The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  Some glitches, of course, were to be expected. In ten years of building sleek, bullet-shaped spacecraft designed to fly through the atmosphere and into orbit, no one had ever attempted to build a manned ship that would operate exclusively in the vacuum of space or in the lunar world of one-sixth gravity. But the number of glitches in this gimpy ship was more than – even the worst NASA pessimists could have imagined.

  At the same time the LEM was causing such headaches, CIA agents working overseas picked up even more disturbing news. According to whispers coming from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet Union was making tentative plans for a flight around the moon by a Zond spacecraft sometime before the end of the year. Nobody knew if the flight would be manned, but the Zond line was certainly capable of carrying a crew, and if a decade of getting sucker-punched by Soviet space triumphs had indicated anything, it was that when Moscow had even the possibility of pulling off a space coup, you could bet they’d give it a try.

  NASA was stumped. Flying the LEM before it was ready was clearly impossible in the cautious atmosphere that now pervaded the Agency, but flying Apollo 7 and then launching nothing at all for months and months while the Russians promenaded around the moon was not an attractive option either. One afternoon in early August, 1968, Chris Kraft, deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and Deke Slayton were summoned to Bob Gilruth’s office to discuss the problem. Gilruth was the overall director of the Center and, according to the scuttlebut, had been meeting all morning with George Low, the director of Flight Missions, to determine if there was some plan that would allow NASA to save face without running the risk of losing more crews. Slayton and Kraft arrived in Gilruth’s oflice, and he and Low got straight to business.

  “Chris, we’ve got serious problems with the upcoming flights,” Low said bluntly. “We’ve got the Russians and we’ve got the LEM and neither one is cooperating.”

  “Especially the LEM,” Kraft responded. “We’re having every kind of trouble it’s possible to have.”

  “So it couldn’t be ready by December?” Low asked.

  “No chance,” said Kraft.

  “If we wanted to fly Apollo 8 on schedule, what could we do with just the command-service module that will further the program?”

  “Not much in Earth orbit,” Kraft said. “Most of what we can do with that we’re already planning to do on 7.”

  “True enough,” Low said tentatively. “But suppose Apollo 8 didn’t just repeat 7’s mission. If we don’t have an operative LEM by December, could we do something else with the command-service module alone?” Low paused for a moment. “like orbit the moon?”

  Kraft looked away and fell silent for a long minute, calculating the incalculable question Low had just asked him. He looked back at his boss and slowly shook his head.

  “George”, he said, “That’s a pretty difficult order. We’re having a hell of a struggle getting the computer programs ready just for an Earth-orbit flight. You’re asking what I think about a moon flight in four months? I don’t think we can do it.”

  Low seemed strangely unperturbed. He turned to Slayton. “What about the crews, Deke? If we could get the systems ready for a lunar mission, would you have a crew that could make the flight?”

  “The crew isn’t a problem,” Slayton answered. “They could get ready.”

  Low pressed him. “Who would you want to send? McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart are next in line.”

  “I wouldn’t give it to them,” Slayton said. “They’ve been training with the LEM for a long time, and McDivitt’s made it clear he wants to fly that ship. Borman’s crew hasn’t been at it as long, plus they’re already thinking about deep-space reentry, something they’d need for a mission like this. I’d give it to Borman, Lovell, and Anders.”

  Low was encouraged by Slayton’s response, and Kraft, infected by the enthusiasm of the other men in the room, began to soften. He asked Low for a little time to talk to his technicians and see if the computer problems could be resolved. Low agreed, and Kraft left with Slayton, promising an answer in a few days. Returning to his office, Kraft hurriedly assembled his team around him.

  “I’m going to ask you a question, and I want an answer in seventy-two hours,” he said. “Could we get our computer problems unravelled in time to get to the moon by December?”

  Kraft’s team vanished, and returned not in the requested seventy-two hours, but in twenty-four. Their answer was a unanimous one: yes, they told him, the job could be done.

  Kraft got back on the phone to Low: “We think it’s a good idea,” he told the director of Flight Missions. “As long as nothing goes wrong on Apollo 7, we think we ought to send Apollo 8 to the moon over Christmas.”

  On October 11, 1968, Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham tested the Apollo 7 Command Service Module (CSM) in a low Earth orbit; eleven days later they plopped down in the Atlantic Ocean. The media applauded the mission wildly, the president phoned his congratulations to the crew, and NASA declared that the flight had more than achieved its objectives. Inside the Agency, flight planners set about the task of sending Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders to the moon just sixty days later.

  Unlike the Gemini spacecraft, the Apollo program went back to using an escape tower. Aldrin:

  Apollo 7, the first manned Block II CSM, lifted off perfectly with the ignition of the Saturn IB at 11:00 am on October 11, 1968. This was Wally Schirra’s third flight and the first for Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele. Their ride on the Saturn IB booster was bumpy for the first few minutes, and on ignition the S-IVB second stage gave them a good kick in the pants. The new mixed-gas cabin atmosphere in this Block II command module, composed of 40 percent nitrogen and 60 percent oxygen, also worked well. After a short time in orbit the nitrogen had been vented and the crew were breathing pure oxygen at a safe, low cabin pressure.

  The flight’s principal objective was to check out the CSM, especially its big service propulsion system (SPS) engine. The crew worked their way into the flight plan slowly, trying to avoid the spacesickness that could ambush an overeager astronaut. As he had on his Mercury and Gemini flights, Wally Schirra managed to combine the precision of an experienced flight test engineer with the zaniness of a fraternity boy. After firing the SPS engine for the first time, Wally shouted, “Yabadabadoo!” just like Fred Flintstone.

  After several more firings to modify their orbit, they made a mock rendezvous and docking with the S-IVB stage before settling down for a rigorous orbital test flight of the CSM. Under zero-G conditions, the command module seemed very roomy. They could float into odd corners to “sit” or sleep. Unfortunately, several of their many windows were fogged up with condensation or streaked with soot from the escape tower’s solid rockets. Nobody got spacesick, but they all caught bad colds, the result of an ill-conceived hunting trip in the Florida marshes with racing driver and car dealer Jim Rathman. But they had practiced the mission in simulators so many times over the past months that their performance was flawless.

  Over the next 10 days, Wally and his crew adapted to the spacecraft’s quirks, like sweating coolant pipes, banging thrusters, and a rudimentary sanitation system. Walt Cunningham and Schirra even accomplished feats of weightless gymnastics in the spacious lower equipment bay below the crew couches.

  Television coverage was a key part of the public relations dividends of this flight. Wally had brusquely vetoed the first planned live TV broadcast because that day’s flight plan was overcrowded. (And he later revealed he was mad at Mission Control for launching them into high-altitude winds.) But soon he returned to his jovial self. He and Walt even held up professionally printed placards that quipped to the camera: “Hello From the Lovely Apollo Room High Atop Everything.”

  For the first time in 23 months, America could see its astronauts in space again. Their competence, their humor, and the Apollo spacecraft’s sophistication went a long way to raise the national mood in an extremely troubled year. In the first eight months of 1968
there had been the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the May student revolt in Paris, the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August. These three grinning astronauts tumbling and pirouetting in their roomy spacecraft were just what the country needed to see.

  After splashdown in the Atlantic less than a mile from the aircraft carrier Essex, NASA called the mission “101 percent successful.”

  The Soviet program had expanded so much that it needed a new centre for cosmonauts. This was called Zvedezni Gorodok (Star Town). They tested a modified Soyuz/Proton disguised as a Zond craft. Zond were unmanned deep space probes.

  Armstrong crashes in training

  Aldrin and Armstrong were training as LEM pilots. After becoming competent on helicopters, they used something called a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) for this, calling it “the flying bedstead” because it was a wingless platform of struts and spherical propellant tanks built around a small vertically mounted jet engine. The astronaut sat in an ejection seat, operating a pair of hand controllers like those on the LEM. The trainer’s jet engine had computerized power settings that balanced earth’s gravity, allowing the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to simulate flight in the one-sixth G of the moon. On 6 May Armstrong crashed it. Aldrin:

  On May 6, Neil Armstrong was flying the LLRV during routine training when the machine began to wobble and spin during his descent from 210 feet to the runway. He fought to regain control with the thrusters, but the platform sagged badly to one side and lurched into a spin. He had maybe a second to decide: if the trainer tipped completely over and he fired his ejection seat, the rocket charge would propel him headfirst into the concrete below. But Neil held on as long as he could, not wanting to abandon this expensive piece of hardware.

  At the last possible moment, he realized the thruster system had completely malfunctioned, and he pulled his ejection handles. He was blasted up several hundred feet, and his parachute opened just before he struck the grass at the side of the runway. Neil was shaken up pretty badly, and the LLRV exploded on impact. Later it was determined that the thrusters system was poorly designed, allowing Neil’s propellant to leak out.

  This was the second time Neil had ejected from an aircraft. The first had been in Korea, when he had nursed his flak-damaged plane back across American lines to bail out over friendly territory. Apparently Neil had waited to the bitter end, trying to make it to an emergency landing strip. His tendency to hang on to crippled flying machines had shown up again in 1962 when he had a flameout on the X-15 rocket plane out at Edwards. He’d ridden that stubby-wing aircraft almost down to the dry lake-bed before getting the engines lit. Neil just didn’t like to abort a flight.

  Apollo 8 flies around the moon

  Apollo 8 was the first spacecraft launched by the larger Saturn V booster. Jim Lovell had joined the astronaut program during Project Gemini and had flown on the Gemini VII and XII missions. Lovell:

  On the morning Apollo 8 was launched, December 21, the doubts and the acrimony were at least outwardly forgotten. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were sealed in their spacecraft just after 5:00 am in preparation for a 7:51 launch. By 7:00 the networks’ coverage began and much of the country was awake to witness the event live. Across Europe and in Asia, audiences numbering in the tens of millions also tuned in.

  From the moment the Brobdignagian Saturn 5 booster was lit it was clear to TV viewers that this would be like no other launch in history. To the men in the spacecraft – one of whom had never flown in space before and two of whom had ridden only the comparatively puny, 109-foot Gemini-Titan – it was clearer still. The Titan had been designed originally as an intercontinental ballistic missile, and if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself strapped in its nose cone – where nothing but a thermonuclear warhead was supposed to be – it felt every bit the ferocious projectile it was. The lightweight rocket fairly leapt off the pad building up velocity and G forces with staggering speed. At the burnout of the second of its two stages, the Titan pulled a crushing eight G’s, causing the average 170 pound astronaut to feel as if he suddenly weighed 1,360 pounds. Just as unsettling as the rocket’s speed and G’s was its orientation. The Titan’s guidance system preferred to do its navigation when the payload and missile were lying on their sides; as the rocket climbed, therefore, it also rolled 90 degrees to the right, causing the horizon outside the astronauts’ windows to change to a vertigo-inducing vertical. Even more disturbing, the Titan had a huge range of ballistic trajectories programmed into its guidance computer, which aimed the missile below the horizon if it was headed for a military target or above the horizon if it was headed for space. As the rocket rose, the computer would continually hunt for the right orientation, causing the missile to wiggle its nose up and down and left to right, bloodhound-fashion, for a target that might be Moscow, might be Minsk or might be low Earth orbit, depending upon whether it was carrying warheads or spacemen on that particular mission.

  The Saturn 5 was said to be a different beast. Despite the fact that the rocket produced a staggering 7.5 million pounds of thrust – nearly nineteen times more than the Titan – the designers promised that this would be a far smoother booster. Peak gravity loads were said to climb no higher than four G’s, and at some points in the rocket’s powered flight, its gentle acceleration and its unusual trajectory dropped the gravity load slightly below one G. Among the astronauts, many of whom were approaching forty, the Saturn 5 had already earned the sobriquet “the old man’s rocket.” The promised smoothness of the Saturn’s ride, however, was until now just a promise, since no crew had as yet ridden it to space. Within the first minutes of the Apollo 8 mission, Borman, Lovell, and Andres quickly learned that the rumors about the painless rocket were all wonderfully true.

  “The first stage was very smooth, and this one is smoother!” Borman exulted midway through the ascent, when the rocket’s giant F-1 engines had burned out and its smaller J-2 engines had taken over.

  “Roger, smooth and smoother,” Capcom answered.

  Less than ten minutes later, the gentle expendable booster completed its useful life, dropping its first two stages in the ocean and placing the astronauts in a stable orbit 102 miles above the Earth.

  According to the mission rules for a lunar flight, a ship bound for the moon must spend its first three hours in space circling the Earth in an aptly named “parking orbit.” The crew uses this time to stow equipment, calibrate instruments, take navigational readings, and generally make sure their little ship is fit to leave home. Only when everything checks out are they permitted to relight the Saturn 5’s third stage engine and break the gravitational hold of Earth.

  For Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, it would be a busy three hours, and as soon as the ship was safely in orbit they knew they’d have to get straight to work. Lovell was the first of the trio to unbuckle his seat restraints, and no sooner had he removed the belts and drifted forward than he was struck by a profound feeling of nausea. The astronauts who flew in the early days of the space program had long been warned about the possibility of space sickness in zero G, but in the tiny Mercury and Gemini capsules, where there was barely room to float up from your seat before bonking your head on the hatch, motion-related queasiness was was not a problem. In Apollo there was more space to move around, and Lovell discovered that this elbow room came at a gastric price.

  “Whoa,” Lovell said, as much to himself as in warning to his crewmates. “You don’t want to move too fast.”

  He eased his way gently forward, discovering – as centuries of remorseful drinkers with late-night bed spins had learned – that if he kept his eyes focused on one spot and moved very, very slowly, he could keep his churning innards under control. Easing his way about in this tentative way, Lovell began to negotiate the space directly around his seat, failing to notice that a small metal toggle protruding from the front of his spacesuit had snagged one of the metal s
truts of the couch. As he moved forward the toggle caught, and a loud pop and hiss echoed through the spacecraft. The astronaut looked down and noticed that his bright yellow life vest, worn as a precaution during liftoffs over water, was ballooning up to full size across his chest.

  “Aw, hell,” Lovell muttered, dropping his head into his hand and pushing himself back into his seat.

  “What happened?” a startled Anders asked, looking over from the right-hand couch.

  “What does it look like,” Lovell said, more annoyed with himself than his junior pilot. “I think I snagged my vest on something.”

  “Well, unsnag it,” Borman said. “We’ve got to get that thing deflated and stowed.”

  “I know,” Lovell said, “but how?”

  Borman realized Lovell had a point. The emergency life vests were inflated from little canisters of pressurized carbon dioxide that emptied their contents into the bladder of the vest. Since the canisters could not be refilled, deflating the vest required opening its exhaust valve and dumping CO2 into the surrounding air. Out in the ocean this was not a problem, of course, but in a cramped Apollo command module it could be a bit dicey. The cockpit was equipped with cartridges of granular lithium hydroxide that filtered CO2 out of the air, but the cartridges had a saturation point after which they could absorb no more. While there were replacement cartridges on board, it was hardly a good idea to challenge the first cartridge on the first day with a hot belch of carbon dioxide let loose in the small cabin. Borman and Anders looked at Lovell, and the three men shrugged helplessly.