Eight Years to the Moon

by Nancy Atkinson

  Members of NASA’s Space Task Group in 1958. Credit: NASA.

  Further embarrassment came during the first launch attempt for the Mercury-Redstone in November 1960. The rocket rose just 4 inches (10 cm) and then its engines shut down, slamming it back on the pad. The rocket didn’t explode, but in an almost comical, confused afterthought, the escape tower shot up into the air, and the capsule’s drogue parachute popped up like a cork and ended up draped innocuously along the side of the rocket. That may have been the absolute lowest point of morale among those who worked on Project Mercury.

  Meanwhile, some members of the Space Task Group—always the innovators with a look toward the future—formed a Research Steering Committee on Manned Space Flight. Headed by Harry Goett, the committee started mapping out an assortment of long-range strategies for NASA. Some thought von Braun and his team had the perfect idea of building gigantic rockets to explore the solar system. Some scientists thought Earth satellites to monitor the environment were important. Several engineers looked into what it would take to go to the Moon, and in fact, the Goett committee recommended either a circumlunar trip or a manned lunar landing as appropriate long-term goals of NASA’s space program. But first, they suggested a major interim program to develop advanced orbital capabilities, such as the construction of a space station. But this was all far into the future, with no meaningful (i.e., financial) support for any immediate effort for such missions. It was hard enough to launch small rockets with any sustained success, and new, young President John F. Kennedy had not given the issue of space much thought.

  But April 12, 1961, transformed all that. The USSR launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into a single orbit around the Earth. It was audacious and stunning, and Americans were shocked that the Soviets had won this race. The public, lawmakers and the media demanded quick action to counter the obvious fact that the United States was in second place on the space frontier.

  Counteraction came just weeks later, when, on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American to reach space, launching on a fifteen-minute suborbital Mercury flight. The success boosted US morale and strengthened hopes for the future of space travel. Shepard’s admonition to the pad crew to “solve your little problem and light this candle” was indicative of the drive many Americans felt to get ahead of—or at least stay in step with—the Russians. Then suddenly, on May 25, 1961, just shy of three years after President Eisenhower signed an act creating NASA and just three weeks after Shepard’s flight—meaning the US had only fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience—Kennedy set a goal for the United States that would surpass any previous engineering and scientific feat.

  “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” President John F. Kennedy told the American people in a speech addressing “urgent national needs” before a joint session of Congress. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

  While most of the US public cheered this daring plan, there were NASA engineers who looked at each other and said, “What?”

  NORMAN CHAFFEE WAS AT HIS HOUSE IN Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the phone with a woman in the NASA office in the East End State Bank Building. She was looking at his résumé, and Chaffee was figuring out how he could convince her he would be a good fit for the new MSC.

  Chaffee explained he was a chemical engineer about to get his master’s degree and had some experience in the petrochemical industry but wanted to get into the space business. He’d always been a science fiction nut, spending any spare money he made from odd jobs in high school on books by Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein, and he was enchanted with the idea of humans traveling to distant worlds in space. In the back of his mind, he always assumed those crazy ideas would remain permanently in the realm of science fiction. But suddenly the Russians accomplished Sputnik and the US was trying to keep up, and then President Kennedy announced the space program’s goal to send humans to the Moon. That was all Chaffee needed to look into a career change.

  Another enticement for Chaffee was that he could come back to Houston. He had spent three years at Rice during his academic days. He fondly recalled going down to the docks at Kemah with his college friends to pick up fresh fish. He loved pulling pranks on his dorm mates, and he even considered the hazing he received as a freshman as great fun. To him, the Houston area had a confluence of wonderful characteristics: It was warm, not far from the beach and fresh shrimp were easy to find. Because he was so excited about the whole concept, Chaffee wondered if the NASA organization was going to need chemical engineers.

  “Well, I don’t know, let me look at this staffing book that I’ve got,” said the woman on the other end of the line, pausing. “Oh, yes, we apparently are looking for engineers, but we’re mostly looking for mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and aeronautical engineers. But here is an area called Energy Systems.”

  “Do you know what that is?” Chaffee asked her.

  “No, I really don’t. It’s a very generic description.”

  Chaffee thought for a moment. He’d been at the university level for seven years, taken courses in advanced thermodynamics, heat transfer and heater design and had dabbled in electrical engineering. Whatever Energy Systems was, he must at least have an inkling of it.

  “Well, I just happen to be an expert in energy systems,” Chaffee told her.

  “Oh, well, my goodness, let me pass along your file and we’ll let you know.”

  That conversation occurred in February 1962. A few weeks later, Chaffee got an offer from NASA by mail and a call from a fellow named Dick Ferguson, a branch chief from the Space Task Group who had moved to Houston. Ferguson offered Chaffee roughly the same amount of money that the oil refinery was paying him, but there were all the intangibles of doing something big and important for the country. It would be a dream job, Chaffee thought. He conferred with his wife, Olga, who had just given birth to a baby girl. “You just decide where you want to go, and we’re going with you,” she said.

  Chaffee finished up his master’s thesis, packed the car and the family and arrived for his first day of work on May 13, 1962.

  Norman Chaffee in the mid-1960s. Photo courtesy of Norman Chaffee.

  It turned out the Energy Systems Branch had responsibility for things like the pyrotechnics that powered the small steering propulsion systems on the spacecraft and power systems such as fuel cells and batteries—but not the big rockets that would blast astronauts into space, as Chaffee first assumed. Instead, he would be working on figuring out how to delicately and precisely steer a spacecraft from Earth to the Moon and back again. Chaffee was placed with the Auxiliary Propulsion Group of the Energy Systems Branch, led by Henry Pohl.

  As a young man, Pohl had been in the army and worked with von Braun and his team in the 1950s building and testing rockets in Huntsville, Alabama. On Pohl’s first day there, they told him to put on a hard hat and sent him out to a blockhouse to take part in the test launch of a Redstone rocket.

  “When that thing lit off, I had never seen such power in my life,” Pohl recalled. “That little blockhouse just shook. I decided right then and there that’s what I wanted to be part of. I would have gladly given them all my $75-a-month pay grade to work on that thing.”

  Pohl helped invent new rocket ignition systems, designed the roll control systems used on the Jupiter launchers and helped solve some of the problems of the early rockets. Pohl recalled that the criterion for the launch to be successful back then was the rocket getting out of sight before blowing up. And a lot of them didn’t make it that far.

  Rockets became Pohl’s passion: All he thought about was building rockets; all he dreamed about was building rockets. Soon he was helping design and test even more launchers: the Polaris, the Atlas, and then the first big rocket, the Saturn 1.
They’d use wind tunnels, vacuum chambers, test stands—whatever facilities they had access to.

  “You did everything,” Pohl said. “I remember sketching out on a piece of notebook paper changes for an injector, taking it down to the shop on the way home at night, stopping by the shop the next morning, picking up that part, bringing it out to the test stand and having the technicians test that change that day. Look at the data that evening, make more changes, take it back to the shop that night, and have the changes made and modifications made, and bring it back and test it the next day.”

  Everything was moving fast and there were always problems piling up with never enough time to figure them all out.

  “We didn’t have a lot of supervision, we didn’t have a lot of people telling us we couldn’t do this, we couldn’t do that, or you’ve got to do it this way,” Pohl recalled, “and I think that’s why we made a lot of progress. I was just always proud when the dadgummed things worked.”

  Every twist and turn, every failure and every success was a chance to learn, and in Pohl’s mind, it was all fun. He always liked working hands-on to solve engineering problems and never wanted to be a supervisor. But all of a sudden, he was asked to move to a management role to help oversee all the working parts and people for the Redstone rocket for Project Mercury.

  Even with Shepard’s successful flight, Pohl knew intimately the variety of problems the US space program faced. And so, when he heard Kennedy’s announcement of going to the Moon, he was dumbfounded.

  “That was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Pohl said in his Texas drawl. “I mean, you have to appreciate what we were working with in that day and time. We still had the vacuum-tube technology. Transistors were just coming into being. The Atlas was the biggest operating rocket that we had, and we were still having failures in seven out of ten flights with it.”

  But if the Moon was where the US space program was going, Pohl knew he wanted to help get it there. Now, in early 1962, he found himself landing in Houston—not far from where he was born and raised in south Texas—tasked with helping manage an even bigger project.

  As passionate as he was about rockets and sending humans to space, he almost turned around and went back to Huntsville after the first week in Houston.

  “We had these staff meetings that went interminably long into the evening,” Pohl fumed, “and all they talked about was editing reports, who was late, who had parked in someone else’s spot. Here we were trying to get to the Moon in eight years and all they did was talk about all this crap.”

  Relief came as the new, young and enthusiastic engineers began showing up in Houston. Pohl immediately liked Chaffee.

  “Norm, we are going to put you to work building rocket engines,” he explained to the new guy.

  Now, with his move to Houston, Pohl was asked to take everything he had learned, invented, tested and built on the big rocket engines and miniaturize it. NASA needed him to apply his knowledge and expertise to the little steering rockets for the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft so they could maneuver in space.

  “And Mr. Chaffee, what we need you to figure out is going to be a completely different device than what we’ve built before,” Pohl started out. “And no, we are not working on the big ones that launch you into orbit or take you to the moon. No, no. Those engines come on once and burn for eight minutes or so, and then they are done. What you and I are working on are small, low-thrust kinds of things that can fire in short, hot pulses, maybe thousands of times during a mission and get us to move about wherever we want in space. And that’s what we want you to work on.”

  “Well, okay. That sounds like it should be pretty interesting,” Chaffee replied slowly, trying to recall the advanced physical chemistry class where he had worked on exactly one homework problem that dealt with the thermodynamics of a rocket engine. Up to this point, that was his only experience. But he was about to become an expert among just a handful of people in the entire world who knew anything about these little rockets called the Reaction Control System (RCS). Chaffee was a tabula rasa who flourished under the tutelage of Pohl and others around him.

  He got stacks of books and manuals to read, studied schematics and drawings, looked at reports and technical papers and found his old physical chemistry textbook that had been packed away in a moving box. He immersed himself in what he considered a wonderful and fortuitous assignment that—for a chemical engineer—was incredibly interesting and unbelievably exciting.

  Then there was actual flight data to study from the Mercury flights: Gus Grissom had followed Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission with another ballistic flight on a Redstone rocket in July 1961 (Liberty Bell 7), and then John Glenn’s historic, nail-biting three-orbit Friendship 7 flight using the Atlas rocket came in February 1962. Scott Carpenter’s Mercury-Atlas Aurora 7 flight was in May 1962, right after Chaffee started work at NASA. By looking at the postflight data, he was coming to understand what these tiny propulsion systems entailed.

  But, as Pohl had explained, the Gemini and Apollo RCS was going to be fundamentally different from what Mercury was using. Chaffee quickly came to understand that all spacecraft needed a system of small, low-thrust rockets that fire in extremely short pulses—just milliseconds worth of little pops—to steer, point or hold steady the attitude of the spacecraft, both during flight and reentry through Earth’s atmosphere.

  The new thrusters Chaffee was working on had to be larger and use fuels that were hypergolic, meaning that when they were combined, the fuel and an oxidizer would ignite and burn on contact and didn’t need an ignition source like a spark or flame. That concept simplified the design of the RCS engines considerably. But a challenge arose in designing the part of the engines called the injector, which Chaffee saw as akin to the showerhead in his bathroom. It squirted out tiny amounts of the fuel and oxidizer in little streams into the part of the rocket engine called the combustion chamber so the two materials could ignite. The hot gas—about 5,400°F (3,000°C)—created by the ignition shot through an area called a throat, which squeezed down the gas and forced it to accelerate out through the nozzle, creating the thrust of the little rocket engines.

  Technical drawing of the Apollo Command and Service Modules thruster and engine locations. Credit: NASA.

  Astronauts review a map of the orbital track for a Gemini mission in 1965. Shown (left to right) are astronaut John Young, Donald Slayton, assistant director for Flight Crew Operations, astronaut Virgil (Gus) Grissom and Ken Nagler, US Weather Bureau. Credit: NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC).

  This whole series of violent events for a single ignition needed to happen in about twenty milliseconds, meaning you could fire the engine twenty times a second if needed.

  Chaffee learned that if he could design it just right, the injector would distribute the fuel and oxidizer in just such a way as to create the most efficient combustion and not ignite in a way that would damage the interior of the combustion chamber. His chemical engineering background was beneficial, but he learned a tremendous amount in a short period of time through hands-on work.

  After a couple of months, Pohl wanted to broaden Chaffee’s experiences and have him sit in on a meeting with people from across the space agency in which issues on various systems for the Gemini spacecraft were being discussed.

  “Norm, there’s a meeting at the Gemini program office,” Pohl said, explaining that Chaffee would have to drive over to the Veterans Administration building in downtown Houston since the various offices were still spread out all over town. “Item number eight on the agenda is something about the RCS engine, and we want you to go down and just take notes. You don’t know enough yet to really contribute, but go down and see what the issue is and bring back the report.”

  Chaffee arrived at the meeting, took an inconspicuous seat and listened intently to try to learn as much as he could. He noticed astronaut John Young was in attendance. Young was among the second group of astronauts—the “New Nine”—selected by NASA to augment th
e original Mercury 7 for the upcoming Gemini and Apollo missions, and he had just been slated for the first Gemini flight, along with Gus Grissom.

  After sitting through a few discussions he didn’t entirely understand, Chaffee looked down at the agenda sheet he’d been handed and saw the next item was “Reliability of Zippers in the Gemini Spacesuit.” A gentleman from the contractor constructing the suits, the David Clark Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, explained that at this time they couldn’t guarantee the reliability of the zippers. The issue was that several of the specialized pressure zippers had been added to the suit, and there was a precise calculation for the reliability against leakage based on each linear inch of zipper. The required level of reliability was no longer being met because there were just too many linear inches of zippers. He recommended the 12-inch (30-cm) crotch zipper be eliminated, and that would solve the problem.

  Since the Gemini missions were going to be several days long—perhaps up to fourteen days—the subject of the astronauts having to defecate during the mission was a known issue that was being considered by engineers and scientists. While urine collection bags were based on the time-honored “motorman’s friend” with a hose and bag, the poop problem hadn’t yet been completely solved. NASA dieticians were working on low-residue diets designed to minimize bowel movements, and other people were working on developing a fecal containment system—basically a plastic bag to be inserted through the crotch zipper, with adhesive around the opening to stick to the proper body area. The baggie would be accompanied by chemically enhanced wipes to kill bacteria and neutralize odors. But all of this was complicated by the issue of zero gravity—body wastes tended to either stick to the astronaut’s behind or float around. And since the Gemini spacecraft was about the size of the front seat of a small car, this zipper issue was going to be an important decision because the other option was having the astronauts wear some sort of diaper that had a self-contained area inside the suit for stowing fecal matter.