The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Yet a few, like Marlowe Cassetti, have always wondered if it hurt the space program. “I think there was a whole mood that changed in Washington,” Cassetti said. “Apollo 13 scared the management and they thought it was way too risky.”11 The public too was getting the idea that space was less romantic and less full of wonder than they’d assumed in 1958. Space seemed mostly colorless, incredibly dangerous, and either boiling hot or deathly cold by instants. Spaceships were not sleek; they were claustrophobic and uncomfortable. Life in space was razor stubble, messy hair, urine bags, and nausea. And even in a nail-biter like Apollo 13, journalists and audiences had to wade through drifts of technical terms and acronyms.

  When Hollywood’s Apollo 13 movie came out in 1995 (the era of VCRs), my father received about five copies as gifts. He was always appreciative, but we couldn’t convince him to watch it. “I don’t understand why I would want to watch this,” he said. “I lived it, and nothing could match that.” But in retrospect, Apollo 13 gave children like me a handhold for appreciating and even bragging about our NASA engineer parents. “You know Apollo 13?” we could tell our friends. “My dad was one of those pocket-protector and horn-rimmed glasses-wearing dudes figuring things out.”

  The last four flights to the Moon, all with successful landings, spanned January 1971 through December 1972. Having summited the engineering mountain, NASA could focus on lunar science. This had long been the plan, from the earliest discussions, as engineering-dominated Apollo tried to appease the scientific community.

  Nine months after Apollo 13’s near disaster, the fourteenth mission flew with not only a redesigned oxygen tank but also an extra tank, extending the possibilities for the length and ambition of the mission. Apollo 14, with much less fanfare, came very close to aborting its landing.

  By this time, the control center had enjoyed an upgrade. “Rather than trying to read all the actual digits,” computer expert Jack Garman said, “you just had these banks of lights all over your console—I had hundreds of them—of every significant event or item or error.” Green meant good, yellow meant caution, and red meant bad. The little lights had labels, but the engineers learned to read the patterns of twinkling lights as geometry, a sort of dynamic cuneiform. What they saw in Apollo 14 was an abort alert that would come on and then go off. They would ask the astronauts to reset a switch and breathe a sigh of relief when the abort light went off, only to see it come on again. Astronauts even resorted to an old-fashioned fix-it method: banging a fist against a console full of switches. This often worked, but only briefly. Engineers on Earth had to solve this problem quickly or cancel the landing. It was “the worst nightmare of all,” said Garman, who’d notably already been through Apollo 13. “I looked around, and standing behind me were about ten people. Every icon of the space program . . . I mean all of them: Gilruth, Kraft, all of them,” he said. “I woke up that we were in serious trouble at this point. . . . We only had like two hours [of fuel]. . . . And worst of all, we had too many solutions.” Dozens of different failed components, in either the wiring or in the computer program itself, could be causing the problem.

  The fact that fist pounding often erased the alarm actually helped everyone figure out the culprit: a bit of loose solder within a sealed box of electronics. Without gravity to corral it, the little metallic pebble floated from spot to spot, like a drunk moving between nearby bars, connecting critical circuit paths at random. But astronauts had little time and none of the equipment to open up a circuit near the Moon.

  With just minutes to spare, the solution emerged from a computer expert in MIT’s Instrumentation Lab. He called Houston and gave them the commands for Apollo’s unique user interface. “Verb 25 noun 7 enter; 105 enter; 400 enter; 0 enter.” While it was impossible to reprogram the Apollo computers, given software forged of magnetic rings and thick wire braids, he had devised a way—an early “hack”—to convince the computer to ignore its compromised abort warning. The third lunar landing could move ahead.12

  Apollo 14 did include a not-quite-welcome sign of the early-1970s times. An astronaut, freelancing from his appointed tasks, agreed to run a number of extra-sensory perception “experiments” with some questionable non-NASA “investigators” on Earth.iii At appointed times, the astronaut concentrated his thoughts and tried sending psychic messages to would-be “receivers” at home. After four such attempts, the results were sadly discouraging. Luckily, astronauts still had the radio antenna.13

  The last three Apollo missions ferried science packages built to run experiments on the lunar surface for years to come. To an untrained eye, the science spreads resembled the worst stereotype of a rural, southern front yard. When fully unpacked and deployed, the experiments radiated out from a central unit that looked something like an abandoned dishwasher, with an array of separate experiments extending via electrical tentacles across a lunar patch as large as a football field. Special radiation and ion detectors put their thumbs out to test the “solar wind.” Seismometers could measure tiny vibrations in the moon, discovering all sorts of “Moonquakes.” Some packs included thumpers that would make their own vibrations and listen for the Moon’s reaction, like a doctor tapping a patient’s chest. Other sensors measured the way heat flowed through the Moon’s surface or probed its magnetic properties (see Figure 13.1).

  figure 13.1 Astronauts in Florida practice deploying a lunar science package in 1970. (NASA photograph.)

  Each of the last missions also hauled extra scientific equipment in the service module so that it could collect measurements while the lander was away. These extra pieces included detailed light measuring equipment, cameras for surveying the Moon, and lasers trained on the surface, to better measure its contours, including ways the Moon might flex and shift over time.14

  The Apollo missions marked an abrupt pivot for the field of geology. Tools long developed for studying Earth turned excitedly to another body. The later missions brought back more and more material, from a greater variety of formations and terrain. A receiving lab staffer recalled understanding the shift for geology and astronomy both, when a visiting scientist had his first chance to cut into a Moon rock. “I looked over at him, and he’s shaking, literally shaking. His face is gray, and the sweat is just pouring off his forehead,” he recalled. “Here’s a man who had devoted his life to cosmic materials, meteorites and everything else. He’s looking at this sample from the Moon . . . and he’s almost beside himself.”15

  In addition to bringing back samples from the lunar surface, the astronauts in the later missions also made forays into scientific observation. Starting in the earliest days of manned spaceflight, the astronauts had endured an awkward and even frustrated relationship with science. Trained test pilots felt bogged down with the tedium of running senseless-looking experiments. Early on, they endured scientists raising all sorts of medical worries for humans in space. Then, when astronauts returned triumphantly from the Moon, scientists had insisted on caging them in a trailer for a few weeks. An early NASA astronaut once interrupted a meeting about new experiments to declare, “To hell with the scientific community!” Another eventually called science “a parasite” on Apollo.16

  Still, many of the later Apollo astronauts relished their role as humanity’s first real field geologists. NASA even hired a couple of research scientists into the astronaut corps, starting in the late 1960s. Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, flew on Apollo 17, the final trip to the Moon. Joe Allen, a physicist, worked as the scientific liaison to the Apollo 15 crew,iv the first to range far from the landing site to make geological observations and collect samples. Allen later just shrugged at the tensions related to science, and saw two different agendas necessarily competing for the astronauts’ Moon time. “If you’re a flight controller,” he said. “You just want [the astronaut] to step down . . . and then come back, because this is a very risky place, and the more time you spend . . . the more chance there is for a catastrophe.” However, a scientist wants the opposite: More time would mean more
data and more chances for fundamental discovery. In training, Allen and his fellow astronauts embarked on a number of geological field trips. They studied rare, lunar-relevant rocks in rural Minnesota, mountain ranges in arid Mexico, and cratering effects on a Nevada bombing range. Geologists wanted astronauts to recognize, for instance, the difference between impact craters and explosive craters.17

  To aid the astronauts as field geologists, the last three missions employed a last-minute device to increase the range of exploration: the lunar rover, developed by the engineers in Huntsville. A four-hundred-pound electric cart meant to carry rocks and astronauts, the scrawny rover could not support a person in Earth’s gravity, but it zipped nicely about the Moon. The rover contained some remarkable engineering. As rubber tires were heavy and ill-suited for a vacuum, engineers built tire treads from a mesh of zinc-plated piano wires. Even as the rovers provided much greater range to lunar exploration, engineers had to worry about the astronauts getting lost in such a colorless and unfamiliar terrain. And given the Moon’s paltry magnetic field, a compass would be of no use. Each rover had its own guidance system that could track how far it had moved and which ways it had turned. As a remedial backup, they also featured little sundials to help astronauts orient themselves if all else failed.

  The fifteenth mission was a sort of high point in terms of NASA’s lunar television signal. The color picture now sparkled with striking quality. Networks aired special-interest segments explaining the rover and the geology focus of the mission. Even when some of these segments went wrong, they made for good viewing. Astronaut and physicist Allen recalled NBC wanting to show off NASA’s new lunar drill, designed to extract samples from twenty feet under the surface. On live TV, in a little sandbox that NBC provided for their demonstration, an astronaut punched the go button and suddenly sank to the studio floor. “Everyone thought the drill stem had somehow broken,” Allen recalled, laughing. “What had really happened, it had drilled down through everything . . . the steel . . . into the concrete . . . and had come out the ceiling below, all in a matter of about five seconds.”18

  Apollo 15 marked the last mission to have long, live broadcasts carried on the three major networks. This time, NASA cleverly left a camera behind to record the liftoff, as the lunar module rocketed away from its own leggy landing platform and up into the Moon’s starry sky.19

  Simulations expert Frank Hughes recalls something else memorable about the crisp movies of the rovers. “Anybody who didn’t believe we went to the Moon should look at those,” he said. “When the dust would fly [from the rover’s wheels], it would fall flat. It didn’t hang in the air. . . . There was no dust hanging in the air or anything like that.” Dust and dirt kicked up by the rover fell in nice, perfect parabolas, sans floating or drifting. Such an effect would be impossible to create in an air-filled earthly studio. Hughes says he used to share this and countless other bits of logic with Moon landing skeptics but, as so many other Apollo engineers have, “I just gave up.”20

  Planners understood that the astronauts would need greater physical mobility in these last, more active missions. Seeking a suit for rock-hauling astronauts, NASA opened a competition between various suit makers. The Latex Corporation faced stiff (sorry) competition from a hard-shelled suit, but they submitted a crucial component in their pitch for their “omega” suit. In 1968, they had loaded a station wagon with recording equipment and transported a omega-suit-wearing coworker to a nearby football field. Over the next few hours, they had him do everything a football player does. He ran around with a football, threw a decent pass to another employee, caught passes in return. He even punted with his astronaut boot. The film of this odd scene, submitted to NASA, sealed the deal, and the Latex Corporation got the contract.21

  In all, the Apollo missions brought back about 2,400 samples of different lunar material, weighing about 840 pounds on Earth. The lunar receiving laboratory, long fostered by Faget against various funding threats, moved quickly from a quarantine facility to one of preservation. Most lunar rocks, three billion years old on average, own a pristine nature due to the lack of atmospheric interference—no wind, rain, or even oxygen to blemish them. As of Apollo 15, the laboratory shifted from making sure nothing could get out to making sure nothing from Earth could sneak in to contaminate these invaluable samples. “I’m talking about a very, very small difference,” the lab’s director explained of the 1971 shift in pressure. Now air gently pushed out of the lab, discouraging contamination from the outside, where it had previously sucked in, discouraging escaped material.22

  The last three missions, with their rovers, accounted for 75 percent of Apollo’s total rock haul. But even the first rock from Apollo 11 had immediately shaken the field of planetary science.

  The receiving lab included a special underground chamber for measuring the natural radioactive fingerprint of each lunar sample. Twenty-five feet underground and freed from the normal radiation noise at ground level, scientists could measure the samples in relative quiet. Many leading scientists expected radioisotope dating to find these Moon rocks, collected from the dark maria regions, to be 300 million to 500 million years old. The maria were relatively clean and smooth. Because they featured much less cratering than the lighter, highland segments of the Moon, conventional wisdom suggested these regions had formed relatively recently in astronomical terms. In 1969, once the first Moon rock cleared quarantine, scientists eagerly descended to their deep, monastic laboratory. “That first sample blew all these theories out of the water,” says modern-day lunar scientist Caleb Fassett. At 3.7 billionyears, if this sample wasn’t a senior citizen in the solar system, it was headed for retirement. Suddenly, scientists had to accept what the Moon was telling them: The most violent times for the solar system, with huge impacts and resulting craters, were mostly confined to its first billion years or so. We’d enjoyed a fairly quiet neighborhood for well over three billion years.23

  But Apollo’s scientific missions brought disappointments as well. Joe Weber, a physicist from the University of Maryland, had successfully lobbied for his special “gravimeter” to be carried to the Moon. Employing a sort of tuning fork that the cosmos could ring, Weber hoped to confirm a fanciful prediction from Albert Einstein: the existence of gravity waves, tiny ripples that move through the very fabric of space and time. The Moon would offer an unusually quiet place to sense these subtle effects, what with no rumbling trucks or portable boom boxes vibrating everything in sight. NASA officials were both excited by and proud of this big-idea type of experiment. A top NASA scientist had even claimed that “the practical utilization of gravitational waves may lead to benefits that far exceed those gained from the practical utilization of electromagnetic waves.” (Given that all radio, wireless, and optical communications use the latter, this is a very tall order.) Placed in 1972 as one of the last Apollo artifacts on the Moon, the gravimeter perked up and started reporting measurements to Earth. But Weber grew increasingly concerned with what looked like a faulty signal. With a heart so heavy one could call it crushed, Weber and his team finally realized that the earth-side manufacturer had carefully calibrated the gravimeter to balance in Earth’s gravity instead of the Moon’s. The discovery of gravity waves would have to wait another half-century. (Weber’s method never quite struck pay dirt on Earth either. More recently, gravitational waves were apparently confirmed using, in essence, the world’s longest and most precisely monitored rulers, which shrink and grow infinitesimally when the waves move past.)24

  In the final Apollo mission, scientists sent half a dozen pocket mice along for the ride. With radiation detectors embedded in their bodies, they lived in a hermetically sealed experiment and became some of the only non-human mammals to orbit the Moon and return to Earth. For what it’s worth, the five male mice all died, and the lone female survived, reinforcing what medical personnel had found in the early days of NASA: females were at no deficit when it came to space fitness, and their constitutions may even provide advantages for lo
ng-term space exploration. Shielding future astronauts (both men and women) is still an unresolved topic for long-duration space travel. There is currently no way to send a person to Mars—let alone to Mars and back—within the allowed thresholds for human radiation exposure.25

  The Apollo 17 astronauts left behind perhaps the final boot prints on the Moon, and they returned with a rare perspective that may be the most lasting impact of the Apollo program: the now ubiquitous “Blue Marble” photograph. It speaks to our home as an unlikely and precious perch, making things like national borders and political hostilities, at least briefly, appear ridiculous by comparison. They snapped this photograph on the outward journey. Apollo 17 was one of the few missions that brought a spacecraft perfectly between the sun and Earth so that, in looking back, astronauts could see their home fully illuminated. As the mission flew in December, the southern hemisphere tilted toward the sun, and the photo handsomely profiles Africa amid swirling clouds and azure waters. Astronauts had checklists and tasks through the early hours of a mission, and any photo op had to be brief. But none of the three astronauts could resist a look back toward the perfectly lit Earth.26

  At the end of 1972, with the close of Apollo, the space program itself exhaled, in terms of both funding and personnel. In what some called the “brain bust,” the nation had one hundred thousand unemployed engineers in aeronautics and astronautics. While the number sounds absurd, it fits well with the official NASA employment numbers (including both federal employees and those from the many contracting companies), which had dropped by one-third from their 1965 peak of four hundred thousand. Marlowe Cassetti recalled visiting the company that built the command and service modules. “I went into office areas that I recall during Apollo were wall-to-wall white shirts and desks,” he says. “And then it was like an empty building, like a morgue.”27 Even these shifts in employment had an abbreviation at NASA. “After the peak work of Apollo,” Huntsville’s Robert Austin recalls, “it seemed like every six months or every year there was an RIF [reduction in force]. It was really demoralizing. . . . You wondered if you’d escape the next one.”