Reaching for the Moon

by Roger D. Launius

  With internal dissention quieted, NASA moved to announce the Moon-landing mode to the public in the summer of 1962. As NASA prepared to do so, however, Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome B. Wiesner, raised objections because the lunar-orbit rendezvous approach brought the potential risk of losing a crew that could not return to Earth. As a result of this opposition, Webb backpedaled and stated that the decision was tentative and that NASA would sponsor further studies. The issue reached a climax at Marshall in September 1962 when President Kennedy, Wiesner, Webb, and several other Washington figures visited von Braun. As the entourage viewed a mockup of a Saturn V first-stage booster during a photo opportunity for the media, Kennedy nonchalantly mentioned to von Braun, “I understand you and Jerry disagree about the right way to go to the moon.”

  Von Braun acknowledged this disagreement, but when Wiesner began to explain his concern Webb, who had been quiet until this point, began to argue with him “for being on the wrong side of the issue.” The mode decision had been an uninteresting technical issue before, but it became a political concern hashed over in the press for days thereafter. Lord Hailsham, Lord President of the Council and Minister of Science for British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who had accompanied Wiesner on the trip, later asked Kennedy on Air Force One how the debate would turn out. The president told him that Wiesner would lose: “Webb’s got all the money, and Jerry’s only got me.” Kennedy was right. Webb lined up political support in Washington for the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode and announced it as a final decision on November 7, 1962. This set the stage for the technological development of hardware to accomplish Apollo.

  The American Moon Rocket

  Wernher von Braun’s rocket team in Huntsville gained distinction in the Moon race by building the biggest, most capable, and most stunningly impressive rocket ever conceptualized. NASA had inherited the effort to develop the Saturn family of boosters used to launch Apollo to the Moon in 1960 when it acquired the Army Ballistic Missile Agency under von Braun. By that time von Braun’s engineers were hard at work on the first-generation Saturn launch vehicle, a cluster of eight Redstone boosters around a Jupiter fuel tank. Fueled by a combination of liquid oxygen (LOX) and RP-1 (a version of kerosene), the Saturn I could generate a thrust of 205,000 pounds. This group also worked on a second stage, known in its own right as the Centaur, which used a revolutionary fuel mixture of LOX and liquid hydrogen that could generate a greater ratio of thrust to weight. The fuel choice made this second stage a difficult development effort, because the mixture was highly volatile and could not be readily handled. But the stage could produce an additional 90,000 pounds of thrust. The Saturn I was solely a research-and-development vehicle that would lead toward the accomplishment of Apollo, making ten flights between October 1961 and July 1965. The first four flights tested the first stage, but beginning with the fifth launch the second stage was active, and these missions were used to place scientific payloads and Apollo test capsules into orbit (Table 7).

  The next step in Saturn development came with the maturation of the Saturn IB, an upgraded version of the earlier vehicle. With more powerful engines generating 1.6 million pounds of thrust from the first stage, the two-stage combination could place 62,000-pound payloads into Earth orbit. The first flight, on July 5, 1966, tested the capability of the booster and the Apollo capsule in a suborbital flight. Eighteen months later, after one flight employing the Saturn I and another introducing the Saturn V, came the January 22, 1968, launch of a Saturn IB with both an Apollo capsule and a lunar-landing module aboard for orbital testing.

  TABLE 7

  SATURN ROCKET LAUNCHES

  The largest launch vehicle of this family, the Saturn V, represented the culmination of those earlier booster development and test programs. Standing 363 feet tall, with three stages, this was the vehicle that could take astronauts to the Moon. The first stage generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust from five massive engines developed for the system. These engines, known as F-1s, were some of the most significant engineering accomplishments of the program, requiring the development of new alloys and different construction techniques to withstand the extreme heat and shock of firing. The thunderous sound of the first static test of this stage, taking place at Huntsville, Alabama, on April 16, 1965, brought home to many that the Kennedy goal was within technological grasp. For others, it signaled the magic of technological effort; one engineer even characterized rocket engine technology as a “black art” without rational principles. The second stage presented enormous challenges to NASA engineers and very nearly caused the lunar-landing goal to be missed. Consisting of five engines burning LOX and liquid hydrogen, this stage could deliver 1 million pounds of thrust. It was always behind schedule, and required constant attention and additional funding to ensure completion by the deadline for a lunar landing. Both the first and third stages of this Saturn vehicle development program moved forward relatively smoothly. (The third stage was an enlarged and improved version of the IB, and had few developmental complications.)

  Despite these complications, the biggest problem with Saturn V lay not with the hardware but with the clash of philosophies toward development and test. The von Braun rocket team had made important technological contributions. Its conservative engineering practices enjoyed popular acclaim. The team tested each component of each system individually, then assembled them for a long series of ground tests. The engineers would then launch each stage individually before assembling the whole system for a long series of flight tests. While this practice ensured thoroughness, it was costly in both money and time, and NASA had neither commodity to spare. George E. Mueller, the head of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight, disagreed with this approach. Drawing on his experience with the air force and the aerospace industry, and shadowed by the twin bugaboos of schedule and cost, Mueller advocated what he called the “all-up” concept, in which the entire Apollo-Saturn system was tested together in flight, without the laborious preliminaries.

  Figure 12. Cutaway illustration of the U.S. Saturn V Moon rocket in 1967 with major components labeled.

  A calculated gamble, the first Saturn V test launch, Apollo 4, took place on November 9, 1967, with the entire Apollo-Saturn combination. A second test followed on April 4, 1968, and even though it was only partially successful—the second stage shut off prematurely and the third stage, needed to insert the Apollo payload into lunar trajectory, failed—Mueller declared that the test program had been completed and that the next launch would have astronauts aboard. The gamble paid off. In seventeen test and fifteen piloted launches, the Saturn booster family suffered only one failure, the unmanned Apollo 6 test, when a stage failed during launch.

  The Apollo Spacecraft

  Almost with the announcement of the lunar-landing commitment in 1961, NASA technicians began an aggressive program to develop a reasonable configuration for the trip to lunar orbit and back. What they came up with was a three-person command module capable of sustaining human life for two weeks or more in either Earth orbit or a lunar trajectory; a service module holding oxygen, fuel, maneuvering rockets, fuel cells, and other expendable and life-support equipment that could be jettisoned upon reentry to Earth; a retrorocket package attached to the service module for slowing to prepare for reentry; and finally, a launch escape system that was discarded upon achieving orbit. The teardrop shaped command module had two hatches, one on the side for entry and exit of the crew at the beginning and end of the flight and one in the nose with a docking collar for use in moving to and from the lunar-landing vehicle.

  Work on the Apollo spacecraft stretched from November 28, 1961, when the prime contract for its development was assigned to North American Aviation, to October 22, 1968, when the last test flight took place. In between there were various efforts to design, build, and test the spacecraft both on the ground and in suborbital and orbital flights. For instance, on May 13, 1964, NASA tested a boilerplate model of the Apollo capsule atop a stubby Little Joe II military booster, an
d another Apollo capsule achieved orbit on September 18, 1964, when it was launched atop a Saturn I. By the end of 1966 NASA leaders declared the Apollo command module ready for human occupancy.

  The NASA project manager for the Apollo spacecraft, Joseph F. Shea, oversaw the spacecraft’s design and construction with verve and style, driving hard to meet a standard of excellence not reflected in written documents. With Bob Gilruth’s support and encouragement at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Shea browbeat contractors, other NASA officials, and experts who weighed in on the system. A special target was the rocket team under Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Shea specialized in systems engineering and integration, taking a holistic approach that controlled every aspect of the project. His intrusion into decisions viewed by von Braun’s rocketeers as within their purview led to more than one flareup that had to be resolved by testy meetings between von Braun and Gilruth. Regardless, as NASA’s George Mueller recalled: Shea “contributed a considerable amount of engineering innovation and project management skill.” While those working for him enjoyed his eccentricities—especially bad puns and decidedly unprofessional clothing choices—they also recognized his dedication to the effort. He made himself a nuisance, too, often by moving into the construction site and sleeping on a cot during crucial times. By the end of 1966 he believed he had a spacecraft ready for human occupancy, but that was not the case.

  The Apollo 1 Fire

  As these development activities were taking place, tragedy struck the Apollo program. On January 27, 1967, Apollo-Saturn (AS) 204, scheduled to be the first spaceflight with astronauts aboard the capsule, was on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, moving through simulation tests. The three astronauts to fly on this mission—Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger B. Chaffee—were aboard, running through a mock launch sequence. At 6:31 P.M., after several hours of work, a fire broke out in the spacecraft, fed by the pure oxygen atmosphere intended for the flight. In a flash, flames engulfed the capsule. It took the ground crew five minutes to open the hatch. When they did so, they found three bodies, the astronauts all dead from asphyxiation. Although three other astronauts had been killed before this time—all in plane crashes—these were the first deaths directly attributable to the U.S. space program.

  Shock gripped NASA and the nation during the days that followed. James Webb, NASA administrator, told the media at the time, “We’ve always known that something like this was going to happen soon or later. . . . Who would have thought that the first tragedy would be on the ground?” As the nation mourned, Webb went to President Lyndon Johnson and asked that NASA be allowed to handle the accident investigation and direct the recovery from the accident. He promised to be truthful in assessing blame and pledged to assign it to himself and NASA management as appropriate. The day after the fire NASA appointed an eight-member investigation board, chaired by Floyd L. Thompson, a longtime NASA official and director of the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The board set out to discover the details of the tragedy: what happened, why it happened, whether it could happen again, what was at fault, and how could NASA recover? The members of the board learned that the fire had been caused by a short circuit in the electrical system that ignited combustible materials in the spacecraft fed by the oxygen atmosphere. They also found that it could have been prevented and called for several modifications to the spacecraft, including a move to a less oxygen-rich environment. Changes to the capsule followed quickly, and within a little more than a year it was ready for flight.

  Webb reported these findings to various congressional committees and took a personal grilling at every meeting. His answers were sometimes evasive and always defensive. The New York Times, which was usually critical of Webb, had a field day with this situation and said that NASA stood for “Never a Straight Answer.” While the ordeal was personally taxing, whether by happenstance or design Webb deflected much of the backlash over the fire from both NASA as an agency and from the Johnson administration. While he was personally tarred with the disaster, the space agency’s image and popular support were largely undamaged. Webb himself never recovered from the stigma of the fire, and when he left NASA in October 1968, even as Apollo was nearing a successful completion, few mourned his departure.

  The AS 204 fire also troubled Webb ideologically during the months that followed. He had been a high priest of technocracy ever since coming to NASA in 1961, arguing for the authority of experts, well organized and led, and with sufficient resources to resolve the “many great economic, social, and political problems” that pressed the nation. In Space Age Management, published in 1969, he wrote, “Our Society has reached a point where its progress and even its survival increasingly depend upon our ability to organize the complex and to do the unusual.” He believed he had achieved that model organization for complex accomplishments at NASA.

  Yet that model structure of exemplary management had failed to anticipate and resolve the shortcomings in the Apollo capsule design and had not taken what seemed in retrospect to be normal precautions to ensure the safety of the crew. The system had broken down. As a result Webb became less trusting of other officials at NASA and gathered more and more decision-making authority to himself. This wore on him during the rest of his time as NASA administrator, and the failure of the technological model for solving problems was an important forecaster of a trend in American culture: technology came to be blamed for a good many of society’s ills. That problem would be particularly present as NASA tried to win political approval of later NASA projects.

  No one took the Apollo accident more personally than Joe Shea and his counterpart at North American Aviation, Harrison Storms. Both were reassigned afterward, Shea in part because of the psychological toll the deaths of the astronauts had on him, as he self-medicated with alcohol and barbiturates. Within a few weeks, Chris Kraft confided that Shea’s erratic behavior was hampering the recovery from the fire. He recalled one meeting on the spacecraft, at which “Joe Shea got up and started calmly with a report on the state of the investigation. But within a minute, he was rambling, and in another thirty seconds, he was incoherent. I looked at him and saw my father, in the grip of dementia praecox. It was horrifying and fascinating at the same time.” Webb also worried about Shea, and asked him to come to Washington to help the Apollo program from headquarters, promising Shea that he would work only for Webb. He did not tell Shea that he would also have no one working for him. Rocco Petrone, a director of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in the 1970s, had been in the blockhouse at the Kennedy Space Center sitting next to astronaut Deke Slayton when the fire broke out. He blamed Shea for the accident, supposedly telling him, “You are a menace and you are to blame for the fire. When you die, I will come and piss on your grave.”

  Shea left NASA in July 1967 after the Apollo fire, moving to Raytheon, where he worked for many more years. He served as a consultant to NASA in later years but never worked directly for the agency again. Although his replacement was not announced as a punishment, the public interpreted it as such, and had it not been for the accident there is no reason to believe that Shea would have been replaced just as the program neared flight stage. In Storms’s case, North American sacrificed him to get back into NASA’s good graces and recover from the accident. Storms never forgave NASA for having been forced to “take the fall.”

  The Lunar Module

  If the Saturn launch vehicle and the Apollo spacecraft were difficult technological challenges, the third part of the hardware for the Moon landing, the lunar module (LM), was the mission’s problem child. Begun a year later than it should have been, the LM was consistently behind schedule. It represented the most serious design challenge of the whole Moon mission, not least because it was required to safely convey a crew to a soft landing on the surface of another world and later return them to a lunar orbit, where the crew could be reunited with the command module for the trip back to Earth. None of these operations had been done befo
re, so it is perhaps understandable that the LM was consistently behind schedule and over budget.

  Much of the project’s difficulties turned on the demands of devising two separate spacecraft components—one for descent to the Moon’s surface and one for ascent back to the command module. Both engines had to work perfectly to ensure that the astronauts were not left stranded on the lunar surface without any means of getting home. The landing structure likewise presented problems; it had to be light and sturdy and shock resistant. Guidance, maneuverability, and spacecraft control also caused no end of headaches for the LM engineers. After various engineering problems, an ungainly looking vehicle emerged that was finally declared flight-ready in early 1968. It would be piloted by two astronauts standing upright.

  Thomas J. Kelly, Grumman’s chief designer of the lunar module, remembered what the design had to accomplish: “The command module was totally dominated by the need to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, so it had to be dense and aerodynamically streamlined and all that, whereas the lunar module didn’t want any of that. It wanted to be able to land on the Moon and operate in an unrestricted environment in space and on the lunar surface. It ultimately resulted in a spindly, gangly-looking, very lightweight vehicle that was just the opposite of all the attributes of the command module. If you tried to do that all in one vehicle, it would be a real problem. I don’t know how you would have done it. But this way, with this mission approach, it was very neatly divided in two halves.”