Huntsville had watched von Braun leave suddenly in early 1970, accepting a reassignment to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Many engineers recall von Braun’s transition as an ouster, an unfair slap not befitting what he had done for the nation’s space program. To his faithful troops, it felt as though NASA leadership was saying, So long, and thanks for all the rockets. But von Braun had privately welcomed a change, and he went to Washington for what he saw as an influential planning role. He would help NASA chart its next steps and win over a skeptical political field. Maria von Braun also welcomed the change, as she sought a more cosmopolitan existence. The von Brauns had already sent their daughters, Iris and Margrit, to elite boarding schools in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
The nation’s cynical political machinery quickly crushed the rocket pioneer’s optimism. NASA headquarters found him to be far too impractical for his role, and despite his powers of enthused rhetoric, he could have a surprisingly tin ear for politics. In one congressional meeting, von Braun argued for continuation of Apollo missions by emphasizing how disappointed the astronauts-in-training would be, only to have an angry legislator bark that disappointment was nothing when pilots died every day in Vietnam. As von Braun told an old Huntsville colleague, “I’ve found out up here I’m just another guy with a funny accent.” After watching NASA overlook his recommendations and protestations concerning the shuttle—it was clearly going to be much more expensive than advertised—von Braun retired from NASA (and his lifelong work for two governments) in May of 1972.28
Engineers in Houston also experienced Apollo postpartum effects. Mission planner Hal Beck schemed in after-hours sessions with the geologist astronaut, Harrison Schmitt. They examined possible future trips around the solar system. “We had a little renegade group,” Beck said, “running a lot of trajectory type stuff that wasn’t the proper thing to do. And then he [Schmitt] was taking that stuff to Washington to try to get approval. Then he got kicked in the pants.” Washington’s appetite for adventure was more than sated. “There was a real long period of bad morale in the program,” Beck says. “We just floundered.”29
Engineer Wesley Ratcliff recalls his decision. “I was not going to leave before we landed on the Moon,” he said. But shortly after Apollo 11, “I looked at NASA, how it was slowing down. I liked what I’ve done, but what could I do for society? I took a pay cut and went to teach.” Just as he’d been inspired by his teacher who’d explained the details of Sputnik, Ratcliff, a pioneering African American engineer at NASA, wanted to inspire a younger generation at historically black colleges.30
Though many of the retired engineers will cite a lack of vision from NASA’s leadership, the nation had simply lost its interest in space. Perhaps America wanted to turn away from that boundary-breaking spirit of the sixties—all of it, from hippies, military strategists, and spacemen alike. Within a year of the Moon landings, more than half of Americans polled said it was not worth the money. And that attitude persisted throughout the 1970s. In 1979, the majority polled still shook their heads: it was cool and all, but nope, not worth it. Apollo, not adjusted for inflation, had cost around $24 billion to achieve the landings. A newspaper columnist noted that developing just the lunar rover, at $38 million, greatly surpassed the entire U.S. automobile safety budget.31
The last missions continued the pattern of declining television ratings and interest. The nation suffered images of dead student protestors at Kent State University just two weeks after Apollo 13. Domestic troubles overwhelmed whatever curiosity Americans had left for the barren, gray Moon. NASA tried to take a more savvy public relations angle for the last two missions, armed as they were with better television equipment for the lunar explorations. Planners worked to achieve landings and astronaut excursions that would occur during North American prime time. And they scheduled a special nighttime launch for the final Apollo mission. But the primetime strategy fared poorly, as networks generally opted to keep their most popular programming in place. They then ran a few Apollo clips during the evening news, like so many sports highlights. Apollo 17’s exciting night launch crept up to just thirty seconds before a perfect liftoff, at about 9:30 p.m. eastern time, when a technical glitch halted the countdown. The three-hour delay, short for any Apollo engineer, moved past the bedtimes of many interested kids and their tired parents. The networks fumed and tried to fill airtime, not knowing exactly when the launch would come. Those who stuck with it took in an incredible event: an enormous, inverted candle roaring, rising, quieting, and disappearing among the stars.32
American culture had turned away from bold optimism to a more negative and fearful stance. The Pew Research Center found that Americans’ trust in their government had plummeted between 1965 and 1972, from about 75 percent saying they trusted it “most of the time” to about 50 percent saying that. (And this predated the Watergate scandal.) The mistakes of Vietnam, repeatedly sold and re-marketed to the public, played a leading role. Movies of the era leaned toward demonic possession, societal crises, and dystopian thrillers. Where the first Apollo milestones coincided with the somewhat optimistic 2001: A Space Odyssey, the later missions played out alongside bleak futuristic fare like THX 1138, with a technological society gone horribly wrong, and The Andromeda Strain, where a NASA satellite returned a horrible space disease to Earth. A year after Apollo’s close, audiences winced as Charlton Heston discovered that his warped, technocratic government was making a food product out of downtrodden citizens in Soylent Green.
The Soviets also endured injuries to their space-flight ambitions. Backing away from a manned lunar mission, the U.S.S.R. focused on near-Earth, long-duration work, prioritizing science in space. In 1971, they launched the first true space station, the Salyut 1. That summer, three cosmonauts became Russian household celebrities. They smiled through nightly broadcasts of their work in orbit. After twenty-four days on-board, the crew returned to Earth in a capsule. But as they descended, an air valve opened too early and let precious air slip rapidly to space. The cosmonauts had a manual crank to attempt closing it, but the process was too slow. Within sixty seconds, the capsule was essentially a vacuum, holding three unconscious cosmonauts. Recovery teams, having no idea of the trouble, were shocked to find lifeless bodies in the capsule, and Russia mourned these losses intensely. Some have compared the public outpouring to America’s loss of John F. Kennedy. The space station, with no occupants, slowly lost its hold on orbit and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere months later. With tensions between the superpowers continuing to thaw, an American astronaut flew to Moscow and acted as one of the pallbearers in the very public triple funeral.33
In NASA’s painful internal conversations of “What’s next?” one immediate option was a collaborative spaceflight between the superpowers. An “Apollo Soyuz” mission proposed for an American craft and a Soviet craft to dock in orbit (a gesture perhaps more symbolic than useful). Max Faget’s right-hand man, Caldwell Johnson, had been part of the engineering team to fly into the heart of the U.S.S.R. Johnson recalled a shaky start. “There were great big billboards, all in Russian, showing Uncle Sam with blood running out of his mouth and little babies, tearing them apart and stomping on them, you know. I thought, ‘Oh Jesus.’ ” But the Americans were met with kind hospitality and an eager space team. “The Russian team was first-rate,” Johnson said. The difference Americans encountered was mainly one of staffing. “They didn’t have much back-up,” Johnson said. “For every position you filled, we could have put ten guys there. They just had one or two. But they were really good.”
He also encountered predictable levels of Cold War spy action in the periphery of their work. The CIA and army intelligence officers carefully and gravely prepped the engineers, warning them against compromising themselves at any moment: Don’t accept offers of vodka, and don’t fall for sexual advances. “That was a bunch of crap,” Johnson said. “Nothing like that went on. . . . But I could see their cloak-and-dagger guys and our dagger guys hang[ing] around in the ba
ckground, you know. . . . And they all wore trench coats, just like in the damned movies.” Another engineer recalls the KGB tail, friendly but also determined enough to follow the young engineers for a jog around Moscow. In their track shoes, two Americans started their run, and the trench-coat-wearing KGB agents jogged after them, huffing but keeping the engineers in sight.
The Apollo-Soyuz program created opportunities for some at NASA. “Nobody wanted to work it,” engineer Cynthia Wells recalled. “They gave me the electrical power system, the environmental control system, the docking module.” She and other engineers had to create a special connector between the superpowers in space, because the Soviets kept their ship at a full atmospheric pressure, where the Apollo capsule stayed at just about one-third of a normal atmosphere (but with 100 percent oxygen). The docking module acted like a lock in a canal system, letting people enter from one side, and then slowly having the pressure change until they could move into the other ship.34
But the larger question of “What next?” remained a bewildering one for NASA, and the agency never found a unifying answer. How exactly would they follow such an enormous milestone, an engineering masterpiece? There were active plans for “Apollo applications,” using some of the existing equipment to launch a type of orbiting station called “Skylab.” And Faget’s shuttle was in active planning by 1972. But what else? The mission planning folks felt the weight of this question acutely.
“I recall being in a meeting,” said Marlowe Cassetti. “I’m embarrassed to say this. It was like we got a bunch of people in a room and our boss got up at the blackboard, said, ‘Okay, let’s figure out what we’re going to do after Apollo. What are some great things we can do? Okay, find a cure for cancer.’ It was like, wait a minute.” He laughed, thinking back on it. “What madhouse am I in here?” On their chalkboard, just under “cure for cancer,” they listed things like a man-to-Mars mission. “We still had a bunch of fairly young people who felt like they could conquer anything, given enough resources.” In fact, Cassetti and his colleagues started working a Mars trip. “We did a lot of studies,” he said. “Running some trajectories out there, the time of flight, and how long do you have to store the propellants and all that kind of stuff.” But the taxpayer’s tolerance for expensive adventure had evaporated. A bewildering game of musical chairs ensued at NASA, with all players nervously walking around at once. “Everybody wanted to work on the shuttle,” Cassetti says now, but as a favor to his boss, he begrudgingly agreed to take on mission planning for the Skylab program.
Society’s eyes were focused inward by this point. Gone were the sleek “space age” designs for cars and kitchens, with gleaming metals and bold colors. The new decade wanted “earth tones,” with kitchen tiles that resembled the colors of a rotting forest. Even cars, boxier than before, needed a more “natural” look, with imitation wood paneling.
Would younger Cassetti have expected us, after Apollo, to have shot for Mars within the next half-century? “You know, looking back, I’m really amazed that we haven’t done anything like that.”35
* * *
i The electrical mode had apparently changed as well—alternating current versus direct current.
ii Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise.
iii Astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
iv On Apollo 15, Allen technically served as the capsule communicator to the astronauts during the Moon walks.
14
1981—Farther Along
As America approached the first launch in a new phase of space travel, Max Faget, America’s original spaceship architect, had decided to retire from NASA. The space shuttle had completed its journey from his gliding, balsa-wood dream to the agency’s chief project.
But Faget was disappointed as well. He’d wanted something smaller and more agile, a craft that would be much easier to launch and land. At one early juncture, he’d said he wanted a shuttle to take “two or three thousand pounds of cargo” into orbit. But the political landscape of the late 1960s was long gone. NASA had to win support from a client. “And the air force said, ‘Well, we’d be glad to use it, but you’ve got to make the cargo bay much larger,” Faget recalled. “They said it ought to carry a payload sixty feet long and at least fifteen feet in diameter.” The air force wanted the shuttle to carry its latest spy satellites, and NASA complied.
Faget suffered a life-long itch to nitpick and improve a design. And if he had a central complaint about the space shuttle program, it was a lack of tweaking. A delicate budget dance meant there had been enough money for the initial design and then operating it but little for ongoing modifications. “It’s the only case that I know of,” he said later, “with no process of evolution to improve that vehicle.”1 He showed the same tenacity for any machine, down to his homemade sailboats. His son, Guy, recalled once taking an elderly Max for a private flight, after Guy had earned his pilot’s license. “And I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ It was a fairly nice plane.” Max focused his full attention, circling the parked craft and finding puzzling details. “This is unbelievable,” he said. “Why do they have all of these things? I can’t believe they couldn’t make this plane faster.” In the end, Guy says this is how he will always remember his father, analyzing and fixing.2 In his post-NASA years, Faget helped found Space Industries, seeking to entice private capital upward, into orbit or beyond. Though a recipient of NASA’s highest honors and a legend within the agency, he never achieved much of a national profile, from the parades of the early 1960s until his death in 2004. And, by all accounts, that suited him just fine.
By 1981, Henry Pohl was on his way to taking over Faget’s role, as NASA’s director of engineering in Houston. Pohl had stayed true to his first love from the 1950s: the beguiling power of a rocket engine. As chief of propulsion and power at the Johnson Space Center, he oversaw the many technical challenges of the shuttle’s main engines, a cluster of three hydrogen burners directly descended from those in the Saturn V. (The final design of the main shuttle engines was robust enough that they are being dusted off and refurbished for use in the nation’s twenty-first century efforts.)
The year 1981 felt like a reawakening for NASA, preparing for a return to manned spaceflight. The shuttle program had survived brushes with cancellation, and the agency was back on its feet after a difficult decade.
After the last Moon mission in 1972, Capitol Hill had excoriated NASA for its employment record. Scanning the ranks of white, male engineers, Congress openly wondered if the agency had just ignored the equal opportunity mandates of the 1960s. While the federal government had increased minority employment to 20 percent of its workforce by 1973, NASA’s sat at 5 percent. By early 1974, under scrutiny from multiple congressional committees, NASA found itself under legislative oversight. The agency’s days as a government darling were officially over. Longtime NASA man George Low, who had boldly pitched the 1968 Apollo 8 flight around the Moon, had become a senior NASA administrator. Stewing in helpless 1970s frustration, he made an incredibly telling remark. It wasn’t just that equal opportunity and affirmative action at the agency were “a sham,” he testified, but more that NASA’s engineering culture possessed “total insensitivity to human rights and human beings” (emphasis added). For NASA managers, given the ambition of their lunar task, they’d perceived no time to worry about the finer points of a diverse workforce. To some, even considering their employees’ basic humanity felt like an abstract luxury.
Charged with investigating NASA’s hiring record in the early 1970s, Ruth Bates Harris later recalled a poignant meeting with Wernher von Braun in Washington, D.C., after he’d left his longtime post in Huntsville. Harris had read a newspaper article describing Germany’s underground V-2 rocket factory, Mittelwerk, with its inhumane slave labor. She went to von Braun’s office and gently but firmly asked if the article was accurate. With a heavy heart, he acknowledged the factory but said the article distorted the story. She told him she had to let the top brass know of these troubling parts o
f his past. He nodded. She said he didn’t fight with her at all, but was instead “sad and understanding.” In reviewing the work of all centers trying to follow affirmative action guidelines, her eventual report said von Braun’s time at Marshall had shown the most “courage and conviction” in pursuing minority hiring, even if making little progress.3
The rocket pioneer’s earliest work, long ignored in the United States, started bubbling to the surface. Groups of protestors often plagued his public appearances, drawing attention to his Nazi past, and even the amiable television host Dick Cavett surprised von Braun with difficult questions about the V-2 weapon. The pioneer’s tarnishing reputation eventually led President Gerald Ford’s advisors to deny von Braun a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976.4
The Marshall center von Braun left behind had changed quickly after Apollo. As its third director, following von Braun’s longtime collaborator Eberhard Rees, NASA appointed Rocco Petrone. An engineer and army officer who had once worked at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Petrone had directed launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center during Apollo. The engineers sensed the new leadership pushing out a lot of the older Germans by encouraging or even forcing early retirements. Many younger German engineers found themselves transferred to other centers. Some of the retired Huntsville engineers still speak of this brief era—from early 1973 to spring of 1974—as the “Petrone Massacre.” Inside NASA headquarters and at other centers, some had long referred to the Marshall center in snide tones as “Hunsville.” Many engineers perceived headquarters intentionally breaking up the group of Germans that America had once forcibly gathered.
The Apollo Chronicles Page 31