It seems more likely, though, that Reader’s Digest’s decision may have rested on something else. A respectably written book with “Moon” in the title had a new salience that fall. Six months before, President Kennedy had dramatically committed real-world America to the science-fictional task of putting a man on the Moon.
THROUGHOUT HIS ADULT LIFE HARRY TRUMAN CARRIED A PIECE of science fiction in his wallet with him—six strange, prophetic stanzas from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1835). They speak of a future age of superweaponry and the “Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World” that the sheer power of those weapons force into being. They are lines which were echoed through much of the superweapon fiction of the early 20th century. Simon Newcomb’s “His Wisdom, the Defender” (1900), an influential prediction of the destructive power that aerial bombardment would have, quotes them directly; H. G. Wells’s “The World Set Free” (1914), a speculation about atomic power and weaponry that was required reading on the Manhattan Project, echoes their sense closely.
Truman recited from the poem on the way to his meeting in Potsdam with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. It is hard to imagine its lines were far from his mind when he ordered the use of the first atomic bomb—or when, two days after the heart of Hiroshima was destroyed, he signed the charter of the United Nations.
John F. Kennedy was not a science fiction reader; thrillers were more his thing. He had no Tennyson in his wallet and no interest in rocketry. But what Truman did for the superweapon, Kennedy did for that matching pillar of science fiction, the Moonrocket.
His motivation was geopolitical. The Soviet Union did not get quite as good a crop of V-2 scientists from Germany as America did, but it got a lot of technical know-how. And it had better people geared up to use it (Robert Goddard died in 1945). The cosmist philosophy of Tsiolokovsky and his coterie of peers (they included Vladimir Vernadsky, whose ideas about the biosphere as a self-regulating Sun-driven machine foreshadowed, in some ways, Lovelock’s Gaia) had, with a touch of mutatis mutandis, made the transition to communism in reasonably good shape, providing as it did a heady mix of materialism and destiny. The advent of nuclear weapons meant that the Soviet Union would need rockets for less spiritual needs—and big ones, too, because its nukes were, early on, large and heavy. And it had a truly inspired engineer, Sergei Korolev, who could put the resources Stalin provided him with to good use. The result was the R-7—an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of putting a satellite into orbit. On October 4th 1957 it did so.
Americans, believing themselves to have been in the van of technological progress, were shocked. They were also afraid. Sputnik made it clear that the USSR could put any place in the world in jeopardy. In the election campaign three years later, Kennedy stoked that fear, emphasizing the idea of a “missile gap” between the two superpowers. There was no such gap; the R-7 was never deployed operationally. America’s U-2 spy planes gave Dwight Eisenhower’s administration a strong indication of this; by late 1960 America’s first CORONA spy satellites were confirming it. But that was too late to change the election results—and could not be talked about anyway, because the satellites’ mere existence was beyond top secret.
The team under von Braun at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, outside Huntsville, Alabama, put America’s first satellite up a few months after Sputnik, in January 1958, on a pretty direct descendant of the V-2. They would have been quite capable of launching one earlier. But the Army was meant to build only medium-range missiles. The job of making ICBMs had been assigned to the Air Force, which was not overwhelmingly seized by the possibility: rockets don’t have pilots. The satellite programme, meanwhile, was under the control of the Navy.
Though Eisenhower was cagey about spending on space flight, later in 1958 he created NASA and approved Project Mercury, which would eventually use an Air Force ICBM, the Atlas, to put Americans into space. In 1960 he even reluctantly approved the development of a rocket specifically for the launching of spacecraft, rather than warheads—a so-called super booster that would be developed as a successor to von Braun’s Jupiter rockets and named Saturn. This was the project that created the F-1 engine. But when it came to talk of grand ambitions, Eisenhower was completely dismissive: NASA’s first administrator, Keith Glennan, remembered him saying that “he couldn’t care less whether a man ever reaches the moon”. His last budget, finalized in January 1961, contained no money for any human spaceflight activities beyond Project Mercury.
Kennedy and his advisers were not, to begin with, noticeably more enthusiastic. He did not commit to anything beyond Project Mercury, from which his advisers were encouraging him to distance himself; it was unlikely to get a man into space before the Soviets, and being too closely associated with a failure would be an unforced political error. On April 12th Yuri Gagarin duly went into orbit on a Vostok launcher. The achievement was not unanticipated, but the level of excitement seen around the world was. Kennedy may not have read science fiction, but he certainly read newspapers; he decided that America needed to take the lead. On April 20, after America had suffered another humiliation, this time in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, Kennedy asked his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, to let him know “at the earliest possible moment” if there was “a space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”
The idea was not simply to look good or to make up for embarrassment. There was more at stake than that. The atom bomb and the spaceship were the most dramatic examples of what was being treated as a new era of technology—an era of worldwide systems and godlike powers, born from and growing up in conflict. The idea that a centrally planned economy might offer the best way of harnessing this new power was not implausible. The USSR might be better at this new task of the future because it was better suited to the future in general—and thus a better model for the countries of the global South then coming into their independent own. After Apollo, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was for decades hard to remember a time when the Dallas News could muse as to whether there might be “some advantages of tight, totalitarian control” when it came to technology. But the idea that the American system might be too soft and too consumerist to bring forth and marshal the world-changing technologies of tomorrow had genuine currency.
The answer that the experts provided when asked what America could do to prove this wrong was to double down: choose a space project so challenging that a whole new level of technology would be needed, thus rendering the Soviets’ first-mover advantage moot. A Moon landing was just such a project. As von Braun, the man in charge of super boosters, self-servingly but accurately pointed out to Johnson, it would require rockets ten times more capable than the current state of the art. Yet, with the F-1 in development, it could be delivered, he and others assured the White House, by 1968 or so—which is to say, before the end of Kennedy’s second term in office.
At various times Kennedy wondered out loud whether pushing a breakthrough in desalination might not be as striking and far more useful. But he started to become enthused about the scale and daring of a Moon mission, the level of teamwork involved, the idea of committing to a national project. After the first—suborbital—Mercury mission succeeded on May 5th, lobbing Alan Shepard up past the atmosphere and back down into the Atlantic without mishap, the die was pretty much cast. On May 25th, on live television, Kennedy told Congress and the nation that he believed that America should commit itself to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely back to Earth within the decade. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
He elaborated on the second part—on the fact that difficulty and expense were not a bug, but a feature—when he recommitted himself to the plan in a speech at Rice University, identifying Apollo with the “New Frontiers” he had promised in his 1960 election campaign. Putting the idea on a par with climbing mountains and
Lindbergh’s crossing the Atlantic, Kennedy told the crowd, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Initially, the preferred way to organise America’s energies was a rocket even larger than those of the proposed Saturn family. The Nova would have a first stage powered by eight F-1s, a second stage powered by four F-1s. It would be large enough to put a fully fuelled rocket capable of coming back to Earth on the surface of the Moon in one go—a simple mission architecture, as such outlines are known, called direct ascent.
Even von Braun, though, came to think that the Nova was a bit much. Its rise might be so ferocious that it would have to be launched at sea from some sort of barge. The Huntsville team came to prefer an architecture that used two Saturn Vs—enormous rockets compared to everything that had gone before, but not as vast as the Nova—each launching part of the craft that would go to the Moon; the two parts would be mated in orbit. This was called Earth-orbit rendezvous.
It was an expediently stripped-down version of the way that von Braun had always thought such missions should be done. In popular articles in the 1950s he had described how the first step in human space exploration was to build a space station in low Earth orbit that could then be used as a base for assembling the craft needed to go to the Moon, or to Mars, and as a place to transfer crews between ships built to go up and down through the Earth’s atmosphere and ships designed for the airlessness of space. Earth-orbit rendezvous was the same idea—but with the space station dropped so that all the assembly had to be done on the fly.
In the end, a third option won out: lunar-orbit rendezvous. Once the mission got to the Moon, it would leave the engines, propellant and heat shield needed for the return to Earth in lunar orbit. The astronauts would go down to the lunar surface in a little spacecraft designed specifically for that purpose. That reduced the amount of mass that had to go down to the Moon and, crucially, the amount that had to be brought back up.
This architecture approach allowed an entire Moon mission to be launched on a single Saturn V: a crewless service module with a largish engine, a conical three-man command module that sat on top of it and a lunar module (the LM, pronounced “lem”) that would take two of the three-man crew down to the surface and back up. It was more complicated than direct ascent, because there were two manoeuvres needed in orbit. On the way to the Moon the command module, which needed to be at the very top of the rocket during takeoff if the crew was to have a chance of surviving a mishap, had to detach itself from the rocket’s third stage, turn round, go back to the third stage and couple its nose to the top of the LM. When the LM came back up from the Moon, the same coupling had to be re-established so that the Moonwalkers could rejoin the pilot in the command module before the service module’s engine sent all three of them home. Each manoeuvre was an opportunity for something to go wrong. But some slightly tricky piloting seemed a fair exchange for not having to build a monster like the Nova.
Without the lunar-orbit rendezvous, it is highly unlikely that Apollo would have made it to the Moon before the 1970s—or, quite possibly, at all. At the same time, looking back, it marked something of a loss. The minimisation of infrastructure that made it so appealing meant it left no legacy—there was no space station, as there might have been if a slower, more orderly approach to the Moon had been taken. Every Apollo mission would be a single shot. Once they were over, it would be in terms of hardware—even, to a degree, in terms of expertise—as if they had never happened.
No one worried about this at the time. They were doing something almost impossible—they weren’t worried about setting up the sequel. Once they had shown what they could do, they would do more. Of course they would. Why wouldn’t they? They would leapfrog again, on to Mars. They would build space stations after reaching the Moon instead of before—and cities in craters and new rockets powered by nuclear reactors and everything else the Space Age that was clearly dawning might need. Obviously, they would not just go to the Moon, look around, take note of the beauty of the Earth, pick up some rocks, come home and pack it all in. That would be madness.
APOLLO’S MEASURE OF THE BEST OF AMERICA’S SKILLS WAS IMMENSE: by 1967 it employed some 400,000 people working through thousands of commercial and governmental entities. It was taking 4% of government spending (and this was while there was a war on). It was stretching the best minds in American aerospace to their limits and necessitating new ways of thinking and working across the continent—across the world, when you considered the telecommunications infrastructure required to keep track of the spacecraft.
But it was also intimate. Part of making lunar-orbit rendezvous work was making the spacecraft that actually went down to the Moon, the LM, as light as possible. In the original specification it was to weigh just ten tonnes. During development, it put on weight, despite furious attempts first to arrest and then to reverse the process. But it remained pretty tiny. And thanks to the need to carry fuel, oxidizer, life support, batteries, computers and more besides, the LM was noticeably smaller on the inside than the outside. The two astronauts had 4.7m3 of pressurised volume between them. That is roughly twice the volume of one of London’s red telephone boxes.
Tiny. Also, a world. Or, at least, a fully functioning pinched-off little bleb of one. The LM gave the astronauts food and water; it kept their temperature stable; it protected them from meteorites. Its guidance computer mapped out their future. Once the LM was separated from the command module, it was all of Mother Earth they had left to them, save for voices on the radio: a microcosmic two-man planet.
A tiny world. But a fully functioning spacecraft, too—engines, guidance, communications, the lot. And one like none before it. Everything else on Apollo had, to some extent, been tried out at a smaller scale. There had been rockets fired by kerosene (in the first stage) and liquid hydrogen (in the second). There had been space capsules with heat shields for re-entry. But there had never been anything like the LM, something designed to come down from space and land under its own power rather than under a parachute. To land by its commander’s hand and eye in a place where nothing had landed before.
And, although designed to land, also designed to be always in space. Previous spacecraft had had to carry their crews up through the buffeting atmosphere and bring them back down through it wreathed in fire. The LM’s only duties with regard to atmosphere were to keep a very small one, composed of pure oxygen, contained within its tissue-thin aluminium walls (they flexed in and out as the air pressure inside them changed). The LM needed no streamlining, and when the first LM pilot, Rusty Schweickart, undocked the Apollo 9 LM, Spider, from the command module, Gumdrop, he was acutely aware of being in the first spacecraft ever to have been built with no heat shield. Dock again, or die.
The LM embodied a new off-kilter modernism—a form that followed function without compromise, however lopsided and implausible that made it look. The bottom half, to be fair, was fairly straightforward. It was a platform with an engine and legs—three in early designs, then five, then four. Octagonal, flat sided, its two fuel tanks and two oxidizer tanks arranged symmetrically around its central axis. Its job was to rob the LM of the velocity it would have when orbiting the Moon, allowing it to fall down to the surface, and to curtail that fall in such a way as to land at the designated site. Once on the Moon it was just a platform and a storage space with an all-important ladder running down one leg.
It was at the top of the ladder that function became complex and form became weird. The ascent stage had started off as a sphere, then been whittled down, then been added to. The result had a stubby-circular face like that of a somewhat satanic Thomas the Tank Engine: flattened nose, square eye sockets with deep-set triangular eyes, a round, shouty mouth. A fuel tank hung precariously off to the left like a goitre. Faceted like origami, aerials pointed in various directions, much of it was wrapped in gold fo
il to deal with thermal issues, obscuring its hard-to-follow lines yet further. There was just one concession to four-square order; at each corner, there were four rocket nozzles to steer with, one pointing up, one down, one forward or back, one to the side; x, y and z axes, as strictly Cartesian as the on-board computer required.
Inside, no seats. Room only for them to stand, side by side, looking out of the strange inset downward-canted windows, a throttle and joystick in front of each of them. A skylight over the commander—rank hath its privileges—and a small telescope, too. The hatch that led to the Moon knee-high between them, the inside of that angry mouth. No airlock. When they leave the LM, the whole thing is depressurized. Above the hatch, the DSKY—the guidance computer display and keyboard (numbers only—no qwerty). Above that, three more control panels. Spread around the rest of the walls, a dozen further control panels. One, in a rare stab at humour, is called ORDEAL: Orbital Rate Display, Earth and Lunar.
They stand in a well. At waist level the cabin opens out behind them in a raised alcove. At the top is the second hatch—the one that will let them back into the command module once they regain orbit. When they stand in the well, their helmets are in the alcove; when one of them needs to move around, he puts his helmet in the well. The personal life support systems that make their spacesuits self-contained—make the suits into leg-propelled spacecraft in their own right—are stowed to the side. So is the Environmental Control Atmosphere Revitalization Section which replenishes them, and which looks as if a madman had lashed drums of paint, plumbing valves, small fans and vessels for which there is no name into a framework of pipes and then applied a hydraulic vice to the whole assembly in every direction. Cram the flows and cycles necessary for life into the smallest possible volume and they have neither elegance nor any visual logic.
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