Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  The spacecraft named America returned to earth on December 17.

  The books were closed on Project Apollo.

  The last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, had paused for a final look at the black beauty of the world about him. He had a message to send home before departing. “As I take these last steps from the surface for some time in the future to come, I’d just like to record that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

  It’s been nearly four decades since he spoke those words. No American, no earth being has yet returned to the moon. Sadly, no one will again for decades to come.

  Within a period of four years, twenty-four American astronauts, some twice, sailed through the vacuum from Earth to the moon. Twelve from those twenty-four rode their landers down to the lunar surface, walked and drove through the dust and rocks of the small world.

  Had the Soviet Union sustained its early lead in power and technology over the United States, the number of humans going there might have increased greatly. It was a fierce competition, and the Soviets went all-out in their desperate attempts to lead the human race to another solar body, small though it might be and devoid of life. The Russians went through a series of devastating rocket explosions and suffered equally costly failures after reaching earth orbit.

  Just two weeks before the last Apollo departed for the moon, the Russians were down to a last-gasp hope that their mammoth N-1 rocket, even more powerful than Wernher von Braun’s spectacularly successful Saturn V, would enable them, at least, to reach the moon during the same period American astronauts were freewheeling across its surface.

  It was not to be. The fourth launch of the N-1, intended to fire a large and heavy unmanned lunar lander directly to the moon in a rehearsal for a manned flight, was ripped apart by a series of violent explosions as it climbed through the atmosphere. When the wreckage tumbled back to earth, it sounded the death knell of the Russian manned lunar effort.

  Bitter and frustrated, the Soviet government insisted it had never been in the moon race. History records otherwise. Several Russian manned landers became dust collectors in remote hangars. The rocket stages and enormous fuel tanks of the leftover N-1s were hammered into storage sheds and playgrounds for children.

  Whereas Russia had endured disastrous failures in its manned lunar effort, though, it had hurled its considerable power, experience, and science into a massive program of space stations in earth orbit. The Salyut stations led the way and were a spectacular success. They were followed by the expensive, complex, and extremely workable Mir station, to which the Soviets steadily added scientific and work modules. Cosmonauts, men and women, flew regularly in Soyuz spacecraft to the stations to conduct medical, science, materials processing, and military observation experiments.

  A dichotomy arose in understanding the ability of the human being to endure long periods in weightlessness. Essentially, the American program was one of extreme caution, which maintained that zero-g was not only biologically deleterious but could also lead to fatalities if astronauts remained too long in space. The Russians crafted a program to find out the effect of long exposure to weightlessness. They kept their men aboard the orbiting stations first for six months, then eight, and finally for more than a year. They suffered no long-term effects.

  The American road to space in the aftermath of the stunning success of Apollo developed potholes and detours. Grandiose schemes for massive stations, a permanent base on the moon, and a grandly heralded manned expedition to Mars quickly succumbed to a disenchanted Congress and a rapidly apathetic public. Domestic problems and challenges, existing with or without a space program, stripped the national space effort to a shadow of its former glory.

  No longer was there the driving force that had carried Apollo to the moon. A cold war rival had technically challenged America, and a sense of fear and national pride had propelled Americans to respond, to win this high-stakes battle for the high frontier. The Soviets no longer were a threat in space, and in terms that became commonplace among the veteran ground crews, as well as the astronauts, the dreamers and builders were replaced by a new wave of NASA teams, bureaucrats who shifted with the political winds, sadly short of dreams, drive, and determination to keep forging outward beyond Earth.

  Slowdown was the new buzzword, a strange mixture of anemic expenditures trying to build a single answer to all needs. NASA, in its commendable wisdom, chose the route of a system that could be used repeatedly for space missions—the STS, or Space Transportation System, known popularly as the Space Shuttle. The huge, winged, reflyable spacecraft, scientifically and engineering-wise, is a spectacular achievement. It is a technological marvel. By comparison, the predecessor Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft were rowboats in size and performance.

  NASA faltered not with its equipment, reduced in performance and reliability by fiscal pitfalls, but in the grandiose eloquence of promising that the Shuttle would be all things for all missions, that it would serve civilian and military needs, and that it would save truckloads of money in the process.

  Those promises were not to be. The program escalated swiftly in cost and decelerated just as rapidly in its time schedule. Weeks became months, and projects to take months stretched into years without definite future dates that could be sustained.

  Something had to fill the gap. NASA needed desperately to keep intact its management, engineering, and astronaut teams.

  Enter Skylab. The space agency had rockets and spacecraft left over from the three Apollo moon missions that had fallen victim to the congressional ax. Engineers proposed modifying some of this hardware into a modest space station where astronauts could study the sun and other stars, conduct experiments seeking pure materials and medicines, and learn to live in space weightlessness for long periods in the event America one day decided to embark on a months-long manned exploration to Mars. The Soviets had a space station, some argued. Could America do less?

  The cost would not be great, and Congress agreed that NASA’s teams were a great national resource that should be preserved.

  The third stage of a Saturn V was stripped of its engines and converted into a complete station to be hurled into orbit by the first two stages of the big booster. Skylab was a “home away from home” with racks of scientific equipment, a marvel of an astronomical laboratory, and more than thirteen thousand cubic feet for unparalleled comfort and freedom for three astronauts at a time. Gone were the cramped telephone-booth-sized craft of the past. It had cooking facilities, private quarters, showers, exercise equipment, and other “luxuries” only dreamed of before the space station roared into orbit in May 1973. Three successive missions of three astronauts each rode smaller Saturn 1B rockets and Apollo command ships to the station, and in 1974 the final “stay in space” extended to eighty-four days and proved that man suffered no ill effects from weightlessness for that length of time.

  The plans to keep Skylab in orbit well into the 1990s went for naught. A constant barrage of solar wind began slowly to drag the station closer and closer to earth. Long-term NASA plans called for a Space Shuttle crew to fly to Skylab in 1978, attach a booster rocket, and fire it into a higher orbit, where it could be visited by astronaut crews for several more years. But the Shuttle languished until 1981 in a swamp of fiscal shortfalls, engineering problems, developmental snags.

  In the summer of 1979, the great space station began its fall and ended its brief career with a spectacular blazing reentry through the atmosphere. Fiery chunks of its shredded body fell in the Indian Ocean and uninhabited areas of western Australia.

  As the herd on astronauts scheduled for space missions, Skylab in the normal course of events would have been the responsibility of Deke Slayton. But with his assignment to the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission, Deke was buried in training and planning for the first joint American-Russian space venture.

/>   Once again his close friend Alan Shepard stepped into the breach. Shepard had planned to return to private life with his family when he determined he was “out of the rotation” for another space trip. That would have hung Deke up with more responsibilities than he could handle, between running the Astronaut Office and concentrating on his first space flight.

  Shepard took over the reins of the Skylab astronaut needs, and Deke went with Tom Stafford and Vance Brand to Moscow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A Handshake in Space

  TWO RUSSIANS AND THREE AMERICANS would make up the team that would join a Soviet spacecraft, Soyuz 19, with an Apollo spaceship and docking adapter, bringing the two together in orbit as a single space vehicle.

  The problems of making the men function, as a tightly knit team appeared just as formidable as the many technical issues to be resolved. For starters, the Russians didn’t speak English and the Americans didn’t speak Russian and, clearly, neither side could read the markings and lettering of the equipment of the other side’s spacecraft.

  Leading the Russian team was Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov. Deke was quick to judge the stocky, muscular cosmonaut as one of the best he’d ever run into. The longer he knew him, the more convinced he became that Leonov was as crazy as most fighter pilots. The cosmonaut veteran was, in fact, a fun-loving extrovert who’d crack jokes every chance he had, which at first, with the English language baffling him, was less often than he liked.

  “Alexei was something out of a storybook,” Deke said. “The guy was a top artist with his work in demand all over Russia. He went to a couple military flight schools, came out on the honor roll, and then—which proves he’d stop at nothing to qualify himself in any way he could—he made a hundred jumps as a paratrooper and became an instructor for combat jumps for the Soviet Air Force.”

  The Russians had had their eye on Leonov from the beginning. He was an outstanding athlete, excelled in swimming, fencing, volleyball, competition bicycling, and yachting. In 1960 he swept into the cosmonaut corps with ease.

  Leonov had flown the Voshkod II flight during which he made history’s first space walk. That kind of experience would be invaluable in the joint mission to come.

  “I had a sort of strange association with Alexei,” Deke explained. “He’d been teamed up with Oleg Makarov, and these two guys were assigned to fly the first mission to circumnavigate the moon. That was late 1968, or early ‘69. Well, he didn’t go, of course. The Russian lunar program came unglued. And I never went to the moon, either, so we had sort of a buddy feeling between us.”

  The second cosmonaut for the joint mission, Valeri Nikolaievich Kubasov, was a brilliant flight engineer—but had never qualified as a fighter or test pilot. To the Russians, two pilots were superfluous, and what marked Kubasov as the perfect second man for Soyuz 19 was his experience as a cosmonaut engineer with orbital experience. He had worked on the Soviet spacecraft program from the beginning as a designer, developer, and tester of the new space vehicles. He made his first orbital mission aboard Soyuz 6 in October 1969, during which he conducted space welding, metals smelting, equipment teardown, and repair experiments. It was quite a mission. Kubasov’s pilot, Georgi Shonin, rendezvoused in orbit with Soyuz 7 and 8, flew complex maneuvers and, after nearly five days in orbit, returned to earth.

  “He is perfect for the joint flight of Soyuz and Apollo,” Soviet officials told the American astronauts. “After all,” they laughed, “if something goes wrong and equipment breaks down, you have Kubasov, who can weld together whatever has come apart.”

  To the Russians, the American three-man team was strangely short of space flight experience. Commanding the U.S. crew was Thomas Stafford. Forty-four years old, he was the most experienced space veteran of the five men who would meet in orbit. He’d flown the Gemini 6 and 9 missions, and then with Gene Cernan taken Apollo 10’s lunar module Snoopy down to within nine miles of the moon’s surface on a flight that came within a thin edge of crashing into the moon.

  Deke Slayton, who’d waited sixteen years for his first space flight, would serve as the docking module pilot. He was the “old man” of the crew, just topping fifty years of age.

  Command module pilot Vance Brand, forty-four, was, like Deke, a “space rookie,” but his credentials served him well. He was a serious, hard-nosed aeronautical engineer and an experienced test pilot.

  Without intending to, Stafford had the habit of cracking up Leonov as the men spent months together working to learn each other’s language. There’s something wooly and wild about a lanky American speaking Russian with a distinct Oklahoma twang.

  A lot would ride on the Apollo-Soyuz mission scheduled for the summer of 1975. The goal of the flight was judged critical to every American and Russian: to engineer, build, and test in space a “common docking device” that on future flights could be used to “hard dock and lock” American and/or Russian spacecraft for rescue missions to a crippled spacecraft or space stations. Until now, any crew that had found itself stranded or marooned in orbit because of a propulsion failure, especially with limited oxygen and power supplies, would have stayed stranded. With the docking equipment available for spacecraft of either country, chances of rescue would take a quantum leap forward.

  That was Deke’s assignment: make the hardware dream come true. He must not only monitor the development of the docking system, but then prove its merit by personally bringing Apollo and Soyuz together at that critical moment when the two ships were to meet and join.

  On the fifteenth day of July in 1975, by the best estimates of military intelligence, some eighty thousand nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union were either poised for launch or kept in pre-launch readiness. Many were small, shoulder-fired missiles. Others were clustered aboard armored vehicles and trucks. Still more were slung beneath the wings or within the bomb bays of fighters and bombers. Hundreds of heavy missiles rode beneath the ocean surface in Russia’s Sherwood Forest bays of nuclear submarines as they did in America’s Polaris, Poseidon, and Trident subs always ready for immediate launch. And to round out the fearsome arsenal were thousands of silo-buried war rockets, some as tall as a ten-story building and crammed with multiple thermonuclear warheads.

  But on this particular day only two of those rockets poised for flight carried men instead of weaponry. If all went well with the launch of Soyuz 19, then later that day with the launch of Apollo, five of good will would meet peacefully in space.

  “This is the Soviet Mission Control Center,” the words moved around the world through speakers and people everywhere listened and watched the first ever live television broadcast from Russia’s Baikonur launch site on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

  “Everything is ready at the Cosmodrome for the launch of the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz. Five minutes remaining for launch. Onboard systems are now under onboard control. The right control board—opposite the commander’s couch—is now turned on. The cosmonauts have strapped themselves in and reported they are ready. They have lowered their faceplates. The key for launch has been inserted . . . the crew is ready for launch.”

  Then, precisely five minutes after the ignition key was inserted, bringing the rocket to live firing status—

  “Ignition! The engines are powered up. The launch! The booster is off! Moscow time: fifteen hours twenty minutes ten seconds. The flight is proceeding normally . . . ”

  Two minutes into the fiery liftoff, four liquid-fuel strap-on boosters separated from the rocket. Forty seconds later the escape tower and protective shroud blasted free of the spacecraft. Five minutes into the ascent the powerful core stage shut down and was discarded. The third and final booster blazed for another thirty seconds, then shut down. Soyuz 19 separated from the booster and eased into a perfect orbit.

  In Florida the sun was bright in the mid-morning sky. Elated NASA officials awakened Stafford, Slayton, and Brand. “Your friends are upstairs. Right on schedule.” It was 9:10 A.M. Cape Canaveral time.<
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  “We’re over hurdle number one,” said Slayton. “Now all we have to do is get our asses up there.”

  Soyuz 19 was swinging around the planet on its fourth orbit when the American crew climbed into their Apollo spacecraft. It had been an interesting ride from their quarters to the launch pad. Tom Stafford filled the time practicing the Russian phrases he would use when they linked up with Leonov and Kubasov. Deke laughed aloud. Tom obviously was in his element. This would be his fourth launch. He seemed far more concerned with his linguistic pronunciation, not showing the slightest concern about the thundering blastoff they all soon would be making.

  Tom’s preoccupation remained unbroken even after they left their transfer vehicle and began the walk to the gantry elevator. Even Vance Brand was deep into his own thoughts, and Deke became aware that he was the only one of the three men to take the time to stop for a long, emotional study of their big booster.

  “It’s beautiful,” Deke thought. After all his years of being grounded, of being chained to a desk, of selecting the crews that would lift off from this launch pad as he stood with his feet rooted to the ground, he was going to ride his own fire monster away from earth.

  He spoke aloud to himself, oblivious to anyone who might be listening. “This mother,” he said, “is going to take me upstairs.” He added a “damn right” before riding the elevator to the enclosed White Room, where technicians made their final checks of the astronauts’ equipment and triple-checked their fastenings, straps, and hookups within their spacecraft.

  Every item on the checklists went with a casual smoothness that belied the complexity of the preparations, and when the countdown neared its end Deke and Tom and Vance felt the Saturn 1B coming alive through subtle groans and creaks as fluids shifted, pressures increased, and pumps were tested. It was like awakening an ancient, giant Rip Van Winkle for a brief but sensational period of life.