The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  “How did [it] get by?” Pohl asked. “There were twelve or thirteen people that had signed off.” A number of people at different ranks had cleared each radiograph scan. Pohl started calling the signatories, one by one in reverse order. Each had a story. “Well, I don’t know anything about N-rays,” said one. “But we get this certification from the company that takes the pictures.” Finally, at the end of this chain, Pohl interrogated the fellow who applied the first signature. “I personally look at every single N-ray that goes out of here,” the man proudly assured Pohl. “And I make sure that it is a good N-ray.”

  “What do you look for?” Pohl asked.

  “Well, first thing I do,” the man said. “I look to see if the film is fogged.” Next, he made sure the images were in focus.

  “Well, what about the hardware that you’re taking pictures of?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea of what we take a picture of.”

  So, the first technician certified that it was a good and proper image of the subject, with no clue what the Apollo equipment should look like. Was it in focus? Showed no artifacts or smudges? It was good to go. But the picture then migrated through a growing bureaucracy. The meaning of the signatures quietly morphed from “the image is in focus” to “this explosive ring is in perfect shape for its job.” They had nearly launched a flawed craft, based on sloppy semantics and the seductive comfort of administrative bloat.16

  In late July, three main drivers of Apollo gathered in a Houston office. Each of the three could trace his roots back to the headwaters of NASA and was now an “old man” by the agency’s standards. George Low, a mild-mannered, well-regarded engineer and manager, had just returned somewhat dejected from the Cape, where he’d seen the hot mess of the lander up close. He called center director Bob Gilruth and the czar of Mission Control Chris Kraft to his office.

  Low had a bold idea that he wanted to bounce off his two most trusted colleagues before it went any further: What if they shuffled the planned missions and really went for broke? They’d fixed the Saturn V, and two of the three Apollo modules looked solid. So, Low suggested, just forget the lander for now. They could push a mission all the way to the Moon and back. He wasn’t suggesting a fancy flight—just a big figure eight, like ice-skating out into the void, gracefully dipping behind the moon, and gliding serenely back to Earth. They’d make no landing but, with luck, they could notch a major milestone before the Russians sent cosmonauts to do it in their Zond.

  His colleagues both liked it. They checked the idea in a carefully curated ring of personnel. One person worried that their model for the Moon’s gravity might be too naive. The lumpy Moon could cause problems as it suddenly changed its pull on a craft. Low’s idea morphed. If they were flying all the way to the Moon, they may as well cozy up to it, take some laps, and measure its gravity more precisely. The new mission might not only prove they could fly a 480,000-mile roundtrip, it could also gather crucial information for future, landing-focused missions.17

  Engineers in the planning program recall the various stages of an expanding ripple. There were just fifteen engineers in one of the early meetings. “This was of course hush hush. . . . It was a pretty scary flight,” engineer Mac Henderson said. “The first time we took a crew beyond Earth orbit.”18

  A small group flew from Houston to Huntsville in early August and consulted with Wernher von Braun and his top brass. After a week of thinking it over and consulting his team, von Braun voiced strong support for the circumlunar voyage. To him, the decision boiled down to whether or not the Saturn V was safe enough for a crew. “Once you decided to man [the rocket],” he said. “It did not matter how far you went.”19 By August 14, strong consensus spanned the leadership in Houston, Huntsville, and the Cape: Not only could this mission work, but it was an obvious choice, especially given reports of the Soviet’s progress with their heavy Zond craft. Privately, NASA decided that the eighth Apollo mission, the first putting men atop a Saturn V, would head to the Moon. Most NASA employees, to say nothing of the contractors, knew nothing about it at this point. For months to come, NASA informed the press and public of the standard plan: Apollo 8 would stay in Earth orbit, testing docking maneuvers between the command module and the lander. “We were in a situation where we couldn’t tell our colleagues what we were working on,” mission planner Lee Norbraten said, “much less our families.”20

  Frank Hughes, the simulations expert, recalls enjoying a rare day off that fall. “I was down at the pool. It’s Florida. It’s Saturday morning, looking forward to the three-day weekend,” he recalled. “I walked back [inside] to get Coke or a beer. . . . The phone’s ringing, I pick it up.” It was his boss, bluntly telling Frank that they were sending the eighth mission to the Moon. “This is Labor Day, and we’re going on December 21st,” he says, still expressing disbelief. He knew he’d spent his last poolside moments for the year.

  Hughes immediately flew to Houston and found himself in a crowded, smoky conference room. The meetings in Building 30, home to the Mission Planning and Analysis division, lasted through the holiday weekend. The assembled quizzed Hughes about the status of the simulators, given the enormous shift in plans. “We’ll be ready,” he said at the time. In hindsight, he says, “I had no clue what the hell I was doing—how were we going to get all that done?”21

  One of the most significant challenges involved speed. Moving faster than any human had moved wasn’t a problem by itself. Any little asteroid or a solar flare would pose the same risk to Apollo. The problem arose when the craft came back to Earth’s atmosphere moving a good deal faster than any previous mission. Nosing into the air with extra speed meant the craft would generate that much extra heat during braking.

  With their “translunar” scheme still a secret, the engineers first had to hear of another step of Soviet progress. A Zond craft—still unmanned but plenty roomy and holding a breathable cabin atmosphere—went all the way around the Moon, snapped a picture of Earth, and survived a splash down in the Indian Ocean. How long would it be until they tried this with a cosmonaut on board?22

  Before any public announcement of NASA’s new plan, the leadership, going all the way to President Johnson, wanted one more successful mission under their belts. Apollo 7 launched in October. Though it did not use a Saturn V, this mission kicked the tires for the command and service modules, leaving them up and toiling in Earth orbit for nearly eleven days. This was America’s first three-person mission, and the first inhabited test of the Apollo spacecraft. Though the crew became unusually grumpy as the endurance test wore on, they caught a surreal new sight. The Apollo craft routinely dumped excess water and waste, forming glittering fields of floating ice crystals and snowflakes, particularly visible during orbital sunrise or sunset. An astronaut reported seeing a perfect silhouette of their ship, the pointy command module atop the soup can of the service module, as a shadow set against a drifting swarm of ice particles.

  A sort of spacecraft burping provided another surprise for the mission. One of the lesser known tasks of the mission involved Apollo flying about one hundred miles away from its original orbit, where the third stage of the rocket still floated as an inert shell. Engineers wanted to practice closing on a target from a great distance, hoping to gain practical experience with the tricky game of rendezvous. When Apollo returned to the third stage, engineers were surprised to see it had changed its orbit from the day before. In time, engineers determined that the stage belched fuel vapor on occasion, with each burp giving it a little propulsive kick. As the stage floated from the night-side of Earth into sunlight, the sudden warmth vaporized some of its unused rocket fuel, leading to the orbital dyspepsia. The Apollo program slowly sorted out these little kinks, mission by mission—every little bit expelled, from fuel burps to urine dumps, introduced an effect like a tiny rocket engine.23

  With the success of the first manned Apollo mission behind them, NASA made the public announcement in November: in one month, our species would try for the
Moon. CBS television had just moved from thirty minutes of nightly news to a full hour, and they now included frequent updates for the upcoming Apollo 8 flight. Against 1968’s backdrop of the Vietnam War, student protests, Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia, and a chaotic political convention in Chicago, a group of plucky engineers said they would, at least for a few days, try to transcend it all.

  But now NASA needed an extra favor. Typically, an Air Force general stationed at Cape Canaveral coordinated with the navy for all capsule recovery operations, but not this time. All special requests for the Pacific Fleet needed to go directly to Navy Admiral John McCain, whose son (an eventual U.S. Senator from Arizona) languished in a Vietnamese prison camp. Local military officials in Florida told NASA they weren’t willing to ask the Admiral to volunteer part of his fleet over the Christmas holidays, so engineer Chris Kraft flew to Honolulu to present the plan and beg for help.

  He awaited his chance to tell Admiral McCain the plan, sitting in front of an amphitheater that filled with more and more navy brass. “At 10:30 a.m. sharp,” Kraft later wrote, “someone yelled, ‘Attention!’ ” and McCain strode in.

  “Okay, young man,” he said to Kraft. “What have you got to say?” Kraft made his pitch and then asked for the navy’s support throughout the Christmas season, to recover, hopefully, a live crew that had flown to the Moon and back. Admiral McCain thought for a moment, working on a substantial cigar. “All of a sudden, he stood up and threw it down on the table,” Kraft wrote.

  “Best damn briefing I’ve ever had,” McCain said, at substantial volume. “Give this young man anything he wants.”24

  In November, the Soviet Union swung another unmanned Zond capsule around the Moon, much closer this time, and it survived a return to Earth, smacking the ground in Kazakhstan. Cosmonauts had been eager to climb aboard and be the first to leave the confines of Earth orbit, but each of the returning capsules concerned Soviet engineers. The one in September had entered the atmosphere at the wrong angle, and the g-forces would have killed any crew inside. Then the more recent one had literally blown a gasket and expelled its air, killing a few animals on board. Nonetheless, according to some accounts, a cosmonaut did board a Zond-loaded rocket and prepare for launch in early December. Engineers detected some worrisome measurements from their rocket’s first stage, however, and they coaxed him out of the ship and away from the pad. When they went ahead with an unmanned launch, aiming again to loop the Moon, the mission exploded within its first minute of flight.25

  By late December, everything aligned for NASA. While planning a mission usually consumed a busy year, the engineers had crammed it all into four months. The world’s most powerful rocket, making only its third launch, would take three humans up and away from Earth. If all went as planned, it would set distance and speed records for the species. It would also take us fully away from the protective confines of Earth’s magnetic shield for the first time. (Our planet’s magnetic field deflects otherwise dangerous charged particles streaming in from the sun and the cosmos.)

  The Saturn V’s launch on the morning of December 21 rattled the astronauts to their bones. One called it “an old freight train going down a bad track.” As the rocket’s brain made little corrections, pointing its massive engine bells a few degrees in one direction and then the other, it pitched the astronauts side to side in their harnesses. One said he felt like he was riding the tip of a car’s radio antenna. And it was incredibly loud, like no other rocket. The astronauts literally could not hear one another.

  When the first stage cut out, the force pushing them upward suddenly disappeared. The astronauts felt themselves at the peak of the world’s largest roller coaster, awaiting whatever came next. One said he felt sure he’d lurch forward into his instrument panel—he held his arms up to protect himself. But the second stage kicked in, and as he flew back into his body-molded seat, he smacked his own helmet with his suit’s heavy metallic wrist. After a little minor pogo in the second stage, the ride ended in a perfect Earth orbit. Everything looked good to go.26

  Just ten years earlier, even with the inception of NASA, the next step must have been inconceivable. Apollo, still connected to the top (i.e., the third) stage of the Saturn V, restarted the single hydrogen-burning engine. The mission sped from what had become a routine seventeen thousand miles per hour in orbit, to roughly twenty-five thousand miles per hour, faster than any humans had ever moved with respect to terra firma. As the Apollo craft leapt away from the security of Earth, the engineers in Houston paused from their obsessive monitoring. “There was nobody even breathing hardly,” according to Mission Control flight director Gerry Griffin. “And it was almost like a religious experience.” Most of the engineers felt they’d won the space race at about 10:00 a.m. on December 21, 1968. “We were headed out,” Griffin said. “We all kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we’ve done it now.’ ”

  With Apollo 8, humanity entered a sort of three-dimensional existence in the cosmos. For tens of thousands of years, humans occupied a thin sheet of comfort enveloping our planet. Even including a person in Earth orbit, just 100 or 150 miles up, our existence had been confined, by analogy, to the thickness of the skin surrounding an apple. If we could ignore gravity, a humble car could cover the distance between the ground and Earth orbit in under two hours, like a trip to grandma’s house. In 1968, we leapt up and away from that thin layer of our history. Human existence no longer mapped to a flat projection of the globe, and we could no longer track our every migration and milestone using latitude and longitude.

  “You’re really happy,” Griffin recalled, “and then all of a sudden you say, ‘Good gosh, I got to get this thing back on the ground again.’ ” With the spell broken, engineers checked the trajectory, and it looked perfect. In fact, the initial path was so perfect that Apollo 8 skipped the majority of seven pre-planned mid-flight adjustments; at most check-in points, the astronauts found the ship not a single degree off course. All the monitored values—pressures, temperatures, rotations—were good. How about the vital signs of the human payload? One of the astronauts wasn’t doing well—he felt weak and started vomiting.iv “Our first thought was that there’s something we don’t understand about going toward the Moon,” Griffin recalled. “It’s going to make them all sick. And we got a disaster on our hands.”27

  Outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, could there be some sort of space radiation sickening the crew? Or could the astronaut have caught the nasty Hong Kong influenza running around the globe that winter? NASA had tried to quarantine the astronauts in advance, but Johnson, wanting to enjoy the last days of a difficult presidential year, waved his hand at the doctors and had the astronauts attend a December banquet with him.

  Before Earth-based doctors could fully panic, the first astronaut stopped vomiting, and the other two never started, despite sharing a small volume of air with their colleague.

  In time, NASA learned that this was just a normal bout of space sickness that would affect many astronauts once they unstrapped themselves from their seats. Simulations expert Frank Hughes describes it as simply having too much room in space for one’s own good. In the first phases of manned spaceflight, “the craft was so tiny, nobody got sick,” he says. But now, with a three-seater and extra room, “it’s the combination of being able to get out of your seat and float.” Floating with no real up or down, and no seat, and no forward to face, has made many astronauts ill over the years.28

  Arguably, the intensely macho tradition of test pilots, and then test pilots who became astronauts, slowed NASA’s progress in understanding space sickness. Trained for extreme motion, and coming from a culture of absolute toughness, astronauts didn’t want to admit any discomfort, never mind discuss any details with a doctor. An astronaut on the following mission, Apollo 9, became very ill,v and his post-mission efforts to research the problem—including an amusement park’s worth of nauseating rides attempting to induce the feeling again—contributed, in som
e accounts, to his fall from the astronaut brotherhood.29

  Now on its way to the Moon, a ship for the first time had to deal with intense sunlight, with no help from even the outer wisps of an atmosphere, and with no periodic shade from Earth. It would suffer nearly three straight days of 250˚ Fahrenheit on one side of the ship, and –250˚ Fahrenheit on the opposite side.

  Some readers may already be wondering why it took so long to reach the Moon. If it is about two hundred fifty thousand miles from Earth, and if the Apollo 8 mission revved to twenty-five thousand miles per hour, then, just like calculating the time for a train to reach a station, it should only have consumed about ten hours. But Earth’s gravity doesn’t quit. Its gravitational pull continues without boundary, just with a weaker effect at greater distance. Hence, Apollo slowed all the way to two thousand miles per hour during its outward journey, as Earth tried pulling it back. Moreover, no Moon mission traveled on a straight line. Apollo’s path was more of a gentle S shape, starting “behind” Earth, arcing out in front of the moving Moon, and then gently sliding in behind it.30

  To handle the temperature extremes, engineers had originally planned a special type of sun shield for this leg of the trip, but one engineer came up with a more cost-effective solution. “We called it barbecue mode,” my father says with a smile. By slowly rotating the entire craft, spinning one full revolution every hour, engineers ensured that no one part of the hull got too hot or too cold. One might then logically assume that the Apollo missions flew like a nicely thrown football, spinning steadily and aimed at the Moon. But the heating in that case would still be uneven. As the craft chased the Moon, its nose or its rear end would have taken more than its share of sun, spinning or no. So instead, after an initial push toward the Moon, each mission pivoted its nose “upward,” facing the North Star, and spun toward the Moon like a child’s top gliding across a well-waxed floor.31