Lunokhod 1 had a unique design; it looked like a bathtub on eight wheels. The inside of the large convex lid served as the solar array, and the tub itself housed the instruments. Using imagery from a large panoramic camera, a five-person team of controllers on Earth sent commands to the rover in real time to control its movement. By the end of its service life Lunokhod 1 had transmitted more than twenty thousand TV pictures and more than two hundred TV panoramas. It also conducted more than five hundred lunar soil tests. The exact location of Lunokhod 1 on the lunar surface is uncertain because laser-ranging experiments have been unable to detect a return signal since the end of the mission. But it traveled more than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles); by comparison, American astronauts during six landing missions traveled on the surface between 10.1 meters (33.2 feet) on Apollo 11 and 35.4 kilometers (nearly 22 miles) on Apollo 17.
Lunokhod 2, launched on the Luna 21 spacecraft on January 8, 1973, was a virtual twin of its predecessor. After a midcourse correction the day after launch, Luna 21 entered orbit around the Moon on January 12. Its orbital parameters, the maximum and minimum heights of an orbit as well as its deviation (inclination) from the lunar equator, were 62 by 56 miles at a 60-degree inclination. Luna 21 soft-landed on the Moon between Mare Serenitatis and the Taurus Mountains and deployed Lunokhod 2 on January 15, less than three hours after landing. Like the earlier, Lunokhod 2 weighed a little less than a ton, but it was an improved version of its predecessor, equipped with a third TV camera, an improved eight-wheel traction system, and additional scientific instrumentation. As with Lunokhod 1, this rover’s primary objectives included imagery of the lunar surface, laser-ranging experiments, solar X-ray analysis, magnetic field measurements, and testing of the properties of lunar surface material.
By the end of its first lunar day, Lunokhod 2 had already traveled farther than Lunokhod 1 in its entire operational life. Lunokhod 2 operated for four months, covered 23 miles of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back eighty-six panoramic images and more than eighty thousand TV pictures. It also completed several tests of the surface, laser-ranging measurements, and other experiments. On May 9, 1973, the rover rolled into a crater, and dust covered its solar panels, disrupting power to the vehicle. Mission controllers were unable to salvage the rover. On June 3, TASS, the Soviet news agency, announced that the Lunokhod 2 mission had been terminated. It remains a target for laser-ranging experiments to the present.
After the end of the Lunokhod 2 mission, Soviet scientists confided that they had received informal help from American scientists working on the Apollo program, who had given them images of the lunar surface near the Luna 21 landing site at a conference on planetary exploration in Moscow, January 29–February 2, 1973. Those images had been taken as part of the planning for the December 1972 Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission that took place in the same region. This was after the landing of the spacecraft, but they proved helpful to the controllers in navigating the rover on its mission on the Moon. A third mission, Lunokhod 3, was planned for 1977 but never flew because of a lack of launch vehicles and funding. It is now a museum piece at NPO Lavochkin near Moscow.
In addition, the Soviet Union succeeded with three sample return missions from the Moon. After several failed attempts the first mission, Luna 16, returned a small sample (101 grams, about 3½ ounces) from Mare Fecunditatis (Sea of Fertility) in September 1970, between the landings of Apollos 12 and 14. A second mission, Luna 20, entered lunar orbit on February 18, 1972. On February 21, Luna 20 soft-landed on the Moon in a mountainous area known as the Apollonius Highlands near Mare Fecunditatis. While on the lunar surface, the panoramic television system returned imagery. It also collected lunar samples by means of an extendable drilling apparatus. The ascent stage of Luna 20 was launched from the lunar surface on February 22, carrying 30 grams of collected lunar samples in a sealed capsule. It landed in the Soviet Union on February 25. The lunar samples were recovered the following day. A third successful sample return mission, Luna 24, landed in the area known as Mare Crisium (Sea of Crisis) on August 18, 1976. Like its predecessor, it used a sample arm and drill to collect 170.1 grams (6 ounces) of lunar samples and deposited them into a collection capsule. The capsule then returned to Earth on August 22, landing in western Siberia. These three Soviet successes salved the open wounds left by the American Apollo program in this most rigorous of all Cold War competitions.
Perceptions
The first race to the Moon may be viewed as the dress rehearsal for the human effort to reach the Moon in the 1960s. As in the human program, the Soviet Union took an early lead in the robotic race. Also as in the human race to the Moon, Soviet early successes did not equate to eventual victory. Indeed, one could make the case that the robotic race was essentially a tie. The successes of the Americans with the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor programs were very real and keenly felt. It would not be until the successes in the 1970s with its Luna and Lunokhod landers/rovers/sample returns that the USSR recovered a fair measure of respectability in this arena. Of course, the Soviets denied that they had engaged in any race at all. They focused attention on Earth orbital activities, and were successful in launching a succession of space stations.
As the early robotic race proceeded, however, both the Americans and the Soviets prepared for a human effort to reach the Moon. Korolev established a human program to orbit cosmonauts around Earth with the intention of preparing the way for missions to the Moon and planets. The Americans followed suit. The result was an ebb and flow by each of the two nations of activities involving humans aboard spacecraft. The Americans announced a lunar mission first, but the Soviets soon responded, without publicly announcing their intentions, and the race was on.
THREE
Star Voyagers
The experiences of the astronauts and the cosmonauts as space explorers dominated all aspects of the story of the race to the Moon in the 1960s. No one could have predicted the public fascination with the astronauts, from the first unveiling of the Mercury Seven in 1959 through Project Apollo until the present. The astronaut as celebrity, and the effect of that celebrity in American culture, was completely unanticipated. The cosmonauts, less publicly available, still became celebrities in their own right. In both nations the pilots and passengers of spacecraft appeared at a time when each space program desperately needed to inspire public trust in its ability to carry out the nation’s goals in space.
Rockets might explode, but the astronauts shined. They seemed to embody the personal qualities in which Americans of that era wanted to believe: bravery, honesty, love of God and country, and family devotion. Similar symbolism prevailed in the Soviet Union. The cosmonaut program had been kept quiet in that communist country until it was publicly unveiled after the success of Yuri Gagarin’s flight in April 1961. The selection of cosmonauts, and the decisions about who flew, when, and in what order was protected as a state secret until the end of the Cold War. The opposing programs evolved an unexpected symmetry.
Meet the Mercury Seven
Just a few days after the establishment of NASA in October 1958, Robert R. Gilruth received approval from NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan to proceed with what soon became known as Project Mercury, the nation’s inaugural human spaceflight program. Concurrent with the decision to move forward with Project Mercury, NASA selected and trained the Mercury astronaut corps. President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed that the astronauts be selected from among the armed services’ test pilot force. Although this had not been NASA leadership’s first inclination, the decision greatly simplified the selection procedure. The inherent riskiness of spaceflight, and the potential national security implications of the program, pointed toward the use of military personnel. The decision also narrowed and refined the candidate pool, giving NASA a reasonable starting point for selection. Furthermore, it made eminent good sense in that NASA envisioned this astronaut corps first as pilots operating experimental flying machines and only later as scientists. Of course
, it was as pilots that the first astronauts became American heroes.
NASA pursued a rigorous process to select the eventual astronauts who became known as the Mercury Seven: record reviews, biomedical tests, psychological profiles, and a host of interviews. Sometimes the would-be astronauts played mind games with their psychologists. Although he had applied during the search for the first Mercury astronauts in 1959, Charles “Pete” Conrad did not achieve his goal at that time. He always believed he failed because he was too flippant when meeting psychologists who were screening the candidates. Conrad’s sense of humor became legendary at NASA, and his wit, charisma, and comedy made him the favorite astronaut of many. As Conrad liked to say, “If you can’t be good, be colorful.” Conrad enjoyed telling the story, which seemed to get better with every rendition, that when a psychologist showed him a blank white card and asked him to describe what he saw, he replied that it was upside down. He was later successful and entered the NASA astronaut corps in September 1962 as a member of the second class brought in to fly during Project Gemini.
Figure 7. The Mercury Seven astronauts in their iconic silver space suits, 1959. From left to right, they are, back row, Alan Shepard, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and L. Gordon Cooper; front row, Walter Schirra, Donald “Deke” Slayton, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter.
Nonetheless, without conclusive results from medical tests, late in March 1959 Robert R. Gilruth’s Space Task Group began phase five of the selection, narrowing the candidates to eighteen. Thereafter, final criteria for selecting the candidates reverted to the technical qualifications of the men and the technical requirements of the program, as judged by Charles J. Donlan and his team members. “We looked for real men and valuable experience,” said Donlan, and he pressed Gilruth to select the epitome of American masculinity. Gilruth finally decided to select seven. The seven men became heroes in the eyes of the American public almost immediately, in part due to a deal they made with Life magazine for exclusive rights to their stories. To most Americans, who knew next to nothing about the organization, the Mercury Seven became the personification of NASA.
Despite the wishes of the NASA leadership, the fame of the astronauts quickly grew out of proportion to their activities. Perhaps it was inevitable that the astronauts were destined for premature adulation, what with the enormous public curiosity about them, the risk they would take in spaceflight, and their exotic training activities. But the power of commercial competition for publicity and the pressure for political prestige in the space race also whetted an insatiable public appetite for this new kind of celebrity. Walter T. Bonney, long a public information officer for the NACA and in 1959 NASA’s chief adviser on these matters, foresaw the public and press attention, asked for an enlarged staff, and laid the guidelines for public affairs operations that could maximize the significance of the astronauts as celebrities.
Bonney’s foresight proved itself in 1959, only a week after the cherry blossoms bloomed along the tidal basin in Washington, D.C., drenching the city in spectacular spring colors. NASA had chosen to unveil the first Americans to fly in space that April 9. This event made the astronauts public figures. Beforehand, they were a crew-cut, military-minded, mad-monk, thrill-seeking, hard-drinking, woman-chasing, flying-fool gang of daredevils. Now, suddenly, they became heroes of a nation. Excitement bristled in Washington at the prospect of learning who those space travelers might be. Surely they were the best the nation had to offer, modern versions of medieval knights of the Round Table, whose honor and virtue were beyond reproach. Certainly, they carried on their shoulders all the hopes and dreams and best wishes of a nation as they engaged in single combat the ominous specter of communism. The fundamental purpose of Project Mercury was to determine whether humans could survive the rigors of liftoff and orbit in the harsh environment of space. From this perspective, the astronauts were not comparable to earlier explorers who had directed their own exploits. Comparisons between them and Christopher Columbus, Admiral Richard Byrd, and Sir Edmund Hillary left the astronauts standing in the shadows.
At the same time the astronauts, as well as the Soviet cosmonauts, were essentially going off to do personal combat in the Cold War. Each group stood for their separate nations, political systems, and economic approaches against presumed rivals. The United States and the Soviet Union couldn’t shoot their ballistic missiles at each other, at least not without ending human existence on this planet, but they could dispatch their space explorers on them and use them as surrogates for outright war.
NASA’s makeshift headquarters was abuzz with excitement. Employees had turned the largest room of the second floor, once a ballroom, into a hastily set-up press briefing room, inadequate for the task. Print and electronic media jammed into the room to see the first astronauts. One end of the room sported a stage, complete with curtain, and both NASA officials and the newly chosen astronauts waited behind it for the press conference to begin at 2:00 P.M. The other end had trip hazards of electrical cable strewn about the floor, banks of hot lights mounted to illuminate the stage, and more than a few television cameras that would be carrying the event live and movie cameras recording footage for later use. News photographers gathered at the foot of the stage, and journalists of all stripes occupied seats in the gallery. Seating was insufficient for the media jamming into the ballroom, and NASA employees brought in more chairs and tried to make the journalists as comfortable as possible in the cramped surroundings.
NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan served as ringmaster for a circuslike press conference to introduce those astronauts. The role did not suit him, and furthermore, he did not comprehend the excitement. But he would play his role. He watched the seven young men chosen at the conclusion of the lengthy selection process take their seats, none of them yet forty years old but each with more than a lifetime’s worth of exciting memories. For all of them, he realized, it was the most important event of their lives. But what did it portend, honor and glory or death and contrition? Either seemed likely to Glennan on that bright April afternoon, for NASA’s ability to fly people in space seemed somehow distant and fraught with folly despite all the efforts made thus far.
Many of the Mercury Seven astronauts have recorded their recollections of this singular event, and all expressed the same hesitation and dread that Glennan experienced. They also expressed irritation at the huge and unruly audience assembled for the press conference. Alan B. Shepard and Deke Slayton had a brief conversation as they sat down at the table behind the curtain and contemplated the event ahead:
“Shepard,” Deke leaned toward him. “I’m nervous as hell. You ever take part in something like this?”
Alan grinned. “Naw.” He raised an eyebrow. “Well, not really. Anyway, I hope it’s over in a hurry.”
“Uh huh. Me, too,” Deke said quickly.
Each of the seven looked at the large Atlas-Mercury rocket and the Mercury spacecraft models set before them.
When the curtains went up, NASA public affairs officer par excellence Walt Bonney announced:
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. The rules of this briefing are very simple. In about sixty seconds we will give you the announcement that you have been waiting for: the names of the seven volunteers who will become the Mercury astronaut team. Following the distribution of the kit—and this will be done as speedily as possible—those of you who have p.m. deadline problems had better dash for your phones. We will have about a ten- or twelve-minute break during which the gentlemen will be available for picture taking.
As if a dam had broken, a sea of photographers moved forward and popped flashbulbs in the faces of the Mercury Seven astronauts. A buzz in the conference room rose to a roar as this photo shoot proceeded. Some of the journalists bolted for the door with the press kit to file their stories for the evening papers, others ogled the astronauts.
Fifteen minutes later Bonney brought the room to order and asked Keith Glennan to come out and formally introduce the astronauts. Glennan offered
a brief welcome and added, “It is my pleasure to introduce to you—and I consider it a very real honor, gentlemen—Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn, Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Donald K. Slayton . . . the nation’s Mercury Astronauts!” These personable pilots faced the audience in civilian dress, and many people forgot that the men were volunteer test subjects and military officers. Rather they were a contingent of mature middle-class Americans, average in build and visage, family men all, college-educated as engineers, possessing excellent health, and professionally committed to flying advanced aircraft.
The reaction was nothing short of an eruption. Applause drowned out the rest of the NASA officials’ remarks. Journalists rose to their feet in a standing ovation. Even the photographers crouched at the foot of the stage rose in acclamation of the Mercury Seven. A wave of excitement circulated through the press conference like no one at NASA had ever seen before. What was all the excitement about?
The astronauts asked themselves the same question. Slayton nudged Shepard and whispered in his ear, “They’re applauding us like we’ve already done something, like we were heroes or something.” It was clear to all that Project Mercury, the astronauts themselves, and the American space-exploration program were destined to be something extraordinary in the nation’s history.
The rest of the press conference was as exuberant as the introduction. At first the newly selected astronauts replied to the press corps’s questions with military stiffness, but led by an effervescent and sentimental John Glenn, they soon warmed to the interviews. What really surprised the astronauts, however, was the nature of the questions most often asked. The reporters did not seem to care about their flying experience, although all had been military test pilots, many had combat experience and decorations for valor, and some held aircraft speed and endurance records. The reporters did not seem to care about the details of NASA’s plans for Project Mercury, either. They wanted to know about the personal lives of the astronauts. The media wanted to know whether the astronauts believed in God and practiced any religion. They wanted to know whether they were married and the names and ages and genders of their children, they wanted to know what their families thought about space exploration and their roles in it, and they wanted to know about their devotion to their country. God, country, family, and self, and the virtues inherent in each of them, represented the sum total of the reporters’ interests.
Reaching for the Moon Page 6