Eight Years to the Moon

by Nancy Atkinson

  John Young jumped up and went berserk. He was furious. He made an impassioned speech about being able to make better zippers and doing better for the program and the country. His bottom line was, “You’ve got to do better, and if you can’t do better, then we’re still just going to have a crotch zipper because I’d rather suffocate than crap in my pants.”

  At the end of the day, the decision was made to find better zippers.

  When Chaffee returned to the office, Pohl greeted him and asked how the meeting went and if he had learned anything.

  “Yes,” Chaffee said. “I learned that John Young is not going to crap his pants.”

  NOT EVERYONE WAS COMPLETELY TAKEN off guard by Kennedy’s announcement that NASA would reach for the Moon. Some who worked in the trenches of the space program knew what might be possible. Chester Vaughan had been with NACA at Langley since 1955, and he saw the progression of technology and the paradigm shifts in the efforts toward spaceflight.

  “All the work that was done earlier allowed us to be in the position so when Kennedy announced the eight years of allowable time to get to the Moon, we already had a healthy head start,” Vaughan said. “Not that everything was defined directly, but we had a good feel for what had to be done.”

  Vaughan started working for NACA through a co-op work training program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute—or Virginia Tech—and when he graduated in 1959, he was kept on at Langley full-time. So, he saw firsthand some of what went on as NACA transitioned to NASA, and he was familiar with the group that had done the initial studies about going to the Moon. He’d also heard of Abe Silverstein, who had become NASA’s first director of spaceflight programs. Before any spacecraft or specific details were even hashed out about a potential Moon mission, Silverstein called it Apollo, because he thought the idea of a Greek god riding his chariot across the sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program. Silverstein’s group officially introduced the concept of the Apollo program at a meeting of NASA program planners in November 1959 at the test facility on Wallops Island.

  Vaughan had spent many days on Wallops Island himself, working with his fellow engineers in a group called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD) and a special research section called the Space Vehicle Group. Through the launches of hundreds of sounding rockets, short-range missiles and eventually larger rockets, they gained a better understanding of the space environment and the hardware required to get there.

  Project Echo, NASA’s first communications satellite, was a passive spacecraft based on a balloon design created by engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Made of Mylar, the satellite measured 100 feet (30 m) in diameter. Once in orbit, residual air inside the balloon expanded, and the balloon began its task of reflecting radio transmissions from one ground station back to another. Echo 1 satellites like this one generated a lot of interest because they could be seen with the naked eye from the ground as they passed overhead. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

  “We tested all sorts of things at Wallops Island in the ‘50s,” Vaughan said. “For example, nobody had a good understanding of the density of the atmosphere as it transitioned into space. That was very much an unknown.”

  A project designed to provide this type of data utilized inflatable spheres packaged in small containers. They were launched to high altitudes, then released and inflated to a 12-foot (3.6-m)-diameter sphere. Vaughan and his team would study how they performed in the upper atmosphere to measure atmospheric density at different altitudes.

  “Their orbit would decay at a fairly rapid rate, but if we could get them high enough and if we could watch them for a couple of days,” Vaughan explained, “eventually we were able to document the pressure density environment and provide the data for anyone to utilize.”

  He then transitioned to working on 100-foot (30-m)-diameter balloons in a project called Echo, one of the first passive-communications satellite experiments.

  “Communications were really hard in those days,” Vaughan recalled, “so if you were trying to communicate with an aircraft or anything on the ground at a long distance away, you’d go over the cliff pretty quickly where you’d lose the signal because of the curvature of the Earth. The thinking at that time was that if we could launch these big balloons into a geostationary orbit and position about three of those around the globe, you’d have some good communications by bouncing radar signals off them. As an added benefit, the large balloon was easily visible at night for the public to view and we gained a positive response as a result.”

  However, only one of the giant balloons was launched, because soon, along came better electronics and transistors to replace vacuum tubes, beginning the trend toward miniaturization, more durability and greater computation power. That meant the first active-communication satellites could be conceived of and built. The advances in rocketry meant that these satellites had a chance of being launched into orbit.

  And rockets and spacecraft were what excited Vaughan the most. The rocket industry had progressed primarily because of the military’s work with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): Engineers figured out that instead of lobbing it halfway around the world, if the rocket’s trajectory was set just right, it could be sent to Earth orbit. Vaughan witnessed a lot of early failures, but once they got something into space, they had to figure out how to operate a satellite or vehicle in an orbital environment.

  Vaughan joined the Space Task Group in the fall of 1961 and, because of his expertise in stabilizing spacecraft, was asked to work on the Gemini and Apollo RCSs. He was hired by Dick Ferguson, the engineering manager for the Energy Systems group, and Vaughan relocated to MSC in early 1962. Since he was single, he was excited to make the move to Houston. But he was singularly focused on his work.

  “We needed a better propellant system after we were in orbit,” Vaughan said, “better than what Mercury was using. But bipropellants are toxic, very corrosive and were at a low level of technology with respect to all of the required system components. Getting ready for Gemini and then Apollo, we needed better data about the chemical propellants that we needed to use and how to get our reaction control systems to be within the required safety standards and down to the weight restrictions where the Saturn rocket could lift everything.”

  In 1962, they still had to work out several issues with the propellant, as there were many unknowns and problems they didn’t know how to solve or even how to stay away from.

  “We had to come up with the concepts for doing all that in space, so first we had to prove we could do it and then number two, we had to provide a workbook for documenting everything,” Vaughan said. “But we were blowing up the thrusters, had trouble with the valving. We didn’t have a good understanding of how frequently we needed to be able to fire the engines to get the control we needed, especially on the lunar module. And we didn’t know the exact impulse we needed.”

  Specific impulse is a measure of how effectively a rocket uses propellant, and while using puffs of high-pressure air is an easy way to do it, this method doesn’t provide much impulse. A single propellant, called a monopropellant, produces a little better power and bipropellants provide the best power.

  The fast and repeatable firings of the RCS required not only some unique hardware but also software.

  “The avionics for that were just emerging, so we were kind of developing what we needed while we hoped for the software to make it possible,” Vaughan said. “The technology was just not there yet.”

  Vaughan also worked on some analysis with Ferguson on the Apollo escape system, which would provide an exit in case of an emergency at the launchpad. Vaughan’s job was to determine the size and scope of it so the details could be included in the statements of work for the contractors to build each system. And keeping the weight down to a manageable level was a continual challenge for all the systems on Apollo.

  “When you start designing a new vehicle, guess what? You need info,” Vaughan said. “They’re go
nna ask you, ‘How heavy is your system?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘How heavy is that system over there?’ ‘Don’t know.’ We had to do a lot of iterations, parametric studies and some pretty informed guestimates to figure out how we were going to build this whole spacecraft and then be able to launch the thing.”

  Glynn Lunney at his console in the Mission Control Center during an Apollo simulation exercise at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. Credit: NASA.

  GLYNN LUNNEY DROVE HIS 1958 CHEVY convertible down to Texas right after Scott Carpenter’s three-orbit Mercury flight on May 24, 1962. Lunney was a NASA flight controller and now had new responsibilities at MSC: to focus on preparing for Apollo. He also needed to prepare for his family’s arrival to Houston.

  Now, in late June, he was waiting at the Hobby Airport, watching for the plane carrying his wife, Marilyn, and their seventeen-month-old daughter, Jenny. Marilyn was eight months pregnant with baby number two, and as Lunney stood on the tarmac while the plane taxied in, he wondered how Marilyn was going to react to Houston’s stifling summer weather. It didn’t take long to find out. As she exited the doorway of the plane into the full afternoon sun, Marilyn staggered backward as if the wall of heat and humidity had assaulted her.

  “That was her welcoming moment to Houston,” Lunney said, “and I’m sure she wondered what she was doing here.”

  Chris Kraft, Chief of the Flight Operations Division (center), along with Walter Williams, Flight Operations Director (standing) in the Mercury Control Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, during the Mercury-Atlas 9 (MA-9) mission. Credit: NASA.

  Off they drove in the convertible—with no air conditioning—to the house they were renting, also without AC. In the next few weeks before the birth of their son, Lunney would often come home to find Marilyn and Jenny sitting in the bathtub full of cool water, their favorite respite from the heat.

  Lunney was only twenty-five, but he had already established himself as a problem solver, getting out in front to tackle some of the issues of operating a human spacecraft. He had begun his career as an aeronautical research engineer in June 1958 with NACA’s co-op training program at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. He was in George Low’s division, and one day a preliminary drawing of the proposed Mercury spacecraft was being passed around the office. Lunney was utterly captivated—in September 1959, he decided to follow Low to Langley and was soon chosen to become part of the initial thirty-five-member Space Task Group.

  Within the first year, Lunney became an analyst, working on the technical issues of spacecraft reentry and of how to control where the Mercury spacecraft would land. He soon met fellow Space Task Group member Christopher Kraft, who had been assigned to the Flight Operations Division and tasked with creating flight plans and figuring out how the spacecraft should be operated.

  The job was daunting since humans hadn’t yet flown in space. But Kraft’s early work as an aircraft flight-test engineer became an inspiration. Kraft led the instrumentation teams on the ground during several of the first attempts to break the sound barrier, and he realized that, just like test pilots, astronauts would need a system of communications and support back on Earth during critical phases of the mission. They would also need a ground-based tracking system and instrumentation on board for the telemetry of data from the spacecraft. The concept of a control center to monitor and operate spaceflights in real time was born, and Lunney was fascinated when he heard Kraft give a presentation about the idea during a meeting of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

  “It was a relatively straightforward thing, but no one had done anything like that before,” Lunney said. “We were still just a small group of thirty-five, so I got involved, and then we brought on more people to help figure this out.”

  A small group started putting together the analytics of what hardware was needed in a control center and what information they wanted to get from the spacecraft. How could they tell if the rocket and spacecraft were functioning correctly? How could they make sure the astronaut was still conscious? How would they communicate with a capsule that was on the other side of the planet, moving at 17,500 miles an hour?

  Carl Huss worked on the hardware, while Tecwyn Roberts (one of the Canadian Avro engineers), Cliff Charlesworth, John Llewellyn and Jerry Bostick began actively planning the control center and what specific areas of flight they needed to focus on. Over time, they created the key positions in the control center: the Guidance officer, who would monitor onboard navigational systems and onboard guidance computer software; the Flight Dynamics officer, responsible for the flight path of the space vehicle, and the Retrofire officer, who drew up abort plans and was responsible for determining times for reentry. Kraft and his group created several other flight control positions, along with the flight director, who oversaw all the people and systems. One important task was the person who talked directly to the astronauts, called the capsule communicator, or Capcom.

  But how to create and perform all these yet-unknown functions? One of Lunney’s first assignments was to help with the Control Center Simulation Group, which planned the simulations used to train both flight controllers and astronauts for the experience of human spaceflight.

  The Mercury Mission Control Center building at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: NASA.

  The goals of Mercury were straightforward: orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth, investigate the pilot’s ability to function in space, and recover both the astronaut and the spacecraft safely. To do this meant that those on Earth had to be in nearly constant communication with the spacecraft as it orbited Earth. A group of Space Task Group engineers designed a worldwide communications network, and a monumental effort ensued to set up the Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network, an impressive system of eighteen ground stations scattered around the world on various islands and three continents. Where there wasn’t any land to build a station, NASA employed naval ships on three oceans and five aircraft outfitted with instrumentation. A small control team would operate each remote station.

  The main flight control room was built inside a modest structure at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and the Mercury Control Center (MCC) took shape, with consoles for fourteen flight controllers to direct all aspects of the spacecraft’s flight and to monitor the spacecraft’s status and the health of the astronaut. The MCC would also coordinate and maintain the flow of communication between all tracking stations and was designed to inform the recovery forces when the capsule would reenter the atmosphere.

  The limits of technology at that time meant that while each station could talk to the orbiting astronaut for a few minutes as he flew overhead, the stations on the other side of the world couldn’t speak directly to the MCC. Instead, each station used teletype machines to transmit information to the MCC—in very precise language—on the status of the spacecraft and astronaut. At best, they could send twenty words of teletype per minute.

  The finest computers of the day were enlisted to help process the data. Since the newfangled transistor-based IBM 7090s were too big and expensive to have at multiple locations, everyone at NASA shared two of these computers, located at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, while an older vacuum-tube IBM 709 computer was used at the Cape to compute initial launch trajectories.

  An interior view of the Mercury Control Center in 1962, prior to the Mercury-Atlas 8 (MA-8) flight. Credit: NASA.

  But the telemetry was all analog, so it came down from the spacecraft and was sent to the computers to be processed for things like trajectory and location and then sent to the MCC. But, there was a time delay, so the flight controllers had only a short time—perhaps thirty seconds—to look at the data, understand it and make a decision if the next phase of the mission was go or no-go. Then the MCC would transmit the instructions to the appropriate station so it could be relayed to the spacecraft. The team had to invent a terse, new language where there could be no misunderstandings in the rapid-fire world of flight control.

  “Our brains began t
o be driven by: What do we need to communicate? What’s our next opportunity? What do we need to get done in this pass in the way of conversations with the crew? And then, what do we need to do in terms of problem solving?” said Lunney, who became the flight dynamics officer. “And what do we need to do in terms of recommendations or direction to what we were going to do with the flight? This all got tied to these little five-minute circles of communication time with the crew that were spotted around the world, where we had teams of people.”

  The consoles in the MCC were basic but they got the job done.

  “We had little meters for all the telemetry,” Lunney said, “and then we had some built-in displays in the console with little numbers, almost like a clock, where we could do things like calculate and display the retrofire times for the various opportunities for bringing the spacecraft back. And when we got in orbit, we would also use the same system to calculate the deorbit times for the various landing points that we had scattered around the world in various oceans that we had recovery forces in.”

  Dominating the front wall of the MCC was a large world map and two large projector boards. The map used a series of circles to pinpoint tracking stations. To keep continuous track of the Mercury spacecraft, a mini spacecraft model suspended by wires traced its orbit. The projector boards displayed flight measurements plotted by sliding beads. Trend charts displayed the astronaut’s condition.

  In just a few months NASA raced through nearly a dozen unmanned Mercury flights. Some were successes and some weren’t, but they learned with every mission how to be flight controllers. Even the infamous 4-inch (10-cm) flight of the Mercury-Redstone in November 1960 was a learning experience. It was Lunney’s first time sitting in the flight control team chair, and suddenly he had to help decide on a completely unexpected course of action. While the fully fueled and armed rocket had been released for flight, it was still sitting on top of the pad, unrestrained by any hold-down device. The parachute draped along the length of the rocket might fill with the Florida coastal breezes and pull the rocket over, which would certainly mean a devastating explosion. The Redstone team in the blockhouse scrambled to decide how to “safe” the rocket. (One idea that was quickly abandoned was using a high-powered rifle to create a hole in the Redstone tank so the fuel would drain out.)