The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  “Roger, Tranquillity,” Charlie said, “we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

  I reached across and shook Neil’s hand, hard. We had pulled it off. Five months and 10 days before the end of the decade, two Americans had landed on the moon.

  “It looks like a collection of just every variety of shapes, angularities, granularities, every variety of rock you could find,” I told Houston. Everyone wanted to know what the moon looked like. The glaring sunrise was directly behind us like a huge searchlight. It bleached out the color; but the grays swam in from the sides of my window.

  Charlie said there were “lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world.”

  Neil grinned at me, the strain leaving his tired eyes. I smiled back. “There are two of them up here,” I told Charlie.

  Mike’s voice cut in much louder and clearer than Mission Control. “And don’t forget the one in the command module.”

  Charlie told Mike to speak directly to us. “Roger, Tranquillity Base,” Mike said. “It sounded great from up here. You guys did a fantastic job.”

  That was a real compliment coming from a pilot as skilled as Mike Collins.

  “Thank you,” Neil said. “Just keep that orbiting base ready for us up there now.”

  We were supposed to do a little housekeeping in the LM, eat a meal, and then try to sleep for seven hours before getting ready to explore the surface. But whoever signed off on that plan didn’t know much psychology – or physiology, for that matter. We’d just landed on the moon and there was a lot of adrenaline still zinging through our bodies. Telling us to try to sleep before the EVA was like telling kids on Christmas morning they had to stay in bed until noon.

  I decided to begin a ceremony I’d planned with Dean Woodruff, my pastor at Webster Presbyterian Church. He’d given me a tiny Communion kit that had a silver chalice and wine vial about the size of the tip of my little finger. I asked “every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” The plastic note-taking shelf in front of our DSKY became the altar. I read silently from Dean’s Communion service – I am the vine and you are the branches – as I poured the wine into the chalice. The wine looked like syrup as it swirled around the sides of the cup in the light gravity before it finally settled at the bottom.

  Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquillity.

  Suiting up for the moon walk took us several hours. Our PLSS backpacks looked simple, but they were hard to put on and tricky to operate. They were truly our life-support systems, with enough oxygen, cooling water, electrical power, and radio equipment to keep us alive on the moon and in constant contact with Houston (via a relay in the LM) for four hours. On Earth, the PLSS and spacesuit combination weighed 190 pounds, but here it was only 30. Combined with my own body weight, that brought me to a total lunar-gravity weight of around 60 pounds.

  Seven hours after we touched down on the moon, we depressurized the LM, and Neil opened the hatch. My job was to guide him as he backed out on his hands and knees onto the small porch. He worked slowly, trying not to jam his backpack on the hatch frame. When he reached the ladder attached to the forward landing leg, he moved down carefully.

  The new capcom, Bruce McCandless, verified that we were doing everything correctly. Once Neil reached over and pulled a line to deploy the LM’s television camera, Bruce said, “We’re getting a picture on the TV.”

  “I’m at the foot of the ladder,” Neil said, his voice slow and precise. “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches.” The surface was a very fine-grain powder. “I’m going to step off the LM now.”

  From my window I watched Neil move his blue lunar overshoe from the metal dish of the footpad to the powdery gray surface.

  “That’s one small step for . . . man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Lunar gravity was so springy that coming down the ladder was both pleasant and tricky. I took a practice run at getting back up to that high first step, and then I hopped down beside Neil.

  “Isn’t that something?” Neil asked. “Magnificent sight out here.”

  I turned around and looked out at a horizon that dropped steeply away in all directions. We were looking “down sun,” so there was only a black void beyond the edge of the moon. For as far as I could see, pebbles, rock fragments, and small craters covered the surface. Off to the left, I could make out the rim of a larger crater. I breathed deeply, goose flesh covering my neck and face. “Beautiful, beautiful,” I said. “Magnificent desolation.”

  Stepping out of the LM’s shadow was a shock. One moment I was in total darkness, the next in the sun’s hot floodlight. From the ladder I had seen all the sunlit moonscape beyond our shadow but with no atmosphere, there was absolutely no refracted light around me. I stuck my hand out past the shadow’s edge into the sun, and it was like punching through a barrier into another dimension. I moved around the legs of the LM to check for damage.

  “Looks like the secondary strut has a little thermal effect on it right here, Neil,” I said, pointing to some engine burn on the leg.

  “Yeah,” Neil said, coming over beside me. “I noticed that.”

  We were both in the sun again, our helmets close together. Neil leaned toward me and clapped his gloved hand on my shoulder. “Isn’t it fun?” he said.

  I was grinning ear to ear, even though the gold visor hid my face. Neil and I were standing together on the moon.

  As we moved about getting ready to set up our experiments, I watched the toe of my boot strike the surface. The gray dust shot out with machinelike precision, the grains landing nearly equidistant from my toe. I was fascinated by this, and for the first time felt what it was like to walk on the airless moon.

  One of my tests was to jog away from the LM to see how maneuverable an astronaut was on the surface. I remembered what Isaac Newton had taught us two centuries before: mass and weight are not the same. I weighed only 60 pounds, but my mass was the same as it was on Earth. Inertia was a problem. I had to plan ahead several steps to bring myself to a stop or to turn, without falling.

  But after a few jogging turns, I figured out how to move quite easily. Time was going by quickly, I realized, when Neil signaled me over to unveil the plaque. We stood beside the LM leg and Neil read the words:

  “HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH

  FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON

  JULY 1969, A.D.

  WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.”

  One of the first things Neil did on the surface was take a sample of the lunar soil in case we had to terminate our moon walk early. Now he started working with his scoop and collection box while I set up the metal foil “window shade” of the solar wind collector. The moon was like a giant sponge that absorbed the constant “wind” of charged particles streaming outward from the sun. Scientists back on Earth would examine the collector to learn more about this phenomenon and, through it, the history of the solar system.

  As we removed the flag from the equipment compartment at the base of the LM, I suddenly felt stage fright. Since childhood I’d been fascinated by explorers planting flags on strange shores. Now I was about to do the same thing, but on the most exotic shore mankind had ever reached.

  Of all the jobs I had to do on the moon, the one I wanted to go the smoothest was the flag raising. Bruce had told us we were being watched by the largest television audience in history, over a billion people. Just beneath the powdery surface, the subsoil was very dense. We succeeded in pushing the flagpole in only a couple of inches. It didn’t look very sturdy. But I did snap off a crisp West Point salute once we got the banner upright.

  I noticed that the legs of my spacesuit were smeared with sooty dust, probably
from the LM footpad. When we removed our helmets back inside Eagle, there would be no way we would be able to keep from breathing some of that dust. If strange microbes were in this soil, Neil and I would be the first guinea pigs to test their effects.

  Bruce told us that President Richard Nixon wanted to speak to us. More stage fright. The president said, “For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.”

  I looked high above the dome of the LM. Earth hung in the black sky, a disk cut in half by the day-night terminator. It was mostly blue, with swirling white clouds, and I could make out a brown landmass, North Africa and the Middle East. Glancing down at my boots, I realized that the soil Neil and I had stomped through had been here longer than any of those brown continents. Earth was a dynamic planet of tectonic plates, churning oceans, and a changing atmosphere. The moon was dead, a relic of the early solar system.

  Time was moving in spasms. We still had many tasks to accomplish. Some seemed quite easy and others dragged on. It took me a long time to erect the passive seismometer (the “moonquake” detector). We were supposed to level it by using a BB-type device centered in a little cup. But the BB just swirled around and around in the light gravity. I spent a long time with that, but it still wouldn’t go level. Then I looked back, and the ball was right where it should be.

  “You have approximately three minutes until you must commence your EVA termination activities,” Bruce told us. Our time walking on the moon was almost over.

  I was already on the ladder when Neil reminded me about the mementos we had planned to leave on the moon. From a shoulder pocket I removed a small packet that held the two Soviet medals and the Apollo 1 patch, as well as a small gold olive branch, one of four we’d bought. We’d given the other three to our wives as a way of joining them to our mission. The packet also contained the tiny silicone disk marked “From Planet Earth” and etched with goodwill messages from the leaders of 73 nations, including the Soviet Union. I tossed the pouch onto the soil among our jumbled footprints. Once more I thought of Ed White. Only 10 years before we had talked about becoming rocket pilots. In a way, Ed had come with me to the moon.

  They stowed 40 pounds of moon rocks, left behind their life support back packs and overshoes, and ate and slept on the surface. Aldrin:

  Finally it was time to eat and sleep. After we had snacked on cocktail sausages and fruit punch, I stretched out on the deck beneath the instrument panel, and Neil propped himself across the ascent engine cover. With the windows shaded, the LM grew cold. Neil was having trouble getting to sleep because of the glare of Earth reflected through our telescope on his face. We had moon dust smeared on our suit legs and on the deck. It was like gritty charcoal and smelled like gunpowder from the fireworks I’d launched so many years before on the New Jersey shore.

  Seven hours later we prepared for ascent. There was an almost constantly active three-way loop of radio traffic connecting Columbia, Eagle, and Mission Control. We discovered during a long checklist recitation that the ascent engine’s arming circuit breaker was broken off on the panel. The little plastic pin simply wasn’t there. This circuit would send electrical power to the engine that would lift us off the moon. Finally I realized my backpack must have struck it when I’d been getting ready for my EVA.

  Neil and I looked at each other. Our fatigue had reached the point where our thoughts had become plodding. But this got our attention. We looked around for something to punch in this circuit breaker. Luckily, a felt-tipped pen fitted into the slot.

  At 123 hours and 58 minutes GET, Houston told us, “You’re cleared for takeoff.”

  “Roger,” I answered. “Understand we’re number one on the runway.”

  I watched the DSKY numbers and chanted the countdown: “Four, three, two, one . . . proceed.” Our liftoff was powerful. Nothing we’d done in the simulators had prepared us for this amazing swoop upward in the weak lunar gravity. Within seconds we had pitched forward a sharp 45 degrees and were soaring above the crater fields.

  “Very smooth,” I called, “very quiet ride.” It wasn’t at all like flying through Earth’s atmosphere. Climbing fast, we finally spotted the landmark craters we’d missed during the descent. Two minutes into the ascent we were batting along at half a mile per second.

  Columbia was above and behind us. Our radar and the computers on the two spacecraft searched for each other and then locked on and communicated in a soundless digital exchange.

  Four hours after Neil and I lifted off from the Sea of Tranquillity, we heard the capture latches clang shut above our heads. Mike had successfully docked with Eagle. I loosened the elastic cords and reached around to throw more switches. Soon Mike would unseal the tunnel so that Neil and I could pass the moon rocks through and then join Mike in Columbia for the long ride back.

  I hadn’t slept in almost 40 hours and there was a thickness to my voice and movements. Still I could feel a calmness rising inside me. A thruster fired on Columbia, sending a shiver through the two spacecraft.

  Seven hours later we were in our last lunar orbit, above the far side, just past the terminator into dawn. We had cast Eagle’s ascent stage loose into an orbit around the moon, where it would remain for hundreds of years. Maybe, I thought, astronauts will visit our flyweight locomotive sometime in the future. Mike rode the left couch for the trans-Earth injection burn. Our SPS engine simply had to work, or we’d be stranded. The burn would consume five tons of propellant in two and a half minutes, increasing our speed by 2,000 miles per hour, enough to break the bonds of the moon’s gravity.

  We waited, all three of us watching the DSKY. “Three, two, one,” Mike said, almost whispering.

  Ignition was right on the mark. I sank slowly into my couch. NASA’s bold gamble with Lunar Orbit Rendezvous had paid off. Twenty minutes after the burn we rounded the moon’s right-hand limb for the final time.

  “Hello. Apollo 11, Houston,” Charlie Duke called from Earth. “How did it go?”

  Neil was smiling. “Tell them to open up the LRL doors, Charlie,” he said, referring to our quarantine in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.

  “Roger,” Charlie answered. “We got you coming home.”

  The moon’s horizon tilted past my window. Earth hung in the dark universe, warm and welcoming.

  Apollo 12 is struck by lightning

  After the success of Apollo 11, the immediate future of the US space program was a mission every two months. Apollo 12 launched on 14 November 1969. The CSM was named Yankee Clipper, the LEM Intrepid; the crew were Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon and Al Bean. Intrepid was intended to land near an unmanned probe, Surveyor III which, had been on the moon for 31 months. Hamish Lindsay:

  Chris Kraft, the Director of Flight Operations said, “Launch has always been an uneasy time for me, and I have always looked forward to a successful separation from the booster. When one adds to this an apprehension caused by bad weather over the Cape, I become even more concerned.”

  President and Mrs Nixon were among the large crowd waiting to see the launch, the only time an American President in office witnessed an Apollo launch. As if to prepare this crew of navy aviators for the Ocean of Storms, the launch area was blanketed by rain when Apollo 12 launched into the overcast stratocumulus cloud with a ceiling of only 640 metres above the ground. Rising from Pad 39A at 11.22 am EST in defiance of Mission Rule 1–404, which said no vehicle shall be launched in a thunderstorm, the huge Saturn V vanished into the murk. Observers then saw two bright blue streaks of lightning – right where the rocket had been. Pete Conrad showed why top test pilots are different from the rest of us when 36seconds after liftoff, at a height of 1,859 metres, they were hit by lightning. At 52 seconds they were hit again. The control panel indicators went haywire and the attitude ball began pitching. If the vehicle really was beginning to fly erratically there were only seconds before it would break up and explode.

  The abort handle was waiting at Conrad’s elbow, but he calmly
announced to the ground controllers, “Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out . . . fuel cell, lights, and AC Bus overload, one and two, main bus A and B out. Where are we going?”

  With the master alarm ringing in his ears, Alan Bean thought he knew all the spacecraft’s electrical faults, but looking along the panel of glowing warning lights he couldn’t recognise any of them – he had never seen so many lights before.

  Conrad remembers, “I had a pretty good idea what had happened. I had the only window at the time – the booster protector covered the other windows – and I saw a little glow outside and a crackle in the headphones and, of course, the master caution and warning alarms came on immediately and I glanced up at the panel and in all the simulations they had ever done they had figured out how to light all eleven electrical warning lights at once – by Golly, they were all lit, so I knew right away that this was for real.

  “Our high bit rate telemetry had fallen off the line so on the ground they weren’t reading us very well on what was happening, so they got us to switch to the backup telemetry system. The ground then got a look at us and they could see that a bunch of things had fallen off the line, but there weren’t any shorts or anything bad on the systems so we elected to do nothing until we got through staging. When we got through staging then we went about putting things back on line.”

  Down among the consoles in the Mission Control Center the steady flow of glowing figures from the spacecraft filing past on the screens were suddenly replaced by a meaningless jumble of characters. All the telemetry signals had dropped out!

  John Aaron was the EECOM, the Flight Controller in charge of the Command and Service Module electrical system, and he recalled, “You must remember we did not have a live television view of the launch. I was just looking at control screens which only had data and curves on them. The first thing I realised was we had a major electrical anomaly. But I did recognise a pattern. When we trained for this condition with our simulators it would always read zeros. It so happened that a year before I was monitoring an entry sequence test from the Kennedy Space Center, and the technicians inadvertently got the whole spacecraft being powered by only one battery. I remembered the random pattern that generated on the telemetry system, and for some reason just filed it off to the back of my mind. I did go in the office the next day to reconstruct what happened and found this obscure SCE [Signal Condition Equipment] switch. Few people knew it was there, or what it was for. It was lucky I was the EECOM monitoring the test that night and when it turned out that we had the problem, I happened to be the EECOM on the console. I don’t think any other EECOM would have recognised that random pattern. Our simulators did not train us for it, but I saw it through the procedural screwup. Although the test happened a year before, that pattern was etched in my mind, and I am talking about a pattern of thirty or forty parameters. Instead of reading zeros, one would read six point something, another read eight point something, which were nonsense numbers for a 28 volt power system.”