to neurotic and self-doubting. Perhaps, the culture seemed to suggest, we were not worthy of the cosmos.

  The strikingly realistic film 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted that spring. (Director Stanley Kubrick had benefited from the early space industry layoffs, hiring newly migrant engineers as consultants.) 2001 featured many parts of von Braun’s longtime playbook: an orbiting, spinning space station; a well-populated human presence on the Moon; routine and commercial-grade spaceflight; and the ability to travel to other planets, including mysterious Jupiter, beckoning from nearly half a billion miles away. All this by the year 2001? Audiences could lean forward in their seats and nod their heads, given the pace of the 1960s.

  Despite the realism of technology in 2001, the mood was not as optimistic and outward-focused as NASA may have hoped. In the film’s central premise, space had actually come to Earth first, instead of vice versa. A creepy and foreboding alien intelligence had some sort of plan for the inferior, ape-like humans. Highlighting a dread for the unknown universe, the movie scored alien technology with an unnerving György Ligeti “sound mass,” with a choir voicing hellish cacophony.