Eight Years to the Moon

by Nancy Atkinson

  Despite the Lab’s experience with aerospace computers, the Apollo project quickly became a genuine challenge. It wasn’t just the challenge of creating a complicated system, the likes of which had never existed before, but also creating the technology to make it possible. Fortunately, the early 1960s was a convergence of time when the digital age was just getting started and technological innovations were transforming traditional production. What the Lab couldn’t find among the burgeoning digital industry they invented and developed. Battin and everyone at the Lab would need every bit (and byte) of advancement they could find.

  Robert Seamans and Doc Draper. Credit: Draper

  In the meantime, Doc Draper made good on his statement that he would volunteer to fly to the Moon. He sent an official letter to Seamans, applying for the job as astronaut.

  “I would like to formally volunteer for service as a crew member on the Apollo mission to the Moon, and also for whatever suborbital and orbital flights that may be made in preparation for the lunar trip,” wrote Draper. “I feel that my work of the past thirty years has given me a unique background of well-rounded experience that may be considered as helping me to qualify for service as the engineering and scientific member of a spacecraft crew. It should be easier for me to learn the techniques of crew operations than for somebody else to acquire the capability I already possess. I believe I could do a good job for you.”

  But since Doc was well into his sixties, NASA had to decline.

  “Doc Draper never let me forget it,” Seamans recalled years later. “He said, ‘You never acted on my suggestion. I was all ready to go to the Moon and you wouldn’t let me go!’“

  AT THE START OF 1963, JOHN PAINTER knew that something had to change. He’d been in Houston at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) since July 1962 and was certain that hardly anyone in his group knew what was going on. In five months, he had received no clear direction or encouragement from his supervisors, something he’d never experienced before. He was beyond frustrated.

  But Painter was happy to be back in Texas. He’d met his wife, Joy, in 1954 when he joined the Air Force at Houston’s Ellington Air Force Base. Following up with four years as an Air Force officer and navigator, and then four years of stretching his GI Bill dollars to squeeze in both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, he was ready to start getting a paycheck.

  Left to right: Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Alan Shepard, Robert Gilruth (Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center), Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra and Gus Grissom behind the sign at the Farnsworth-Chambers Building in Houston, Texas, the interim MSC headquarters. Credit: NASA.

  “I was doing job interviews when my wife asked if we could get a job in Texas,” Painter said. “We had two little boys, and she wanted to be closer to her parents. I had interviewed at several Houston oil companies already, but that kind of engineering didn’t appeal to me. So, I told her that a new government outfit called NASA had just set up shop down in Houston, and I’d check it out. It was about manned spaceflight, and they were even talking about flying to the Moon and back. And that interested me. Maybe I could get paid for doing something that was connected with flying.”

  After John was hired on at MSC, the Painters found a new house in a little town called Pearland, population 580, which split the 40-mile difference between John’s work and Joy’s parents. Painter was enthusiastic about getting in on the ground floor of what he felt was a promising and exciting extension of America’s aeronautical initiatives. He felt he could contribute to NASA’s space missions with his electrical engineering knowledge. Within the lengthy NASA hierarchy, Painter was hired in the Communications Group of the Radio Frequency Section of the Electronics Systems Branch of the Spacecraft Evaluation and Development Division of MSC.

  His new office consisted of an old-line civil servant who was the leader, one seasoned engineer and four recent college graduates. Painter soon realized he was the only person there with an advanced degree. The six-person group represented the entire MSC capability in spacecraft communications theory and technique.

  After two or three days on the job—during which nobody gave Painter any indication of his responsibilities—he started asking questions, like, “What are we supposed to be doing, anyway?” The group leader let Painter know he had just broken the first cardinal rule of civil service. Never ask what you should be doing. Be inventive. Look busy.

  Wow, Painter thought. He didn’t know how the other offices at MSC were handling their employees, but he now had firsthand experience confirming rumors he’d heard about government civil servants: that they avoided responsibility whenever possible. Painter tried to give his new boss the benefit of the doubt—maybe everyone here in Houston was in the same boat, and perhaps no one was exactly sure how to proceed in accomplishing the monumental task of sending humans to the Moon. But in articles he read in MSC’s employee newspaper, the Space News Roundup, he saw how other areas within the MSC were making advances, how contractors were rapidly being chosen for building various systems. There was even an article about how the communications network for Mercury had been improved.

  Finally, the group leader gave Painter a task, handing him a stack of job applications. He was to screen the applicants and call any who looked promising. Painter talked with one candidate who worked at General Dynamics in Fort Worth and had a master’s degree. However, when Painter approached his boss about potentially hiring this applicant, the group leader looked Painter straight in the eye and said, “We don’t need anyone with a master’s degree!”

  Painter was taken aback and speechless. Now he knew why his own job offer had been so low.

  To make matters worse, Painter’s office was in the Rich Building, which had a labyrinth of halls and partitions and no windows. During the summer heat, the power and air conditioning would fail once a week or so, and Painter and his coworkers would have to grope around in the pitch-black hallways, looking for someone who knew how to get in touch with the electric company, usually one of the secretaries.

  The one saving grace of Painter’s workplace came in the person of George Hondros, a fellow electrical engineer in the Communications Group. Hondros had joined the Space Task Group at Langley after graduating from the University of Virginia, and he was quickly transferred to Houston in the spring of 1962. Hondros and Painter soon found they were kindred spirits, hitting it off immediately because of their similar viewpoints. Since they were both new to the area, their friendship extended to off-work hours as well. Hondros, a bachelor, enjoyed the family atmosphere at the Painter household, and his new friend bestowed on him the nickname “The Greek.”

  “It became clear to me in a hurry that The Greek was probably the brightest person then employed in the section,” Painter said. “This was not just technical know-how, but his ability to deal with people and cause things to happen.”

  But even Hondros was flummoxed by their boss. The two engineers figured this guy was either too uncertain in knowing how to proceed with the unknowns in the Apollo communications systems or he just didn’t care. Painter and Hondros took it upon themselves to figure out how to best spend their time in order to maximize their work on the radio communications conundrums for the coming space missions. They decided they had a wide-open opportunity to define their own jobs.

  Since Mercury and Gemini were only operating in Earth orbit, their communications systems could both use off-the-shelf hardware that was based on the aviation communications experience. They used four different sets of radio and radar equipment operating on different frequencies: radio systems for voice used UHF (Ultra High Frequency) and telemetry used VHF (Very High Frequency), while tracking was done using a C-band beacon on the spacecraft with ground-based radar “listening” for the signals.

  These systems were proving extremely reliable so far. But the Apollo program would be significantly more complex than either the Mercury or Gemini programs, and it presented a corresponding increase
in the complexity of communications. Apollo would be going much farther than Earth orbit, traveling out 238,000 miles, entering orbit around the Moon and landing there with a separate craft. Additionally, there would be three astronauts working in two spacecraft, with communications for both operating simultaneously. And an added complication being discussed was the plan for sending back a live television feed, both from the spacecraft and from the lunar surface. NASA needed a better system with the additional bandwidth to uplink and downlink more data.

  One of the keys to the development of the new communication technology, Painter and Hondros determined, would be figuring out what the astronauts and flight controllers really needed to accomplish during the Apollo missions, and specifically, what they would require for communications. In October 1962, the two engineers had the chance to get some opinions on that topic. NASA’s Astronaut Group 2, also known as the New Nine, arrived in Houston needing training on various systems.

  The Crew Systems Division was looking for people to give a series of lectures to the new astronaut trainees, and a fellow named Ray Zedeker came by the Communications Group office looking for volunteers. For reasons Painter and Hondros couldn’t fathom, their boss discouraged such an endeavor as a waste of time. That meant the two quickly volunteered to do it, and they set about finding instructors and materials for a one-week course.

  “I realized I didn’t really know much about space communications,” Painter said, “although I had had one course in communication theory at Illinois and was an FCC-licensed amateur radio operator. However, even if I knew absolutely nothing, it was at least as much as anyone else in the bunch knew. So I outlined the areas I thought an astronaut should be acquainted with and set out scouring the division for anyone that could possibly give an hour’s lecture in each area.”

  Apollo astronauts during classroom training at the Manned Spacecraft Center, including Jerry Carr, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and other unidentified persons. Credit: NASA.

  Painter and Hondros arranged for lectures on particular kinds of radio hardware (such as antennas, transmitters and receivers), and Painter prepared a set of notes from which he would personally lecture on the theory of space communications. Visual demonstrations came in the form of hand-drawn paper flip charts on a three-legged easel. To make sure that no one would goof off, Painter and Hondros decided to make all the instructors write up their lecture in narrative form, so the astronauts could receive a set of study notes.

  Painter realized his initial attempt at being an instructor wasn’t stellar, but it was better than nothing. Some of the astronauts took it seriously (McDivitt, Borman, Armstrong). Some slept (White). And some cracked jokes (Conrad). John Young, still worried about bodily functions in space, commented about the proposal of live television from inside the spacecraft: “I don’t care what anybody says. When I’m taking a crap, that damn TV camera is going to be off.”

  But during the course, Painter and The Greek got to know this group of astronaut pilots who would fly Gemini and then Apollo. The connections they made with those who would be operating the spacecraft—and the communications system—would soon pay off.

  In the spring of 1963, things finally changed for Painter and Hondros. Barry Graves Jr. and Howard Kyle, who had both worked on setting up the Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network for Project Mercury communications, were now assigned to MSC. Graves had formed a new office called the Ground Systems Project Office (GSPO) to oversee the design and construction of what became known as Building 30, the Mission Control Center. Kyle was his assistant.

  Graves was recruiting for the GSPO and had heard good things about the astronaut-training course in communications. He asked for a meeting with Painter and Hondros, inquiring if they would like to move over to his new organization. The two engineers looked at each other, smiled and told Graves they’d come if they could also bring the branch secretary, their friend Frances Smith, with whom they had developed a good rapport. The threesome became the first employees for the GSPO.

  The functional requirements for the Mission Control Center were to be put together by Christopher Kraft, Glynn Lunney and their team of fellow flight controllers. The work of the GSPO was to compile requests for proposals, select the contractors from the submitted applications and monitor the contracts after they were awarded. Since neither Painter nor Hondros had the necessary civil service rank to be heads of any of GSPO’s internal branches or sections, Graves hired a boss for the two engineers.

  The GSPO crew moved over to better facilities at the Houston Petroleum Building, and while their new boss was taking two weeks off, Kyle gave Painter and Hondros an assignment. He wanted them to create a flight-test procedure for the Apollo communication system that had recently been selected (in December 1962) called the Apollo Unified S-Band Telecommunications and Tracking System. Painter and Hondros didn’t know anything about it, and Kyle wanted the test procedure delivered in just two weeks.

  The two engineers gathered what information they could on the system and, wanting to succeed in their test-procedures task, worked twelve hours a day for fourteen days straight. At the end of the two weeks, they were so exhausted, they were punch-drunk and jumped on top of their new boss’s desk to dance a celebratory jig. But they delivered the procedure on time.

  “It wasn’t very good,” Painter said, “but it seemed to satisfy Mr. Kyle.”

  After their initial assignment to write the flight-test procedure, Painter and Hondros began pursuing in earnest the details of the Apollo communications system. Apollo required additional bandwidth to uplink and downlink more data—but with Kennedy’s deadline of getting to the Moon by the end of the 1960s, there just wasn’t time to create an entirely new system. NASA turned to a design built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for tracking and communicating with their robotic missions to deep space. JPL’s system was technically called the Block III Receiver Exciter and Mark I ranging system, but the common nomenclature among those who worked in the industry was the Unified S-Band system (USB).

  The USB system was an elegant and very capable solution for the communications challenges posed by human spaceflight to lunar distances, and it combined voice communications, telemetry, command, tracking, ranging and television into a single transmitter system. It also saved size and weight—significant for getting a weight-conscious spacecraft to and from the Moon—and simplified operations.

  “Digital data was really something quite new,” Painter said, “and the USB system would transmit many measurements on the spacecraft and health status of the astronauts back to Earth. And it would transmit digital data from the controllers up to the astronauts, for entry into their onboard flight computer. It would even handle the transmission of live TV from the spacecraft to the ground. Perhaps most importantly, the radio system would transmit a digital data stream, called a range code, up and back to track the path of the spacecraft, from which its precise trajectory could be calculated in the ground computer.”

  But the system hadn’t been completely designed yet with the new modifications for Apollo, and the people in the Flight Operations Division hadn’t yet developed a set of operational requirements for all the kinds of data they wanted to transmit to and from the Apollo spacecraft. When they looked at some of the paperwork submitted by the contractors for the Apollo CSM and the LM, Painter and Hondros noticed discrepancies in how the communications systems would be incorporated into the two spacecraft. They came up with a plan of action to understand the system well enough to write a set of technical reports so that everyone would have the same documentation, specs and requirements. This would keep everyone on the same wavelength, so to speak.

  “Everyone” included the prime contractors for the CSM, North American Aviation in Downey, California; the contractors for the LM, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Bethpage, New York; the team developing the Saturn booster rocket at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama; and several divisions at MSC
, all of which would use the radio system. The ground equipment for the communications stations around the world was being coordinated by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

  In early 1963, none of these companies and agencies knew what the modified Apollo design would be. Only JPL could predict that. So, Painter and Hondros started traveling to the different entities involved, going first to California to talk with the JPL people who had designed their deep-space radios.

  JPL is nestled in California’s San Gabriel Mountains, and Painter and Hondros found the weather, landscape and nightlife to be delightful. They worked out of a $9-per-night motel on Pasadena Boulevard, driving a rental car up to JPL. At night, the two explored Los Angeles and Hollywood, looking for movie stars. Every place along Hollywood Boulevard where they ate, Hondros would discover a fellow Greek from the “old country,” and some of the meals ended up being free. Once, Hondros ran into a former high school friend, who was playing in a nightclub band.

  At JPL, Painter and Hondros tracked down two of the original analysts and designers of the USB system. One was an “old guy,” age forty-five. Painter had been trying to unravel the mathematics of the system from a report done by one of the Apollo contractors. The old guy took a look at the contractor’s mathematics, which ran several pages. He then went to the blackboard and derived the sought-after result in three lines of equations.

  “John, when something looks that complicated, you’re probably looking at it the wrong way,” the old guy said, something Painter would always remember.

  The two engineers returned to Houston to document in their own report of the mathematics of the USB as it was to be redesigned for Apollo. Having the mathematics, the performance of the USB system could be calculated, channel by channel, using MSC’s computers.