by Jay Barbree
Deke lifted his eyes. The shoreline of coastal towns along the Atlantic glowed and sparkled, long iridescent pearls of color that dotted the horizon. He shifted his gaze to the ground beneath him. Incredible, he thought. If you stood a football field on its end, it would still be sixty-three feet shorter than the Saturn V rocket.
Deke was “walking the tower,” an instinct born of a lifetime of pre-flight checks of the machines he flew. It wasn’t quite the same as kicking the tires on a car, but the sense of inspection was the same.
Memories of Gus Grissom flooded his thoughts. It had taken Slayton a long time to accept losing that man. Gus had been closer than a brother. Now, Shepard would ride an even bigger dragon. They all knew the odds. Millions of parts must work perfectly, in concert, or . . . Apollo 13’s close call was fresh in his mind and he cringed.
He shook his head. He didn’t know if he had it in him to bear the loss of Alan Shepard. He wasn’t at all sure that he could get over the loss of another so close. Alan filled that special space reserved for best friend, and here Deke was, “walking the tower,” inspecting the rocket at every level as if it were some evil giant that in a searing burst of flame could kill Alan and—
A plane swept overhead, the throb of powerful engines matching the pulsating pain of his thoughts. He flashed back to when he had flown B-25 bombers in World War II—twin engines hammering out 3,400 horsepower—a brute for its day. Numbers flashed before him. You could fill the sky with more than five hundred of those bombers, throttles mashed to the gate, and all of them combined didn’t have the power to heave this rocket from earth.
At this moment, as Alan Shepard slept to rest for his lunar mission, fears gnawed at Deke. He had to know that everything at the pad was ready. He began his slow walk down the stairs, stopping at each level, checking and rechecking making sure everything was in place. Making sure . . . Good Lord, just making sure . . .
For Alan Shepard the early afternoon of January 21, 1971, provided an eerie moment of déjà vu. He had just left the van that transported him along with Ed Mitchell and Stuart Roosa to the launch pad. Walking toward the elevator for the long ride skyward, Alan stopped. He leaned his head back and looked up at the giant rocket towering over him. This was the same scene he had etched in his mind ten years earlier as he began the walk to the Redstone booster for America’s first manned launch. Then, in pre-dawn darkness split by brilliant searchlights, he had studied the rocket that would take him into space.
“How much bigger this monster is . . . ” he thought, not even certain he had spoken the words aloud. But the sight was staggering. The Saturn V loomed nearly five times taller than the Redstone, and Alan reminded himself it also was a hundred times more powerful. Even the escape rocket atop his Apollo spacecraft had twice the power of the Redstone booster.
There was almost an eerie silence about the launch pad. The silence was the absence of voices. During those times he’d been here for training, the launch stand and the service towers had swarmed with activity, workers in every direction laboring. Now the human beehive had almost disappeared. Saturn V was fueled. Most of the launch pad crew was gone; only those needed to complete the pre-launch orchestration remained.
“It’s like a ghost town.” Alan wasn’t sure if Mitchell or Roosa had made the comment, but it fit.
By Alan’s side was Deke Slayton. He had ridden in the van with the crew to the pad and there would be no good-byes.
“Watch your ass and have a good trip,” Deke told his friend as he turned away to watch the crew enter the elevator.
Deke planted his feet where he could see most everything up top. He focused on the narrow steel walkway leading from the elevator to the White Room, where technicians would make final checks of the astronauts’ equipment and assist them in boarding Apollo 14.
Minutes later, the three space suited figures appeared, tiny dolls from this distance nearly four hundred feet below. Deke saw Shepard stop to stare down at him. He had the feeling of many years compressed to this single moment. Up there was the only one of the original seven Mercury astronauts who was about to realize the dream of one day going all the way—to the moon. Alan Shepard, in a very real sense, was going for all seven of them—going not only for him and Deke but also for Gus, John, Scott, Wally, and Gordo. Deke gave him a thumbs-up.
Three hundred technicians and controllers gathered at the Launch Control Center. Backing up that team were three separate firing rooms, each with five hundred people on constant alert for any contingency. Hundreds more waited through the countdown at Mission Control in Houston. Thousands of other men and women were on duty at tracking stations around the world, in tracking and recovery ships at sea, in tracking aircraft already airborne.
Alan Shepard knew memories of the troubled Apollo 13 flight were still fresh in the minds of every one of those people. The tension riding the countdown was almost a physical presence in the spacecraft. Yet there was a new level of confidence that they had the tiger by the tail. As far as the three men in Kitty Hawk were concerned, the problems that had bedeviled Thirteen were fixed. Their moon ship now carried three oxygen tanks instead of the two for each Apollo, and the extra tank was kept isolated from the others. There was another extremely welcome addition—a spare battery of four hundred amperes of power, which would supply their craft with enough electrical energy to handle all their needs from any point in the mission.
At T-minus 110 minutes, the count went down to business with the abort advisory system checks. Shepard’s thoughts as he and his crew went through the checklists mixed the immediate work at hand with constant self-reminders that a lot more than going to the moon was riding on this flight.
Project Apollo was under direct fire from a growing number of critics, who were sniping at the whole manned lunar program. NASA had sold Apollo as a race to the moon with the Soviets for national prestige. With the race over, the public, concerned about other problems besetting the nation, had generally lost interest, and politicians were taking notice. Shepard knew that one more failure, even if the crew survived, would doom the entire project. Since Thirteen’s cliffhanger ride, the political naysayers had already cancelled three scheduled flights to the moon. Apollos 18, 19, and 20, planned for extensive exploration, had been scrubbed.
Fresh from that kill, the doom merchants were already aiming at more Apollo scalps to hang from their office walls. To the dismay of the astronauts, Congress had slashed NASA’s budget to its lowest level in ten years. What really shook the astronaut team was that even one of their own, Bob Gilruth, had suggested that it would be to everyone’s interest to kill all lunar missions after Apollo 14.
Gilruth offered the theory that by landing on the moon the country had achieved the political goal laid down by President Kennedy. So why risk any more lives? Forget the moon, he urged top government officials, and get cracking with a manned space station in earth orbit. That way, if any serious problems occurred, returning astronauts to earth would be simpler and safer.
So Apollo 14, Shepard knew, had to be better than merely a successful mission. It had to be a superb effort that would keep Apollo afloat. The same damn burden he had carried in Freedom Seven.
T-minus 43 minutes. No problems, no unexpected stumbles. The three men were in great spirits, feeling confident about their mission’s success.
The count sailed smoothly down through arming the escape system. Range safety went to “green all the way.” Launch Control tested the systems for power transfer to the booster; everything checked out perfectly. At T-minus 20 minutes the lunar lander they had named Antares came alive with its own internal power.
Fifteen minutes to go and Kitty Hawk was now on its own power systems.
Ten minutes. Perfect!
Eight minutes.
Hold!
Apollo 14 was still right on the money, but the storm front to the west bore down with heavy rain toward the launch pad. From within Kitty Hawk, with its protective shield, the storm wasn’t visible.
Shepard groaned. “Christ, not again,” he muttered to himself. Unpleasant memories flooded his mind. His first attempt to fly in Mercury-Redstone had gone down the tubes with heavy rain, and now he sat on the pad for his second launch, delayed because of another cloudburst.
Every previous Apollo manned flight had lifted off exactly on schedule. Shepard chafed at this unexpected delay. He’d waited too many years for his crack at the moon to be held up now because of rain.
In Launch Control, listening to Shepard’s voice, Deke Slayton judged correctly the surge of frustration in his friend. Immediately Deke went on the communications loop to speak directly with Alan. “Hey, the way it looks, this storm is going to go right over us and out to sea,” he said. “At least, it’s more comfortable for you than in your old tin can.”
“Yeah, right,” the impatient Shepard growled. “Tell you what, Deke, let’s get on with it.”
“Hang tight, buddy.”
The storm did just what had been forecast. It lashed the launch pad, swept out to sea, and the count resumed and eased right through all final status checks. The launch team armed the destruct system, and the access arm leading to Kitty Hawk swung back out of the way.
T-minus 3 minutes 10 seconds. Apollo 14 was now on its automatic sequencer, the long-awaited “Initiate firing command,” which slipped the rest of the count into computers.
T-minus 50 seconds. Saturn V went to full internal power. The dragon was stirring.
Butterflies swirled in Shepard’s stomach and he pushed the doubt away. He felt the first distant whispers of Saturn V flexing its sinews, the rush of thousands of gallons of propellants hurtling downward through their lines, turbo-pumps spinning.
T-minus 8.9 seconds.
The countdown call echoed across the spaceport. . .
“Ignition sequence start!”
She clasped her hands to her chest as the first savage pinpoint of fire snapped into view. Louise Shepard felt her heart leap into her throat. Three miles from the launch pad, she heard no sound, only saw growing flame; the roar would not reach her for fifteen seconds. She had been the first wife to endure that private, special agony of watching her husband rocket away from earth. Back then she had watched her television screen as the toy-like, slender Redstone sent Alan skyward.
Nothing could keep her away now. By her side were family and friends, clasping hands, holding one another for strength.
Everything except her husband faded from her thoughts. She suddenly recalled a heart-rending moment the night before, the last time she had seen Alan close to her. How cruel such moments could be! They had been forced to remain on opposite sides of a glass partition, behind which the moonbound astronauts had to remain in quarantine against any possible germs or virus. So close, so close . . .
They both pressed their hands against the glass and then stood back slowly. “I won’t be making my usual phone call tomorrow night,” he told her. Then, with a bittersweet smile she knew so well, he added, “I’ll be leaving town.”
Far below Shepard, Mitchell, and Roosa, a torrent appeared instantly, exploding beneath the five mighty engines of the first stage. Twenty-eight thousand gallons of water per minute smashed into curving flame buckets to absorb the downward blaze, bursting to each side of the high complex, cascading steam hundreds of feet out and upward.
The Saturn V roared and screamed, anchored to its launch pad by huge, hold-down arms chaining it to earth until computers judged the giant was howling with full energy.
Two seconds remaining . . .
Flame increased in fury.
An ice shower fell steadily. Chunks and sheets and flakes of ice poured from the rocket. An ice storm in Florida, coatings of ice that formed about the super-cold oxidizers and propellants of the huge fuel tanks, tumbling, falling—the incongruous sign of the space age that the monster was ready to leave.
“All engines running . . .
“Zero!”
Alan Shepard was prepared, his body tensed, and in its blaze of flame and torrents of cracking ice, Apollo 14 began its mission.
The astronauts felt a gentle sense of motion, mildly jerky at first, but to their surprise “a very gentle rise.” It wasn’t that way outside.
The Saturn V roared, bellowed, and shrieked, hurling out ear-stabbing sonic waves and a crackling thunder which sent birds flying and wildlife fleeing, and which slammed into people miles away, fluttering their clothing and causing them to step back uncertainly. The sound was so great its shock waves tumbled and mixed together, swirling deep thunder with an acetylene-torch cry that continued impossibly long, echoing from clouds, rebounding across the ground, seeming to split the very sky asunder.
The earth shook, a feeling akin to the jellied trembling of an earthquake. The longer the first stage burned, the farther its stentorian bellow hurtled outward. Scientists judge the savage roar of the Saturn V akin to the explosion of the volcano Krakatau, which tore apart the islands of the Sundra Strait in 1883.
At three minutes past four o’clock on the afternoon of liftoff, Saturn V tore free of its hold-down arms and sounded Gabriel’s trumpet of the space age. Eleven hundred miles distant, the overpressure in the atmosphere of Apollo 14’s liftoff shook atmospheric instruments at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in Palisades Park, New Jersey.
It seemed the rocket mountain was held back it raised so slowly, more than seven and a half million pounds of blazing thrust straining to push more than six million pounds of rocket upward. Ten seconds passed after liftoff before the first-stage engines cleared the launch tower.
A ponderous slogging slow motion beginning that did not last for long.
Thirty seconds passed. The g-load was only one-half again what the astronauts felt before the engines ignited. But going to the moon is a matter of constant acceleration.
Fifteen tons of fuel converted to fiery thrust every second.
Now, with telling effect, g-forces increased as the giant continued to accelerate. Saturn V slammed into the area of maximum aerodynamic pressure—that jagged reef in the heavens where sonic waves hammered and pounded against the great body, trying to rip inside.
The Saturn and its load pushed through. The world outside saw a fire river eight hundred feet long. Shock waves formed like ghostly dervishes dancing along the circular flanks of the rocket. A mist appeared and expanded upward above the howling engines: ionized gas, shock waves plasma in maddening motion.
Inside Kitty Hawk, the speed of sound now far behind, it was eerily quiet. Had the crew not heard the humming of electronic equipment in the command module, they might have been in a simulator on the ground.
They weren’t.
“Stand by for the train wreck,” the astronauts called.
Two and a half minutes from first motion, g-forces made them weigh four times more than they did at liftoff. The five great engines of the first stage had compressed the entire rocket like an accordion until first-stage shutdown. Without constant acceleration and with the sudden cutoff of stage one, the three men jerked forward in their seats. The accordion stretched out and then compressed again; the fuels sloshed, and the astronauts felt a series of bumps as they heard metallic bangs and assorted noises as explosives separated the now empty stage.
They were nearly forty miles high and nearly sixty miles downrange climbing faster than six thousand miles an hour. Tongues of flame lashed briefly outside Kitty Hawk as solid rockets in the first stage ignited to push the stage back and to the side of Apollo. They didn’t need a “highway-in-the-sky collision” at this point.
The crew heard sudden bangs from below as ullage rockets fired with brief but powerful bursts, kicking the second stage into motion to settle the propellants in the tanks. Five engines ignited right on schedule, and the three men were squeezed back in their couches from suddenly increasing acceleration.
Earth’s atmosphere lay below. Th
eir continued ascent was “very smooth and strangely quiet.”
Abruptly a new sound reached them. As if someone were pounding with a rubber hammer against the spacecraft. The sound came from a fiery rocket blast as the escape tower ignited automatically, jerking free the tower and the protective shield around Kitty Hawk, uncovering their windows for the first time. The ignition rocket and smaller rockets threw the no-longer-needed escape tower away to the side of their flight path.
They strained for a view through the windows. No luck. They were pointing upward, and they could see only the blackness of space.
Eleven minutes.
One hundred and fifteen miles high.
Faster and faster. Stage two emptied its tanks and went silent. Again the men snapped forward in their harnesses; again they were pushed back as the third stage lit off.
Two minutes later, still heavily loaded with fuel, the third stage shut down. Apollo 14 began its orbital race around the planet at 17,400 miles an hour.
“We settled into that wonderful, wonderful feeling of weightlessness,” Shepard remembers.
He exchanged broad smiles with Mitchell and Roosa, almost boyish grins, and knew he’d make the most of the upcoming week. He released his harness, floating freely as if he were a feather with invisible wings.
“That alone,” Alan said, “was almost worth the entire trip.
Apollo 14 sped around the earth for two and a half hours, nearly two full circuits, while the astronauts in space and Mission Control in Houston took the pulse and status of all elements of the three-stage space train. Fourteen was proving to be a textbook mission, and CapCom sent up the message, “Fourteen, you’re GO for translunar injection.”
Translunar injection was their ticket to the moon.
Ed Mitchell held up a gloved fist in celebration. They ran through a final checklist, and once again lit the fire. Saturn’s third stage reignited, hurling back a magnificent plume of red and pink and violet flame, and they were on their way.