When he had first proposed this at a NASA meeting, he was greeted with derision. His scheme was seen as unworkable, even dangerous. ‘His figures lie,’ announced Max Faget. ‘He does not know what he is talking about.’ Certainly Houbolt could not say how a rescue would be effected should there be an accident in lunar orbit, 240,000 miles from the earth. The plain truth was that it would not be possible and men would be condemned to certain death, whereas a space station in earth orbit would be within range of rescue. All senior NASA engineers, including von Braun, were convinced that Houbolt’s far-fetched idea did not make sense. It called for a skill and manoeuvrability that were not yet in NASA’s repertoire.
The other unknown factor causing delays and adding to design difficulties was the lack of information regarding the moon’s surface. Was it, as some suggested, layers deep in dust or was it firm enough to take a landing craft? Would some million-dollar space capsule carrying astronauts land on the moon’s angelic-looking surface only to sink fathoms deep in primeval dust undisturbed since time began? Caldwell Johnson, who was considering what kind of landing equipment might be needed, found no one could give a definitive answer about the moon’s surface. ‘How in hell are we gonna design landing gear if the moon’s seas are nothing but pools of dust,’ he despaired, ‘and the mountains are nothing but blown-glass fairy castles?’
But one certainty was agreed upon: NASA had, at last, clocked up a victory. John Glenn had made his historic journey into space. He had not been the first in orbit, however. Another trip had been thought necessary before sending up a man to circle the earth on top of an Atlas rocket, and that honour had fallen to Enos the chimp who was as sharp at pressing the buttons and pulling the levers as Ham had been. He also had his own foolproof method of bringing a little joy into his life. Whenever his ‘load’ passed unreasonable levels, he had simply pulled down his clothing and begun masturbating. Much thought had been put into controlling Enos’s little hobby, which he even preferred to banana pellets. A catheter was inserted into the offending member as a means of collecting urine and to help Enos concentrate on his piloting responsibilities.
Yet when the great day arrived, just as Ham had done, Enos experienced all manner of diabolical unfairness from the ‘god’ of the levers. On his flight through the eternal skies, utterly absorbed, concentrating on those complex levers, no matter how perfect his routine he was rewarded only with bolts of searing electricity shooting through his feet. Mean and moody when he met the press after his journey, he showed one or two of them what his teeth were for. And to everyone’s embarrassment, in order to escape the endless boredom of the press conference, he turned to his favourable pastime, the one his name was famous for among his keepers: ‘Enos the Penis’. As he pulled down his trousers, cameras clicked, flashing like diamonds, ensuring Enos’s name would live in memory as much for his hobby as for his aeronautical achievements.
However, with John Glenn’s flight in February 1962, NASA came of age. It was not without difficulties and it highlighted just what the input of the pilot’s brain could do when automatic systems failed. Glenn was able to correct manually the craft’s tendency to veer to the right, losing altitude, when the automatic system failed. But he really showed his mettle when ground control received warning lights telling them that the heat shield was loose. If this were the case, Glenn would be subjected to heat of around 4000 degrees F on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere. Ground control was sick with anguish. It was hard to see what could be done. Time was running out.
Max Faget advised mission control that they should leave the retro pack in place after the rockets had fired for re-entry. It might just hold the heat shield in place, unless, of course, one or more of the rockets had failed to fire, in which case NASA’s first man in orbit would end up as a fiery sacrifice. America was watching. As the news spread, millions more tuned in across the globe.
It was time to fire the retro rockets. Three, two, one, zero … silence. Silence for five minutes. No signal could get through the ionized air surrounding the diving fireball capsule. Ground control continued calling …
Eventually they heard Glenn’s voice reply: ‘I hear you loud and clear.’
He was alive. By what miracle he stood in front of the cameras with that well-known smile the American public was not sure. But there was no doubt he was a hero, and he was going to get a hero’s welcome, carried with countrywide euphoria, shoulder high, straight to the President to receive all his honours. He was the man who had kept his cool under the most terrifying threat of death, just as the American public knew he would. Four million lined the streets of New York on 23 February to catch a glimpse of him through a snow of ticker tape in the motorcade as he passed – to experience for themselves a moment when legend touches the everyday. Later, when the craft was examined, it was found the heat shield had not after all been loose. Faulty wiring had sent the wrong message to ground control. Glenn had spent what he thought must be his last moments while the fixed retro pack caught fire on re-entry, embracing the capsule in its fiery debris.
Although John Glenn’s trip was a very public American triumph, it merely proved that America could put an astronaut into orbit. Behind the scenes, the stormy debate about how to put a man on the moon – LOR or EOR – was holding up progress. The argument had dominated NASA for more than a year. No craft could be built until there was agreement between all the different NASA centres about the basic principles. Max Faget was to design a powered lunar craft that could be manoeuvred by astronauts, but until the method of lunar approach was resolved he could not proceed. Precious time was being lost. ‘If all the paperwork NASA generated were piled up, the stack would reach the moon long before a space craft ever did,’ fumed one frustrated engineer.
Houbolt’s seemingly far-fetched plan for a lunar orbit rendezvous was gaining supporters once the engineering was examined in detail. The lunar module would only be required to manoeuvre from a command module in lunar orbit to the moon’s surface and provide some means of returning to the waiting command module. This had to be simpler than launching a large spacecraft from earth orbit to the moon and back again. As Faget scrutinized the proposal, he wondered whether the Saturn V would have the power to launch both the command and lunar modules to lunar orbit and began to consider what could be the minimum weight of both of these craft. He discussed his ideas with Gilruth and suddenly the scale of the engineering began to seem manageable. However, von Braun and his team at the Marshall Space Flight Center remained staunchly in favour of EOR.
The dispute continued one long day in April 1962 at a meeting in the Flight Space Center. Von Braun was there with his top assistants listening to yet another persuasive briefing on lunar orbit rendezvous from Gilruth’s team at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. The staff at Marshall put forward the arguments for EOR. The day was spent in concentrated argument and nothing was settled. Finally, one Apollo programme contractor, who had originally been an advocate of EOR, rose to cut through the confusion: ‘I’ve heard these good things about lunar orbit rendezvous and I’d like to hear what son-of-bitch thinks it isn’t the right thing to do?’ All eyes were on von Braun, who politely conceded that there were indeed advantages to LOR. A few weeks later, in the same place, the same arguments were aired once more. At the end of the day, to the astonishment of his team, von Braun rose to conclude the matter: ‘It is the position of the Space Flight Center that we support the lunar orbit rendezvous plan.’ He added that it ‘offers the highest confidence factor of successful accomplishment within this decade’.
Von Braun had taken his time making up his mind. He had weighed all the evidence and now genuinely believed the lunar orbit was the right route to take. His mission was to get to the moon, not win arguments. But to his dismay, later that month von Braun found that his massive F-1 engines, each one the size of a room, were proving problematic. They were being tested at a specially built test stand at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In a matter of seconds, durin
g a static test on 28 June, one engine was completely destroyed.
To get to the moon, everything was gambled on the success of the F-1 engines. Yet in scaling up a rocket engine to provide 1.5 million pounds of thrust, it was proving near impossible to prevent combustion instability as the propellants mixed. Kerosene had to be pumped to the combustion chamber at a rate of over 15,000 gallons a minute and the liquid oxygen at over 24,000 gallons a minute. Huge pumps operating at different temperatures pushed the fuel through 6300 holes in the injector plate. The two fuels met with exact precision at 3 tons per second in the combustion chamber where, in a few seconds, the temperature would rise to 5000 degrees F. To ensure a smooth and efficient burn, it was essential that the propellants were well mixed, otherwise pressure waves would be created within the combustion chamber and a destructive explosion would occur within a fraction of a second. Temperature, too, was important, to create a ‘smooth flame front’. A little extra heat, a fluctuation of fuel flow, an imperfection in the injector plate: all these could cause an imbalance of pressure, sending a wall of flame zooming out of control in the combustion chamber.
Work on the problem of the F-1 engine’s instability was a priority. Arthur Rudolph and von Braun discussed the crisis. Jerry Thomson, chief of liquid fuel engines at the Flight Space Center, was assigned to the problem and so began a long, slow process of trying to discover the cause of the instability. The flow rates were overhauled, the combustion chamber modified, the injector plate redesigned, to no avail. With more test failures during the autumn, ‘it might just be too big to make it work,’ concluded one cautious member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. There was increasing speculation as to whether an engine on this scale was even possible.
The Soviet space programme still had no coordinated plan to compete directly with the Americans in a moon landing. For military leaders, the number of rockets with nuclear warheads pointing at American cities was far more to the point. Glenn’s trip, however, and its attendant ballyhoo, sent the message loud and clear to the Soviet Union: ‘We are going to the moon; watch us.’
Khrushchev’s immediate response was to push for Korolev to do something brilliant. Ustinov was on the telephone ordering results. Kamanin chose his most suitable cosmonauts. The time had come for Korolev to do another juggling act, which, if it worked, would leave NASA gaping, open-mouthed, and von Braun wondering just what he had seen. Korolev’s plan was to launch a first manned Vostok on day one. Day two would see a second rocket launched at a calculated time and inclination that would ensure its entry into an orbit that would bring it close to the path of the first. At one stage, the craft would be so very near each other that uninformed onlookers might well assume that a deliberately manoeuvred link-up in space had been performed: something far beyond American expertise.
On the morning of the launch, Korolev did his best to hide his anxiety. Recent booster failures had unnerved the Chief Designer and had him ready to push the abort button at the slightest sign of a problem. But at 11.30 on 11 August 1962, Captain Andrian Nikolayev soared rapidly out of sight in a whirl of fire and fury and a perfect launch. As the day progressed, it was clear from the live pictures shown on Soviet TV that Nikolayev, now promoted to major, was enjoying weightlessness, eating sumptuously and waving to the world. He slept well and was ready to view the second Vostok carrying Major Pavel Popovich launch directly beneath him twenty-four hours into his flight at Baikonur. On the first orbit, the two Vostoks were a mere three miles apart. The Soviets announced nothing of how this had been achieved and the Western world assumed with Sir Bernard Lovell at the Jodrell Bank Observatory that the Soviet Union was massively ahead. ‘I think that the Soviets are so far ahead in the technique of rocketry,’ he declared admiringly, ‘that the possibility of America catching up in the next decade is remote.’
Once again, Korolev had created a masterstroke. The jubilation in the Kremlin was matched by the celebration and partying in Moscow. More importantly for Korolev, that September he received the go-ahead to build his N-1 rocket. The design was revised to allow for a lifting capability of 75 tons. This would serve military purposes and fulfil Korolev’s private ambitions for space. And Korolev had also won the fuel argument. The N-1 would be powered by the liquid oxygen and kerosene that he strongly believed were most suited to the task. Engine designer Nikolai Kuznetsov was developing the NK-15 engine with 153.4 tons of thrust for the first stage, and the NK-15V with 180 tons of thrust for the second stage. They could now proceed with planning the layout of engines across the different stages to create the most powerful Soviet rocket ever built.
With the backing at last of the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a huge operation coordinated by Korolev and involving many bureaus was planned. Everyone of significance in the space and defence industry was involved, it seemed – except Glushko. With the first N-1 launch pencilled in for 1965, Korolev had just three years to accomplish the task. Although no specific space mission had been confirmed, Korolev could at last build the launch vehicle that would allow him to compete with von Braun.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘Friends, before us is the moon’
In September 1962, President Kennedy went on a two-day tour to give a much-appreciated fillip to the space programme, dusting it with the usual Kennedy glamour. He marvelled at the giant complex taking shape at Cape Canaveral, was astonished by the size of the Saturn I rocket under development, proudly displayed by von Braun, grinned with delight inside the mock-up of the lunar module, and ended his trip with a rousing speech to an audience fifty thousand strong at Rice University, Houston. He re-affirmed America’s intention to fight for the elusive grail of one day putting a man on the moon. ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,’ he said. ‘Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.’
Khrushchev might well have been eyeing the handsome Kennedy, standing in the sun, giving his rousing speech as cameras twinkled like stars. His cherubic smile of satisfaction might well have broadened to a grin as he thought of his nuclear missiles hiding quietly in Cuba. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Cuban leaders had turned to the Soviet Union for protection conveniently providing Khrushchev with a welcome opportunity. Khrushchev wanted to counter America’s lead in developing and deploying missiles and aimed to strengthen his hand by creating a Soviet missile base in Cuba – just ninety miles off the coast of America.
In the summer of 1962, American spies on the island had become aware of unusual items being unloaded from Soviet ships. There were isolated reports of military equipment being transported on the island. The presence of Soviet engineers also did not escape notice. An air of threat steadily materialized. Finally, on 14 October, aerial reconnaissance from a U-2 spy plane confirmed the worst: intermediate-range Soviet missiles were in place on Cuba. American cities were potentially only three minutes away from Soviet attack. At a stroke the Soviet Union had dramatically increased its first-strike nuclear capability. The world held its breath. Khrushchev was taunting, daring. Kennedy was wondering how to avoid outright nuclear confrontation.
A fleet of Soviet cargo ships was moving towards Cuba. America threatened to invade the island. The hawks among Kennedy’s military advisers urged bombing the missile sites. Kennedy played for time, worried that any bombing of Soviet engineers would bring the world tumbling towards World War Three. He imposed a naval blockade on the Atlantic sea lanes to prevent the arrival of more weapons and demanded the immediate removal of all missiles from Cuba. The Cold War had suddenly become fiercesomely hot. Khrushchev would not give the order to turn the cargo ships around. Kennedy prepared an invasion force. Khrushchev gave orders to his military to launch nuclear missiles if the Americans invaded. For thirteen days, the world stood poised on the brink of nuclear war.
Secret talks were held. There was a fr
antic exchange of letters. Finally, on 28 October, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba in return for Kennedy secretly removing US missiles from near the Soviet Union’s borders with Turkey. Both world leaders retreated to the safety of their positions as guardians of their own ideologies. The world breathed normally again.
Watching the escalation of hostilities throughout the autumn, von Braun was conscious of the need to overtake the Soviet Union in rocket design. As the crisis wore on, he and his team were battling with their own predicament: the continuing instability of the F-1 engines. The fifty engineers headed by Jerry Thomson had concentrated their efforts on the flow rate of the fuel, the injector plate and modifications to the combustion chamber, but they were no nearer to solving the problem. They could find no pattern to the instability and all they had for their pains were two more burned-out engines.
By January 1963, a radical plan was agreed: to accept the instability. It was argued that an engine of such size would always be subject to this problem. What was needed was the ability of the engine to right itself after instability and create a ‘dynamic stability’. The aim of the team now was deliberately to create instability in the engine in order to study how to solve the problem. Ironically the method proposed for artificially creating instability was to place a bomb in the engine. That should certainly create instability.
Korolev and his team still devoured the news of NASA assiduously translated into Russian from the Western press. All too often there were interviews with von Braun, setting out plans for the lunar mission and elaborating on his total conviction that ‘the Americans would soon have the lead role in space’. ‘Unfortunately he is right,’ Kamanin admitted with chagrin in his diary. ‘We can do fascinating “tricks” but for the specialist it is now clear that we lag behind.’ They knew that NASA leaders had decided on lunar orbit rendezvous using the massive Saturn V to launch the command and lunar modules to lunar orbit. A contract had been signed with Grumman Aircraft Engineering to build a lunar module that would descend to the moon’s surface, while North American Aviation would build the Apollo command module that would wait in orbit around the moon. It seemed that Kennedy was causing money to flow like water towards the American space programme.
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