Beginning with the Apollo 7 mission in March 1968, Steve Bales had been part of the guidance (GUIDO) team, but he was also assigned to follow and study LM lunar ascent and descent. He had a lot of essential issues to work out: How were they going to align the LM platform when it was docked with the command-service module, since the LM radars would be blocked from the stars they navigated by? And how would they align the platform from the lunar surface? And would GUIDO have the responsibility of calling an abort during the descent? If so, what were the criteria? Not every member of the Trench—those flight controllers who sat at consoles on the first row in MOCR, the ones who monitored the mechanics of the flight, not the systems—could call an abort that would stop the mission.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to figure this out alone. Other people were working the lunar-landing problem. He and the rest of the MOCR crew assigned to the Apollo 11 mission labored long hours on ascent and descent. Bales got to know the LM’s guidance systems well. The primary guidance and navigation system (PGNS, pronounced “pings”) handled the LM’s descent, ascent, and rendezvous using the LM guidance computer. While the command module’s guidance system was powered up and aligned by a ground crew of hundreds, the LM’s system had to be started up and initialized by a crew of two who were two hundred and forty thousand miles away from Mission Control—and it had to be done twice, once during lunar orbit for descent, and again from the lunar surface for ascent. There was also the backup abort guidance system (AGS, pronounced “ags”), which was much smaller. It could perform only abort and rendezvous, though it could navigate during the landing if PGNS failed.
Bales was overwhelmed at first. But in late summer and fall, he began to get more of a handle on it, largely by attending Howard “Bill” Tindall’s Lunar Landing Flight Techniques Panel, which met every month and sometimes more frequently.
Tindall, chief of Apollo Data Priority Coordination, a catchall term that gave no hint of his broad involvements, was one of the unsung—at least to the public—heroes of the Apollo program. As a mission planner, particularly in the area of orbital mechanics, he was brilliant; for Gemini, he had figured out rendezvous—not just theoretically, with equations on paper, but how to actually do it. He had also played an important part in developing the Apollo guidance system and the onboard computer. But it was his ability to bring together a wide-ranging group of individuals to determine mission techniques—in plain English, how a particular thing was going to get done—that was most valuable. Chris Kraft would later write that no one had contributed more to the success of Apollo.
Tindall was a family man, slender, in his early forties with brown hair and glasses, and he liked to drive his Ford Pantera fast on Houston’s freeways. He led weekly “Black Friday” meetings that tackled any number of important Apollo matters and involved up to a hundred people—astronauts, contractors, flight controllers and planners, engineering specialists, and others. (Later sessions would involve subgroups of ten or twelve in his office conference room.) He generally kicked off a meeting with “Why are we here? What are we trying to do?” Anyone was allowed to speak his mind without being judged. Then he’d offer an opinion or summarize—a variation on the Socratic method—and allow others to respond. Ideas and approaches were introduced, discussed, attacked, defended, abandoned, and combined until what was left was pretty close to how something would be done; the process resembled a sculptor chipping away until a work of art revealed itself. The problem wasn’t completely solved, but usually the meetings cleared a path to solving it. When he thought he’d gotten enough for a particular subject, and the requisite assignments for further study or action had been made, he’d move on to the next.
The first Lunar Landing Panel, held in August 1968, was a two-day marathon of fifty or sixty people. The meeting had only one subject: What needed to be done in the first hour after the crew entered the LM? The response was “a total cacophony of opinions,” remembered Bales. “People talking at once, sometimes shouting. Once in a while someone would get so mad they would have to leave the room.” By noon of the first day, there was some consensus on what the major tasks would be. After lunch, they tackled the crew’s second and third hours in the LM; the next day, hour four and more. “By the end of day two,” recalled Bales, “we had baselined a big picture of what was needed to be done.” Each group had action assignments to perform—more than fifty—before next month’s meeting.
Tindall’s summaries and his opinions on and concerns about any number of important matters were often recapped in weekly reports that became known as Tindallgrams. Concise, well-written, straightforward, and occasionally playful and even folksy, they were a refreshing change from NASA’s bureaucratese and its endless acronyms and abbreviations. In one Tindallgram, he wrote: “Maybe I’m an ‘Aunt Emma’—certainly some smart people laugh at this concern, but I just feel that the crew should not be diddling with the DSKY [the onboard computer’s interface] during powered descent, unless it is absolutely essential. They’ll never hit the wrong button, of course, but if they do, the results can be rather lousy.”
By the time simulations began for Apollo 11’s launch, set for early February 1969, the procedures were in place.
Over the next several months, Bales spent hundreds of hours in flight techniques and mission rules meetings and many more hours in the room dubbed the “Guidance Officers Training School” running through every type of guidance failure conceivable, hundreds of them. There were also trips to the MIT Instrumentation Lab, where the Apollo Guidance Computer had been designed, to go through all the software what-ifs, and to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles with astronauts; because they would navigate by the stars, he had to know them also. In Houston, because so many flight teams were practicing a lunar landing, there were shifts throughout the day and evening. Sometimes, after a long night shift, Bales and some other controllers would relax with a round of golf in the morning, then return to the MSC, catch a few hours of sleep in the bunk room on an upper floor of the Mission Control Center, and get back to the work that evening.
A couple of months or so before the Apollo 11 launch in July, Bales began to notice something.
He had heard a story about the great boxer Joe Louis and how, near the end of his long career, he had told a reporter, “I have to think to throw my right hand”—before that, it had just come, without conscious thought. The young GUIDO realized that, for the first time, he didn’t have to think to make all the calls: “I knew what to do,” he recalled. “I knew which ones to worry about and which ones not to…I realized I didn’t have to consciously think what’s the next most important thing to worry about—it just came naturally.”
That was the good thing. The bad thing, or at least what kept Bales up at night, was that after weeks of discussion, NASA had decided that GUIDO—in this case, Bales—had the power to abort during descent to the lunar surface. Bales hadn’t wanted this responsibility, and neither had some of the other flight controllers. Now GUIDO could abort the landing even if it could be completed, under certain circumstances. And if the abort led to a botched rendezvous—entirely possible, since it would result in a changed trajectory—and if that led to the two crewmen stranded in the LM with no chance of rescue…Bales tried not to think of what could happen.
In addition to figuring out what to worry about, Bales had also developed the ability to follow several conversations at once. While in the MOCR, he wore an earpiece on his left ear, and he could pick the loops—the radio conversations between different parties involved in the mission—he wanted to take part in. He regularly listened to six: his staff support room (SSR), the flight director’s loop, the air-to-ground loop, the MOCR trajectory-dynamics loop, the computer-dynamics loop, and the systems loop. Some controllers listened to more. He had learned to talk to one person on one loop and monitor the others at the same time. The talent carried over from work; he could walk into a party or a restaurant and pick up on several conversations at any volume and comprehend them a
ll. It was a kind of superpower but one that, he would recall, was “not a terribly socially endearing thing.”
Twenty-four-year-old Jack Garman was knee-deep in his work too. Over most of the previous year, he had been the key software support for the Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 missions, learning the details of the command module and LM software programs. Bales thought he was the most knowledgeable computer person he’d ever met, and he impressed others too, so much that he soon earned the nickname “Gar-Flash.” Garman started flying up to the instrumentation lab at MIT every other week to learn all he could about the Apollo computer, and the recent college grad started asking the older guys there to show him what they were doing and why. He found that they loved to talk about the Apollo computer—and why shouldn’t they? They’d invented it.
Then Garman found a new interest. During the Apollo 8 mission in December, he’d struck up a conversation with a smart, young math aide, one of several young women in the Mission Control Center who plotted mission analyses. They began seeing each other and soon fell in love. They became engaged, and planned to marry soon after Apollo 11.
But except for the occasional Sunday-afternoon barbecue at Glynn Lunney’s house, where the MOCR people would drink beer and eat burgers and oysters—and talk shop—there just wasn’t much recreational time. The Apollo program was like a fully loaded freight train hurtling down a mountain, and there was no chance to get off. The young controllers wouldn’t have had it any other way.
But before Apollo 11 was given the go for a landing, two other fully crewed Saturn V missions had to be perfect—and both would involve dangers no human had faced before.
Chapter Thirteen
A Practice Run and a Dress Rehearsal
The crew of Apollo 9 are prepared to make up with their personal courage any shortcomings of their spacecraft.
Pravda
There were no guarantees that Apollo 11 would attempt to land on the moon. First, Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 had to go off without a hitch. Each mission had its challenges and its dangers.
Apollo 9, scheduled to launch in March 1969, would be the first manned test of the LM in space. To Commander Jim McDivitt and lunar-module pilot Rusty Schweickart would fall the tricky job of firing the LM, flying it out of sight of the command-service module and its pilot, Dave Scott, then maneuvering back to it and docking successfully. There would also be an EVA involved, a dry run to prepare for an emergency. The LM had no heat shield and could not withstand the tremendous heat of reentry without incinerating, so if something went wrong during rendezvous, McDivitt and Schweickart would be stranded in space with no hope of rescue. If they couldn’t dock, they could probably spacewalk over, but they’d have to be close, so the LM had to rendezvous with the command-service module. But because the flight would largely be an engineering one and the spacecraft would not leave low Earth orbit, most of the American public had little interest in the mission. After all, the previous one had gone around the moon.
If there were complications, the crew would be up to them. McDivitt had flown one hundred and forty-five combat missions in the Korean War, and he was as reliable as they came—he had impressed Slayton so much that he had been the first man in Gemini to command his initial spaceflight. Scott had acquitted himself well during the near calamity of Gemini 8. The redheaded Schweickart had logged more than thirty-five hundred hours in high-performance jet aircraft, and he knew the LM inside out. McDivitt and his crew were well trained and well prepared; they’d been together as a crew for three years and they’d worked with the LM that entire time. None of them were bothered by the fact that Apollo 8 had jumped them in the schedule and stolen their thunder—they regarded Borman’s crew as mere passengers on an unchallenging and quasi-political mission designed to get America to the moon before the Soviets. They considered theirs a “connoisseur’s flight.”
Mission complexity had increased significantly since the man-in-a-can Mercury flights, and that meant much more preparation. McDivitt’s crew had been training up to eighteen hours a day, spending most of that time in simulators, but the simulators broke down frequently, so the crew had to train hard until the last minute, leaving them little time to rest and recuperate. The physical and psychological strain finally caught up with them. All three developed serious head colds and sore throats a few days before the scheduled launch, so it was postponed three days to allow them to recover. By March 3, they were healthy enough to fly.
Von Braun’s Saturn V boosted Apollo 9 into space at exactly 11:00 a.m., and a few hours after liftoff, Scott separated from the Saturn’s third stage, maneuvered the command-service module around, and linked it with the LM, packed chrysalis-like inside a launch adapter just below the command module, despite—shades of Gemini 8—a few stuck thrusters. After remotely opening the LM’s four-piece housing shroud, Scott carefully lined up an extending device, the docking probe, with a circular hole on the LM that was in the center of a conical recess, or drogue, and moved forward. Three latches on the probe grabbed the inside of the drogue, a retract system pulled the two vehicles together, the probe retracted, and twelve latches on the sides of the LM’s docking tunnel snapped into place to form an airtight silicon seal—a hard dock. Then the craft delicately pulled away from the Saturn. The first docking attempt had been successful.
Despite some serious space-sickness on the part of Schweickart, the astronauts pressurized the LM, and Schweickart and McDivitt collapsed the probe and drogue, entered the LM through a tunnel, powered it up, and pulled free. While Scott piloted the command-service module alone, the fragile LM ranged up to a hundred and eleven miles away. Over the course of six hours, it passed every maneuvering test with flying colors. Even the all-important ascent engine—which had no backup—worked smoothly. It powered the LM back to the command-service module, where the two vehicles rendezvoused and docked once more. The piloting skills of both McDivitt and Scott were put to the test, but especially McDivitt’s, since he was the one who guided the LM first by radar and then by sight back to the command-service module. The space-sick Schweickart’s first EVA—a risky crawl from the docked LM to the command-service module and back—was canceled. The next day, he felt better and performed a seventy-seven-minute space walk that fully tested the reinforced lunar spacesuit and its four-hour independent oxygen supply.
Ten days after leaving Earth, Apollo 9 returned safely. One essential test flight was done. The mission had been so successful that there was talk of allowing the next one to attempt a landing—but the talk didn’t last long. The LM was still just a bit too heavy to try that within the safety margins. Apollo 10 would return Americans to the moon’s orbit, nine miles above the surface, and just to make sure, the LM’s fuel tanks were only partially filled. If the LM did happen to land on the surface, there might not be enough to get it back into lunar orbit. Besides, the crew hadn’t been trained for a landing.
And there were still too many unknowns to think about a lunar landing. In addition to the issues of tracking and communications with two spacecraft orbiting the moon, the delicate dance of orbital mechanics and rendezvous and docking in the moon’s weaker gravity, the untried landing radar, and many other problems, there were the mascons, those lunar regions that for unknown reasons exerted a stronger gravitational pull on orbiting objects than other areas did. They had changed the orbit of Apollo 8 dramatically. Twelve mascons had been charted, but there might be more of them—or there might be some other kind of anomaly that could wreak havoc on a lunar landing.
In 1957, several years before NASA revealed its plans for a lunar landing, a science fiction writer named Poul Anderson wrote a short story entitled “The Light.” It involved three American astronauts—a commander-pilot, an engineer, and an instrument man—in a spaceship on mankind’s first trip to the moon. After they land—presumably having employed the single-spacecraft direct-ascent mode—and prepare for a two-week stay, they draw lots to see which two will go for a walk. The engineer remains inside, and the commander and the in
strument man go outside; the instrument man has the privilege of going out first. Soon he and the commander are standing in the shadow of their ship. Since the instrument man was the first one out, the commander tells him to make the speech, which was written earlier. The instrument man defers to the commander. Neither has any desire to give the speech, so neither does; later, the commander will write in the ship’s log that the speech was delivered. They begin to perform the first job—collecting rock samples—while the commander takes photographs.
The story provided amusing parallels to the upcoming landing attempt, but there were two differences: the utter lack of importance attached to being the first man to set foot on the lunar surface, and the complete lack of interest in his official first words.
An early timeline of the LM landing and surface activity written by mission planners years before, when the LM existed only on paper, indicated that the lunar-module pilot would be the first crewman to egress through the hatch, climb down the ladder, and step onto the moon’s surface. That followed a tradition in Gemini, where the command pilot, the left-seat astronaut who did almost all the flying, remained in the spacecraft and continued piloting while the junior crewman in the right seat performed the EVA.
Apparently that early plan was still in effect on February 26, 1969, six weeks after Apollo 11’s crew was announced, when a “top NASA official” told the Chicago Daily News that the flight plan called for lunar-module pilot Buzz Aldrin to do the honors. This was a new development; when Deke Slayton had been asked about it at a press conference on January 16, he replied, “I don’t think we’ve really decided yet,” and Armstrong chimed in that the choice would not be “based on individual desire, but on how the job can be best accomplished on the lunar surface.”
Shoot for the Moon Page 28
