The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  If you ask the Apollo engineers about Mars, many hedge their answers. They don’t want to be negative, but they admit this effort might make the journey to the Moon look like a cakewalk. Recent studies of long-duration space missions (e.g., at the International Space Station) aren’t encouraging. The human body exhibits a great deal of stress away from its natural home. And instead of days, any trip to Mars will take many months, leaving astronauts riddled with cosmic rays and risking many more rolls of the solar flare dice. Chances of brain damage and leukemia would skyrocket. Some scientists estimate, for instance, that about one-third of an astronaut’s brain cells would have been struck by cosmic rays for a thirty-month round-trip to Mars. But aside from the perilous transit, at least Mars would appear more habitable than the Moon at first glance, right? The planet has a thin residual atmosphere and at least a warm-looking color. But the soil, far from being crop ready, offers unique dangers. It contains a compound hazardous to the human body at even small doses.iii And the planet has no magnetic shield to protect life from the pitter-patter of cosmic rays. Unless Mars pioneers build underground, they would suffer extreme radiation exposure.2

  Obstacles notwithstanding, one of the most eager groups for a new Apollo-type era lives within planetary science. Apollo’s gritty bounty—the scientific measurements and rocks returned from the Moon—is considered the gold standard not just for understanding the Moon but also for calibrating the solar system’s history. Scientists crave more material from the Moon and, if possible, other planets. To an extent that would surprise most of the Apollo engineers, scientists are still gleaning discoveries from the old Apollo data and the remaining lunar material. Using modern techniques on old data or old rocks can truly squeeze fresh blood from old, gray turnips.iv

  Early on, Apollo’s advocates had promised an understanding of how the Moon came to be. Today, we still haven’t nailed down a unanimous picture of the Moon’s origin. The composition of the Moon rocks (similar to Earth’s crust) and the prevailing age of the oldest rocks (roughly ten million years younger than Earth by recent estimates)3 support a “giant impact” hypothesis. Though it’s not a closed case by any means, the prevailing narrative unfolds as follows. If we compress the 4.5 billion years of our planet’s existence to just forty-five years, with Earth now entering middle age, then when Earth was still but a babe, an interloping body (or a swarm of them) sideswiped Earth and knocked a bunch of its crust into a nearby orbit. Gravity pulled this material together into the Moon, and gravity likewise helped wounded Earth return to a spherical shape.

  Unlike Earth, the Moon’s surface preserves its history with museum-like precision, pristine for billions of years.4 It provides a unique sort of time machine for astronomers. As scientists today return to the Apollo Moon rocks, they can literally see and even sniff history to an unprecedented degree. For example, recent work has probed tiny, sealed bubbles within the Moon rocks, using specialized needles. In letting these bubbles exhale a tiny breath held for billions of years, scientists can smell exactly what the young Moon was cooking in its turbulent youth, including a surprising amount of water vapor.

  But Apollo traded with the Moon—as it brought material to Earth, it left mementos behind as well. One of the most significant leave-behinds needed no batteries or transmitters: just a simple set of mirrored reflectors, originally proposed to NASA by a Princeton graduate student. Pinging these reflectors with laser beams allows Earthlings to measure the distance to the Moon with incredible precision. This measurement is still a central one for physicists debating the finer details of gravity. The Earth-Moon distance isn’t simply increasing an inch-and-a-half per year as the Moon recedes—it’s also constantly fluctuating. The Moon’s devilishly complex orbit (elliptical but not without tiny irregularities) provides humanity’s best available ruler against which to test, for instance, Einstein’s general relativity against other, newer theories.5

  The later Apollo missions also left active experiments on the Moon, transmitting measurements to Earth that NASA scientists recorded onto spools of magnetic tape until 1977. These precious reels, each about the size of a dinner plate and numbering well over ten thousand, won’t be with us forever. The magnetic tape degrades, and even maintaining the antique equipment that can wind and read the tape presents an ever-larger hurdle.

  One of the most bountiful data sets wiggled forth from the remote seismometers measuring each shudder in the lunar soil. By combing these old data sets with modern, digital tools, scientists have identified more than four hundred previously undetected quakes that happened deep within the Moon. Researchers continue building a better understanding of the Moon now, year by year, using the old recordings. Scientists have also identified the seismic signatures for scores of meteoroid impacts from these data sets. Since Earth has a thick atmosphere, many of our meteors burn up undetected. But the record of thumps on the Moon tells the straight story, providing astronomers one of the most reliable measures of the solar system’s “bombardment rate.” That rate, pegged in the Apollo seismograph data and carefully married to a catalogue of craters, allows astronomers to extrapolate backward in time, to glimpse the solar system’s more violent childhood when the rate was much higher. Billions of years ago, as Earth and the Moon spun as mere children in the cosmos, they withstood a relative hailstorm compared to today’s drizzle.

  The Apollo equipment packs, strewn on the Moon like the remains of nerdy picnics, transmitted all sorts of other information as well. Tragically, a lot of it has wandered off and disappeared. NASA, in shedding its Apollo spending habits, couldn’t store all the tapes. The agency sent boxes full of them to scientific experts and, presumably, safe and secure storage within their various universities. But buildings flood, professors retire, and university administrators tend to wrinkle their noses at obscure, musty boxes. Approximately half of Apollo’s remote sensor data is now missing, and the evidence trail for thousands of tapes has grown cold.6

  In many homes of Apollo engineers, you can find a wall or corner set aside for their own mementos. Key photos of missions and banquets mix with plaques of recognition and, less often, models of rockets or spacecraft or even bits of equipment. As with Mrs. Faget’s tearful moments following a 1962 parade, the engineers’ spouses are often the ones to express blunt pride about the mountains of overlooked work. No matter how much time you spend with the engineers, you come away feeling you’ve only skimmed the surface of this history. Many of them mention losing colleagues more and more frequently. Even while scheduling interviews for this book, some have passed away, taking with them unique stories of near misses and late-night “eurekas.”

  A great many of the Apollo engineers have returned to—if not their origins—initial loves. Marlowe Cassetti, now retired in western Colorado, has rekindled the rapture that began with his first balsa-wood glider. “I probably have a dozen,” he says of his model airplane fleet, but he adds that they could use some work, after a few crashes. He helps organize a couple of model airplane clubs. They meet year-round, and Cassetti’s Houston-inspired chili is a crowd favorite when they land their planes in fresh high-country snow.

  He’s watched the groups dwindle in recent years. “Unfortunately, many of the people are older, retired,” he says. “And we don’t have a lot of young people come in.” The younger fliers seem to prefer drones. These come pre-assembled, require less time, less attention to detail—less engineering. Drones don’t need long, flat runways cleared of rocks either.7

  Frank Hughes, one of Apollo’s simulation wizards, stays as busy as ever. He works an array of engineering consulting gigs, his active mind seeking good problems like an aardvark tearing into logs for insects. The cold winter of 2018 found him in a west Georgia rock quarry. He served as an advisor for the film First Man, which portrayed Neil Armstrong’s path to the first lunar landing. Frank witnessed a whole new type of simulation, with the bleak quarry standing for the lunar surface. The cast and crew occasionally halted filming to wait out some very un-lu
nar snow showers.8

  Henry Pohl has circled back to cattle ranching. And he has returned to the family land near Ezzell, Texas. Now in his mid-eighties, he owns several hundred head of cattle grazing on about a square mile of warm, green land. Ezzell is as rural as one can still get in Texas, a three-hour drive south of Austin, with two-lane state roads passing through alternating German- or Spanish-settled communities like Schulenburg and La Grange. No cell phone’s mapping tools can guide you to Pohl. Gravel county roads eventually give way to a private dirt road that rumbles over cattle guards and past a hand-carved “Welcome to Paradise” sign. He and a few family members live in homes scattered near the original Pohl homestead—the one he wired for electricity in the late 1940s—and it stands ringed with weeds and nostalgia. Most of its last coat of white paint fiercely clings to dried gray boards (see Figure 15.2).

  figure 15.2 Meeting for the first time since their NASA days, Robert Brown (left) and Henry Pohl (right) reminisce near Ezzell, Texas, in 2017. During the 1940s, Pohl wired the family home in the background for electricity. (Photograph by Dana Smith.)

  If you’ve arrived on a warm day, Henry, tall and cordial, might be sporting bare feet. His fierce blue gaze reminds you of his memory’s power. When he tells a story, he inserts pauses. He is not searching for a word, but letting the story prepare a pivot, surprise, or shift. “It was about forty degrees out, and it was raining. I was terribly cold and wet,” he says of his first tractor ride. He pauses a beat, before adding, “but I was the happiest boy on this Earth.”

  Pohl has devoted most of one room to mementos. A large model of a space station sits in one corner. Henry and his colleagues designed it later in his career, but NASA abandoned it, he says, when they decided to partner with the Russians. A thruster manufactured for Apollo sits on a shelf like a bowling trophy. He grabs a piece of the pint-sized Saturn he built for von Braun as well, and he points out the double-walled structure. “In between,” says Pohl, “we ran water down this side of it and up the other for cooling.”

  Pohl likes to take guests around his ranch land. At one stop, near the old homestead, Henry points out a structure he built as a boy. He and his brother cut the timber one year, let it dry, and then erected a barn the next. “It looks better than it functioned, that one.” Henry failed to predict the width of cars and farm equipment as the twentieth century roared past. But this structure from the mind of an untrained boy, an engineer-to-be, is remarkable.9

  My father’s mementos, kept in a box, feature a now-familiar collection: mission pins and patches, letters of thanks and commendation from NASA leaders, his early papers plotting Moon routes, some mission photographs, and a bit of shuttle tile wrinkling within a Lucite block. As of this writing, my father is as restless as ever if not more so. He’s spent years volunteering for veterans’ organizations and, with my Mom, for before-school reading programs in elementary schools. The volunteer opportunities start to dry up for people in their eighties though.

  At my parents’ central-Texas retirement home, he is known as a kidder. So, when people ask what he did for a living, I suspect some don’t initially believe him when he flatly replies “rocket scientist” with no elaboration. In the spring of 2018, he gave a talk about the Apollo years, coordinated to follow a screening of the movie Apollo 13. About fifty curious retirees gathered to hear about those Moon missions. They sat attentively as he went through some slides and stories, and then some hands went up. People seemed very appreciative, even impressed. But most of their questions centered on the astronauts and the minute-to-minute mission drama, as opposed to the painstaking wiring, test runs, and computing—all the late-night homework, sweat, and worrying—that lifted Apollo to success.

  * * *

  i The private firm Space X uses the old Apollo launch pads for its busy schedule, but it prefers to prep its rockets at the launch point.

  ii My thanks to NASA historian and tour guide Brian Odom as well as tour companions and retired engineers Tom Parnell and Don Woodruff.

  iii Perchlorate compounds interfere with proper thyroid functioning. They would be ever-present in the treads of any astronaut’s boots.

  iv With many thanks to scientists Caleb Fassett, Debra Needham, and Renee Weber for their time and patience in sharing the world of modern lunar science. Any mistakes in the text are mine alone, in my attempted simplification.

  16

  How We Did It

  It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he just rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

  —Sheriff Bell describes a dream of his father, in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

  A group of NASA thought leaders, including many of the original group from Langley along with a few astronauts and key administrators, gathered a couple of years after the Moon program’s conclusion. “Twenty-five or thirty people that had all worked on Apollo,” engineer, flight director (and eventual director of the Johnson Space Center) Gerry Griffin recalled, “We went out to Cal Tech and spent about three days contemplating our navels. . . . what we had done, why we had done it, how did we do it.”

  “We talked a lot of technical stuff, some politics,” Griffin said. And he tells a story of attendee Neil Armstrong, the first man to set boot on the Moon. “He didn’t talk a lot, but when he spoke, people listened carefully.” Armstrong was in many ways not a typical test-pilot-turned-astronaut. While known for being quiet, he was never what someone would call shrinking or invisible. His thoughtful presence carried significant weight in a room. He’d been a bookish kid and grown to become an oddly earnest high schooler, studying calculus on his own time and carefully assembling a wind tunnel in his parents’ basement. Instead of turning wrenches on hot rods, he learned to fly before he could drive. “I am, and ever will be,” he once said, “a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer.”1

  After everyone else had finished speaking at the Cal Tech gathering, Armstrong calmly rose and went to a chalkboard. He drew four bell-type curves, spaced slightly apart. “They looked kind of like mountain peaks,” Griffin recalls. The astronaut labeled the curves: Leadership, Threat, Economy, and Talent. And he said to the room, “My thought is, when you get all these lined up, you can’t stop something really big from happening.” A bold (and in some ways, desperate) president. The threat of the Soviet Union. A roaring economy with budget surplus. And a newly educated bunch of young adults. When the curves aligned—a rare enough event in history—Armstrong suggested an Apollo could bloom. “We were trying to figure out what allowed us to get this done,” Griffin recalls. “He kind of summed it up in a way that everyone said, ‘Of course—you’re exactly right.’ ”2

  The analysis of aligned curves can help explain why we haven’t quite restarted a program of sending humans to explore the cosmos, despite many presidential initiatives. But the four factors cannot account for four hundred thousand voices and their feat: joining forces in peacetime on a breakneck, ambitious project. Looking at our species and our collective history, Apollo is an outlier. We are probably wired to comprehend and associate with only so many people. Many researchers believe that our human specifications, as tuned by evolution, have us naturally understanding and organizing groups of about 150 humans.i Any greater number stretches a brain uncomfortably. (Some see the rising angst of the internet age—with its disconcerting swarm of voices and faces—as a predictable result.) Since the Apollo engineers were part of an anomaly, we can as
k them what they saw and experienced as the glue.

  First and most obviously, Apollo had a goal of perfect clarity: As advised by Wernher von Braun and Bob Gilruth, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson stated the mission criteria in a way that every engineer, every technician, and really everyone on the planet could understand. In 1961, Wernher von Braun said Kennedy’s announcement “puts the program into focus. . . . Everyone knows what the Moon is, what this decade is, what it means to get some people there.”3 The only gray areas were left on the Moon itself. And such a clear goal underwrites many of history’s rare stories of dramatic success. Ironically, the clarity of Apollo made the next steps difficult at best. How could NASA get that many people on the same page again?

  Getting to what worked and the answer to how they did it, I’m going to group the answers together into four wide buckets. They appear here in the order of how often these factors come up in interviews with engineers.

  Agency in the Agency

  The first time I asked my father “what worked,” he immediately spoke of the way old NASA doled out big scoops of responsibility. Nearly every Apollo-era engineer will tell you they owned their work. Just return to July 1969 and hear each of them hyperventilating; their one part of one device or calculation could be the one to ruin the enterprise. Whether it was miscalculating the fuel supply, worrying about a breaking ladder, missing a tiny flaw in the lunar lander’s ascent engine, mistyping or mis-weaving the computer code, or mistaking the Moon’s spastic gravity, the engineers lived, breathed, and sweated their contributions.