Also during that week, Painter and The Greek completed the manuscript of volume 1 of their “NASA Technical Notes” on the Unified S-Band communication system. After conferring with the astronauts, Painter and Hondros decided to utilize the information in the technical report for the second week of class. All that needed to be done was for the eighty-eight-page manuscript to be typed in final form. So at about 5:00 p.m. that Friday afternoon, the two engineers broke the news to their faithful secretary, Frances Smith, that they needed twenty copies typed and xeroxed by 2:00 p.m. Monday afternoon.
“Of course, she did it,” Painter said. “Even though she tried to be mad at us, she just couldn’t be. I’m pretty sure she worked about twelve hours that Saturday to type it up for us and make all the copies. She was something else.”
PAINTER AND HONDROS CONTINUED TRYING to ensure functional compatibility between all the different contractors for the USB radio system for Apollo communications. During a couple of meetings in early 1964 with all of the various contractors, the problems weren’t resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. Barry Graves Jr. expressed considerable concern, and early in 1964, he started making trips to Downey, California, to check out, among other things, how North American Aviation was spending their money allocated for communications.
But North American had bigger concerns than just the USB system. They were in the middle of redesigning the entire Command and Service Modules (CSM). When NASA awarded the Apollo contract to North American in 1961, the initial designs were based on the Direct Ascent plan for getting to the Moon. Therefore, their early version of the CSM, called Block I, was crafted to land on the Moon atop a rocket stage and it did not have a docking port for an LM. But with the change to the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) plan, a substantial redesign was required and the CSM also needed to lose some weight. North American was also haggling with NASA over certain design aspects: They wanted to use a mixed-gas atmosphere inside the CM instead of pure oxygen and include a different type of hatch with explosive bolts for quick release in case of an emergency. NASA turned down both due to time, cost and weight (plus they didn’t want a repeat of what happened with Gus Grissom’s Mercury spacecraft, which sunk in the Atlantic Ocean after the hatch blew open unexpectedly following splashdown). Other technical obstacles also surfaced in several subsystems, such as environmental control and communications. Since a few of the Block I CSMs were already in production, NASA decided the most efficient way to keep the program on track was use the Block I versions for early Earth orbit test flights. The new design, Block II, would include a docking port and hatch and incorporate weight reduction and lessons learned from Block I.
But as far as Graves, Painter and Hondros were concerned, the communications-systems issues couldn’t wait, and North American appeared to be ignoring them, not willing to make some of the suggested fixes—especially for redundancy and flexibility of the system. What was needed was laboratory verification of the system components, hooking together the prototype hardware USB designs for the CSM, the LM and the ground stations.
“We didn’t have any laboratory facilities in Houston for setting up a compatibility test,” said Painter, “and we were just preparing to move to the permanent center facilities at MSC. It was clear that to set up a test rapidly would mean contracting it out, and it was clear that Motorola had a decided advantage in terms of experience and familiarity with the system since they were building the spacecraft transponders for both the LM and CSM and also building a good part of the ground station hardware.”
In the interest of speed, Graves quickly approved getting the contract set up. However, soon after word got out about the contract, a strange edict came down from NASA Headquarters. Motorola could be selected to do the tests. But the tests themselves would be done at MSC, meaning a whole new laboratory would need to be built before the tests could be run.
Then something even stranger happened. Just a few weeks later, Painter and Hondros walked into their offices one Monday morning to find a green slip of paper on all the desks. It was a notice that the Ground Systems Project Office (GSPO) had been abolished, and they were all to be reassigned. Additionally, Graves had been taken out of the Apollo program and would be going back to the Langley Research Center, with his management responsibilities drastically curtailed.
Everyone was stunned. Gradually, Painter and Hondros pieced together what they thought had likely happened. They were certain the reason was office politics, both external and internal to MSC.
“Graves had many disagreements with North American on many things about the Command Module that he was attempting to get them to fix,” said Painter. “One, of course, was the Block II Unified S-Band. But there were far worse problems with the Block I design, which needed to be fixed as a part of the Block II design. The prime contractor was dragging its feet and Graves had been pushing.”
The Apollo Unified S-Band System. Credit: NASA.
For instance, Painter knew that with respect to the Unified S-Band system, Graves threatened North American with cutting its profits on the system by having it installed in the spacecraft at the Cape by its manufacturer, Motorola, as government-furnished equipment. Painter was sure that North American pressured NASA to eliminate the demands from Graves.
The internal aspect, in Painter’s opinion, was that another assistant director at Houston wanted control of the construction of the Mission Control Center, which had been in the hands of the GSPO. Thus, when Graves drew fire externally from the Apollo prime contractor, other administrators went right along with firing him.
Painter and Hondros were reassigned to a new division and they decided to do two things.
“First, to get volume 2, the mathematical analysis of the Apollo USB system, written, come hell or high water,” said Painter. “Second, we decided to look for jobs away from MSC. We knew that it would only be a matter of time before an astronaut got killed in the Command Module, and we didn’t want it to be on our watch.”
NORMAN CHAFFEE, HENRY POHL AND Chester Vaughan continued to live under the premise that there was nothing more interesting to work on than rocket engines.
“You get to do things that nobody has ever thought about and nobody else has ever dealt with,” Chaffee said. “And then you also have problems like nobody else too.”
An Apollo Command Module reaction control 93-pound (42-kg) thrust engine (left), and a cutaway showing the charred area of the thick wall that results from firing the engine. Credit: NASA/Mike Salinas and Norman Chaffee.
The problem under consideration by Chaffee and Pohl during most of 1964 came from cracked liners on the two sets of small Gemini thrusters. The Reaction Control System (RCS) controlled the reentry portion of the spacecraft, and the orbital attitude maneuvering system provided steering capabilities while in orbit. Both systems were embedded in the outer hull of Gemini, and under test conditions, the liners in the “throat” area of the thruster were cracking and sometimes flying apart into little pieces. If Chaffee and his colleagues in the Propulsion and Power Division at MSC couldn’t figure out how to prevent the cracking and shattering, the Gemini spacecraft wouldn’t be able to fly. If Gemini couldn’t fly, neither could Apollo.
So this little problem became a big concern for both the Gemini and Apollo program offices, because the Apollo CM also contained these embedded small rocket engines. The thrusters were built by Rocketdyne, but Chaffee and his compatriots were test-firing them at their newly built test facility at MSC, the Thermochemical Test Area, where they could conduct qualification tests.
“We were fortunate to have our own independent design, manufacturing and test capability in Houston,” said Pohl, “and we could evaluate the new designs Rocketdyne was proposing, as well as evaluate our own ideas.”
“What was happening was something called thermal shock,” explained Chaffee, “where if your thruster hasn’t operated for a while, it cools down. We were testing the thrusters under flight conditions, and things get pretty cold in space. Suddenly y
ou turn on the thruster, fire it for fifty milliseconds and sock it with a shot of fifty-five-hundred-degree gases—it’s like throwing an ice cube into a glass of tepid water. It cracks or sometimes shatters because of the tremendous change in temperature.”
Chaffee had already spent a good chunk of the past two years improving on some of the design parameters of these thrusters, called ablative thrusters. After several months of testing and redesigning, Rocketdyne made some improvements in the ceramic liners. These helped but didn’t completely solve the cracking issue. However, their tests also showed that none of the new thrusters were failing because of the cracking, and the design requirements were being met.
“Our program manager was a practical individual,” said Chaffee, “and he said, ‘Look, I’ve got a certain amount of money and a certain amount of time, and I’ve got to get on with this. Okay is good enough for me. It doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as it works.’“
So NASA and Rocketdyne decided they needed to live with the problem because time was running out before the Gemini flights were to begin. With certain restrictions, cracked throats were to be accepted.
“We never did completely solve the cracking problem,” Chaffee said. “So we defined a specification that said the throat piece can’t break into more than twenty-seven pieces, and none of the pieces can be ejected or come out. That ended up working.”
“One of the things that really helped us a whole lot in the Apollo program is that we were able to get things tested early on,” Pohl said, “even prototypes or things that we knew sometimes wouldn’t work. But at least it gave us an idea of how to change something, how to modify something, how to do something different. We were always doing something. We didn’t have time to just sit around.”
ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, JOHN PAINTER was at home, working in his yard in Pearland, when four T-38 jet aircraft—the type of planes the astronauts used for flight training—flew over at a low altitude. Because of the planes’ low altitude and the fact they were following the Friendswood-Pearland Highway, Painter knew something must be wrong. He switched on the radio and heard reports of an airplane crash at Ellington Air Force Base. Painter couldn’t help it—he needed to know what happened, so he jumped in his car and drove to Ellington. There, between the Gulf Freeway and Old Galveston Road, was the crash site, cordoned
John Painter in 2010. Image courtesy of John Painter.
off. He found out that as astronaut Ted Freeman was making his landing approach to the Ellington runway, his T-38 struck a Canadian snow goose. The goose shattered Freeman’s plexiglass canopy and the pieces went straight into the engine intakes, flaming them out. Freeman ejected from the aircraft but did not have sufficient altitude for his parachute to open. Freeman was found dead, still in his ejector seat. MSC mourned the first loss of an astronaut and the tragedy of an accident that occurred not in space, but during a routine aircraft flight. Freeman became the first American astronaut to lose his life in the quest for the Moon.
Painter recalled that he and Hondros had spoken to Freeman in passing just the previous afternoon outside the MSC headquarters building. Freeman’s tragic death, along with the unsettled and challenging nature of Painter’s work at that time, made it difficult to concentrate and he was secretly looking at different employment options. And then Hondros received an offer to work on the Apollo ground station design and implementation at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He would travel to the various ground station sites around the world, troubleshooting problems and overseeing the installations, which gave him the opportunity to visit his family in Greece occasionally.
“After George left, I was really lonesome and knew that my own days at Houston were numbered,” said Painter. “George and I had been a good team, and we had done a lot of good for Apollo in a year and a half. But I just didn’t feel like carrying on the fight by myself. Besides that, I was looking for more money, since I now had a wife and three kids to feed.”
Astronaut Theodore C. Freeman in 1964. Credit: NASA.
Painter made a few trips to Maryland to work with Hondros on the second volume of their technical paper. Once it was finalized and submitted for publication, Painter accepted a job with Motorola and moved his family to Scottsdale. He couldn’t work on the Apollo USB system because of federal regulations concerning conflict of interest in the hiring of former government employees. Instead, he worked on the Air Force’s version of the Unified S-Band system called Space Ground Link.
EVEN THOUGH NO ASTRONAUTS FLEW TO space in 1964, this was a pivotal year for NASA. Preparing for the Gemini program defined and tested the technology and skills NASA would need to land on the Moon. Going forward, Gemini needed to test the ability to fly long-duration missions—up to two weeks in space—and understand how spacecraft could rendezvous and dock in orbit around the Earth and the Moon. Astronauts would need to leave their spacecraft for their extravehicular activities (EVAs), such as conducting spacewalks to demonstrate they could work effectively in bulky spacesuits in the harsh environment of space. These were all things that had never done before, and 1965 and Gemini would prove NASA could do them all.
CHAPTER 4
1965
The Gemini 2 spacecraft in Earth orbit is connected by a tether to an Agena Target Docking Vehicle in September 1966. Credit: NASA.
Just [say] the magic words: “I’m working on Apollo.”
—EARLE KYLE, aerospace engineer, Honeywell
JERRY BELL ISN’T SURE WHEN HE FOUND time to ask his girlfriend to marry him, but somehow during 1965, they tied the knot. This year turned out to be one of the busiest of his life: taking care of his recently widowed mother, courting his sweetheart and many times working sixty to seventy hours a week with the Rendezvous Analysis Branch at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), developing rendezvous techniques for Gemini and for subsequent use with Apollo.
“The hours were just unbelievable,” Bell said. “I had to get permission to take time off to go to my engagement party, which was on a Sunday afternoon. And the only time it worked to get married was on Thanksgiving Day.”
But as 1965 began, so too began a flurry of activity, with the Gemini flights directly ahead and Apollo soon to follow. For Bell and his coworkers absorbed with the intricacies of rendezvous and docking, success for Gemini seemed almost mandatory.
“We worked in parallel on two programs at once,” said Bell. “The whole purpose of Gemini was to verify and test out all the different concepts for Apollo. But there were certain aspects of Apollo that were completely divorced from anything we were doing in Gemini. And in the meantime, everything we learned from one Gemini flight went right to the next one.”
A simulator for Apollo rendezvous for the Command Module and the Lunar Module at Langley Research Center. Credit: NASA.
Astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. Credit: NASA.
Bell joined the rendezvous team in 1963, working with Ken Young, Catherine Osgood and an ever-growing group of engineers and scientists. Engineer James (David) Alexander also came on board in 1963, and the rendezvous team operated under the leadership of Ed Lineberry, who took over when Bill Tindall became involved with his wide-ranging responsibilities in coordinating the Data Priority meetings. Lineberry was a talented but shy mathematician and an orbital mechanics genius. He came up with the logic and equations for what he called the analytic ephemeris generator (AEG), a computer program that became an essential rendezvous-planning tool for the group. This allowed them to plan out different maneuvers for various rendezvous scenarios.
“At first we thought, Just launch directly into orbit and rendezvous on the first orbit,“ Osgood explained, “but oh, if your launch is delayed, your plan is gone. So then we looked at the tangential method, but then it turned out the closing rate then was just so fast that it would be a dangerous final approach. So then we came up with the concentric two-maneuver sequence, and following that we came up with what was called the CSI/CDH. Then, it was the NSR, the NCC/NSR burn, and …
”
All of that may sound simple (to rendezvous engineers, anyway), but it actually took years to figure out the different components within rendezvous. Fortunately for the team, Buzz Aldrin came aboard. Among the third group of astronauts, he graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a doctorate of science in astronautics, and his thesis was titled “Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” Tindall easily convinced Aldrin to confer with the rendezvous team in 1964, and the astronaut helped develop the plans for how two spacecraft could meet in orbit and at the Moon. His work earned him the nickname “Dr. Rendezvous” from fellow astronauts, a named bestowed, Aldrin noted, with a mixture of respect and sarcasm.
“Buzz came over to our building to discuss exactly how we wanted to do the rendezvous coming up off the Moon,” said Alexander. “We were throwing ideas around, and we found he was an absolute genius about rendezvous. Many of his ideas and suggestions were things we actually ended up doing, such as the co-elliptic sequence, which places the chaser vehicle on an intercept trajectory with the target vehicle.”
Alexander himself designed several of the rendezvous maneuvers used throughout Gemini and Apollo, one called the conic fit, and another commonly referred as the football rendezvous because the motion of the Lunar Module’s (LM’s) trajectory looked much like the shape of a football.
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