“Up until this event, I had a rather constrained view of what my job as a flight dynamics officer might entail,” Lunney said. “All of a sudden, the preparation for effectively operating the MCC took on several more dimensions than I had been imagining. From that day on, my thinking and that of my colleagues embraced the idea that the unexpected could happen and things could get even more complicated from there.”
Lunney came to think of the MCC building at the Cape as something close to sacred, “a cathedral of sorts where we went and did what we thought was important work for our country and for humanity.” With lessons learned on every unmanned mission, Lunney took his seat at the MCC as the flight dynamics officer for the first two ballistic flights for Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. Later, he was stationed at Bermuda for John Glenn’s orbital flight. When the mission was delayed for two weeks, Lunney also learned about things like rum, card games and scuba diving.
“It was all fun,” he said, “basically a crash-course PhD in things we had to invent and figure out. Man, we were busy.”
He was asked to move to Houston to become head of the Mission Logic and Computer Hardware section, to define and oversee the computing and display requirements of the Flight Dynamics Division within the new Mission Control Center.
“We had just this handful of people,” Lunney said, “and moving to Houston, we were ready to start staffing up. I began hiring these young men right out of college, probably about one a month, putting them to work on figuring out how to monitor the lunar landing. These young men were inventing everything we needed to do.”
The new Mission Control would have state-of-the-art mainframe computers from IBM providing the computing backbone for mission operations, allowing the flight controllers to pull up graphs, tables and pictures in seconds and overlay static images (such as maps) with computer-generated images displaying things like spacecraft flight paths. More than two hundred different types of telemetry data would flow into Mission Control, displaying the condition of the astronauts, spacecraft and booster systems.
For interoffice communications, Mission Control created a high-tech, fifty-three-station pneumatic tube system with 2 miles (3.2 km) of tubing and electrically manipulated switches and control valves. This system would automatically guide messages to their final destination.
And finally, teletype equipment that could transmit as many as one hundred words per minute.
It was going to be a new era in spaceflight.
EARLY IN HER CAREER, DOTTIE LEE HAD spent hours on hours punching in numbers on a Friden calculator, computing the trajectories of various rockets. The Arcas, Cajun, Aerobee, Little Joe, Scout—she plotted them all. The noisy Friden contraption was a god-awful green-gray color and took up half her desk at the Langley Research Center. Lee punched the loud, clackety buttons on the electric machine, pulled the lever and hoped with each computation it didn’t go into a do-loop—which inevitably it would—meaning she would have to turn it off, unplug it and start over.
“Oh, goodness,” she said. “You can’t begin to appreciate what it takes to calculate the trajectory of a vehicle on one of those, and you do it for every second for the time in flight. You punched lots of numbers.”
Dorothy “Dottie” Lee at her desk, holding a model of the Apollo Command Module. Credit: NASA/Johnson Space Center.
And even though the calculations spit out by the Friden were helpful, Lee still had to plot everything by hand. The calculations were completed with the aid of a slide rule and results were recorded in logs and plotted on graphs.
But it was exhilarating, and from the beginning Lee had an innate sense that she was in the right place at the right time. Lee started out in June 1948 as a “computer” at Langley, recruited by NACA while at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She took a position in PARD, and at some point, her job title changed to a math aide in the Computing Section. She ran the calculations for the teams launching the rockets and testing different configurations. The engineers would design a model and fly it, then Lee and the other women in the Computing Section would take the telemetry data and run the aerodynamic calculations for it. Later, Lee worked on calculating some of the initial heat transfer designs for reentering the vehicles—and the numbers showed the future Mercury spacecraft, blunt in shape and built with just the right materials, could plummet down through the atmosphere without burning up.
Over time, Lee worked her way to becoming an aeronautical engineer and later an aeronautical research scientist. That meant that she was designing and testing vehicles, not just running the numbers—she was one of the very few women to do such work. She recalled one test of a five-stage launch vehicle out at the test facility on Wallops. It was so windy, they had to wait all day until the squalls on the barrier island calmed down enough so the rocket’s trajectory wouldn’t be jeopardized.
Women scientists gathered in a meeting room at NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1959. From left to right, Lucille Coltrane, a computer at Langley Research Center; Jean Clark Keating, an aerospace engineer; Katherine Collie Speegle, a mathematician; Dorothy “Dottie” Lee (standing), mathematician; Ruth I. Whitman, an engineer in the pilotless aircraft division; Emily Stephens Mueller, a computer who worked with the Space Task Group. Credit: NASA.
“Finally, by dark we were able to launch,” she said. “A night launch was exciting because you could see as each stage separated and the next one ignited. But the fifth stage we never saw ignite, and we knew we’d have to wait to get the data telemetered back to us to see what happened.”
From Wallops Island they took the ferry back to the mainland. It was midnight, but on the boat Lee and her fellow engineers huddled over their charts, trying to determine why that fifth stage did not ignite. It was a failure, they knew, but the thrill of trying to solve a problem was what Lee relished.
“I can’t recall which rocket that was or even the date,” she said. “So I don’t think it will go down in history as anything except that we learned with each experience. And that’s what I did every day of my life.”
Lee knew she was lucky that her boss, Max Faget, saw and appreciated her abilities. The fact that Lee was a woman didn’t seem to matter to Faget; he valued her skills and how she approached her work. Faget was a research scientist and head of PARD, and Lee shared an office with his secretary, Shirley. When Shirley left for a two-week honeymoon, Lee was asked to fill in on the secretarial duties. While she didn’t know how to type, she answered the phone and distributed the mail. And all the while, she was working on a particularly sticky set of triple integral calculations another engineer had asked her to compute. For two weeks she diligently worked the numbers until she solved the problem.
Faget had watched her efforts and at the end of the two weeks said, “Dottie, how would you like to work for me all the time?”
Lee thought he was being funny because she didn’t type and she knew Shirley was returning the next week. She flippantly replied, “Oh, sure.”
Faget left the room, went downstairs to talk to the division chief and returned, saying she was to start working for him—as an engineer—on Monday.
“They found me a desk, and I was put with some engineers who were beautiful and brilliant and they taught me how to be an engineer,” she said. “I learned on the job.”
She learned that engineers do their work by testing, calculating and sometimes working backward from the requirements. She discovered she already had fortitude and stick-to-itiveness like the men she worked with and that she, too, liked her facts in black and white—whether they were true or false, good or bad. And she learned that engineers sometimes figure things out in unconventional ways. Lee walked into Faget’s office one day in 1958 to find him standing on his desk, dropping paper models of the Mercury spacecraft, checking for the stability of each model. But to her, that was the beauty of the hands-on engineering world she was in. At Langley they lived for data; they could feel it and understand it.
Growing up, Lee
somehow knew at ten years of age that the human race was going to the Moon. How she arrived at that notion she’s not sure, but she recalls sitting outside one evening looking at the stars and just knowing. She was an only child who read voraciously and she particularly enjoyed reading the works of George Gamow and other physicists—authors she noticed other ten-year-olds weren’t reading, whether they were girls or boys.
And now here she was helping design a spacecraft that was going to the Moon. But to get to the Moon, she had to move to Texas. So, in the early summer of 1962, she was standing on a muddy lot, overlooking the bayou in Dickinson, Texas, checking in on the construction of the new house she and her husband, John, had designed.
Dr. Maxime A. Faget was the Director of Engineering and Development at the Manned Spacecraft Center for NASA. Credit: NASA.
John, too, was an engineer at Langley and also worked for Faget. They had met in their early days there, were married in 1951 and started their family right away. Langley allowed women to continue working while they were pregnant and raising children, a decision unusual for the times. Dottie loved her work and couldn’t imagine not being at Langley. In 1958, with the formation of NASA and the feverish work on Project Mercury, their professional responsibilities increased dramatically. John was one of the first people assigned to the Space Task Group: He was chief of the Mechanical Systems Section for Mercury, overseeing the work done on the parachutes, rockets, pyrotechnics and hydrogen peroxide jets, all of which had to work perfectly for the missions to succeed. Then he was the lead engineer on a study that mapped out the specifics of how NASA could go to the Moon with Project Apollo. John was also on the management committee to choose the contractor responsible for building the Apollo Command and Service Modules. Meanwhile, Dottie was working on determining the requirements for Apollo’s heat shield and other systems. Although they worked in different areas, Dottie and John were both committed to Apollo, so they were moving to Houston with their two daughters, Laurie and Dottie Mae.
The first time they saw this plot of land in Dickinson was on a beautiful December day. NASA had flown a group of those who were moving to Houston down from Langley to provide them an opportunity to look for housing. When they left Virginia, it was snowing, but the weather in Houston was warm and gorgeous. John said, “Gosh, what a wonderful place!” But Dottie wasn’t so sure. She grew up in Louisiana and knew what the sultry summers could be like down south. She was also having second thoughts about leaving Langley.
The home search was frustrating because the area around the new MSC was almost entirely undeveloped. The couple decided to look for a lot where they could build a house but couldn’t find any they liked. The second day in Houston, late in the afternoon, they had given up and gone back to their motel room. Dottie was upset, crying, not wanting to make the move.
There was a knock on the door—it was Faget. He exclaimed excitedly, “I’ve found it! I’ve found it, a place to build our homes—let’s go!” The three of them drove over to the Kellner Division in Dickinson, where there were two lots available. They were beautiful—overlooking the bayou with big oak trees covered in Spanish moss.
“I’ll take this lot, and you take that lot,” Faget said enthusiastically. “Now, Johnny, I have to go back to Virginia tomorrow. I want you to buy these lots for both of us first thing in the morning.” They got lots.
Back in Virginia, every day over lunch Dottie took out a sheet of graph paper and worked on their new home’s floor plan. Now the house was taking shape, on schedule to be done when Dottie and the girls would move in August, in time for the start of school. John was already living in Houston, staying at the barracks at Ellington Field. NASA provided a shuttle flying between Houston and Langley every weekend. Every other weekend, John would fly to Virginia, and on the alternate weekends, Dottie would fly to Texas. But there were times John was so busy, he didn’t always get back to Virginia. He was working ten to twelve hours a day, sometimes six or seven days a week. For John, the work was exhilarating. But during one trip to see the family, Dottie told him, “Your daughter Laurie said that she wants to get a new daddy.” John took Laurie in his arms and asked her why. Laurie said, “I want one that stays home sometimes.”
That was a wake-up call, and he promised the girls that living in Texas was going to be an adventure. But he and Dottie would continue to be busy, working hard to get to the Moon.
EVERYONE AT MSC WAS BUSY, LITERALLY doing three things at once. In 1962 NASA was flying the Mercury spacecraft, in the process of building the Gemini spacecraft and designing the Apollo spacecraft. NASA had already signed the contract in November 1961 with North American Aviation in Downey, California, for the Command and Service Modules for the Apollo spacecraft. They were also in the process of choosing contractors for the other components and systems.
Gilruth and his staff had to hire enough people to run the three space programs, build the MSC with all its laboratories and test facilities and organize the entire organization with all the directorates and various divisions. Gilruth made Faget head of the Engineering and Development Directorate, responsible for the design, development and testing of the spacecraft and its hardware. Dr. Christopher Kraft was made head of the Flight Operations Directorate, which was responsible for building the Mission Control Center and flying the missions. Astronaut Deke Slayton, who had been grounded because of a heart condition, was appointed head of the Astronaut Office. Guy Thibodaux was the head of the Auxiliary Propulsion Division, while Ralph Sawyer took the helm of the Electronics Division. Joe Shea was sent down from NASA Headquarters to be the program manager for the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office.
There was so much to do in a short period of time, with major decisions to be made at every turn. But in the summer of 1962, one decision loomed above them all: How was NASA actually going to get to the Moon and land there?
In the beginning—even with so little spaceflight experience and so many unknowns—the method to accomplish the goal of getting to the Moon seemed like an easy and logical choice. But soon, heated differences of opinion arose. Friendly scientific discussions became a rivalrous and acrimonious debate after Kennedy had directed NASA to land on the Moon in less than a decade.
It turned out there were going to be three options to choose from. The first—and the early favorite—was called Direct Ascent. This was a vision of spaceflight directly from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells or the science fiction from the 1940s and 1950s: A massive spacecraft launches directly to the Moon, lands “fins first” on the lunar surface using retro-rockets, the astronauts climb down a ladder and do their explorations, then climb up and blast off again. The mission would be completely self-contained in one giant spaceship. At first blush, this method seemed simple in comparison to trying to rendezvous and dock in space, a feat not yet attempted. This fiction-inspired version of the Moon landing seemed to be stubbornly stuck in the heads of almost every decision maker at NASA, and von Braun had already been designing an incredibly enormous booster called Nova that might possibly make it feasible. Direct Ascent was the brute-force method of getting to the Moon.
The second option was called Earth-Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), which entailed two spacecraft launching separately on two different Saturn rockets. The two ships would rendezvous and dock in Earth orbit to create one large vehicle; the ship would then either be fueled in orbit or hook up with a booster rocket, then leave for and land on the Moon in the same manner as envisioned by Direct Ascent. This method took less brute force, as it had the advantage of using the Saturn 1 rocket, which had already had a successful test flight in October 1961. Additionally, the same EOR concept could be used to build space stations or other large space vehicles on Earth—which were among the early suggestions from the study groups at Langley for determining America’s future in space. And of course, von Braun had also proposed large, elaborate space stations in Earth orbit. But early on, the concept of rendezvous seemed mysterious and impossible.
“There was a reluctance to be
lieve that the rendezvous maneuver was an easy thing,” said Clinton Brown, who headed up a small research group at Langley, the Lunar Mission Steering Group on Trajectories and Guidance. “In fact, to a layman, if you were to explain what you had to do to perform a rendezvous in space, he would say that sounds so difficult we’ll never be able to do it this century.”
But Brown became one of the instigators for a third option, a dark horse for landing on the Moon called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). LOR’s basic premise was to launch an assembly of three small spacecraft into Earth orbit with a single powerful rocket—the proposed Saturn V could likely handle the load. The three ships were a command ship, a lunar lander and a supply vessel. The trio would head for the Moon together and, once in lunar orbit, the lander would detach, visit the surface, then return to lunar orbit and rendezvous with the other spacecraft before returning to Earth. Early on, anyone who considered the concept of a rendezvous dismissed it out of hand. But a rendezvous around the Moon? If this tricky maneuver failed, astronauts would be dead, stranded in lunar orbit.
Mercury spacecraft with measurements and cutaway view. Credit: NASA.
Eight Years to the Moon Page 5
