Jack Garman and Bales had started working together while preparing for Apollo 10. Bales had been guidance officer for that flight’s LM activation phase, and Garman had been the software-support expert, working from the GUIDO staff support room (SSR) outside and down the hallway from Mission Control. Now, a few weeks before the Apollo 11 flight and toward the end of Mission Control’s sim training, Garman was picked to play both sides of the fence.
SimSup Dick Koos, a former army sergeant who looked and sounded more like a college professor, was in charge of the descent-stage simulations. Koos asked Garman if he could provide some kind of computer glitch, error codes he could run past the flight controllers. Garman did. Who knows? he thought. The knowledge might come in handy.
July 5, eleven days before the flight, was to be the final day of simulations for Gene Kranz’s White team, which had been assigned the lunar landing; the team members still had plenty of other things to do in preparation, and he felt good about their progress. They were ready for the mission. Traditionally, the last few sims were nominal, with no complications, a kind of confidence-boosting graduation day.
After lunch, from the glass-fronted sim room on the right side of the MOCR, Koos looked down at the White team as his instructors sprang the computer-program alarms on Kranz’s unsuspecting controllers. In the back room, Garman played along, acting as if he knew nothing, and Bales, the GUIDO in the Trench and the man responsible for the LM computer, called an abort at ten thousand feet. The puzzled crew in the LM—Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, the backups for Apollo 12, which was scheduled for late in the fall—had heard an alarm, seen it on their onboard computer, and asked for assistance; now they confirmed the abort, throttled down the descent engine, and ignited the ascent engine to rendezvous with the command-service module. Kranz was furious with Koos; he felt they should have landed. In the debriefing afterward—there was always a debriefing, during which every controller took a turn in the hot seat and defended the calls he had made—he started in on the SimSup. Then Bales said they didn’t have a rule for alarms programmed to be used in testing because that would never happen during an actual flight. And since it should never have occurred, he assumed it meant something serious had gone wrong—and so he’d called the abort.
Koos was unwavering. “No,” he said. “You should not have aborted for those computer alarms. What you should have done is taken a look at all of the functions. Was the guidance still working? Was the navigation still working? Were you still firing your jets?”
Bales was devastated. At the end of the day, Kranz called his Trench together. There were no mission rules for the alarms, and he wanted some before the launch. Bales said he’d pull a team together and get some answers. Later that night, Bales called Kranz. Koos was right, he told him. They should have continued. He and his team would come up with rules that night and go through some extra training runs in the morning with Koos just to make sure they were on top of the problem. They did go through some extra runs—four hours’ worth.
That wasn’t good enough for Kranz. He told Garman, “I want you to study and write down every possible program alarm whether they can happen or not.” Garman met with his MIT software people to go over the various alarms. He found that there were alarms in the computer just for programming purposes—they’d been put there to ensure that the computer’s cycling time was adequate to handle all the guidance and control, and the programmers just hadn’t taken them out. The MIT group kept telling him they’d never come up in an actual flight, but they finally categorized them into actionable types. Garman made a handwritten list of all twenty-nine, along with the correct response to each. He put it under the Plexiglas on his SSR console.
The mission rules were constantly evolving—and increasing. Kranz had begun recording the what-ifs during Mercury, and since then, the list had grown from a booklet to a book to a very large book. It was vital for both the crew and controllers to know what could go wrong during a flight and what the responses should be to each problem so they would not have to figure out what to do when seconds might mean the difference between life and death. For Apollo 11, the book ran to more than 330 pages. Since its initial publication on May 16, it had been revised three times, and the changes kept coming. On launch day, seven last-minute changes would be handwritten into each copy. Every flight controller had a copy, and of course there was a copy aboard the command module. No one could memorize every rule and every response, but it was at hand, and since it was organized by system and subsystem, it wouldn’t take someone more than a moment or two to find the solution to virtually every problem—or at least, that was the idea.
Not every rule was black or white. There were some gray areas, especially in rules pertaining to the landing. This would become a point of contention between Mission Control and Armstrong.
In more than one discussion about the LM’s abort rules, Armstrong made it clear that he wouldn’t feel bound by them. After one long debate about insufficient data during the landing, he shook his head. “You must think I’m going to land with the window shades down.”
In a planning session shortly before the mission, Kranz—whose White team was training for the descent exclusively—went over landing strategy with the crew. As they discussed various abort situations, Armstrong remained silent, occasionally smiling and nodding.
Kranz saw something in Armstrong’s manner that led him to believe that the Apollo 11 commander had “set his own rules for the landing,” the flight director wrote later—that he could “press on accepting any risk as long as there was even a remote chance to land.” That was okay with Kranz, who, like Armstrong, had flown in Korea: “I had a similar set of rules. I would let the crew continue as long as there was a chance”—even if that meant overruling a mission rule.
Kranz’s boss, Chris Kraft, got the same impression during other descent discussions. He and Armstrong butted heads over the rules concerning a landing radar failure. Armstrong didn’t want some nervous flight controller aborting the descent based on questionable information. “I’ll be in a better position to know what’s happening than the people back in Houston,” he told Kraft. “And I’m not going to tolerate any unnecessary risks,” Kraft fired back. “That’s why we have mission rules.” They finally agreed that the rules would remain as written, though Kraft too had doubts: “I could tell from Neil’s frown he wasn’t convinced. I wondered then if he’d overrule all of us in lunar orbit and try to land without a radar system.” Unlike Kranz, Kraft wasn’t fine with Armstrong—or any astronaut—flouting a mission rule. As far as Kraft was concerned, that was insubordination, and he had made it abundantly clear over twenty manned missions that he wouldn’t put up with it.
Even NASA administrator Thomas Paine, likely alerted by Kraft, got involved. Six days before the launch, he shared a quiet dinner with the crew in their quarters and asked them not to take any risks. He promised them that if they didn’t have a chance to land this time, they’d get another one. “If you want to abort,” he said, “I’ll see that you fly the next moon landing flight. Just don’t get killed.”
They nodded their heads and responded properly. But Armstrong still reserved the right as commander to make the final decision.
Just as important as the mission’s training was its timing. Armstrong and Aldrin would be heading from the east, away from the dazzling sun. They would land at dawn, when the angle of sunlight on the moon’s surface was at ten to twelve degrees, meaning the shadows of features—hills, craters, boulders, mountains—were long but not too long and the light not too bright or high, which would cause a washout and make visibility difficult. There was only one day in the lunar month that fit those requirements, July 20, which meant a departure date four days earlier, July 16. If they missed this window, the mission would be scrubbed until the same time next month.
In all, the final mission plan for this first landing attempt had taken six years to create. The moonwalk itself—the two hours and twenty minutes Armstrong and Aldrin
were scheduled to spend outside the LM—had taken two years to choreograph. They spent dozens of hours tromping around fully suited on a realistic facsimile of a lunar landscape, complete with sand, practicing the deployment of several experiments devised by NASA’s scientists. If they landed, they wouldn’t have time for much of that in their brief sortie out of the LM, though later missions would. Get out, grab a bunch of rocks and soil, salute the flag, get back in, and get home safely—that would be more than enough for this mission.
Even the astronauts’ postflight activities were planned, at least for the first few weeks after they got back. Years earlier, the scientific community had begun to express alarm at the idea of back contamination—the notion that moon bacteria brought back to Earth might prove dangerous. Although the chances of that were minimal, complex safeguards and protocols were put into effect to keep any alien occupants of the command module, and its potentially deadly human occupants, from destroying life on Earth. Upon the astronauts’ return, after they splashed down in the Pacific, a frogman would toss three biological isolation garments (BIGs) into the command module. After donning them, the astronauts would scrub themselves with disinfectant in their life raft, then they’d be hoisted into a copter and taken to their recovery carrier, where they would be whisked into a biologically sealed, modified Airstream trailer and, eventually, to an eighty-three-thousand-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility at MSC called the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. There, they and any lunar samples would be isolated, along with a few doctors, a cook, several technicians, a PR person, and a group of mice who would also be exposed to the lunar soil. The astronauts would be monitored for a total of twenty-one days, starting from Armstrong and Aldrin’s lunar-surface EVA. At that point, if there were no health issues—for the men or the mice—they would be allowed to leave the facility. If something went amiss, they would remain in the LRL until it was deemed safe to release them. No one really knew what would happen if the astronauts weren’t given the green light—theoretically, they might stay there for the rest of their lives.
The public’s fears of such a catastrophe went back at least as far as 1898 and H. G. Wells’s classic War of the Worlds, in which he raised the issue of the potentially dangerous consequences of microbes crossing alien biology, though in his story, it saved rather than harmed Earth. The fears were further stoked by a few novels published during the run-up to the flight. One was a July 1968 paperback by Harry Harrison titled Plague from Space: “THE SPACE PROBE RETURNED TO EARTH CARRYING A CARGO OF WRITHING DEATH,” screamed the copy on its bloodred cover above an illustration of a suited, helmetless astronaut whose face was covered with hideous boils. The Andromeda Strain, a highly effective thriller published in May 1969, made even more of an impact, and it quickly became a bestseller. Written by a young doctor named Michael Crichton, it featured a deadly, mutating microorganism that comes to Earth aboard a military satellite and wreaks havoc on the planet. Three days before the Apollo 11 launch, on Sunday, July 13, the book ranked number five on the New York Times fiction bestseller list.
In addition to the long hours of training the astronauts endured, they also had endless lists of nontechnical tasks to take care of. Each man was permitted a half-pound personal preference kit (PPK), a small bag in which he could carry items for friends, family, and co-workers—coins, medallions, miniature flags, jewelry, and any number of other mementos that could, upon their return from the moon, have significant monetary and historic value—and deciding what to take was surprisingly time-consuming. Armstrong requested and received permission to take two small pieces of the original 1903 Wright Flyer. They also needed to design a mission emblem, and they had to come up with call signs for their two ships, for communication purposes. After much deliberation, Jim Lovell suggested an American eagle for the emblem, which was quickly adopted, and Collins supplied a rough design that was refined and finally approved. That led to the landing craft’s name: Eagle. For the command module, a NASA public affairs officer offered Columbia, and that stuck.
There was also a stainless-steel plaque that would be left on the moon, bolted to one of the LM’s legs. Below an image of two hemispheres of the Earth was this legend:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
Below the inscription were the signatures and names of the three crewmen and, beneath that, of President Nixon. When the LM lifted off, leaving the four-legged descent stage, the plaque would remain on the moon unchanged in the vacuum of space for all eternity. Other items to be left on the surface included an American flag with a telescoping support rod along its top length, an Apollo 1 mission patch to honor its crew, and medals commemorating Soviet cosmonauts killed in action.
The crew spent the long Fourth of July weekend in Houston with their families. Then they flew back to Cape Kennedy, where they would remain semi-quarantined to protect themselves from catching any last-minute viruses or other bugs. While there, they continued to train on the simulators.
Armstrong and Aldrin had been training on the LM simulator for almost two years, first as backups, then as part of a prime crew, but it was only after the Apollo 10 launch in May that they got top priority. For the first time, crew training, not the command-service module or the perpetually tardy LM, was the pacing item in the schedule. Mike Collins spent four hundred hours in the command-module simulator, mostly by himself, though occasionally his crewmates practiced with him; both had spent just as much time in the LM simulator. When they teamed up with Collins to do an integrated sim while connected to Mission Control, the runs could be surprisingly close to the actual thing, and all involved were generally wrung out when they were done. The crew would finish up the day reviewing the 240-page flight plan.
Like the command-module simulators, the two LM simulators were state of the art, the world’s most realistic arcade game, though this game was deadly serious. Each was a life-size replica of the LM, accurate in almost every way. TV cameras linked to computers projected whatever the astronauts would really be seeing at that point in the mission and moved along with the LM’s progress, even casting a simulated shadow on the simulated moon. Most of the descent was somewhat crude, since no previous mission had produced images to approximate the last several thousand feet, but as the LM neared the simulated surface, the scene became more accurate; the moving image was actually a stationary camera focused on a revolving, realistically sculpted plaster-of-Paris moon hanging above it. Combined with an exact-replica cabin featuring accurate instrumentation and computer readouts, these proved highly valuable exercises. The men could participate in full spacesuits or in shirtsleeves, and they could even be tethered to the deck with elastic cords as they would be during an actual mission.
The LM-sim guys threw every abort and emergency situation at them. Days usually began at eight a.m. and ended about five p.m. Other LM crews—the Apollo 11 backups of Lovell and Haise, the Apollo 12 crew of Conrad and Bean and their backups, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin—also were training on the two LM simulators. There were hundreds of episodes with much repetition of both basic procedures and those involving complications. After a while, even the aborts and emergencies became second nature. Overtraining was a fundamental tenet of Apollo mission preparation, just as it had been for Mercury and Gemini; this overtraining enabled an astronaut “to perform better in the presence of stress in an actual mission,” according to an early NASA report on Apollo training.
A direct result of this was the reduction of fear. Astronauts hated the word and avoided using it. (Only one, the ill-fated Gus Grissom, had admitted he’d been scared during a mission.) When pressed on the subject, the men preferred the euphemism apprehension, and they used even that term sparingly. “We literally trained out fear,” said Wally Schirra. “You’re not born with the ability [not to be afraid], you sort of develop it over the years. That’s why they selected people like us, because we could do it,”
said Bean. Fear led to panic, which led to mistakes. Train the fear out, and you lowered the chance of a mistake in a life-or-death situation to zero, or close to it. And since there was no better equivalent to high-stress situations involving spacecraft than similar situations involving high-performance aircraft, it was no coincidence that Deke Slayton would pick six test pilots (and one fighter pilot) to land the LMs in seven Apollo missions.
Shoot for the Moon Page 30
