The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Docking with the lander went surprisingly well for a first attempt and now all three modules, for the first time, flew as one Apollo craft in space. As two astronauts crawled into the lander from the command module, one astronaut became incredibly space sick, reacting to his body’s new absolute freedom. Engineers had to revamp their mission schedule, particularly for his spacewalk. Sudden vomit inside a helmet (without helpful gravity to pull it footward) could clog an astronaut’s airways, leaving his gloved hands pressed uselessly against the helmet’s glass.

  Aside from one slightly green passenger, the mission suffered very few technical worries. Over the next ten days, the lander performed well, and NASA rated the mission a success. Astronauts complained that the lander was a noisy little thing inside, but it survived jostling, docking, and maneuvering in space. It did everything but land on something—that would have to wait, but hopefully not long. The decade had barely eight months remaining.10

  The “mobile launch” concept entered full bloom at the Cape. Before the ninth mission had crawled toward the launch pad, technicians had already stacked the next Saturn V rocket in the vaulted assembly building. By the time of the next mission, in mid-May, four manned Apollo launches had spanned just seven months.

  But sometimes a head start could create its own complications, leaving too much time to tinker. Approaching its launch date, the tenth Apollo mission finally arrived on the pad, but a technician decided to replace a suspect valve. Cutting the rocket’s power line to make this change triggered part of the fuel system to open its own valves. Thousands of gallons of kerosene immediately gushed from the giant first stage and spread over the launch pad. The tank itself, roughly the size of Henry Pohl’s childhood cabin, started to buckle inward without the pressure of its contents. Happily, no stray sparks found the wayward fuel, and engineers avoided a pad conflagration. Refilling the thin metallic balloon of a fuel tank even kicked out most of its new dents. With a nervous shrug, engineers decided to plow onward, restarting the countdown.

  Launching such a major mission every two months made for a sort of steady mayhem in Houston. Engineers separated into teams for planning, preparing, and simulating the staggered missions, each with different aims, different computer programs, and even different equipment. In interviews, they speak of sometimes wandering from real missions in Mission Control to simulated practice missions in a nearby parallel facility, and becoming confused as to which was which. Engineers working a fake, preparatory mission were just as serious and focused as those running the real thing.

  Planners created recipe lists of commands for astronauts at every stage of a mission, including sequences for various emergencies that would hopefully never come to pass. Engineers referred to the extreme game planning as “dispersion analysis”—the many forking paths of the future—and some worked for years on alternate scripts that remained forever shelved, happily never needed. But mistakes were inevitable in these growing stacks of plans and procedures, no matter the double- and triple-checking. And a simple mistype on one such list snuck aboard the tenth Apollo mission.

  Departing in May, Apollo 10 would return our species to lunar orbit. This time, NASA aimed to practice everything but the landing, echoing Faget’s original, informal answer to how one approaches the Moon: cautious step by cautious step, adding one complication at a time. The launch was a rough one, as the second stage began with an intense kick—one astronaut said it felt like “a train wreck.” A few minutes later, pogo oscillations began with such intensity that the astronauts considered aborting the mission. Eyes shook so fiercely that they could not read shaking instruments. One astronaut forced his quaking hand toward a manual abort handle, but decided against it. They survived the pogo, entered a serene orbit of Earth, and soon they refired the third stage engine to push for the Moon.

  Only at this point, at their maximum speed, did the Apollo modules begin their elaborate dance, where the command module spun about and gently plucked the lander away from the third stage. Soon, all three linked modules headed for the Moon, after a little thruster kick pushed the depleted Saturn stage away (see Figure 12.2).

  figure 12.2 A step-by-step Apollo Moon mission. The Saturn V, topped by the three Apollo modules, (1) launched into Earth orbit. After the third stage re-fired and pushed the mission toward the Moon, the command and service modules spun about, docked with the lunar module, and (2) pulled it away. (Subsequent “barbecue” mode not depicted.) Once arriving at the Moon, (3) Apollo rotated until its service module engine could slow it down to enter lunar orbit. The lunar module would then depart, (4) head for a landing, and later return to rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit. With the astronauts all reunited in the command module, (5) Apollo jettisoned its lunar module, and the service module’s engine then propelled the mission toward Earth. The cones in the front of the ships give a sense of the engineers’ notion of “dispersion,” a range of possibilities. Coming back to Earth, (6) the mission would jettison the service module, bypass Earth orbit, and re-enter the atmosphere. (The labeling has been modified from a 1969 NASA illustration. Almost nothing here is to scale.)

  It may sound absurd to think of the modules executing delicate maneuvers, including docking and extraction, while moving at about twenty-five thousand miles per hour, but this perfectly underscores what Einstein (and Galileo before him) saw as the lack of any real meaning for an object’s speed. Any movement boils down to: with respect to what? In this case, because the command and service module, the lander, and the third stage were all moving together, they had no speed versus one another. And space has no wind to blow one’s hair back. While the Apollo speeds sound ridiculous, all major astronomical bodies have large speeds relative to one another, compared to our tame, everyday speeds on Earth. Earth moves at about seventy thousand miles per hour as it orbits the sun. And the sun, in turn, moves at about five hundred thousand miles per hour around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. These relative speeds have meaning, but since there is no absolute fixed point—no central rock, or star, or black hole in the universe—there is likewise no way to assign absolute speed. In this sense, Apollo setting a “speed record” for humanity should be qualified: the greatest speed of human beings . . . with respect to Earth’s surface.

  After docking, the first astronaut entering the lander pulled up short. A flurry of little white bits floated in to greet him. They lit on his spacesuit, his hair, and his face. The lander’s walls had shed insulation at some point, perhaps during the cocktail-shaker launch.11 What else might have come loose? Luckily, engineers had wired the newer landers with slightly thicker wire. It carried extra pounds but had comforted engineers with many fewer problems.

  This trip to the Moon showcased engineers’ calculations like never before. The two hundred forty thousand miles went by like a perfect computer simulation. Given a flawless trajectory, engineers skipped most of the scheduled checkpoints for course corrections. Once our nearest neighbor loomed large once more, three humans slipped away from any view of the Earth and around the back side of the Moon, where a perfect burn of the service module’s engine inserted the mission into lunar orbit. With two astronauts aboard, the lander departed its sibling modules and descended to just nine miles above the lunar surface. Skimming over the Moon this close allowed NASA to get the best data yet on the uneven gravity there. If the two astronauts were tempted to defy orders and set down on the Moon, self-preservation stopped them. Figuring it was best not to tempt anyone, engineers hadn’t loaded enough fuel for a landing.

  Flying over dramatic, colorless landscapes, the astronauts went through their lists of orders for flipping switches and entering commands. They had done this thousands of times in practice missions and simulations, with no reason to doubt what was typed on a page of instructions. But suddenly a crew member radioed a very unpracticed and un-NASA-like “son of a bitch!” to Earth. The astronaut, Eugene Cernan, didn’t even append “over.” The lander, now spinning out of control, seemed to have lost its computerize
d mind.

  As the astronauts in the low-flying lander had prepared another in a long line of tests, one of the recipe lists instructed them to set a single switch—one of hundreds—incorrectly. Following the mistaken setting, the lander had commenced an automated search for its partner modules. But they were out of sight, in a different orbit. It was as if a stranger had leaned down to a grocery-store-wandering toddler and sternly asked, “Do you know where your parents are?” A violent pitching rotation resulted, with alarm lights flashing. The lander warned the crew that it was about to lose all notion of its own orientation—it wouldn’t know which way was “up” from the Moon—and the sickening spin might become permanent.ii Astronauts quickly took over manual control and righted the crazy ship, but not before the expletive made its one-and-a-half-second sprint to Earth’s waiting ears, alarming Mission Control’s assembled engineers (and probably a few Russian eavesdroppers as well).

  After successfully redocking with the command module, the three astronauts, together again, completed thirty-one orbits of the Moon and refired the service module engine for their return trip. The entire eight-day mission, despite extra spins and stress, solidified confidence in the Apollo game plan and brought home the best description yet for the Moon’s spastic gravity.12

  Rolling into July, with every preparatory step complete and every module working well, NASA readied a Moon landing. Just eight years and two months had passed since President Kennedy issued the challenge. The milestones, the solutions, the hours, the sum toll on the engineers and their families didn’t seem to fit within that time. But it looked like all the work might pay off with a hard-to-fathom moment. Henry Pohl’s son, then about five, recalls big gatherings of the engineers and their families, as NASA welcomed them to the center and screened films summarizing each Apollo mission along the way.13

  The media prepared for a grand show. As the Apollo 11 launch approached, 3,500 reporters from around the world descended on the Cape, and hundreds more gathered near Mission Control in Houston. At a July 10 press conference, a NASA panel fielded all manner of question about astronauts, the spacecraft, and the Moon itself. But the once-central Wernher von Braun received exactly zero questions; he sat politely listening. Given the chance later to make some remarks, he responded to all the great excitement and what was, to some, a celebratory air. Maybe the lack of attention made him a bit cranky. But he knew they’d been lucky in space so far. And surprises surely lurked in attempting a landing. A sobering number of unmanned probes had accidentally smashed themselves on the Moon like so many dropped pieces of china. “Something may happen and the public should be prepared for the shock,” he said. And even if the astronauts lived, he wanted to temper excitement for the maximally safe and relatively featureless landing site and what could be learned there. “The maria on the Moon,” he said, referring to the flatter, darker areas, “are about as much value to science as a gravel pit.”

  When a clutch of reporters gathered around him on July 14, he let himself return to his more quotable rocket-sage self. Asked how to place a Moon landing in historical context, he ranked it “about with the importance of aquatic life first crawling on land.”14

  CBS News prepared a television extravaganza of wholly new proportions. They built a massive studio especially for the Moon landing, with 142 cameras, a special interview area, a new desk for mission updates, and a number of spacecraft models. Space fan Walter Cronkite would run the show, planning for an unprecedented day-and-a-half of continuous coverage. But the ringmaster behind the scenes, producer Robert Wussler, pioneered a new sort of broadcast. How would CBS fill all those minutes? For one, they would roll out “experts” as talking heads. Wussler hoped academics, astronauts, literary figures, and NASA officials could jabber away between infrequent bursts of updates. CBS lined up hundreds of candidates ahead of time. A decade later, Wussler would co-found the Cable News Network, utilizing the same blueprint, one that would eventually fill our lives with armies of arguing faces.

  As additional filler and entertainment for audiences, the network enlisted the services of a small animation company, Reel III, to create life-like visions of the space mission. Their short movies, incredible in retrospect, offered vistas that could never be captured by a real television camera (e.g., the lander detaching from the command module in lunar orbit, or a perfect perspective view of the lander approaching the Moon). A technical illustrator named Ralph McQuarrie spearheaded these animations. After modeling the gritty reality of the function-over-form Apollo missions, he would go on to advise a young director on a space epic called Star Wars, with its own lumpy and gritty spaceships.15

  Engineers went through countless checklists, and technicians monitored hundreds of dials for fuel pressures, temperatures, and boil-off rates. Still others worried about the sun. It had suffered an unusually restless month, having spit forth a couple of solar flares already. Whether in barbeque mode or not, an Apollo craft in transit could get roasted by such an event.16

  Engineers kept running simulations into the last weeks before takeoff, trying to find each conceivable thing that could go wrong and combing computer code for whatever remnant bugs might be lurking there. Day to day, their confidence improved that this mission really would work. Mission Control managers told a small group of engineers to make sure they understood every possible Apollo computer alarm and what it meant. The engineers devised robust “cheat sheets” telling them what to do for each error message, even the most unlikely ones. “As I look back on that, I’m horrified,” said engineer and Apollo computer guru Jack Garman, “because we’d have them written on the back of envelopes. . . . We would stick these things under the plastic on the console.”17

  Some of the errors were head-scratchers. In one case, just days before launch, Apollo’s computer appeared to throw up its hands and give up. Engineers failed to diagnose the problem or what had triggered it. They simply had to abort that practice run—what else could they do? They hoped that obscure error wouldn’t show up again during the real mission. Consulting with the programmers at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, the Mission Control crew learned that some of the error alarms could be ignored, while others were dire. They annotated their lists accordingly.

  Engineer Tom Moser, sitting at his desk in Houston, received a strange visit from his boss. “I’m going to give you an assignment, but you can’t talk to anybody about it,” the supervisor said. “Congress has said we’re putting a United States flag on the Moon.” This was against the spirit of a recent treaty, but Uncle Sam was going for it.iii Now, this one engineer needed to design a storable flag that could easily deploy and fly proudly, in a vacuum. Moser would also need to find a place for the flag. The boss emphasized there was no spare room inside the lander. Stored somewhere outside, the flag had to be easy for astronauts to find but not close enough to the engine to get toasted. Moser came up with a telescoping flag stored in a long, thin case, almost like a pool stick. A top bar would hold up the nylon stars and stripes, despite the absence of breeze. After a lot of nervous consideration, he decided to attach this case to the lander’s descent ladder. He determined it shouldn’t affect the ladder’s strength or performance, but given the secrecy, and the short deadline, he couldn’t have anyone double-check his work.18

  As the launch approached, America wasn’t exclusively flag-waving. Various protests ramped up. An engineer recalled leaving a long Houston shift and seeing bona fide hippies protesting nearby. He’d heard about protests in the news but had never actually seen one before. This one appeared subdued in the thick summer heat. And at the Cape, civil rights leader Reverend Ralph Abernathy declaimed technological extravagance by leading a mule train, a symbol of long oppression and poverty, to the launch complex. A NASA administrator went to meet with Abernathy, suggesting earnestly but not literally, “I want you to hitch your train to our rocket.” We’re all in this together, he wanted to say. The reverend wasn’t persuaded, but he politely accepted tickets to watch the launch from the viewing
stand.19

  On July 16, an incredibly humid day even by Florida standards, the Saturn V rocket did not disappoint the crowds, and better yet, every stage gave the precious cargo a relatively smooth, pogo-free ride to orbit. The big hydrogen engine on the third stage relit on request and sent this eleventh Apollo mission on its way to the Moon. With all modules flying away from Earth, the astronauts maneuvered to dock with the bug and pull it from its shroud. The only slight cause for worry reminded some of the tragic capsule fire: an astronaut crawling into the lander detected a faint, sour odor, as if something might be smoldering.

  The two-day trip to the Moon went smoothly, with just one course adjustment in route. After Apollo eased into lunar orbit, the astronauts, their spacecraft, all of NASA, CBS, and Walter Cronkite were ready, and the lander detached from its siblings. With its crew of two, it finally began its real work, heading for the lunar surface. Its arc was not straightforward. Astronauts could not stand at their windows, watching the approach of craters and chasms. For most of its descent, the lander glided at a shallow angle with the astronauts facing up—imagine sledding down a gentle slope on your back. The crew faced the stars, placing their faith in their instruments and their onboard computer.

  Many busy systems on the lander came to chattering life, making sure it knew where it was, exactly, and where the Moon was, exactly. Its single descent engine, wholly separate from the one that would later propel it back to orbit, was a flexible machine, angling its thrust much like a skunk does its precise sprayer. This wasn’t just for fine control of the lander’s descent. It was a lumpy craft, and it contained not just two fidgety humans but also steadily decreasing fuel levels. In short, it was not what physicists call a “uniform body.” Hence, the lander in action was prone to unwelcome spinning, if an engine burst wasn’t directed through the lander’s exact center of mass. As the lander’s distribution of weight constantly shifted during descent, the lander’s engine nozzle, guided by the on-board computer, would thrust in such a way as to avoid spins.