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He thought it would even be possible to build a multistage rocket that could reach the moon; but “it might cost a million dollars,” he added, with an air of dismissing the idea from consideration.
I am a watercolor painter, but that is a frill. If I botch a painting, it’s a private failing. But someone who mangles the English language in public, that’s altogether different. More common is the engineer who has an important point to make, verbally or in a memo, but cannot really get it across, as it is immersed in a cloud of jargon.
Every once in a while I look up at the moon, but not too often: been there, done that, as I hope I have explained properly in this book.
Here the very first American jet had been tested, with a make-believe wooden propeller stuck on its nose whenever it was parked, so as not to arouse suspicion;
It was a brutal process as well. In the eleven weeks I was there, twenty-two people were killed. In retrospect it seems preposterous to endure such casualty rates without help from the enemy, but at the time the risk appeared perfectly acceptable.
We set high standards and met them and were proud of it. We lived in a sloppy world, but we were precise, very precise.
As will be discussed later, the astronauts were hired early enough to participate in the design phases of Gemini and Apollo, and in my view this was one of the wisest decisions NASA made.
It is all right for a squadron pilot to fall in love with his airplane; it is all he has to fly, and he might just as well enjoy it because it has already been designed; it exists in its present form and no one is going to change it now.
The test pilot cannot fall into this trap. Just because he has spent years flying Convair products doesn’t mean that Lockheed’s system is not just as good.
Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, for instance, had a longitudinal instability which generally would have been considered objectionable. However, Lindbergh didn’t mind, because the constant attention he had to pay to the elevator control helped to keep him awake during the long lonely hours over the Atlantic.
but others had actively avoided the selection like the plague. In retrospect, I can’t say whether their reasons were obtuse or perceptive, but they do seem to me to be a fascinating indication of the time and place. Man, they were here to fly, not to be locked up in a can and shot around the world like ammunition.
I was reminded of Pete Conrad’s battle cry: “If you can’t be good, be colorful!”—except that Pete is both very good and very colorful.
Pete Conrad Funny, noisy, colorful, cool, competent; snazzy dresser, race-car driver. One of the few who lives up to the image. Should play Pete Conrad in a Pete Conrad movie.
Fame has not worn well on Buzz. I think he resents not being first on the moon more than he appreciates being second.
Living and working with these people was like having an aunt who lives in a haunted house, or a close friend who sincerely believes in astrology and can’t stop talking about it, especially delighting in reading you your horoscope on bad days.
But if 1964 was for astronauts a year of technological doubt, a year for questioning scientists, engineers, and flight planners, it was also a year of great spiritual exuberance. We had not been with the space program long enough to become jaded by constant close contact with its marvels. Nineteen sixty-four was a great vintage year for Burgundy wine, as well, and it was a pleasure to know that the longer the wine waited in its bottle, the better it became—up to a point. When the time to drink came, years later, in some cases it would be harsh and bitter, but in others delicious and rewarding
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Who would suspect that (Fe2+ ,Mg) Ti2O5 would be discovered at Tranquility Base in 1969 and that this new mineral would be called “armalcolite,” a name derived from the initial letters of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.
I chose to ride, but picked an animal which stopped walking whenever I stopped kicking, so I got as much exercise as if I had been afoot. I also had plenty of time to contemplate the rapid pace at which I was speeding toward the moon. From supersonic jets at Edwards, I had progressed all the way to kicking a burro up out of the Grand Canyon.
Somewhere along the way I picked up a couple of hundred companions, chiggers, evenly distributed from the waist down. I cannot adequately explain to the unchiggered what they are missing.
That the vast majority of the emergency library has remained untouched over the years is no indictment of it. It was one of NASA’s wisest investments.
and one in the Mojave Desert.
A classic case of poor cockpit design is the ejection procedure which used to be in one Air Force trainer. It was a placard listing half a dozen important steps, printed boldly on the canopy rail where the pilot couldn’t miss seeing it. The only flaw was that step 1 was “jettison the canopy.”
The IMU contains three gyroscopes mounted at right angles to each other and connected to the spacecraft by gimbals. When the gyroscopes are spinning at full speed, they keep the IMU pointed in one direction (“fixed in inertial space”). Think of it as a “stable table” around which the spacecraft turns.
As time goes by, the state vector loses accuracy and it must be updated, either by the ground computers, which can radio a new state vector up to the spacecraft, or by the astronauts, who can measure the angle between a selected star and the earth or moon horizon.
If we want to change course, it’s as simple as ABC. We just get Roger Chaffee’s tracking network to send up a state vector and a couple of other things to Dave Scott’s computer, which feeds pointing commands through Dick Gordon’s instrument panel to Donn Eisele’s controls, which cause Walt Cunningham’s electricity to power Gene Cernan’s engines, which fire, to get us out of Bill Anders’s radiation zone into the position called for by Buzz Aldrin’s flight plan. The rest of you guys must be loafing!
In fact, each crew member has three suits tailored to his individual measurements.
Unlike a pilot’s seat, his couch is oriented in such a way that all his Gs are transverse, or “eyeballs in.” While “eyeballs in” can hurt your chest and impair your breathing, you can endure much higher levels without losing vision or consciousness.
If you were a crewless astronaut trying to point out a long-term problem of great consequence, you were less likely to be heard than if you were scheduled for the next flight up and had some trifling complaint.
First, and most reassuring, was that I had reacted as I had practiced. I had done a lot of things right, such as waiting long enough to gain sufficient ejection altitude, but not long enough to risk an explosion. My memorized procedures had been clear in my mind when I needed them, and I had followed them swiftly and accurately. In short, I gained a lot of confidence in my own ability to practice emergency procedures and to use them if necessary.
I would miss Ed, but I liked John, and besides I would have flown by myself or with a kangaroo—I just wanted to fly. All that stuff about crew psychological compatibility is crap. Almost anyone can put up with almost anyone else for a clearly defined period of time in pursuit of a mutual objective important to each.
I figured Carley had won and was going to make a Magellan out of this poor soul who got lost every time he visited the Pentagon.
When you think of a space walker, you may visualize a chap confidently exploiting the most advanced technology which this rich and powerful nation can provide, but not me, friends. I see a covey of little old ladies hunched over their glue pots in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I only hope that between discussions of Friday-night bingo and the new monsignor, their attention doesn’t wander too far. Maybe it’s basic insanity to abandon hearth and home to dance in space on the end of a fifty-foot cord.
On the ground our CAPCOM, Gordo Cooper, throws the wrong switch and broadcasts to us a conversation intended to stay within Mission Control. “All personnel, we’re going to debrief in the Ready Room.” With what I hope is the proper tone of sarcasm I say, “Sorry we’re going to miss that debriefing down there.” Gordo ignores me.
We get a nice surprise as we unpack the plates and find some kind soul has pasted a photo on each, photos of two voluptuous, wildly beautiful girls. They are shocking intruders into this masculine little cubbyhole full of machinery, and they seem weirdly out of place; but if we can’t have darkness without girls, well, that’s life in orbit.
Purely as an accident of timing, we have found it necessary to come up here to 475 miles, and as a casual byproduct, John and I now hold the world’s altitude record. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, when I think of all the pioneer aviators who have aspired to this record and who have put their reputations, money, and lives into seeking it, and now John and I are handed it on a platter.
Work, work, work! A guy should be told to go out on the end of his string and simply gaze around—what guru gets to meditate for a whole earth’s worth? I think nirvana must be at an altitude of 250 miles, not down below in the teeming streets of Calcutta or up above in the monotonous black void. I am in the cosmic arena, the place to gain a celestial perspective; it remains only to slow down long enough to capture it, even a teacupful will do, will last a lifetime below.
I don’t know what to make of these data.
There is a facetious saying in the airplane business to the effect that not until the weight of the paper work equals the weight of the airplane will it be cleared for takeoff. In the space business, paper is the most important material. Without paper, chaos results, and no one knows which jobs have been talked about but not performed, and which performed but not talked about.
The fire, horrible as it was, gave the other parts of the program much needed breathing room, while North American struggled with its redesign problems. Saturn V problems, LM problems, ground radar tracking and computing problems—everywhere one looked, people were struggling to catch up. I don’t think the fire delayed the first lunar landing one day, because it took until mid-1969 to get all the problems solved in areas completely unrelated to the fire.
On the other hand, the Russian program was hidden from view, secret and mysterious, and if our side knew what was going on, the information never trickled out of the CIA files down to us working troops in Houston.
If the Russians weren’t interested in a manned lunar landing, if—as they subsequently said—they were not racing us to the moon, then why on earth (no pun intended) were they training cosmonauts to fly helicopters in 1967?
With familiarity comes confidence, and I began to feel comfortable in the Apollo shoes which had squeezed and squeaked so badly the year before. Gemini became a memory, rather than a competitor, and the moon, which had almost disappeared in the aftermath of the fire, once again shone and monthly seemed larger and more inviting.
The first stage burns liquid oxygen and high-grade kerosene, which will produce a highly visible flame, unlike the almost transparent exhaust of the Titan, so it should be a spectacular sight as the five first-stage engines ignite, each one gulping over three tons of propellant per second.
We are so far away the sound hasn’t reached us yet, but when it does, it is a surprise, a jolt, a shock—even for one who thought it overdue. God, it’s not a noise, it’s a presence. From tip of toes to top of head, this machine suddenly reaches out and grabs you, and shakes, and as it crackles and roars, suddenly you realize the meaning of 7.5 million pounds of thrust—it can make the Cape Kennedy sand vibrate under your feet at a distance of four miles. Supposedly, the acoustic energy kills birds who fly by too closely; what must it be like to ride one?
Along the way I had plenty of time to think, too much in fact, as the monotonous highway stretched westward. If one followed it far enough, he ended up in Downey, California, where iron men were assembling the fabulous Apollo command module. If one stopped short, he ended up with his throat cut and a very cloudy future. What a small thing forcing the poorer choice, a bone spur—how could it have happened? Apparently it had grown as the disk adjoining it had deteriorated and become thinner, but then what had caused the disk to degenerate? A sudden jolt, such as ejecting from my F-86 a dozen
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Pat and I enjoyed a leisurely dinner at a delightful Mexican restaurant in the heart of old San Antonio, on the banks of the beautifully reconstructed canal which gives the place a quiet tropical charm. It was an anniversary of a sort—two years to the day since Gemini 10 had splashed down, but a poor two years they had been, in the main, not at all what I had expected of life as a “real” astronaut. I certainly had no reason to feel bitter, but to end up this way, after the past five years’ work? I paid the bill, left an extra-large tip for luck, and, with a heavy, resigned feeling, headed for
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All these questions had to be probed by the computers, and a library of answers compiled. The appropriate volume could then be snatched off the shelf in time of need, and a month’s work could then be applied in a matter of minutes.
Borman at the same press conference hit upon another vital point, namely that Apollo 8 was acting as a catalyst, a forcing function, to clear all closets of skeletons, to force people to state their doubts about going so far from home, and to cause the moon to become an arena of actual operations, not just some far-off place it was theoretically possible to visit “… We designed Apollo, we said we were going to the moon, and … finally when we get down to examining the details and saying we are really going, people start getting a little queasy about it.”
Again the fire, in its ghastly way, had made its contribution, as about five thousand engineering changes had been made to the CSM in the post-fire redesign.
As we counted down to S—IVB ignition for TLI, a hush fell over Mission Control. TLI was what made this flight different from the six Mercury, ten Gemini, and one Apollo flights that had preceded it, different from any trip man had ever made in any vehicle. For the first time in history, man was going to propel himself past escape velocity, breaking the clutch of our earth’s gravitational field and coasting into outer space as he had never done before. After TLI there would be three men in the solar system who would have to be counted apart from all the other billions, three who were in a
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