The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  Apollo 17: last man on the moon

  The final Apollo lunar mission was delayed at the last minute for some makeshift repairs to their lunar rover vehicle. The crew were Gene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt. Schmitt was a geologist who had qualified as a LEM pilot. Lindsay:

  Scheduled for a 9:53 pm liftoff, Apollo 17 had the only last minute hold of the Apollo launches. As the last moments approached the astronauts steeled themselves for the thrill and excitement of lift-off and heard the count drop to “Thirty . . .” and stop. The count had stopped at thirty seconds to go! Cernan’s fingers tightened on the abort lever – just in case. In the firing room a red light flared indicating the pressurization for one of the propellants in the Saturn-IVB hadn’t registered because a ground computer failed to send a command to the third stage oxygen tank due to a faulty diode. When the manual override also failed the launch team began a frantic procedure to bypass the fault before time ran out. Countless prayers were answered when the count resumed within the launch window.

  Finally Launch Control called:

  “Two . . . one . . . zero . . . we have a lift-off and it’s lighting the area. It’s just like daylight here at the Kennedy Space Center as the Saturn V is moving off the pad. It has just cleared the tower.”

  After the 86-hour routine flight they attained lunar orbit. On 11 December they landed on the surface. Schmitt recalled:

  “Gene landed the LM as if it were an everyday event.”

  Four hours later Schmitt reached the end of his EVA checklist, then announced, “The next thing it says is that Gene gets out!”

  Cernan asked Schmitt, “How are my legs? Am I getting out?” Schmitt replied, “Well, I don’t know. I can’t see your legs. I think you’re getting out though, because there isn’t as much of you in here as there used to be.”

  Cernan felt a great satisfaction and sense of achievement to be able to plant a Cernan bootprint on the lunar surface and looking around at the looming mountains, giant boulders, landslides and craters found to his pleasure they had landed beside the crater he had named after his daughter and reported, “I think I may just be in front of Punk.” Cernan noticed the soil glittered with what looked like millions of tiny diamonds, but the magic evaporated when Schmitt joined him and reported he was seeing specks of glass. “The soil looks like a vesicular, very light-coloured porphyry of some kind; it’s about ten or fifteen percent vesicles.”

  The now familiar routine of exploring around the Lunar Module in the rover was interrupted by Cernan breaking part of the wheel fender off with his rock hammer sticking out of the pocket of his suit. “Yeah, I caught it under my hammer. The reason it was so important to fix it was because of the lunar dust. It’s fine like graphite, but rather than a lubricant, it’s a friction producing material – it gets into everything, into your visor, into the electronic gear, and when we drove the rover without that portion of that fender we had a rooster-tail of dust thrown completely over the top – over everything, and that was just unacceptable. So we made a fender out of some geology maps. We took duct tape, but we couldn’t use it because of all that lunar dust, we couldn’t clean it off enough for the tape to stick. So we taped a couple of maps together the night before and then had to use light clamps from inside the LM to clamp it on to the existing portion of the fender. When we came home we needed the clamps because they held both lights, so we brought the fender home and it’s now in the Smithsonian in Washington.”

  The lunar soil looked orange. Lindsay:

  Schmitt’s boot had kicked the ground and revealed soil ranging from bright orange to ruby red, which at the time was hoped to be more recent volcanic activity but turned out to be microscopic glass beads, tinted by titanium, about the same age as the rest of the rocks around. It had been ejected by an impact, not by volcanism.

  At 13° Apollo 17 had the highest Sun angle of all the missions.

  Cernan said:

  When you are on the surface of the Moon in the daytime it’s a paradox. You are standing on the surface of the Moon lit by sunlight – you, your body and the surroundings, and you look up at the sky and it’s black – it’s not darkness – it’s just black. Most people confuse darkness with blackness – they are two totally different worlds. Darkness is the absence of light in my definition. Blackness is a void. Blackness is the absence of almost anything. If you look at the Earth from the Moon it reflects sunlight, yet it is surrounded by the blackest black you could ever conceive in your mind – the absence of anything. The blackness has three dimensions. I didn’t find the black sky above oppressive. I define blackness as the infinity of time and space and if you let your mind and imagination wander the infinity of time and space does anything but close in upon you. When you stand on the Moon and look up and see that blackness which goes all the way to the horizon of the Moon, it doesn’t feel like you are being closed in upon like a black painted ceiling at all – as a matter of fact it is exactly the opposite – you know it goes on forever.

  When you are on the Moon you can’t look anywhere near the Sun – it’s devastatingly bright. When we drove the rover back to the east it was a lot more difficult to see up-sun than down-sun because of the reflective surface. The closer you looked toward the Sun you just couldn’t see much definition at all.

  A lot of people say can you see anything else in the daytime on the Moon – can you see stars? The answer to that is yes – if you shield your face and eyes from all the reflected light around you can see stars in the daytime on the Moon – not as brightly as at night of course.

  Lindsay:

  A visit to the North Massif during the third geological excursion during day three and a visit to the Sculptured Hills and the Van Serg Grater brought to an end the last journey on the surface of the Moon in the twentieth century. By this time both Cernan and Schmitt were weary, aching, and rubbed raw trying to follow all the planned instructions and changes relayed up from the geological experts gathered at Mission Control in Houston.

  Houston called to the moonwalkers, “Okay, you guys, say farewell to the Moon.”

  Cernan replied, “Bob, this is Gene. I’m on the surface . . . as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.

  Gene Cernan turned to climb the ladder and spotted a plaque mounted there by a Grumman factory worker and repeated the inscription aloud, “Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.” He then climbed up the nine steps of the Lunar Module’s ladder to become the last person in the Apollo Program to leave the lunar surface. At the top he paused and looked around.

  “I felt excited that we had been there, but disappointed that we had to leave. Jack Schmitt and I described that valley that we landed in as our own private little Camelot. We knew once we left we would never come back. It was our home – it was a uniquely historical place no man had ever been before in the history of life on this planet of ours. You were there – you made your imprint. You would think that would be enough, but there was so much to do. Then you do leave and you remember all the things you wished you would have done – little things or big things or whatever. It was hard to leave but it was time to leave. I always thought that if I knew things were going to go so well I wish I could have stayed another week or two. But you do know the longer you stay the more vulnerable you might become to problems that might come to keep you from getting home.”

  On Earth Mission Control read a statement from President Nixon:

  “As Challenger leaves the surface of the Moon we are conscious not of what we leave behind, but of what lies before us.” So, as the last words exchanged between the Moon and Earth echoed around the world, what were the people of Planet Earth who were listening thinking?

  It seems everybody remembers the first step on the Moon, and of course that is what the people on Earth commemorate, but few can remember the last person to pull his boot off the surface of the Moon in the twentieth century.

  At 4:54 pm on 14 December the la
st unofficial words spoken on the Moon’s surface were heard: “Okay, Jack, let’s get this muther outta here,” as Cernan flicked the yellow ignition switch and red flames ripped into the lunar surface. Shredded gold foil from the descent stage glinted in the boiling cloud of gray dust shooting out from under the engine bell housing. The Stars and Stripes whipped madly in the rocket’s exhaust, then relapsed into a permanent stillness as the rocket’s red glare dwindled into the distance above, and winked out. The dust drifted down to settle over the discarded twentieth century artefacts. The last of the aliens had gone.

  Apollo 17 returned to Earth to splash down in the Pacific at 1:24 pm spacecraft time on 19 December. The crew of Apollo 17 were welcomed back with a big party on the carrier USS Ticonderoga, and entered the record books with the longest manned flight to the Moon, the heaviest swag of lunar samples, the longest activity time on the lunar surface with the greatest distance travelled, the longest time in lunar orbit, the greatest distance travelled and the only Saturn V night launch.

  Skylab in deep trouble

  The Skylab project grew out of a number of proposals dating back to the idea of an orbiting solar observatory which had been suggested in 1962, and von Braun’s ideas of the 1940s. George Mueller suggested the concept of using the casing of one of the lower stages as a space lab. Such a project would extend the life of the manned space flight network.

  Skylab was made up of the Saturn Workshop (SWS), 15 metres long with a diameter of 6.7 metres. The SWS connected with an Airlock Module (AM) connected, in turn, to a Multiple Docking Adapter (MDA), 5.2 metres long by 3.2 metres in diameter. The MDA had two ports: one to to dock the visiting command module and one for rescue. The docking port allowed the astronauts access and also contained the control and display panels for the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). The four diagonal solar wings provided the power for the telescope and part of the power for the SWS, most of which would come from the solar panels mounted on beams which would extend at 90° from the SWS itself.

  The Skylab 1 mission was launched on 14 May 1973. Lindsay:

  Skylab 1 was the last Saturn V launched in the twentieth century. With the regular stunning successes of the Apollo launches, it was expected to be another copybook mission. It was – until just after launch. On a nice warm spring day, right on time, the SIC first stage thundered into life on Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center and lifted smoothly into the air. It looked another perfect launch, then 63 seconds later the flight engineers were startled to see their telemetry giving strange indications from the micrometeoroid shield and part of the solar array – it looked as though they had initiated deployment early. Atmospheric drag had torn the shield loose and a portion had jammed one of the workshop solar wings, and severely damaged the other solar wing. The staging rocket’s blast then tore the wing from its hinges and flung it into space to be lost.

  Just over ten minutes after launch Skylab entered a nearly circular orbit above the Earth, and manoeuvred around until its centreline pointed to the centre of the Earth. Unlike Apollo, which rolled around on its way to the Moon to keep the temperatures evenly spread around, Skylab remained in one attitude throughout the orbit, the heat and cold being controlled by a micrometeorid shield using black, white and aluminium paints painted in a carefully tailored pattern to control heat losses and gains. This shield was lost, so the surface of the workshop was left exposed to the Sun, and the temperatures rose 93°C above the designed limits.

  It is interesting that Skylab became overheated out in space – because Apollo 13 became unbearably cold when in trouble. Why the difference? First it should be understood that a passive body in space absorbs and radiates heat. If these are not equal the body will heat up or cool down to a stable temperature where the heat being received equals the heat loss, providing the conditions remain constant. Although there are other factors, the simplistic explanation is Skylab lost its temperature controlling thermal heat shield which was carefully designed to balance the heat absorption and losses in its planned environment. The Laboratory was also orbiting very close to Earth. As the Earth radiates roughly the same amount of heat it receives, particularly in the infrared band, Skylab was receiving heat energy from both the Sun and Earth while in daylight, so its temperature went up.

  Apart from being away out in space beyond the Earth’s reflected heating influence, Apollo 13’s electrical equipment was shut down to an absolute bare minimum, so again the carefully planned temperature control for its environment was out of balance. With the lack of internal heat being generated by the spacecraft’s electronics, Apollo 13’s temperature went down.

  After nearly 26 minutes into the flight the solar panels for the telescope mount were successfully set up, but when they tried to extend the two big wing-like solar panels to provide the electrical power for the workshop just before Carnarvon, nothing seemed to happen. When Skylab came up over the horizon, Carnarvon found that instead of 12,400 watts of power there was a paltry 25 watts! As these panels supplied 60% of the power to run the laboratory, added to temperatures going up by the hour, and there was also a gyro malfunction, Skylab was in deep trouble – and the mission had just begun!

  EGIL, the flight controller in Houston for the spacecraft electrical and environmental systems at the launch, was John Aaron:

  “Right after the spacecraft got into orbit the rules called for me to start powering it up and turn on the heaters to warm up the inside. I told Flight I didn’t want to do that because I realised something was really wrong. The power system wasn’t activating right and the temperatures were going up instead of down in the workshop.”

  For ten days engineers worked to save the project before the Skylab 2 mission was launched on 25 May to fix the problems by means of EVA. Lindsay:

  “Tally Ho! The Skylab. We got her in daylight at 1.5 miles, 29 feet per second.” It was 8 hours after another perfect Saturn 1B launch at 9 am EST, and Conrad could see the crippled laboratory above the bright Earth below. They did a fly-around Skylab and sent video pictures of the damage back to Houston, confirming that the micrometeorite shield was gone and the single remaining solar panel was stuck down by what looked like a strap of aluminium.

  They parked the Command Module by soft docking it to the laboratory, and while the ground crews studied their television pictures of the damage, the astronauts tucked into their first meal.

  “Dinner’s going pretty good,” reported Conrad, “except that Paul found another one of those tree trunks in the asparagus. I had stewed tomatoes for lunch. It turned out even as goopy as they are, they were real simple to handle, and the same way with the turkey and gravy.”

  After discussions with the ground they decided to do an EVA to try and prise the solar panel loose. Working from the Command Module hatch they tried to free the solar panel beam from the aluminium strap holding it down by cutting it.

  Kerwin recalls, “Weitz was hanging out the side door with a shepherd’s crook in his hand – a ten foot pole with a hook in the end – trying to stick it under the opening in the solar panel to pry it up, while I had my arms around his legs to hold him in the Command Module. Pete was flying the spacecraft and every time Weitz would pull on the shepherd’s crook the two spacecraft would move towards each other and the jets would fire on the Skylab workshop and the jets would fire on the Command and Service Module and Pete would have to haul back on the stick to keep them from colliding – it was pretty spectacular.”

  Weitz explains, “I tried to pry the beam up but it didn’t work because the aluminium strap was too firmly fixed. We had another fitting on the end of the pole which was a branch cutter. This thing is wrapped around your leg and comes up over your ankle to your knee on the inside and you have these scissors held parallel to your leg. These cutters didn’t work – they just weren’t beefy enough and I couldn’t get enough purchase on it to cut through the strap, so we had to give up.”

  When they entered the night side they closed the hatch and tried to dock with Skylab again, bu
t this time the soft dock latches refused to lock. Kerwin says, “The three soft dock latches which had worked perfectly the first time simply wouldn’t capture. Pete tried and he tried and he tried and he tried again – we went through the back-up procedure and it looked like we had a spectacular failure here where we would have to come home because we couldn’t dock.

  “We finally backed off a little bit and decided to try the last ditch third back-up procedure that was in the checklist, which fortunately one of our trainers had shown us a few weeks before launch. ‘We have never looked at this back-up procedure – why don’t we just go through it and show you where the wires are,’ he had said to us.

  “This involved an IVA (Intravehicular Activity) so we had to get back into our suits, depressurise the spacecraft again, but this time we opened the tunnel hatch where the docking system was. We went up in there and cut a wire to bypass the soft dock system. We put the hatch back on but this time the deal was we were just going to force it in to where the main hard dock latches might work. In came Pete one more time, hosed on the fuel, pushed the switch to activate the twelve main latches and we counted one, two, three; we got to about seven and we heard this rat-a-tat sound which was all the twelve latches locking on one after the other – that was a very sweet sound – and we had a good hard dock. We had been up for about eighteen hours by then – we were kinda tired – so we had a snack and went right to bed.”

  When Conrad, Weitz, and Kerwin awoke, the first task was to check the atmosphere in the laboratory for any deadly gases. Weitz says, “We had a sniffer – a glass cylinder with a rubber bulb on one end like a hygrometer they used to test batteries in the old days – with an adapter to go in the MDA hatch. We sniffed that and it didn’t show anything so we opened the hatch. In the MDA it was relatively cool, in the fifties (10°C) as I remember, but when we got in the airlock it was very hot. Pete and I said if it’s hot in there we’ll go in our skivvies, but then we soon found out why the people in central Africa wear a lot of clothes when they are in very hot conditions – we bundled up rather than took clothes off because of the heat. We made forays into the workshop for about ten or fifteen minutes until we felt we needed a break then we went back to the MDA to cool off for a while. Except for the temperature, everything looked as it should be.”