Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  So it is to be expected that a discussion of the psychology of machines has more fascination for a physicist or a serious engineer than for the average student of humanities. Aquarius, armed by his four years as an engineering student, would sometimes try to tease intelligent ladies and literary critics out of their supposition that science was an exact study with certain knowledge. On the contrary, he would assure them, there was no final knowledge whatsoever in science. We knew that gravity was an attraction between bodies, and we could measure that attraction, but why they chose to be attracted to one another was nicely out of our measure. We knew that energy was required for all work and that it sometimes took the form of light or heat or electricity, we knew it was stored in fuels and in explosives, we could measure energy in its various forms, measure it as majestically as the tides of an ocean, or gauge it so finely as the drops in the sea, but we did not have the remotest notion of what energy might look like. Nor did we know what electricity was. We knew how to use electricity, we could use it with precision in uncounted different instruments, but finally we knew no more about its nature than to say it was usually present as a flowing stream of electrons in a wire, and we did not know what an electron looked like. Certainly we did not know why passing a wire between the poles of a horseshoe magnet would have so magical a result as to cause an electrical current to run through the wire, anymore than we understood why any electrical current in a wire would in its turn produce a new field of magnetism. The entire world of communications was built on electricity, yet we did not even have the right to say that if magnetism was mood, and someone interrupted your mood, the quick impulse of irritation you might feel was electricity in your nerves. We did not know. We did not understand the ultimate nature of electricity. Nor did we comprehend time. There were numerous theories of time, but time remained as fundamentally mysterious as the notion that space was infinite, or matter consisted of individual atoms whose makeup was as complex as solar systems, and then proved more complex. Each year the number of subatomic particles discovered was greater. To laymen who had grown up on electrons, protons, neutrons and positrons, there were now mesons and photons and mu mesons, still more names and concepts no layman could follow, and science had less certainty today about the periodic table of the elements and the structure of the atom than at the turn of the century. The list could continue. If the nature of time was not comprehended, nor gravity, nor magnetism, nor the final meaning of the word electric, what did we know finally about sound? We could say that sound was caused by waves, but we could not explain why the waves made sound in the ear. That was still a mystery. So, too, was touch if one thought about it, and smell, and taste, and pain, and death, but these were all beyond physics, yes, somewhere between sound and smell the domain of physics ended. Small matter. Even in the very center of physics, before the phenomenon of light, darkness abounded. Nobody could be certain whether light was composed of little pellets, or traveled like sound in a wave, or was both. Both! When it came to ultimate scientific knowledge we were no further along than the primitive who thought light came from God. Perhaps it did. No physicist could begin to prove it didn’t. So we didn’t even know what a flame was. We had forgotten the majesty of fire, the impenetrable mystery. What indeed was a flame? A burning gas we were told. But why did a gas burn with a light? And from where did a gas come? Savages had looked once at fire and knew. God was in the wood of the trees and in the core of everything which burned, but now one could hardly remember that to look into a fire hot as the manifest of immanence might be equal to staring into the fires of Apollo 11 as the ship of flames began its way to the moon. What confidence was in that fire.

  No, nothing was known at the root of science. To worship science was like being married to a beautiful woman who furnished your castle, bore your children, decorated and illumined your life, filled your days, was indispensable. Yet all the while you did not know the first thing about her true nature. Was she in love with you or a masterpiece of hate? There, in the center of the dream, was not an answer but an enigma. Was light corpuscular or a wave? Or both. Both!

  These ultimate matters, before which the most sophisticated scientists could feel consummate ignorance, were subtly troubling to the technologist because he above all men was married to the beautiful woman and had relations with her every day, near to predictable relations, he was ready to devote his life to her predictability, and yet anxiety remained profound for he knew enough to know that the psychology of machines was not necessarily a fiction since even the function of an ordinary radio was not without its elements of savage awe. If an electromagnetic wave could travel for hundreds, or thousands, or millions of miles at the speed of light and all invisible, and be detected by an apparatus of no great complexity when all was said, being occasionally so simple as a length of wire whose end was attached to an ordinary crystal, and in any case no matter how elaborate an apparatus, one which consisted finally of endless refinements of that wire and that crystal, well, who was to say that the incredibly complex and artful networks of the brain fed by all the electricity of the nerves could not send electromagnetic waves as well (or some not yet detectable variant of them) and receive extraordinary communications in return. One did not have to be a champion of telepathy to recognize that if wireless communication was so simple, nay, so basic to the physical order of things, then telepathy might be more simple to conceive in its presence than in its absence; if one added to this thought a recognition of all the metal conductors in the rocks and in the earth beneath the magnetic fields of the atmosphere, and the unalterable fact that any metal form which passed through a magnetic field would generate electromagnetic waves which might be received by another form somewhere else sympathetic to it—well, the existence of natural receivers, of organic radios in every square mile of earth and God knows what unknown forms of psychic electricities still undetected by any instrument of measure but radiated in messages between every insect, blade of grass, and tree, the possible existence then of the earth as one giant communications bank of invisible transmitters and receptors!—it was enough to knock a technologist on his ear if he began to think too much of the psychology of machines. Indeed the electrical phenomena of electrical machines were so often so incomprehensible in small but painfully inexplicable ways that the astronauts and Capcoms and commo engineers at NASA used the word “glitch” to account for an unaccountable electrical phenomenon like the light on an instrument panel suddenly turning on when the machine it serviced was most definitely off. That was sometimes not merely hard to explain, but impossible to explain. So they called it a glitch. God’s own luminescence was in the switch! Give a better explanation! “I just threw a glitch into the light when I was turning my warning lights off and on,” said Gordon Cooper during the flight of Mercury-Atlas 9 when a gravity signal showed on his switchboard during an orbital free fall. Cooper was renowned for his phlegm, but one butterfly of the night must have beat its wings in his throat when he looked at a dial which showed the force of gravity was present at a time when he knew he must be without weight. Yet note: whether it is with vanity, woe, or awe, he still takes credit for throwing the glitch. Who indeed has not felt the force of his own personality before a sensitive machine?

  IV

  If a covert belief in the existence of a psychology of machines is the sepulchral drama of many a physicist and engineer, there can be no branch of technology where the force of this unspoken possibility is felt more acutely than in the design of space vehicles. The early history of rocketry reads like an account of the burning of witches. One sorceress did not burn at all, another died with horrible shrieks, a third left nothing but a circle of ash and it rained for eight days. At the Raketenflugplatz outside Berlin in the early Thirties, rocket engines exploded on their stands, refused to fire, or when tested in flight lifted in one direction, then all but refired at right angles and took off along the ground. Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to functio
n long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

  Even at the end of the Fifties and into the beginning of the Sixties, the malfunctions of rockets were legend, and the first of the large launch vehicles like Thor and Jupiter, Juno and Vanguard and the early Atlas were all failures, misfiring on the launching pad, or failing to behave under control once in the air. The flat mournful moors of Cape Kennedy with their abandoned launching towers and gantries could remind the tourist of earlier stricken hours when Echo had failed and Mercury 1, Explorer, and Ranger I and Ranger II and Ranger III, Mariner I and Beacon Explorer A, Explorer XXI and Mariner III, Atlas-Centaur in its vehicle test and OSO-C Delta. Even as late as 1965, Gemini 6 had an engine abort on the Launch Pad.

  The basic principle of a rocket was simple enough, it was as simple as lighting a cannon. Inflammables were brought together, ignited, fired through a chamber open only at one end—the gases of the flame pushing out pushed back against the rocket, and the rocket accelerated from the continuing push. That was simple enough, simple as Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—but physics was divine and engineering was sweat. The theory had all the elegance of natural economy, the engineering had to deal in the beginning with the almost intolerable problem that the heat of the flames melted the engine which contained them—so rockets never were able to function with any predictability until their cooling systems were perfected—metallurgy, ceramics and plumbing were all to take a mighty leap through mighty pipes and valves before Saturn V would lift. Then had come a host of problems on variations of trajectory: a rocket was not unlike a ball inhabited by smaller not quite symmetrical balls which rolled around within—so deviations were present in every trajectory. Rockets with solid fuel had a firing chamber which grew larger as the fuel burned away—therefore, the thrust altered; rockets with liquid fuel were obliged to react to the fact that the fuel sloshed around in the tanks. A world of instruments, of gyroscopes, radios, telemetric devices, computers and various electric monitors and controls moved into position on the rocket, each instrument to exhibit its own peculiarities, working difficulties, tendency to malfunction, and subtle hint of private psychology.

  So dread inhabited the technology of rockets. Two of the most primitive and mysterious actions of nature, the force of fire and the transmission of thought, had been harnessed in machines which sat within other machines—the fire was controlled to aim and hurl a ship to the moon; the thoughts of men on the guidance and preservation of that ship were directed into electromagnetic circuits which propelled these thoughts and observations into other electromagnetic instruments thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles away. If the mysteries of physics were still unplumbed, if men were able to perform these actions without knowing altogether why they worked, no ordinary dread had been engaged, particularly if we consider that the management of fire and the management of thought are two of the most perilous activities for primitive man. Speak next of what it means to invade the heavens, then occupy the moon, the moon! that pale sister of Creation. Dread sat in the personality of NASA technicians, sat in the cold loveless air of concentration they brought to their work, sat like the guilt which squats in the vaults of all those banks where the ill-gotten gold of the world is stored. Like a capitalist who risks all the moral future of his soul on the gamble that God believes in capitalism and wants each man to seek to enrich himself as part of God’s design, so the engineers at NASA lived in that ice-chamber of the moral heart where they could not know if their actions were divinely approved or abhorred, but dread showed in the chill dank air of air-conditioning and human relations at the Manned Spacecraft Center south of Houston.

  And indeed the technicians had much to concern themselves with. The huge size of the launch vehicles, and the delicacy of their instruments, the length of the trip and the fields of magnetism and radiation through which they must pass, the virtues and talents of the astronauts, and their fatigue and occasional lapses had resulted hitherto in all the eight years of manned space flights in America in some astounding triumphs, and an unbroken list of mishaps, errors, and deviations in function in every one of the flights. Errors had cropped up in the ultracomplex machine of the spaceship, among the astronauts in their space suits (also machines) and in the network of communication on the ground. All of the Mercury flights had trouble: Alan Shepard had leaks in his thrusters—the language is not without its humor, but rocket terminology is not without its sexual reference—the hatch on the Liberty Bell 7 blew before the capsule had been secured—Grissom almost drowned; John Glenn had endless delays in lift-off, weeks went by. In flight the automatic steering did not work too well, the left thruster failed, then the right, the gyroscope indicators were at odds with what Glenn could see for himself. Ground control received signals that the lock holding the heat shield in place for reentry had opened. If that were true, then Glenn would be dead on return. Carpenter in Mercury-Atlas 7 also had trouble with his control system; his deployment switch failed to release the landing parachute. He had to throw the switch by hand. With these malfunctions he overshot the recovery area. Schirra in Mercury-Atlas 8 had a flight suit which overheated, and the launch vehicle did a clockwise roll after it left the pad—the booster engines were misaligned, Cooper flying Mercury-Atlas 9 had a host of malfunctions, the suit, the gravity light, the carbon dioxide level, finally, the automatic pilot system failed. He had to fly the ship into reentry himself. Not for nothing had they called their ships Freedom and Faith and Friendship. If the experience of being weightless was new even for a test pilot, and the sight of earth from a hundred miles up might have taxed the language of a literary giant (“The earth is real beautiful from up here, babe, I wish you could see how beautiful the earth is from here,” said the astronauts) certainly the recognition that one might soon be dead gave flesh to Freedom and Friendship. Such words may have arrived late to certain of the astronauts, have come to them indeed with the force of new concepts. Just as a Marxist who had abruptly discovered religion might have found whole echelons of thought in words like charity or grace, so a pilot, hard-bitten, self-centered, stingy, and anchored in military systems of authority might have found words like Freedom and Friendship not only strange and new, but not without comfort as they stood before these spooky technological ventures into the vacuums of space knowing that malfunctions in their equipment were bound to appear. So it had been with every Mercury flight, so was it to be with each of the ten Gemini missions, from Gemini 3 to Gemini 12, thrusters failing, short circuits, electrical problems, control systems affected, cooling systems failing to cool, overshot landings, missed rendezvous, computer failures, fading fuel cell batteries, transponders running out of power, engine abort because of a dropped plug, Armstrong in direct peril in Gemini 8 when the capsule began to whirl around frantically at sixty revolutions a minute, face-plates on EVA suits fogged up, eyes irritated by antifogging mixture, defective turbopumps—yes, mixed into all the triumphs of the Mercury and Gemini programs were the flaws whose reason could be found and the flaws which defied reason, and then the total of all these triumphs and all these ruptured taboos, all the flaws which had been corrected and all the luck which had been gathered, blew up into one vast moment when a machine to everyone’s horror might even have developed a psychology of its own, for Spacecraft 012 mounted on top of Uprated Saturn I booster Number 204 during a pilot-manned checkout had a fire in the cockpit at 6:31 in the evening on January 27, 1967, there out on Launch Complex 34 at Kennedy Space Center and before the hatch was opened, the crew, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were dead. Of course, one did not have to look for a psychology of machines. There was a psychology of politicians as well, there was that complacency which finds its way into the most serious tests of the most critical materials when a large corporation has the highest
influence in the highest places, as indeed which large corporation does not. One could look for the villain everywhere, even in the White House. There were more than a few to whisper maliciously that the bag if ever opened would have blasted Lyndon Johnson to the moon. And Bobby Baker could have been his launch vehicle. The investigation which followed was obliged to consider such possibilities as careless exposed wires, pure oxygen atmosphere, untested materials which had been termed fire-resistant but actually burned in pure oxygen, then had to look at discrepancies between what North American Aviation had delivered and what NASA had specified. The investigating board had been selected by NASA, there were some who accused it of whitewash, yet even so, how much was revealed! It was announced that the quality of work fell below standards and specifications. There were manufacturing discrepancies, unestablished performance goals, high rates of rejection of product, a lack of means to measure work done against work planned, 113 Engineering Orders considered “significant” which were not accomplished by the time the Command Module in which the astronauts were killed was delivered to NASA, and 623 other Engineering Orders only finished subsequent to delivery. The ensuing cries of congressmen demanding to see an old and most critical report by General Phillips on work at North American in 1965 now resulted in a replay of stories about the investigation of Bobby Baker by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in 1963, for this long-gone inquiry had uncovered the fact that Baker and two partners had majority control of a vending machine corporation called Serv-U which received most of its income, close to a million dollars a year, from a contract with North American Aviation. That good contract had been signed three months after North American Aviation succeeded in obtaining the contract to build Apollo, a deal which would yet be worth over three billion dollars. Baker was described as being “like a son” to Senator Robert S. Kerr, who was Chairman of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. Kerr had a company called Kerr-McGee Oil. One of its directors was James E. Webb. After a recommendation from Senator Kerr, James E. Webb became NASA Administrator, the highest job in NASA. Of course Webb was well-regarded by Lyndon Johnson. “More than any other individual, James E. Webb deserves credit for United States success in space,” Johnson had later been bound to say. Yet the contract for Apollo had been granted after one hundred and ninety panels of experts in NASA had ranked not North American but the Martin Company highest in technical approach, technical qualifications, and business qualifications for the project. Martin received an overall rating on the scale employed of 6.9; North American, which came in second, had 6.6. Webb however and two of his deputies in NASA overruled the Source Evaluation Board of NASA, and gave the contract to North American after all. Three months later Bobby Baker had his Serv-U contract with North American. Bobby Baker—Senator Kerr—James E. Webb. This was of course the purest kind of guilt by association. But what association! North American was to weather the examinations and condemnations of the Apollo 204 Review Board after the fire. North American would keep the contract to make Apollo.