by Jay Barbree
At nearly seven miles a second—24,500 miles an hour—the rocket stage shut down. For the fourth time the three men “tumbled forward” against their harnesses, then once again they were weightless.
“We’re on our way, guys!” Shepard exclaimed.
Stu Roosa raised a clenched fist. “Right on!” he cried.
There was no sensation of movement, only the delicious freedom of floating without weight. Immediately they rid themselves of the bulky, movement-confining pressure suits and donned comfortable flight coveralls. They were grinning like kids at a country swimming hole. They felt terrific.
An hour later, like a house of cards on a table shaken wildly, their world seemingly came tumbling down about their ears. Fourteen would suddenly be in deep trouble and, just as quickly, the scheduled moon landing would seem millions of miles away.
Stu Roosa now began the procedure of separation, turnaround, and docking Kitty Hawk nose-to-nose with the lunar module Antares. The maneuver had been accomplished on the previous Apollo flights with ease. Antares was parked in a “garage” attached to the top of the now-empty third stage. Stu would separate from the stage, fly a short distance away, and maneuver back for a hookup with the moon ship. Extending forward from the top of Kitty Hawk was an arrow-like probe, which Roosa would connect with a cone-shaped drogue receptacle on Antares’s nose. The hook system assured a firm connection between the two ships and a tunnel through which the astronauts could float from one craft to the other.
Three metal probe latches, each the size of a cigarette, would lock inside the drogue and inch both spacecraft close enough for twelve larger and stronger latches on matching docking collars to clamp together tightly.
“Let’s do it,” said Shepard quietly.
“Houston, we’re in a position to proceed with the docking,” Roosa informed CapCom.
“We copy. You have a GO, Kitty Hawk”
Command Module Pilot Roosa fired his small control thrusters with the touch of a surgeon. Kitty Hawk and the heavy service module nudged gently toward the docking target.
The arrow slipped into the waiting cone. “Hot damn, you hit it dead center, Stu,” Mitchell confirmed. The astronauts listened for the click of latches catching, watching their control panels for the green light that would confirm capture. No click. No green light.
They were astonished to see the docking probe rebound from Antares. “What the hell is going on?” Shepard asked with impatience. Stu had made a perfect dock, but it had refused to “take.”
“Houston, we’ve failed to secure a dock,” Stu called to earth.
CapCom hesitated before answering. In Mission Control tension joined the duty team. Then a call, “Roger, Kitty Hawk. You’ve got a GO for another attempt.”
Apollo 14 sailed alone through the endless ocean toward the moon. Exuberance turned to concern. Stu turned to Shepard. “Al, what do you think?”
Shepard kept it cool. “The position was perfect. So were you. Let’s go again.”
Stu nodded, notified CapCom. “Houston, we’re going in one more time.”
Shepard and Mitchell could only watch as Roosa maneuvered the heavy command and service modules with his exquisite touch on the controls. In Houston, the huge control-room drone of noise and voices fell to the hiss and crackle of the open radio frequency to Kitty Hawk. Controllers either sat on the edge of their chairs or were standing, listening, waiting.
A whispered voice carried across the room. “If they can’t dock, there goes the farm.”
Far out in space, Roosa tweaked his thrusters. Perfect alignment. Probe and cone met, snubbed tightly.
And separated.
Roosa’s voice carried through Mission Control, flat-toned, frustrated. “Houston, we do not have a dock. We’re going to pull back and give this some thought.”
“Roger, Kitty Hawk. We’ll be doing the same down here.”
The standby teams in Houston, kept on alert for emergencies with a flight in progress, came running. A sudden, loud cry burst through the groups. “Where in the hell are the probe and drogue?”
“We’ve always had a docking probe and drogue available in the control center,” Chris Kraft said with swiftly fading patience, “as well as experts on the system.” There were frantic calls for assistance, and the absent docking system had to be hurriedly located to help engineers understand what might be going on thousands of miles out in space.
In the spacecraft cabin, concern became a fog of gloom. Failure to dock successfully would cancel the scheduled moon landing by Shepard and Mitchell. Alan was swept from frustration to anger, the latter emotion all the worse because the crew had to wait for Houston’s recommendations. No one needed to voice aloud the penalty for a docking failure. If the lunar landing went into the bucket, Apollo 14 would fly an alternate mission, orbiting the moon for two days to map and study the surface with new cameras and instruments.
The whole idea galled Alan. Worse, he thought, their failure to land could once again unleash the critics and doom what was left of Project Apollo.
“No way,” he told himself. “I’ve got to take this trip all the way down to landing. We’ve got to fix this thing.”
Apollo 14’s mission now clung precariously to mechanical latches that needed no hydraulic pressure, no electrical energy, no pneumatic drive. Metal pieces were supposed to come together with utter simplicity, go click, and lock. It was maddening to be blocked by one of the simplest mechanisms of the entire Apollo program.
In Houston, the probe and drogue teams met with top officials of Mission Control. Flight controller John Llewellyn, Bob Gilruth, Chris Kraft, Deke Slayton, and others huddled together, shoving the probe again and again into the drogue receptacle.
It worked every time on earth, but had failed every time in space.
The components were exactly the same. One man ran his fingers over the smooth metal in Mission Control. “If a piece of debris, or even dirt, lodged in this mechanism, the one that’s on Fourteen, then it’s possible it prevents the latches from depressing. That prevents, as well, their snapping into place.”
“Hell, if that’s the case, then Stu should keep at it. Coming back again could dislodge whatever is blocking the hard dock.”
“Tell him to stay with it.”
Three times in the next hour Stu Roosa brought Kitty Hawk in with his precise maneuvering. Three times the arrow slid into perfect position.
Three times the message came down from space: “No joy.”
A new problem loomed. Roosa had been maneuvering Kitty Hawk so many times that he was eating into the limited fuel reserves of the spacecraft. Mission Control passed the word. Stu could make one, perhaps two more attempts, and then the docking maneuver must be abandoned.
And then they’d fly a limited, secondhand, blah mission.
Shepard got on the line to Houston. To hell with this again-and-again business, he told CapCom. It’s not working. He recommended the crew get back into pressure suits, depressurize the cabin, and he’d exit Kitty Hawk far enough to reach the top of Antares and pull the two ships to a hard dock.
Mission Control teams discussed the matter briefly. Too dangerous, they said. They told Alan to remain in Kitty Hawk. Deke Slayton knew the frustration, the disappointment his friend must be enduring, but he concurred with the decision.
Several men rushed back to Mission Control from working in the simulators. “We think we may have a way,” they said. CapCom passed the word to Roosa.
Change the procedure. Come in faster and harder for the docking; ram the docking probe as deeply as possible into the cone. If the closure rate was great enough, and absolutely accurate, the latches could telescope from the impact. That would drive Kitty Hawk hard up against Antares and hold it there long enough to engage the twelve latches of the docking rings directly. If the smaller latches, which normally made the first connection, were faulty, then they could be bypassed and a hard dock achieved.
If.
It had never been
done except several minutes before in a simulator. And the simulator was a hell of a distance away from Kitty Hawk and Antares.
Roosa wasted no time preparing for what he and his crewmates realized was a do-or-die attempt.
“Houston,” Shepard called, “we’ve got the LM on the television for you.”
“Roger, Kitty Hawk, we see it. “There are scratches on the drogue . . . probe is entering on target.”
Roosa went on line. “Houston, requesting a fuel status.”
None of the astronauts liked the response. “Kitty Hawk, we’ll reevaluate following your attempt to dock.”
“Roger, Houston.”
Suspense built as the gleaming Apollo rode on invisible rails toward the moon lander.
“Houston, we’re going in,” Roosa said quietly.
“Good luck, Kitty Hawk.”
“Luck, hell!” thought an angry Shepard. It was time to stop screwing around with gentle maneuvers and worrying about fuel usage.
Time to ram the throttle forward, push the power right to the firewall.
“Stu!”
Roosa looked at his commander.
“Stu, just forget about trying to conserve fuel. This time, juice it!”
Kitty Hawk charged ahead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
No Turning Back
THE APOLLO 14 COMMAND SHIP, Kitty Hawk, appeared as if it were a thick-bodied creature about to devour the lunar module Antares. Its crewmembers sat three across, readying the spacecraft for its final shot at docking. Stu Roosa took his cue from Alan Shepard. He dismissed his concerns over fuel quantity in the tanks and brought his thrusters up for a full-power charge.
Three men braced themselves. Roosa brought Kitty Hawk alive with a powerful blast from the thrusters. Spears of transparent flame streaked back. Vibrating and shaking, Kitty Hawk burst forward. Shepard’s command to “Juice it!” still rang in Roosa’s ears as the probe at the tip of Kitty Hawk slammed into the lunar module cone.
Both ships rocked from the impact. No one dared to breathe, afraid the two spacecraft might once again rebound away from each other.
C’mon, grab, grab . . . grab you . . .
If Shepard’s force of will could have kept the two ships joined as one, it—
No rebound!
They listened with fierce intensity, knowing not only the future of their mission but also the whole Apollo program was hanging on just one sound.
Click! The capture light came on!
“Got it!” three men yelled as one, pent-up breath bursting from their lungs. As quickly as exultation swept through them, they were silent, their eyes riveted to Shepard’s data panel.
Alan turned his face slowly. The furrows that creased his forehead were swept away like smoke before the wind. His teeth flashed with that Tom Sawyer grin.
“We have a hard dock,” he said quietly.
Roosa jammed his transmit button. He wanted to shout, but soft words had the same effect. “Houston, we’ve got a hard dock.”
“Roger that, Kitty Hawk. We confirm.” They could hardly hear the words of CapCom. In the background Mission Control was a bedlam of whistles and cheering. Shepard took a deep breath. They hadn’t won this race yet. And they’d almost lost everything because someone had not done his job. A piece of dirt or debris had stuck in their docking mechanism, thwarting their plans and training.
He shook off the euphoria of the successful docking. “Houston, we’re ready for business up here.”
But Houston had applied the brakes. Controllers couldn’t keep Apollo 14 from its energy-impelled drift moonward, but they refused to clear Shepard and his crew to continue with the planned lunar touchdown.
They were justifiably edgy about making premature conclusions. Flight operations boss Sig Sjoberg told his team leaders he was going to be damned sure “that this thing is indeed satisfactory for docking— again—before we can commit to the moon landing.”
From his position, Sig was right. But the commander in Kitty Hawk, way out in the middle of nothing and on a planned collision course with the moon, was ready to chew his nails. He knew what Sig was doing, looking at all the possibilities. Suppose Alan and Ed made a great moon landing mission, boosted back up, and then failed to dock with the command module? Their only chance for survival, let alone making the mission pay off, would be a never-tried formation flight between Kitty Hawk and Antares—slinging rope tethers between the two ships, and performing an impromptu space walk, also moving boxes of moon rocks from one ship to the other.
Well, hell! Shepard would have paced back and forth if cramped quarters in zero-g had allowed it. Any test pilot worth an ounce of salt knows you can’t predict all the problems and possibilities. That’s why funereal smoke had drifted upward from test fields from the beginning of aviation. You knew the chances you were taking before you even slipped on your flight boots. It was no different now.
Besides, he and Mitchell had tested that jury-rigged ship-to-ship transfer in the astronaut water-training tank. They had had fits, frustrations, and snarls, but they’d done it. And they could do it again. They didn’t need another guaranteed hard dock. They could do the mission without—
CapCom reminded Alan and his crew they’d been up nineteen straight hours. “Get some rest,” they ordered.
That’s the great thing about flying on a centrifugal slingshot. They went to sleep, and Kitty Hawk kept chugging to the moon.
Shepard slept fitfully, alternating between brief periods of deep sleep and half-awake restlessness. Aware he faced unexpected problems, he was working out the solutions and alternatives before they happened. That way he could react to virtually any scenario instead of wasting precious time trying to figure out who or what was trying to take down his craft.
Several times he awoke and was drawn to the viewing ports of Kitty Hawk, where he could convince himself again that he was actually living what for so long had been a dream. It was folly beyond comprehension even to consider backing out of this mission before they’d gone all the way. To have vanquished odds that would have felled a hundred men and then quit because of some mechanical hang-up went against every fiber of his being.
It wasn’t just his experience as a fighter pilot and test pilot that accounted for these feelings. Shepard believed absolutely that in almost every respect a man’s adult character is formed in his early years. He considered himself to have been blessed in many ways, not the least of which was having as a father a man with an innate ability to understand machinery. Making things work had been as commonplace to the young Alan Shepard as opening a book on flight, and he’d done that many a time. Even as far back as age four, when Charles Lindbergh had made his solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris. That’s when the love for aviation first had begun to grow inside him.
And what had been given as this gift by his father began to reap rewards while still in his teen years. Alan Shepard became, in the classic sense, an airport bum. There is no deprecation in this term. The airport bums were those kids who hung out at airports, doing odd jobs, seeking eagerly to sweep out hangars, to wash airplanes, to run the fuel hoses and change oil and clean windshields, all to hear the hallowed words, “Hey, kid, want a ride?”
That’s where it began, and from sweeping and cleaning, the local pilots learned that young Shepard had mechanical magic in his hands. He could repair broken fuel and oil lines, torque replacement spark plugs just so. He could be trusted to taxi planes from one part of a field to another. Through this process began the skills of knowing how to listen to an engine, how to feel what a winged machine is telling its pilot.
“The Fix-it Kid.” That was young Alan Shepard.
“A born pilot.” That, too, was the praise from the experienced flyers.
The teenager walking, bumming a ride, or pedaling between home and airport was beginning to realize his dreams. He would be among the best.
Yet his wildest dreams could not match the reality of this moment. The kid who had thought bre
athlessly of flying at a hundred miles an hour had made the long upward march from rag-wings to metal, from propellers to jets, and exchanged his greasy jeans and coveralls for g-suits and flight gear and the helmet over his head and went supersonic.
And in spite of the years of fighting his inner-ear problem, it had happened. He was here, moonbound, and he wasn’t going to let some mechanical burp or a piece of scratched metal screw up his mission. Not if he had to step outside and change the oil in this thing, if he had to fix a “flat” on Apollo 14, he was taking his lunar ship to a touchdown in the Fra Mauro highlands on the shore of the moon’s Ocean of Storms.
“To hell with worrying about docking after the moonwalk,” Shepard told himself. If Roosa was unable to complete a successful linkup on the return from the lunar surface, Alan had made up his mind to break all mission rules and fix the broken machine himself. He would have Stu hold the ships tightly with thrusters and in his pressure suit he’d climb into the tunnel between the two craft and manually pull them together.
He couldn’t tell controllers what he had planned. They would have ordered him not to proceed with so foolhardy a move. But he was determined to do whatever was necessary to go on with the mission.
Houston greeted them at the end of their ten-hour break. “How’d you guys sleep?” asked CapCom.
“My mattress was hard,” complained Roosa. A neat trick in weightlessness, but Stu carried it off with a straight face.
Alan was in no mood for casual banter. He glared at the cabin speakers until he heard Mission Control say, “You are GO.”
The moon landing was back on the schedule. Tests on the ground had proven even a small chunk of debris could have fouled Roosa’s docking maneuvers, that the astronauts could repeat their earlier “juice it” maneuver if it became necessary. Shepard lightened up when he heard the news. “Hot damn!” he exclaimed.
They sailed without a quiver through the halfway mark toward the moon. Gravitational pull from earth had slowed their speed to little more than a tenth of what it had been but they were still moving at a heady 3,200 miles an hour. To the impatient Shepard they were “crawling” through space.
