The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Arguably as responsible as any other American citizen for the successful Moon missions, Wernher von Braun passed away at age sixty-five in 1977. After Apollo, he had battled cancerous tumors, losing a kidney to surgery in 1973 and part of his colon in 1975. Until the end, he maintained his enthusiasm and as busy a schedule as he could manage, though with increasingly less of his trademark energy. In his last essay, “Responsible Scientific Investigation and Application,” he aimed his vision at earthly matters. He faced, in his own words, “the grim problems besetting humanity” with a mix of pragmatism and philosophy.i

  As von Braun spent his last painful days surrounded by friends and family, the latest federal budget ordered NASA to stop monitoring all the remote experiments left on the Moon. Though the instruments would continue broadcasting temperatures, moonquakes, and other data for years to come, Earth simply quit listening in 1977.5

  As the space shuttle rose from Earth in 1981, so did Apollo’s popularity. By 1989, three in four Americans said Apollo money was well spent. Perhaps the shuttle, the most complicated device ever constructed, served as a reminder of space flight’s extreme challenges. In an earlier technological age, with slide rules, horn-rimmed glasses, and grainy video, we had gone to the Moon.6

  Apollo had triumphed before my generation was really conscious. But we had steady reminders. Kids binge-watched a new phenomenon in 1981: Music Television. An Apollo astronaut on the Moon provided its flagship symbol. Where the stars and stripes should have been, a glowing “MTV” insignia buzzed on the flag. “We had this idea of copying the biggest TV event in world history,” the network’s creative director later explained. “The man walking on the moon.”7

  Growing up in the shadow of the Johnson Space Center, most of us kids took for granted that the nation’s space investment had reaped incredible rewards: For every dollar spent on NASA, America gets five dollars back in technology. We recited this like a prayer, even though, given such an incredible claim, the examples should have been more obvious and plentiful. People brought up the orange-like drink Tang and the grip of Velcro fasteners, but even those light-hearted examples had predated the birth of NASA.

  The impact of the space age certainly goes far beyond a few indentations in lunar soil, but a careful analysis questions the exact return on investment. Scholars trying to untangle the threads connecting the space age to major technologies find two indisputable examples. First, Earth-orbiting satellites have had a deep and pervasive impact on commerce and communications. Without our rush to meet the challenge of Sputnik, we would have been years or decades slower in putting “comsats” in orbit around Earth. They’ve revolutionized the connectivity of the world, and their cousins, the weather satellites, also deserve mention. Having a much better understanding of what storms are headed where, and when they’ll arrive, has saved lives and boosted the efficiency of global shipping.

  The next most important influence of NASA is less obvious: It greatly upgraded food safety for a huge swath of humanity. My father has always explained NASA’s approach to spacefaring as “fo, fo, fuzz”—a goofy pseudo-acronym for “fail operational, fail operational, fail safe.” For a mission flying through a dangerous vacuum and coming back through the atmosphere, engineers designed each system so that it could have one failure, and still keep going. Then, it could suffer a second failure, and the mission would soldier onward (its second “fail operational”). An unlikely third failure within the same system might cut the mission short, but it should not endanger the crew (“fail safe”).

  The agency took this “fo, fo, fuzz” mindset to astronaut nourishment just like it would for a fuel line. NASA had asked the food industry as early as 1959 how they ensured food safety and were surprised to learn that they really did nothing of the kind. The industry just responded to outbreaks of foodborne illness after the fact, with no rigorous method to prevent them. Medical personnel and mission planners didn’t like the idea of responding to food poisoning in a small, orbiting capsule. Instead, the agency developed a very NASA-sounding system, the “Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point” approach to protecting astronaut meals. Working with an army laboratory, NASA set a maximum bacterial count per gram of food, a radical idea for the early 1960s. The agency developed a series of seventeen “control points” in food assembly like they would for any space mission. Stop at this step, they told the food industry, and answer a few key questions. Then make a “go” or “no go” decision for, say, a tin of deviled ham. If it moves forward to the next step, you will again stop to review the data and make another informed decision. NASA unveiled this more broadly to the food industry in 1971, and by 1981 the sensible protocol infused the seafood preparation and canning industries. Eventually, an array of international food producers adopted the engineering-informed safety system, and it now protects a sizable fraction of the world’s food supply.8

  Beyond these two giant NASA examples, the true impacts become more muddied. Some sources credit the space program for direct impact on medical technology. Engineers had worked with doctors to track an astronaut’s vital signs during these stressful space missions and for days afterward. This required new devices, more miniature and reliable than anything available in a hospital, that could send live updates from afar. Larry Bell described the biological containment protocol for returning astronauts being adopted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and he relayed a direct migration of NASA’s astronaut biosensors to the operating room. Bell’s group brought some of their sensors to Dr. Denton Cooley, a pioneering heart surgeon at the Baylor College of Medicine. It gave Cooley’s group their first access to round-the-clock electrocardiogram (EKG) monitoring for a patient and greatly shrank the equipment required. But that wasn’t what most impressed the surgeon. “It was the first time Dr. Cooley had seen that clean an EKG,” Bell recalled. The doctor had asked where all the extraneous wiggles had gone. The NASA engineers, as usual, had squeezed every bit of noise that they could out of any measurement and, in this case, found a heart’s pristine underlying beat.9

  And how about computers? In January 1981, the Apple Computer company held its very first shareholder meeting, after their initial public offering had attracted more capital than any other since the Ford Motor Company’s in 1956. By August of 1981, International Business Machines entered the new “personal computer” market. Can we say, as many do, that NASA’s early embrace of semiconductor chips hastened America’s eventual immersion in and leadership for the digital age? Didn’t Apollo push computers to become smaller, more lightweight, more robust, and energy efficient? The story is not so cut-and-dried.

  Jack Garman, one of NASA’s chief computational engineers, later said, “The Apollo guidance computer was no PC.” But he also believed that, aside from making a computer smaller, Apollo required a type of interactivity that computers had rarely offered before.10 The Apollo guidance computer had to react, in real time, to changing conditions, and it had a relatively novel “interface” where astronauts could ask questions and request maneuvers minute to minute using a keypad. Before Apollo’s version, most computers were hulking machines that worked like oracles. You left an offering of punched cards and returned in the morning for the computed wisdom.

  However, historians of technology note that NASA, in its understandable rush for the Moon, opted wherever possible for proven circuit technologies instead of pushing for new innovations. And while NASA placed some of the first big-ticket orders for semiconductor chips, the military, ever the valued tech customer, was buying the rest. The military-industrial complex would have kept the baby computer industry crawling forward, with or without NASA. Since the military wanted computers to fly in guided missiles, for example, they were applying significant pressure for computer miniaturization and reliability. The dawn of the personal computer, sans Apollo, would probably have still lit our homes with ghostly blue light in the 1980s and 1990s.11

  One of the earliest adopters of the personal computer found himself finally benefiting
from what once seemed a useless skill. “I took typing in high school at my dad’s insistence,” Marlowe Cassetti recalled. “He deemed I wasn’t smart enough to get into college.” (Dr. Cassetti had hoped that if Marlowe was drafted into the Korean War, typing skills might keep him far from the front lines.) In 1974, an electronics magazine article had caught Marlowe’s eye: how to build your own microprocessor. By the end of that summer, he had an 8-bit homemade computer up and running, and he founded one of the first home computer clubs in the Houston area.

  After years of laboring through stacks of punch cards, he’d never considered himself a computer enthusiast, but his work life shifted in a similar, digital direction. After completing work on the Skylab orbiting space station in 1974, Cassetti had started a new job working with the eventual shuttle’s computer software. “On Apollo, Gemini, Skylab, and everything, there was nothing that the crew couldn’t do if the computer went out,” he said. “But with the shuttle, from the start it was a fly-by-wire system, as they call it.” In one sense, the shuttle was more like the Saturn V, making many adjustments moment-to-moment via an automated brain, with little to no human input.12

  As the shuttles began achieving orbit in the early 1980s, Cassetti, like Faget, decided it was time to retire from NASA. Making a last drive through the main gate of the Johnson Space Center, he would have passed an unmistakable reminder of Apollo.

  The canceled Apollo missions, 18, 19, and 20, provided NASA with enormous leftovers. By 1981, the Johnson Space Center had set out one of the three remaining Saturn V rockets for all to see. Built to be vertical, this rocket reclined stage by separate stage on the earth. The black-and-white paint matched all the nearby buildings of NASA, white and black by layers. For a twelve-year-old kid, they were something from a different era, like a television showing reruns of Leave It to Beaver. It seemed like another relic of America’s wholesome, bygone days.

  I remember going to the rocket with my father. He told me it was more powerful than the shuttle’s launch system and that America couldn’t even build a Saturn V anymore. We would barely know where to start, he said, and some of the blueprints had been lost. (That was true for a while. The blueprints wandered a bit, but NASA could account for nearly all of them as of 1987. Some of the specialized tools required to build the parts, however, had already been sold as scrap metal.)13

  Eventually, he wondered in our evening talks if federal agencies should come with built-in expiration dates. So, NASA would have ended? Well, he said, a new agency should have been born with a new, clear set of space exploration goals. To his mind, and those of many other Apollo engineers, an incredible, do-anything organization had succumbed to overgrown, unfocused bureaucracy.

  My father had become a branch chief in the later Apollo years and smoothly transitioned into a “mission analysis” role, helping develop a ubiquitous piece of planning software. Poignant in hindsight, he also ran a “failure analysis” project in the early shuttle days, following a NASA tradition of planning for the worst outcome and understanding, as best they could, the odds of survival and success. His team identified some weak points—including the solid rocket boosters—but he recalls powerful voices dismissing some of the predicted odds as “Brown’s horror stories.” As always, the agency had to weigh worries and warnings against payoffs and progress.

  What I remember most, from the shuttle planning era, is his morning routine. His excitement and his sled-dog-like energy for each day still embody, for me, these NASA engineers. As he buttoned a short-sleeved shirt and fixed his necktie, he belted out parts of his favorite hymn: “. . . Farther along, we’ll understand why. Cheer up my bro-ther. . . .” Once he had clipped his NASA ID badge to his shirt pocket he’d start pacing at the front window. As America roiled in gasoline shortages and carpools, Robert Brown awaited the sound of his coworker’s car. Standing at the front window, he stared at an empty street barely lit by dawn. “Come on,” he’d say to himself, to his ride, to the day and the work ahead.

  * * *

  i After his death, von Braun’s American star fell still further. Within a decade, not only did his Nazi SS membership finally come to public light, but so too did his collaboration with Mittelwerk, where thousands of slave laborers perished in hellish conditions.

  15

  Today—Mementos and Returns

  In early 2018, Marlowe Cassetti inverted our normal routine: He sent me a question. He wanted to know the working title of this book. After he received my reply—The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America’s Moon Missions—he thought it over before adding his two cents.

  “I like ‘Engineering the First Moon Missions.’ ”

  First? Did he mean there will be more to come?

  “Yes. . . . Optimistically.”

  While the surviving Apollo engineers express a great range of predictions, from hopeful to doubtful, the younger voices at NASA have worked out a path for new, Apollo-like missions.

  Over the last several years, the old centers have shown new signs of life, in many cases sprouting from Apollo’s old roots. At the Cape, the enormous Vertical Assembly Building proudly wears fresh paint, and engineers plan to bring the old crawlers back to life. Von Braun’s directions for the “mobile launch” scenario are back in business: stack a massive rocket in the world’s most cavernous garage, bolt it to a movable launch platform, and then inch it toward a launch pad.i NASA’s new “Space Launch System” looks like a newer version of the Saturn V with shuttle-like side-boosters. (While not quite as tall as a Saturn V, the SLS will fight gravity with slightly more power.) The rocket’s main engines, literally handed down from surviving space shuttles, reprise the liquid hydrogen burners of Apollo’s upper stages. The new crew capsule expands the old command module to include a fourth seat, but it will return to Earth the old-fashioned way, like a meteor just slow enough to survive, holding huddled astronauts with their backs against the heat shield (see Figure 15.1).

  figure 15.1 The Vertical Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, freshly painted and ready for business again. For scale, one stripe from the painted flag could accommodate the width of a standard car. Opening one of the 456-foot-tall doors takes roughly forty-five minutes. Starting from the bottom, each square panel slides upward to nest behind its higher neighbor. (Photograph by author.)

  Meanwhile, the view from atop the old Saturn V test stand in Huntsville features new skeletal stands rising nearby to help test-fire Mars-hopeful rockets. Many of the old facilities remain at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The Saturn V static test stand still looms like some sort of post-apocalyptic castle, dwarfing in sheer mass all the other facilities. In its old concrete body, a network of hallways, elevators, and stairways connect rooms alternately holding huge pumps or clustering bales of power cables. On one of the higher platforms, the metal ramparts underfoot show plenty of rust.

  In hindsight, it’s difficult to believe rocketry’s ascent from humble mid-century origins to the Moon. In addition to the 1960s Saturn test stand, the Marshall Spaceflight Center maintains an older one as well, dating to the 1950s shortly after von Braun moved to Huntsville. This one looks like a poor excuse for a nineteenth-century oil derrick: sturdy, hewn by hand, and standing just twice the height of a basketball goal. Von Braun borrowed whatever parts he could find, because any expenditure over $20,000 would have brought additional congressional scrutiny. In the pre-Sputnik days, rocketry was a fanciful pursuit.ii The structure stands as a reminder of the space program’s humble origins: repurposed timbers the width of human limbs and a flame-bucket the size of a shallow grave mixed here with otherworldly energy, ingenuity, and ambition.

  If one drives into Huntsville, Alabama, at night, a massive, uplit rocket—a full-sized replica of the Saturn V masterpiece—dominates the landscape. As the tallest structure in town, it anchors the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a brainchild of von Braun’s. The center opened in 1970, as a gear-headed, kid-friendly technical museum, and it remains Huntsville’s primary tourist de
stination.

  Huntsville is still very much Rocket City. A full-thrust-ahead attitude pervades the Marshall Space Flight Center and a lot of the town itself. At the airport, a larger-than-life Wernher von Braun makes intense eye-contact with arriving passengers. His face anchors a large mural summarizing Huntsville’s rocket history and projecting hope for the future. The new Space Launch System, a natural descendent of von Braun’s work, anchors the mural’s other end, seeming to say the intervening years were just a pause, a deep breath.

  As of this writing, the nation has a Space Policy Directive signed by President Donald Trump on December 11, 2017. It calls for a return of American astronauts to the Moon, using a public-private partnership. From there, the plan leads to Mars and, eventually, other stops around the solar system. The directive provides no specific timeline or special stream of funding, and NASA currently consumes about 0.5 percent of the federal budget, compared to about 4.5 percent in Apollo’s heyday.

  There have been several other presidential proclamations following Kennedy’s challenge. In 1989, George H. W. Bush honored the twentieth anniversary of the first lunar landing and announced the “Space Exploration Initiative.” He declared that America would return to the Moon, establish a base, and then journey to Mars, all according to a logical thirty-year plan. It never got off the ground with Congress or the public. He had believed in what he was saying, but years later he reflected that he’d been “set up” and misled by space advocates.1 Despite that disappointment, his son George W. Bush unveiled 2004’s “Vision for Space Exploration.” It also called for a return to the Moon but requested no new federal spending. Time will tell if America will ever again take our species beyond Earth orbit, but the vision of a president single-handedly pushing the nation outward appears misleading or at least irrelevant to modern times. Even Apollo emerged less from President Kennedy himself and more from Cold War panic.