The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

After six days of hurtling through space, the Apollo 8 capsule finally stopped, coming to rest in the Pacific. Astronauts immediately noted pooling water at their feet and worried that seawater was seeping into the capsule. But the intense atmospheric braking had simply thrown every tiny water droplet, from a week’s worth of breath and spills, to form a big puddle at the capsule’s floor. If anything, their approach had been too perfect. The capsule hit the sea within just two miles of an aircraft carrier, arguably too close for comfort. They would allow for greater separation from now on, making sure to avoid a catastrophic on-deck landing.44

  With a surprising number of Apollo engineers, the last months of 1968 still resonate deeply, with a sustained sense of awe. Many rank the period, without hesitation, as the program’s peak. They’d flown three humans all the way to the Moon and returned them not just alive but with no obvious injuries. In retrospect, American and Soviet engineers alike mark this mission as the end of the space race.

  Just eight years earlier, a little farm-to-market road ran from Webster, Texas, toward Clear Lake, bordered by nothing but cows and barbed wire. As of December 27, 1968, the road exploded in a no-holds-barred party, with revelers dancing across the pavement. In a nearby hotel, drunken engineers threw furniture into the swimming pool. After this trip to the Moon, with days of television coverage showing astronauts and Mission Control, Houston became the leading character of NASA’s public relations. And despite the enormous success of the Saturn V rocket—in only its third launch, it had pushed Apollo to the Moon—Huntsville receded in terms of prestige. “Compared to astronauts,” von Braun said during a Houston visit, “our Saturn has about as much sex appeal as Lady Godiva’s horse!”45 Just ten years prior, von Braun and his strong chin were cover-worthy for Time; for 1968, the magazine pivoted from their planned cover (reportedly president-elect Richard Nixon) and named the three Apollo 8 astronauts together as its “man of the year.” The astronauts received bushels of fan mail, but one struck a famously pithy note: a telegram simply thanked them for “saving” an otherwise awful year for the planet.46

  After the safe return of Apollo 8, one NASA administrator told the press that the mission was “the triumph of the squares—the guys with computers and slide rules who read the Bible on Christmas Eve.” The statement bristles with pride to the point of being prickly or even cutting. Time magazine explained the sentiment when the editors opined that NASA engineers “epitomize the solid, perhaps old-fashioned American virtues.” In a late-year essay titled “Of Revolution and the Moon,” the magazine declared, “This is what Westernized man can do. . . . [H]e will not drop out and turn off [sic]; he will not seek stability and inner peace in the quest for nirvana. . . . [H]e knows how to reach the Moon.”47 With the counterculture movement in full flower, some of NASA’s engineers, having started this intense work in 1958, could hardly recognize the country when Apollo 8 came shooting back to Earth just ten years later.

  * * *

  i The Zond 4 actually went in the opposite direction of the Moon, probably to avoid worrying about the Moon’s gravity. The Soviets aimed to recover it on Earth, but after a guidance malfunction, they gave it a self-destruct order during re-entry.

  ii In one of those names that can only come from scientists, engineers, or rock bands, the third stage was actually called “S-IV,” because, in earlier planning phases, they considered a total of four stages, but they eliminated what would have been S-III. And, while we’re speaking of numbers, the Saturn “five,” did not relate to stages or number of engines. It was simply the fifth milepost in that rocket series.

  iii These frequencies are too low for human hearing, but they might coax a reaction from a rhinoceros or a humpback whale.

  iv Astronaut Frank Borman.

  v Russell “Rusty” Schweickart.

  vi Robert Sherrod.

  vii Joseph Laitin, who served the press communications efforts of five presidential administrations.

  viii Simon Bourgin, who served as science advisor for the U.S. Information Agency during Apollo.

  12

  1969—Alarms and Lightning

  He was sitting with almost a hundred and fifty other villagers in the assembly room of the new parish hall, watching two young Americans walk on the moon for the first time. There was a tense silence in the room for almost the whole of the broadcast, yet . . . everyone started cheering, and for a few moments at least it was as if some kind of burden fell from the farmers’ heavy shoulders. Afterwards there was free beer for the adults and juice and doughnuts for the children, and a member of the parish council gave a short speech about the tremendous endeavours that made such marvels possible and would probably drive humanity on goodness knows whither.

  —From the novel A Whole Life, by Robert Seethaler, set in the Austrian Alps

  I headed up the river, past dusty villages so unused to the new American presence that young women bathing in the river saw no need to cover their breasts as they waved at the boats. Little children ran to the water’s edge repeatedly shouting something that sounded like Ah-Pa-Lo, which baffled me until I realized the word was Apollo. The moon landing was still our greatest ambassador there. They didn’t know to distrust us yet.

  —U.S. Naval Officer Armistead Maupin’s account of an expedition into Cambodia, from his memoir, Logical Family

  At the start of a most crucial year for Apollo, two giants of the program focused, to a surprising extent, on anything but the Moon. Max Faget’s son now recalls that his father brought home a new model at about this time. “He cut all the little balsawood pieces, and he made an early mock up,” Guy Faget says. “He and I went out in the back yard and played catch with it and watched it land in the grass.” Father Max had been talking about this idea for years now. “It’s going to be lifted into orbit by a rocket,” Max told his family. “And it’s going to glide back.” Henry Pohl remembers Faget bringing versions of his new spaceship to staff meetings and gliding them across conference rooms. Dating to the 1950s, Faget and others had wondered about a winged craft: a spaceship sophisticated enough to maneuver in orbit and then survive a fiery re-entry, returning to Earth as an airplane. The idea of a “shuttle” running to orbit and back could, NASA believed, greatly cut the cost of spaceflight, by reusing more components.1 (See Figure 12.1.)

  figure 12.1 Max Faget, in 1969, with an early model of a reusable, gliding spacecraft—a shuttle. (NASA photograph.)

  Wernher von Braun, as attuned as anyone to the increasingly pessimistic budget forecast, supported the notion of a shuttle program as a way to revolutionize the cost structure of space flight. He advocated not just for some sort of winged shuttle but also for a winged, reusable rocket to be developed in Huntsville. In this picture, everything would be reused: land it, clean it, refuel it, and launch it again. NASA, bright-eyed with recent Apollo success, claimed they could lower the costs of lofting things to orbit from Apollo’s five hundred dollars per pound to just fifty dollars per pound (an absurd dream, in retrospect).

  To keep Huntsville in the game, von Braun maneuvered his center for new space work in the post-Apollo era. Aside from lifting a shuttle craft, he’d also embraced an emerging project called “Voyager,” that in its early incarnation aimed to send sophisticated unmanned landers to various planets in the solar system. Marshall was to lead the way and had requested a significant new budget line in 1967, but Congress had nixed it.

  In 1969, NASA headquarters kept its chin up and expressed optimism against all federal headwinds. As von Braun wrote in a letter to his father, they hoped this new president, Nixon, would want a robust, achievement-focused space program; headquarters asked von Braun to spearhead their D.C. presentations advocating for Mars. Vice president Agnew, for one, was a vocal proponent. But public polling and congressional sentiments should have discouraged NASA from the red planet. Though von Braun’s heart shouted “Mars or bust,” he was also showing a realistic side in this era. “I, for one, have always felt that it would be a good idea to read the si
gns of the times and respond to what the country really wants,” he told the political scientist John Logsdon, “rather than trying to cram a bill of goodies down somebody’s throat.” He knew Mars was a tough sell. Instead, he started speaking passionately for projects like Earth observation and new communication satellites that could show immediate benefits to humankind.

  In fact, von Braun had confided to family members by 1969 that he had tired of directing the Marshall Spaceflight Center. It is less likely that the long hours of 1957–1969 had dented his nearly inhuman energies, and more likely that he recognized America’s reduced appetite for space. He’d already watched his Huntsville stronghold change, as retirements and transfers depleted its hungry optimism. He started talking discreetly to NASA leadership about new possibilities within the agency, perhaps turning loose his powers of persuasion—his scientific charm—directly on Washington, D.C. After all, there had never been—and really, there never would be again, with all due respect to Carl Sagan—a better salesman of space.2

  Though the Houston-versus-Huntsville rivalry was alive and well in the era of budget reductions, von Braun and Faget, the two dreamers, had learned to appreciate one another. Recognition of mutual interests grew during their 1967 trip to Antarctica (a naïvely optimistic scouting trip to envision requirements for lunar bases and Mars missions). Max Faget’s son, Guy, recalls the family hosting von Braun one evening circa 1969, as the former Allied submarine officer and the Axis weapons designer celebrated their Apollo success on the Dickinson, Texas, bayou. “Our Mom was very taken with him,” Guy says of their tall, dapper guest. “Very charming guy . . . loud, pleasant laugh.” Max asked Guy to show von Braun his model rocket collection. After paying patient, close attention to the boy’s presentation, von Braun praised Guy’s attention to detail.3

  While these visionaries looked forward, most of NASA toiled to realize a previous and now pressing dream. As of January, 1969, engineers still had to pull off the unprecedented within twelve short months: landing humans on a foreign body, where any substantial mishap could publicly extinguish three lives.

  Preparing for Apollo 9, technicians and astronauts crawled into the latest lander on Earth, but despite tiptoeing about the aluminum eggshell of a ship, they broke components at every turn. NASA had one gaping question: Would a lander hold its various cracks and fragile wires together long enough to land on the Moon? The program had yet to put a habitable version into space.

  After various bouts of binging and purging, the lander had stabilized at about 3,300 pounds, the weight of a midsize sedan in today’s world. But the lander distributed those pounds like so much cotton candy. It stood twenty-three feet high and its legs spanned an area thirty-one feet across. The bug’s crew cabin had many times the volume of a sedan’s interior. Its rows of controls, switches, and indicators would overwhelm even the busiest of today’s dashboards. And unlike a car, the lander had to protect two humans from the hazards of space, all while boasting an extra engine fit to lift itself from the surface of a foreign body.4

  In January, NASA busily prepped Apollo 9. In this mission, engineers sought to place a lander into Earth orbit, along with the command and service modules, and have them practice their intricate dance near Earth: a dress rehearsal before taking the show to the Moon. Owing to basic issues of geometry, the bulbous lander could not launch in its final form, with legs deployed, nestled atop a Saturn V. During launch, the pointy-headed command module sat on top, with its service module right behind it. Underneath those sat the lander, with its legs folded like a dead, dry spider. Assuming everything went well with the launch, the astronauts would fly the command and service modules, as a combined cone-plus-can unit, away from the remnant third stage of the Saturn V; the folded lander would wait atop the third stage. Spinning carefully around to then face these remnants, the astronauts would move the pointy nose of the command module forward and dock with the lander. The two very different craft—one simple, conical, and sleek, but the other awkward and lumpy—were then connected head to head. And this unlikely chain, starting with the can and engine of the service module and ending with the legs of the lander, would comprise the entire Moon-bound Apollo spaceship. For the ninth Apollo mission, NASA wanted to build this chain in Earth orbit. Then, once astronauts occupied both the lander and the command module, they would separate, maneuver, and then dock once more.

  With some trepidation, a team from Houston arrived at the Cape and meticulously checked through the latest lander. They found nearly four hundred splices inside, where Grumman workers had already mended broken wires. Biting its collective lip, NASA decided this would have to do. They really needed to give the bug a chance to fly.

  The more significant worry involved docking between the top of the command module and the top of the lander. The three-dimensional trials in Houston had shown the connectors to be finicky. Even if the probe of the command module found the drogue of the lander, the latches sometimes failed to secure their union. In other cases, a partial connection led one module to essentially throw the other over its shoulder, as if in a judo match. In space, this unwelcome move could be a death blow.5

  Meanwhile, the USSR trumpeted a successful January docking mission, as the Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 spacecraft connected in orbit. Two cosmonauts exited one ship, and spacewalked to the other. In an eerie moment, one cosmonaut lost his grip on a camera. Instead of documenting their historic transfer, the camera drifted away, in a slow tumble, into the star-speckled void.

  After separating the craft, three of the cosmonauts safely returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz 4, while the last cosmonaut waited to bring down Soyuz 5. His descent to Earth, held for many years as a state secret, puts any dramatic episode of Star Trek to shame.i

  As with NASA’s program, the Soviets now had modular spacecraft, and the descent capsule separated from a supply- and instrument-rich segment that stayed behind in orbit. However, on Soyuz 5, they didn’t cleanly split. (It could well have been a problem like the one Pohl and his young employee found with the incomplete line of explosives meant to cleave Apollo modules, or one like the finicky docking latches.) The cosmonaut had no choice but to set his jaw and attempt re-entry dragging a non-aerodynamic, unwanted hitchhiker. As soon as he began slipping into the main atmosphere, this extra appendage tripped on the rushing air and the entire ship began to tumble end over end. Mercifully, the ship stabilized, but the cosmonaut realized to his horror: it had flipped backward. His heat shield now faced the stars. Instead of the dramatic slowdown pushing the cosmonaut into his seat, everything was reversed—physics now yanked him away from the seat and tried to extrude him through his restraining straps toward the nose of the capsule.

  Unprotected by a heat shield, the top of the ship began to melt, and smoke snaked about the capsule’s interior. The cosmonaut heard tanks of unused propellant exploding in loud bursts outside. Soon, the braking craft pulled him against his straps with more than nine times the force of gravity. And he could feel the intense heat growing all around him. He might dissipate as a bright meteor over the Motherland.

  In a stroke of luck, the chaotic rush of air spun his craft quickly about face, so that his heat shield could finally do its job. But now, pushed back into his seat at last, he realized that the parachute casings near the smoldering nose had been welded shut. Without the normal slowing from the chutes, the capsule slammed into the ground. Miraculously, he survived. The jarring impact broke many bones, but he was alive. In the sudden quiet, his steaming ship hissed against the frigid Russian soil.6

  While not announcing this terrifying re-entry, the Soviets did plan a massive celebratory parade for the four cosmonauts, claiming that the docked spacecraft had formed “the world’s first space station.” They were hungry for PR success after the Americans’ Christmas lunar trip. But the turbulent 1960s could reach any city, including Moscow. During the parade, a soldier in dark glasses stepped from the crowd and drew two pistols. Angry at being conscripted to the Russian army, he sought the
life of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, but he began firing at the wrong car. Before police could tackle the gunman, he killed the driver but missed the cosmonauts, who dropped to the floor under a spray of broken glass.7 They had to wonder if life on Earth was becoming more dangerous than life in space.

  An American at the time could have understandably considered the same question. Against the backdrop of a growing antiwar movement and both political parties preaching “law and order,” America continued to fracture its view of technology. In 1969, Housing and Urban Development, an agency even younger than NASA, lured away one of the space agency’s lead administrators, Harold Finger. Becoming HUD’s “assistant secretary for urban technology and research,” Finger led the new “Operation Breakthrough,” aiming to use technology and engineering approaches to somehow cure urban violence through the structures of cities themselves. The effort (ultimately futile) envisioned a sort of pre-fabricated, calming set of Habitrails for a new urban America.8

  While some wanted technology to fix every type of social trouble, others continued turning away. In 1969, aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh published what would become a very popular letter, renouncing technology entirely. The sixty-seven-year-old said technology had lost its way in America and that people must embrace a more natural, intuitive path to living on Earth. After serving as a boyhood hero to so many future NASA engineers, he now shook his head at the approaching Moon landings, telling readers that “in instinct rather than in intellect is manifest the cosmic plan of life.” In essence, set down your protractors, America, and go with your gut.9

  In early March, NASA launched the ninth Apollo mission on top of the fourth Saturn V rocket. This time, ascent to orbit went smoothly, give or take a bit of pogo in the second stage.

  The command and service modules glided away from the Saturn’s top stage, and now Apollo just needed to spin about and pull the lander from atop the Saturn’s third stage. But the command module was responding oddly and acting sluggish. Engineers on the ground diagnosed the problem—as he floated freely, an astronaut had accidentally flipped a switch and deactivated a set of thrusters. With a sigh, the engineers made a note to add more switch guards.