Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

O’Malley was out at the pad one day, watching liquid oxygen being pumped from a tank up onto the umbilical tower. He asked the engineer where the LOX was being pumped to. “It beats the hell out of me,” the engineer replied. “Once it gets up there, I don’t know what happens to it.” Shortly after that, O’Malley called a meeting. Thenceforth, every engineer was expected to learn everything about the system he was running—where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. And they did. “You understood it from the very beginning of the tank farm to the last nut and connector in that system,” said one engineer, “and you could just about close your eyes and draw a schematic of the electrical and mechanical systems by heart. Everybody had a thing called a ‘Smarts Book,’ and in that Smarts Book each system engineer had every fact that you could possibly collect about that system that you worked on. . . . You understood that system from womb to tomb and there was nothing in that system you couldn’t recite by heart, including torque values, safety wire specs—you name it and a system engineer down there could tell you what it was. Those guys were terribly intense.”