by Jay Barbree
As the long hours passed they marveled at the glow of a moon growing ever larger in their view. During their scheduled rest periods Alan Shepard took every opportunity to study both the diminishing earth and the expanding details of their destination. “Kitty Hawk, how big a moon are you seeing?” asked CapCom.
“Sort of half,” Alan replied. “It appears about the size of an orange held at arm’s length. The moon is starting to take on a little bit of brown and grayish colors about this point, as opposed to being as bright as it appears from earth. You can start to see a little bit of texture.”
When they awoke from their second sleep period, Alan and Ed floated into Antares for a meticulous checkout of their lander. Two hours later, they notified Houston their bird was “immaculate” and ready to go.
Terrestrial gravity diminished, and the moon’s grip assumed dominance, a steady acceleration toward the small world now less than forty thousand miles before them. Global size required new thinking. The diameter of the moon just about equaled the distance from Los Angeles to New York.
“The moon is out my rendezvous window right now,” Mitchell updated Houston. “We’re running downhill very rapidly toward it.”
The next day, they swept around the lunar far side into the thirty-three-minute radio blackout with earth. Thirteen minutes later, Roosa fired their big engine to reduce their speed by two thousand miles an hour.
“We’ve got capture orbit,” Roosa confirmed as they emerged from the far side.
“This is really a wild place,” Shepard sang out.
“Fantastic!” exclaimed Roosa. “You’re not going to believe this, but it looks just like the map.”
Mitchell gazed down with awe. “That’s the most stark and desolate-looking piece of country I’ve ever seen,” he added.
“Let’s get to work, troops,” Alan said, breaking up the sightseeing tour.
Roosa dropped them into an elliptical orbit with its low point ten miles above the surface. This would enable Shepard and Mitchell to save fuel for the critical phase just before touchdown. It was their best shot of making a bull’s-eye landing.
On the twelfth orbit, Alan and Ed, moonwalk suits pressurized, unplugged from Kitty Hawk. Stu Roosa watched every move as the two spacecraft separated. “Okay,” he called to Antares, “you’re moving out. You seem real steady. I’m going to back away from you.”
For the next four hours Shepard and Mitchell studied the lunar landscape on passes over their highland landing area at Fra Mauro and ran through their spacecraft systems and computer programs before being cleared to fire their descent engine and head for the surface.
As they swept above Fra Mauro, excitement grew in the lander. “There it is, big as life,” Mitchell radioed. “The sun angle looks real good for the next time around.”
Shepard was ready to drop the hammer with rocket fire. But not yet. He and Ed would take advantage of every allotted minute of checkout time, coordinating with Houston, to confirm Antares was in perfect shape for descent.
As they continued their sweep over their landing site, Alan recognized nearby craters. “I have Cone Crater, Triplet, and Doublet,” he told Mitchell. Both men watched more details flash past. “Star and Sunrise. Right down there . . . ”
“On the nose,” Mitchell confirmed.
“Got ‘em!” Shepard said, excitement rising in his voice. “Yep, sure do. Hoo-ha! I think we’ll know them next time.”
Mitchell called out their checklist items, watching every move Shepard made, backing him up on every detail, missing nothing. Then it was time to begin the complete dress rehearsal of their computer-controlled descent program.
“Final pre-landing check,” he announced to Alan. “Time to punch in.”
The rehearsal was a full practice run for the lander’s computers, for all its systems that would be used to fly the descent flight path to Fra Mauro.
“Got it,” Shepard replied. He activated the simulated lunar descent profile sequence just as he’d done so many times with Ed in the ground simulators. Only this, hopefully, would be the final, final run-through.
Numbers flashed by as the critical sequence moved through the computers. If there was going to be a problem in the system, now was the time to discover the glitch and get it fixed.
“Practice descent has started,” Shepard announced. “The computer is beginning the practice descent.”
“On the mark,” Mitchell confirmed.
They would do everything except fire the descent engine for this rehearsal.
But no sooner had the simulation begun than something did not click. Their monitors should have indicated that the computers had simulated engine ignition and that they were beginning their descent as if they were really on their way.
“Oops!” Mitchell exclaimed. “Hey, we’re not showing a descent sequence.”
Disbelief was clear in Shepard’s voice as he called Houston. “Hey, our abort program has kicked in!”
Everyone in Mission Control leaned toward monitoring consoles. They all shared the same thought. If this had been the moment of truth, if they actually had been trying to fire the engine and that abort program kicked in, Shepard and Mitchell would never reach the moon. The abort program called for a rapid-fire sequence of events. The ascent-stage engine of the lunar lander would hurl out fire, the two stages would separate, and the computers would set Alan and Ed on a rendezvous course with Kitty Hawk, the mother ship.
“We copy, Antares,” Houston responded. They had the currency of time in the bank for the fix. That’s why they have the rehearsal. “Try your descent program again.”
“Roger, Houston, we, ah—” Shepard’s voice cut off as their consoles indicated that this time their engine would have fired on schedule. Mitchell glued his eyes to the panel. His instruments showed the simulation was underway. “We show simulated engine start. Everything came on line.”
“Descent program commencing,” Shepard, confirmed to Houston. “It’s starting down.”
One man in Mission Control held up crossed fingers. “Now if it just runs like this when it’s time to really light the fire.”
“You bet.”
The simulation suddenly was hung up again. Shepard’s words burst through 240,000 miles of space. “Houston!” They could tell the vexation in his voice. “Our abort program has kicked in again.”
Mitchell turned to Shepard. “Al, are we snakebit?”
Alan studied his instrument readouts. They had a great ship, but somewhere in the innards of their computers a spurious signal was loose, like a virus, leaping from its assigned circuitry and kicking in the abort signal.
Suddenly that long pre-descent checkout period had become an invaluable blessing.
CapCom was as baffled as the two men swinging over rugged mountain lands. “This is Houston. You sure someone up there doesn’t have a thumb on the abort button?”
Both astronauts checked. The “panic button” to kick in an emergency abort was securely encased in a plastic shield that prevented accidental tripping. Yet that mysterious signal kept hamstringing their computer.
“Nobody’s on the abort button,” Shepard radioed.
Mitchell was scanning every switch, gauge, and control, looking for the spurious-signal needle in his or Shepard’s electronic haystack.
Everything checked out perfectly. Except that their mission was coming unglued before their eyes.
Mitchell’s voice remained the cool Mr. Unflappable that Shepard knew so well. “According to everything on the panels, Al, we’re smack on. Everything checks out normally.”
“Houston, come in,” Alan called. “What’s wrong with this ship?”
“Stand by, Antares.”
The two astronauts exchanged knowing looks. They’d have to wait for an answer. The established routine to handle a problem like the one they faced was to gather the best brains in Mission Control and hammer out a solution.
They were right. Top officials and engineers went into a huddle. Eyes ke
pt looking to the timers on the walls. There was a finite period in which to produce a solution. Little more than three hours.
They went with the theory that if Antares’ computers were picking up a short circuit in the abort switch, it would cause the very problem being faced by the two astronauts. They soon isolated it to one set of contacts of the switch on the lunar module’s instrument panel. Recycling the switch, or tapping on the instrument panel, removed the signal from the computers.
The experts realized they could reprogram Antares’ computers so they would ignore the abort command. But this killed their automatic abort capability. That was taking one hell of a chance.
“They’re the best,” Deke Slayton said with steely authority. “Get with it!”
A telephone call roused Donald Eyles, MIT’s computer whiz, out of a sound sleep in Massachusetts. He threw a coat over his pajamas. By the time he reached the front door, an Air Force car was pulling into his driveway. Moments later he was on his way to his office at Draper Labs.
Eyles, who had helped develop the lunar module computer programs and knew them better than anyone, listened to the problem, nodded, sat before his computer keyboard, and began a new program to eliminate the glitch in the lunar lander quarter million miles away. He also found a way to dump the unwanted signal that would still leave the two men with their auto abort option.
Ninety minutes remained as his fingers flew across the keys. He pushed back his chair and announced, “Done.” Immediately a specialist fired the program into the lunar module simulator computer in Houston. The test run flashed back in numbers.
“It’s perfect!” called out the monitor for computer systems.
Flight Director Jerry Griffin barked at his crew. “Let’s get it up to them!”
Antares hauled around the far side of the moon.
Alan and Ed had thirty minutes left before their lander would be over the point on the lunar surface where they must fire the descent engine for real. Or the mission went down the rat hole.
“This is CapCom, Antares. The new computer program has been checked. We’re sending it up to you.”
Electronic signals flashed at the speed of light to the spidery space vessel.
Finally: “Antares, transmission is completed.”
Shepard felt as if he and Ed were treading a minefield. Every minute lost now was gone forever. “We have it all,” he said clearly.
Alan turned to Mitchell. “This is your ball game, Ed.”
Mitchell lowered the lights, stared at the bright numbers, and raced against the clock to reprogram the computers with the new descent-flight profile data. Shepard watched in silence as Ed fed sixty new sets of information, in perfect order, in the system’s logic circuitry. Once again he lived up to his reputation as the smartest in the astronaut corps.
“It’s all yours, Al,”
“Houston, we’ve got it,” Shepard notified CapCom.
“Good show, Antares.”
Mitchell turned from his window. “Al, we’re coming up on point.”
“Got it.” Shepard, whose frustration had been rising, exhaled a great sigh of relief. Mitchell had completed the new computer program with barely fifteen minutes left in the bank before they would have been forced to head for a rendezvous with Kitty Hawk. He’d had to stand by with his hands itching to fix something. But you can’t climb into a computer, buried deep inside a spaceship, with a screwdriver or a wrench. Not unless you want to kill the thing. And Antares had needed perfect logic programming and exquisite accuracy to prevent that maddening abort signal.
Shepard swore that, no matter what happened from here on out, they were going down to the rugged surface. This wasn’t just his ship. If it didn’t land, Apollo 14 likely would be the last of its kind to try for the moon.
“Houston, we’re commencing with the descent program.” He didn’t ask controllers. He told them.
“Antares, you have a GO.”
PDI. That’s what they called it, and Alan Shepard worked his controls with the precision and experience of thirty years of flying as Antares’ descent engine came to life with transparent flame, danced on the fire, and arced moonward.
They were still racing at 3,700 miles an hour as they moved through 46,100 feet above the surface.
Twelve minutes and thirteen seconds from landing.
They went down, thrusters working to keep them perfectly aligned along their flight path. Dull thudding sounds, the ship rocking fore and aft, side to side. Airless turbulence. Every time a thruster fired, they heard the distant hollow sound, felt the punch through their feet and hands.
No longer could they see the moon. Blind faith in Antares’s systems was now their lot. They fell down and backward, their eyes looking out into space.
“Coming on down, just like the book says,” Mitchell announced as casually as if flying any airplane on final approach.
He grinned at his partner. “No more snake bites, Al?” he chuckled.
But the snake came back hissing with a vengeance. Shepard was looking from his panel to the outside and back again when Ed gave him the bad news. Mitchell’s voice had a distinct edge in it.
“Al, I’m not getting a landing radar update.”
Shepard didn’t blink. “No radar, you don’t land. You abort.”
The hell with that.
“I’ll punch it through again, Ed.”
“Okay,” Ed said. He paused just long enough to confirm radar function.
“Nothing, Al. No update.” Another pause.
They were still “visually blind” to the moon. Their only downward-looking eye was the radar, the dead radar. Without it there was nothing to tell the computer their precise altitude.
Twenty thousand feet.
“This is Houston.” That worried tone again. “We’re not seeing a lock on the landing radar system.”
Shepard was cool. “Roger, Houston, we’re on it, trying to activate it.”
“Antares, you’re at nineteen thousand feet.”
They stared, mystified. Shepard looked at Mitchell. None of this made sense.
“Houston,” Alan called, “the onboard navigational system is not receiving any data. Our landing radar is out.”
They were flying to the moon without their electronic seeing eye. Belly up, it was worse than useless.
Mission Control was considering the options. “We could have them pitch over before they hit ten thousand feet. They’ll have a longer look at the surface that way.”
“Sure, that way they can land without the radar.”
“No! They’ll burn too much fuel. They’d go empty before touchdown. It’s too risky. We could lose them.”
Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell knew the rules.
CapCom: “Seventeen thousand five hundred feet.”
Think Shepard think. “Roger, Houston. You guys find anything?”
“Negative, Antares.”
Mitchell was incredibly calm as he supported Shepard. “Seventeen thousand,” he said quietly.
“Antares,” came the dreaded words, “we should go over the procedures to abort.”
And there goes our landing and the Apollo program, Shepard and Mitchell thought together.
From the surface of Fra Mauro on the edge of the moon’s Ocean of Storms, it wasn’t yet possible to make out Antares against the velvet black sky, a star blazing in dazzling transparent flame with a purple glow, falling steadily, a startling traveler from outer space.
Aliens come to visit.
Except tense humans in a control center on the aliens’ home world, that dazzling blue jewel suspended against the velvet blackness, were about to extinguish the flame.
Shepard called out the abort procedure. “Okay, at thirteen thousand we pitch over, activate the ascent program—” He almost choked on the words.
A morose CapCom answered, “That’s affirmative, Al.”
Shepard, testily, “We’re aware of the ground rules, Houston.”
CapCom: “Countdown to m
ission abort will commence at fourteen thousand feet.”
The hell it will!
That was it. He turned to look at his partner. “Ed,” and he announced, “if the radar doesn’t kick in, we’re going to turn her over and fly her down.”
He never knew if Mitchell was surprised or not. Ed didn’t say a word.
“Dammit,” Shepard snapped. “We both know we can do it!”
“That’s what we came here for,” Mitchell answered after a pause.
“Antares, you’re at fifteen five.”
“We copy, Houston,” Shepard acknowledged. He wasn’t saying a thing about abort procedures.
Deke Slayton sure as hell wasn’t missing anything. He knew Alan Shepard too well; Alan wouldn’t quit easily. The tone in Alan’s voice made it clear to Deke the man would do whatever was necessary to plant that ship on the moon. By God, he’s gonna take her all the way down with or without his radar.
Deke smiled and knew others in Mission Control were sharing the same thought.
“Antares, you’re at fourteen thousand seven hundred.”
“Copy, Houston. We’re still trying to reactivate.”
“We still see no apparent malfunction,” CapCom called, a flat, puzzled tone.
“Ed,” Shepard said with quiet intensity to Mitchell. “I know we can bring it down.”
Mitchell never hesitated to push back the unknown. That was his whole life. He studied Shepard. “Got to admit, Al, it would be a first. Promises to be interesting.”
The icy commander managed a laugh. They were a team. Two test pilots fully aware of the dangers.
“Fourteen thousand two hundred,” CapCom announced.
No reply from Antares.
“Antares, we’re going to try something,” CapCom called with a sense of excitement. “We want you to reset your circuit breaker.”
“Houston, we copy,” Alan answered. “Pull the plug, huh?”
“Hell, it works for my computer,” Mitchell offered. “Let’s do what the man says.”
Shepard yanked the circuit breaker, killing the main power to the radar. He shoved the breaker back in to bring the radar back on line.
