Joe Gavin, Saul Ferdman, and I visited NAA’s facility at Downey, California, where we were graciously hosted by John Paup, the company’s Apollo program director, Norm Ryker, the Engineering manager, and Charles Feltz, the project engineer. They showed us through the aging World War II aircraft factory buildings, which had been used by Consolidated Vultee to build B-24 Liberator bombers during the war and were being spruced up with cleanser and paint for Apollo. The general appearance of these buildings was not unlike Grumman’s World War II factories. Upon entering the adjacent Apollo Conference Center, however, the dreary world of wartime leftovers was forgotten in a tasteful display of modern functional elegance.
A large reception area, thickly carpeted and decorated in designer shades of brown, orange, and beige, led into the main Apollo meeting room, a combined conference room and briefing theater designed to hold 150 people. It was carpeted and comfortably furnished and contained the best audio-visual and climate-control equipment then available. Paup advised us to provide such a facility; NASA insisted upon comfort and efficiency in their conference centers, as meetings took up so much of their time.
Back home Gavin and Ferdman had a set of renovation plans drawn up, which, although not the equal of North American Aviation’s, were a major improvement over what we had. Nothing happened, though, because top management, usually Titterton, Schwendler, or Towl, was very skeptical of the need for such opulence. The company fathers and their navy customers had grown up and worked in spartan, austere surroundings. They cherished the “hair-shirt” image of frugality and conservatism, which had always suited the navy. How, they asked (not unreasonably), could we expect the navy to be content with second-class facilities at Grumman if they saw a luxurious NASA center right in Bethpage? Did not NASA and the navy both work for the same U.S. government? There also seemed to be an unspoken suspicion that we in the LM program were simply seeking to inflate our own status and egos.
Not until the disastrous LM-1 Customer Acceptance Readiness Review in June 1967 was it obvious that the austere image that played so well with the navy was alienating the NASA management of Apollo. We finally did what our Apollo teammate had recommended more than four years earlier, but by then it was too little and too late.
2
Designing, Building, and Testing
5
Engineering a Miracle
Congratulations—you certainly look happy.”
“It’s wonderful. Good luck!”
“You look so excited. I’m really glad for you.”
Good wishes poured forth from my relatives and friends during the ten-day Christmas holiday break, further stimulating a dizzy feeling of excitement that I could scarcely contain. I had the aerospace engineer’s dream job of the century. Not only would I design and build the first spaceship to land men on another heavenly body, but I was encouraged by NASA to let my imagination run wild and question everything we and they had done in prior studies and the LM proposal. I could start fresh, with a clean sheet of paper, using our past work as a point of departure. Such freedom! Now I could probe some puzzling questions more deeply: With no aerodynamics, why did we propose a smoothly contoured LM? Why not just let its form follow function as it will? How would we fly the landing, and what would we find to land upon? Could two men alone safely launch a rocket ship from the Moon? There were so many fascinating issues to explore—it would challenge every bit of ingenuity and talent I could muster. I longed for the holiday break to end so we could start redesigning the lunar module.
In mid-January 1963 we moved into Plant 25, our new LM Engineering building, built on what had been the softball fields on the north side of Plant 5, the red-brick World War II building that housed Grumman Engineering, Preliminary Design, and the Experimental Shops. With 190,000 square feet on three floors, the empty new building seemed huge. In Grumman style it was plain, even austere, with cinder-block walls painted a light beige, reinforced concrete floors covered with speckled beige-and-black vinyl tiles, and white suspended ceilings with row after row of recessed fluorescent lights. But it was fresh and clean, the polished floors gleaming as bright as our hopes for the audacious project we were beginning. On each floor an almost continuous narrow window ran along each outside wall. The steel-partitioned offices on the periphery had half-height glass panels on their inside walls to allow natural light to penetrate the interior. Half-height partitioned offices were erected across an aisle from the windowed offices in some locations, but mostly the interior floor space was open to accommodate the typical aerospace “bull pen” mass-seating arrangement. The office areas for the group leaders whose engineering groups were scheduled to move in first were in place, along with neat rows of new and shiny beige metal desks and chairs.
Bill Rathke and I moved into a large window office on the second floor in the middle of the south wall facing Plant 5. We had decided that as LM Engineering manager and project engineer we must work together hand-in-glove and felt that sharing an office would enhance communication between us. Our beige metal desks and chairs, the same as those on the floor, faced back-to-back, Bill’s looking toward the window and mine facing the Engineering floor. There was a large metal table at the end of the room and a blackboard and corkboard on the adjacent metal partitioned wall. On the other side of the partition was a large conference room primarily for our use. It was filled with new furniture: a metal table at one end in front of a blackboard on the wall, and several rows of not-uncomfortable straight-backed metal chairs with vinyl-upholstered seats and backs.
I had come to know and respect Bill Rathke since he had been assigned to the LM program during the proposal. He was in his mid-forties, short and stocky, with wavy dark brown hair and square, rimless eyeglasses. His quiet demeanor made him seem solemn, unless you noticed his eyes, which were often merry and twinkling. His steady, amiable disposition and dry sense of humor made him easy to work with, and his wealth of aircraft design and project leadership experience provided me with much to learn and emulate.
Bill Rathke came to Grumman in 1943 with a freshly minted degree in mechanical engineering from Iowa State University. He had never been east of Iowa in his life and was greatly relieved to find that Long Island was not the same as New York City. Living accommodations were scarce in Bethpage and other nearby villages, so Rathke found a room in a boardinghouse that catered to Grumman people. A few months later he and three other newly hired engineers rented a former summer house near the water in Huntington Bay Hills.1
Rathke loved sports and at Iowa State had hoped to play football. His short stature, flat feet, and poor eyesight made that impossible, but he became the Iowa team’s manager, looking after the players’ gear and traveling to games. Even the wartime draft would not take him—he was 4F—but they urged him to get a job in the defense industry. He had taken courses in aerodynamics and aircraft design and eagerly interviewed with the airplane company representatives who recruited on campus.
At Grumman he started in structural design, but he showed an ability to design other systems as well and obviously had leadership talent. He soon became project engineer of the W2F antisubmarine aircraft, one of Grumman’s earliest successful airborne electronic weapons systems. Rathke had more than once taken a complex aerospace project from preliminary design through development, manufacturing, and into flight—the route we now had to follow with LM. Knowing his impressive credentials, I was delighted that he was modest and unassuming as well.
We soon developed an effective partnership for running the LM Engineering Department, keeping each other fully informed through morning and evening discussions so that we could function interchangeably. We divided the work along whatever lines our backgrounds suggested but tried to avoid becoming specialized.
The one factor I had not considered when I suggested to Bill that we share an office was that he was a heavy smoker of cigars. A nonsmoker myself, I found the smoky atmosphere in our office unbearable because my eyes teared and my eyelids became red and itchy. W
e got Building Maintenance to install an exhaust fan in the ceiling behind a louver directly above Bill’s desk. This solved the problem. I watched contentedly as the clouds of gray smoke swiftly vanished into the louver, leaving the air in the office largely smoke free.
Eagerly I tore into the design work facing us. At the LM contract negotiations NASA had made clear that in selecting Grumman for the job they were not buying the design that we had presented in the proposal. Now that we were under contract they wanted us to redo the preliminary design, using more conservative assumptions on weight and redundancy, and with NASA’s extensive advice and approval. Rathke and I got the former LM proposal team together, along with the newcomers to the program, and laid out a three-month program to reexamine and rework the proposal design using new assumptions. The primary new assumptions were an increase in the fully loaded LM target weight from twenty-two thousand to twenty-five thousand pounds and an emphasis on assuring that no single failure in LM would affect crew safety—to be achieved by redundancy or by design simplicity and safety factors. I challenged our people to start afresh and rethink the design, because this time what we designed was what we would build and fly to the Moon: “This is no longer a proposal drill—this is for real!”
One morning in early February 1963 I received phone call from my wife. I answered with apprehension because she rarely called me at work. She told me in an anxious voice that I should come home right away because my father had been in a serious accident. Outside in the cold, crisp air and bright sunshine, my mind raced ahead to dozens of possibilities, all of them bad. I knew Joan would not tell me to come home immediately unless it was very serious.
One look at Joan’s crestfallen face told me the worst. My father was dead from a heart attack while on his way to work on the Long Island Railroad. We had to go to the LIRR station in Jamaica, Queens, to identify his body. Shock settled over me, and I sat for a few moments clinging to Joan as both our eyes filled with tears. I pictured my Dad as I had seen him only two days earlier, when we visited my parents at my boyhood home in Merrick. We brought our four children with us: David, eight, Tommy, six, Edward, four, and Christopher, just two and a half years old. It was a lovely visit; both Mom and Dad played with the kids and enjoyed them fully.
The reaction control system configuration. (Courtesy Northrop/Grumman Corporation) (Illustration credit 5.1)
At the Jamaica station Joan and I were ushered into a small room in the basement, and there was Dad stretched out on a wooden table, neatly dressed in his business suit, shirt, and tie. He looked like he was taking a catnap, and I hoped that he would open his eyes, get up, and come home with us. He looked healthy, certainly not dead. But he was dead, and I shook with sobs once again as the irreversibility of it all sank in.
The next four days were a blur of grieving, loving, and consolation from relatives and friends. Out-of-town relatives, including my brother and his wife from California and my aunt and cousin and her husband from upstate New York, stayed in the house with my mother, helping her perform the required rituals. My mother, brother, and I received condolences and support from our family, friends, and many people who had known my Dad. At last we laid him to rest with his mother and father in the family plot in Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn and returned home to resume our lives.
My father’s sudden, unexpected death was a jolting reminder that life goes on despite the Apollo program. I had been so wrapped up in Grumman that I had lost contact with the “real world.” Dad’s passing reminded me that I must try to achieve a better balance of home and family life versus work. But my immediate response was just the opposite. In grieving for my Dad, I tried to escape his loss by plunging into my job with greater intensity. The quest to land on the Moon created its own reality, a place where we could isolate ourselves from the problems of everyday life, substituting an intriguing and different set of problems over which we had control.
Defining LM’s Basic Configuration
It was an exciting time to be on the LM program at Grumman, and after the immediacy of my mourning had subsided, I bounded into work each day full of enthusiasm. There were many wonderful work sessions that year (1963) in which we used our ingenuity and imagination to make our exotic spacecraft take shape. There were no precedents for what we were doing, so we were neither bound nor guided by convention. NASA allowed us most of the year to firm up the preliminary design and translate it into full-scale mockups.
I vividly recall one Saturday session in the conference room with Ozzie Williams, Bob Grossman, and others from the Reaction Control System Group. We were reexamining the RCS configuration, particularly the geometric placement of the sixteen thrusters on the ascent stage and the degree of redundancy. We spent most of the day at the blackboard, sketching different system configurations and thruster locations and tabulating the features of each arrangement, including weight, redundancy, and controllability after successive thruster failures. We argued engineering logic and practical issues, such as jet contamination effects on adjacent areas of the ascent stage. This latter consideration convinced us to abandon the originally proposed RCS configuration, which had four jets close to the front windows, likely to obscure the windows with rocket-exhaust products.
“Well, where does that leave us?” I challenged. ‘All the configurations we’ve looked at have some major drawback. Are there any others that we’ve missed?” I stood at the blackboard facing the group, all of them deep in concentration.
Bob Grossman jumped up and took the chalk from me, his face glowing. He vigorously erased the blackboard and began to sketch. “Here, how about this?” he said as he continued to sketch. “We’ll mount the thrusters at forty-five degrees, keeping them away from the windows. And we’ll arrange them as an axial pair and an orthogonal pair. Let’s see how that looks in our tables.”
Grossman was panting with excitement as he quickly filled in our comparison tables on the blackboard for this configuration. It looked better than any of the others, but we continued discussing its pros and cons for another hour before choosing it as the preferred design arrangement: Four four-jet clusters located at forty-five degrees from the centerline of the crew cabin, with two of the jets aligned parallel to the main rocket engines’ thrust axis; the other two jets orthogonal and at ninety degrees to each other. The RCS was arranged in two totally redundant systems, A and B, each having a fuel, oxidizer, and helium tank, eight jet thrusters (two in each four-jet cluster), and fully redundant components. This system could maintain control about all three vehicle axes after any single failure and many selective double failures. We left the office that evening elated at having successfully solved a difficult puzzle and created something novel and valuable.
During this formative phase of the program I realized how fortunate I was to have two very talented assistants who worked effectively with each other and with me. Bob Carbee, LM Subsystems project engineer, was in charge of the design sections, and Arnold Whitaker, LM Systems project engineer, headed the analytical sections. Whitaker led Grumman’s proposal team for the navy’s TFX missile system and Carbee assisted him. The TFX competition, which included a subsonic attack airplane called the Missileer to carry the advanced missiles, was canceled by the navy in a change of planning direction while the missile proposals were being evaluated. The cancellation occurred as we were preparing the LM proposal, making Carbee and Whitaker available for key engineering positions on the LM program.2
Bob Carbee was tall and athletically built, often smoking a straight, sporty pipe, which enhanced his 1950s movie star image. Nevertheless, Carbee was a down-to-earth design engineer with broad interests and curiosity. At Grumman he worked his way up from structural designer to armament group leader, then cockpit group leader, designing and integrating the cockpits with their controls, instrument panels, ejection seats, windshields, and plexiglas canopies. He led a newly formed Weapons Systems Section that cut across older design specialties to analyze, design, and integrate the airborne weapons systems i
nto the aircraft and be responsible for their mission performance. For example, Carbee’s section was responsible for the overall accuracy of the A2F-1 Intruder’s attack system, the lethality of the Eagle missile system, and the operational effectiveness of the W2F-1 Hawkeye. To integrate these systems across disciplines Carbee became a practitioner of systems engineering, learning this field from the bottom up before the air force’s systems engineering manuals even existed. His breadth of systems design experience and exposure to a wide variety of missions and flight vehicles made the LM the next logical step in his career.
Carbee’s office reflected his wide-ranging interests. Engineering artifacts were everywhere—cutaways of bomb-release mechanisms, an escape-seat actuator, canopy locking latches, and so forth. Behind each item was a story about the technical issues that shaped its design. On his desk and walls were pictures of his life beyond Grumman. One was of a smooth-faced nineteen year old posed in his leather flight jacket and overseas cap next to a sleek fighter plane. Carbee downed two German planes with his P-51 Mustang during the bloody campaign up the rugged boot of Italy. When I asked him about his wartime service, he modestly remembered being very young and very scared. Other photos showed his lovely wife Mary and two beautiful daughters.
Carbee was a competitive but good-humored sailor racing a seventeen-foot Mobjack weekends in the strong winds of Long Island’s Great South Bay. Always among the winners, on Mondays he often told us about his latest adventures, replete with knockdown gusts, hairbreadth recoveries, and a stirring finish.
The section heads who reported to Carbee admired and respected him. He helped them solve technical problems and gave sound advice regarding administrative and personnel matters. Once convinced that they were right, he backed up his people ferociously, tackling me, Rathke, or anyone else in the hierarchy to make sure their viewpoint was considered. He was tenacious in argument, seldom losing his temper unless severely provoked.
Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (Smithsonian History of Aviation and Spaceflight) Page 8