More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
On November 5, 1958, the United States formed the Space Task Group, consisting of forty-five people. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon—an elapsed time of ten years and nine months.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Perhaps the best way to describe Faget’s style is cheerful ruthlessness. His associates recalled knock-down, drag-out technical arguments with him. Faget’s voice would rise, his face would flush—and then it would pass as quickly as a summer storm and Max would be off on something else.
Max Faget, the lead designer of the shuttle, as of the end of 1988 had never gone to Cape Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch.
George Low wanted NASA to go to the moon, the sooner the better. Not only did he want to go to the moon, he wanted to land on it. After the first meeting, he lobbied his colleagues on the Goett Committee, reasoning with them in his quiet, precise voice still tinged with an Austrian accent. Manned space flight needed a goal to sustain it, he argued, a dramatic focal point. A lunar landing was that goal.
Two months after the flight of Big Joe, on November 2, 1959, President Eisenhower signed an executive order transferring Wernher von Braun’s rocket engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville to NASA. It was the indispensable step for making NASA legitimate, giving that young and uncertain agency an infusion of talent it could have gotten nowhere else.
Then in 1950 the Army decided that an inland site was too confining, a decision prompted in part by an unfortunate occasion when the German team put a V-2 into a cemetery south of Juarez.
Space station and a circumlunar flight: That was the immediate agenda. To get plans moving, NASA announced in August that three $250,000 contracts would be let for design studies of the Apollo spacecraft. The Request for Proposals specified that the spacecraft had to be compatible with the new Saturn and it had to be capable of a fourteen-day mission—more than enough time to get to the moon and back. The proposals were submitted on October 9, 1960.
A note attached to Eisenhower’s last budget request for NASA said that Mercury was an experimental effort, adding ominously that “further tests and experimentation will be necessary to establish if there are any valid scientific reasons for extending manned space flight beyond the Mercury program.” And this was a softened version. Originally, Eisenhower had wanted to say flatly that there should be no commitment of any sort to manned space flight beyond Mercury.
Johnson, who was fascinated by space flight and had been the space program’s best and most powerful friend in Washington since it began, met with Kennedy on December 20 and got the decision partially reversed. The Space Council would continue to exist, but its chairman would no longer be the President. Instead, the council would be headed by Vice President Lyndon Johnson—good news for NASA insofar as Johnson was such an ardent friend.
Low’s people also worried during these first weeks about the nature of the lunar surface. Was it firm and rocky? Or was the surface covered with several feet of fine dust, so that a spacecraft coming in for a landing would sink without a trace? There were advocates for both positions, and nobody really knew.
First, they decided, no more of the “man-on-the-moon” language they had been using—it was too slangy, too likely to be ridiculed. “Manned lunar landing” would be the phrase for what they wanted to do.
This was known around NASA as “the country-boy treatment,” Disher explained later. “You could have been spending your life on it, but you go in and say, ‘This is just something we threw together.’ It helped disarm people sometimes.”
The remaining hurdle was the first U.S. space shot, Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight. If that failed, coming after the one-two punch of the Gagarin flight and the Bay of Pigs, no one could anticipate what direction events might take.
“I could hardly believe we could move that fast,” Disher recalled. “In those days, you could do things with a half-page memo.”
For Rocco Petrone down at Cape Canaveral, June and July of 1961 were so many lost weeks. It was a time so frantic, he recalled, that meetings were scheduled for 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning. “I only wish we’d had someone sitting in the corner taking notes,” he said wistfully.
But alternative sites with better weather and larger labor forces had to be considered with this in mind: The destructive equivalent of a fair-sized nuclear weapon might one day explode on the premises (the Saturn V had the explosive potential of a million pounds of T.N.T.).
Moreover, the ocean had to be to the east of the launching site, because, for reasons of orbital mechanics, it was much more efficient to launch eastward with the rotation of the earth than to launch westward. Also for reasons of orbital mechanics, the closer to the equator the site could be, the better.
The result—the Vehicle Assembly Building, the V.A.B.—is one of the man-made wonders of the world, but at the time of Apollo it was celebrated mostly for things that weren’t true. The most widely accepted legend was that the V.A.B. was so huge that it had to be air-conditioned to prevent clouds from forming inside. Wrong on both counts: The V.A.B. was not air-conditioned, and clouds didn’t form anyway.
The building is immense. Its floor covers eight acres. Its walls extend upward 525 feet (the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet high). Each of the four doors of the V.A.B. is 456 feet high, tall and wide enough to admit the United Nations’ headquarters building. The V.A.B. is secured to Florida bedrock by 4,225 piles driven down 160 feet to prevent it from taking off like a box kite in a hurricane.
During its voyage from the V.A.B. to the launch pad, including its climb up that five-degree slope, the tip of the Saturn, 363 feet above the platform, never moved outside the vertical by more than the dimensions of a basketball.
They compromised. The probability of getting the crew back safely was set at three nines, or 999 times in 1,000. The probability of completing the assigned mission was set at two nines, 99 times in 100. And that, Johnson recalled, is how it happened, in a ten-minute conversation. “We wrote those numbers down, and they had a most profound effect on the cost of the program. If you took one decimal point off of that thing, in theory you could probably cut the program cost in half. If we’d added one more, there’s no way in the world we could ever have done it —there’s not enough money in the world
...more
[* The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, “Is there any reason why it won’t work?” to which they answer: “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, “Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines.”]
“Caldwell’s the sort of guy who’s the artistic designer as opposed to the engineering designer,” remembered one colleague. “He says, ‘Well, dammit, if it doesn’t look right, it’s not right.’ And he’ll come up with something that looks right and it’ll work.”
Caldwell Johnson was once reflecting on the accounts he had read about the design of the Apollo spacecraft. “The way the history books say things came about,” he said, “they didn’t come about that way. The official records and all, that’s a long way of explaining a lot of things. It turns out that the thing was done by people, not by machines, and people have a way of getting to a very rational conclusion in a very irrational manner.”
In 1952, a new idea was shown in spectacular full-color pictures in the Collier’s issue of March 22. A panel of scientists headed by Dr. Wernher von Braun told how a space station, a great spinning shining ring, filled with workshops and living quarters and observation posts, with artificial gravity, serviced by a fleet of space tugs, could be built within the next ten to fifteen years. Among other things, such as promoting world peace (“It would be the end of Iron Curtains wherever they might be”), the space station would be an intermediate step for getting to the moon. A spacecraft would be
...more
Whichever way the choice went, direct ascent or E.O.R., the problem facing Maynard and his team was the same. Whether it was lifted in one piece or assembled in earth orbit, the spacecraft had to be able to escape Earth’s gravitational field, cross 240,000 miles of empty space, execute a landing on a surface of uncertain terrain and composition, execute a liftoff from the lunar surface without ground support, survive entry into the earth’s atmosphere, and then serve as a boat after it landed in the ocean. It was one thing to talk about such a vehicle in the abstract; it was quite another to
...more
The chief barrier to getting to the moon and back again was the energy budget. Putting a pound of payload into earth orbit takes a lot of energy coming off the launch pad, which means a lot of propellant; taking a pound all the way to the moon requires that much more; taking a pound all the way to the moon and back again requires the most of all.
Dolan and his men developed a solution: Design the spacecraft so that you can throw away parts of it as you go along. The Dolan team called it a “modular” spacecraft, in which different segments were designed exclusively for certain tasks. When the task of one module had been completed, it would be detached from the remainder of the spacecraft and discarded, ending its drain on the energy budget.
On June 28, 1962, the same day Jim Webb learned that the centers had agreed on lunar-orbit rendezvous, NASA’s first F-1 engine destroyed itself on a test stand at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
NASA’s rocket engineers had chosen 1.5 million pounds of thrust as the goal for the F-l not because they knew it was within their capabilities, but because that’s what they needed for a launch vehicle that could be used to build space stations or go to the moon, the missions that von Braun had in mind.
In principle, liquid rocket engines are simple, far simpler than the internal combustion engine. Liquid fuel is pumped into a combustion chamber in the presence of liquid oxygen and a flame. It burns. That’s all there is to it. There are no crankshafts to turn, no pistons to drive. The burning fuel produces energy in the form of gases that exit through the rocket’s nozzle. The force the gases produce against the top of the engine is called thrust. The thrust is transmitted through the rocket’s structure and, if it is greater than the weight of the rocket, the rocket lifts off. Put in its most
...more
With the sole exception of a nuclear explosion, the noise of a Saturn launch was the loudest noise ever produced by man. The only sound in nature known to have exceeded the noise of a Saturn V was the fall of the Great Siberian Meteorite in 1883. Sound waves of such force tended to disrupt the burning process.
Therefore, what Mueller proposed to do was to scrap the plans for incremental testing of the stages and to condense drastically the testing schedule for the spacecraft. This was called all-up testing—“up” meaning that a stage is a flight-ready piece of hardware, “all-up” meaning that everything on the Saturn V would be a real, functioning stage the very first time they launched it.
criticism of North American was really part of an inevitable charade to which contractors must reconcile themselves. “The contractor is always the underdog when something comes up,” he said later. “He has to absorb the criticism.”
“That’s kind of a handicap for the contractor’s technical people, because they are being second-guessed by a large gathering of technical people in NASA. If the work goes wrong, the contractor is wrong. If it goes right, the NASA technical man gets his medal or whatever.”
“The better is the enemy of the good,” Shea told them again and again.* The biggest problem with a new product in its developmental phase, Shea thought, was that a good engineer could always think of ways to make it better. This was fine, except that they couldn’t keep changing the spacecraft forever. Sooner or later they had to lock it into one configuration, so that they could make that configuration work. Keep the changes down.
In January 1965, the injector for the F-l was rated flight-ready by Marshall Space Flight Center. On April 16, 1965, five F-l engines, mounted together as they would be in flight, were ignited on the Huntsville test stand. During 6.5 seconds of ignition, they generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust.
The history of Apollo is divided into two eras, Before the Fire and After the Fire.
“With a young guy, you don’t realize sometimes you can’t do something, so you go ahead and do it,” said one Cape engineer. “As you get older, you get more cautious, and you have a fear of how you would look if you failed.” The night of the fire, the young men of the space program suddenly became much older. After that night, there would always be a heightened sense not just that things could go wrong (they had always known that), but that things might actually go wrong, something that had been hard for the young ones to recognize.
“Boy, you can think you’re the smartest sonofabitch anybody ever saw, but there’s so many events that occur that can affect one’s performance or one’s role in life. You still can’t stop people from stuffing rags in pipes and things like that, all of which make somebody look dumb in retrospect. The obvious question is ‘Jesus, why didn’t you guys see that?’” That is the question Shea refused to quit asking of himself. For years after, as he neared the top of one of the nation’s largest high-tech corporations, he kept the photograph that the crew of Apollo 1 had given him displayed prominently
...more
“You just sort of wade into it,” Hello said. “It’s like a gigantic piece of cheese—you’ve got to start biting somewhere.”
As for why the first flight in the Apollo series was Apollo 4: The Grissom crew’s flight was A.S.-204 (fourth Apollo flight on a Saturn II). After the fire, at the widows’ request, “Apollo 1” was reserved for the flight that never took place. Then Low suggested retroactively naming the three unmanned Apollo/Saturn II flights Apollo 1A, Apollo 2, and Apollo 3, respectively. While that was being considered, A.S.-501 was named Apollo 4; subsequently, NASA headquarters decided not to rename the earlier flights after all.]
For later flights, a C.D.D.T. for a Saturn V lasted four days—sixty hours of actual tests and thirty-six hours of planned holds. Expecting some first-time delays, Petrone planned for this first C.D.D.T. to take six days. It took seventeen.
All of the valves and settings at the pad had to be set so that the actual loading, the most dangerous part of prelaunch operations, could be conducted by remote control from the Firing Room. Once loading began, there were dozens more procedures, and the process took hours—after all, they were pumping the equivalent of 144 trailer-truck loads of kerosene, liquid oxygen, and liquid hydrogen into the equivalent of a thirty-six-story building.
To a New York Times reporter, the Saturn looked like a crystalline obelisk. To visiting Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Saturn and the red umbilical tower with its swing arms were a white maiden clasped by a monstrous lobster. Rocco Petrone was reminded of a cathedral.
At T–3 minutes 7 seconds, control of the launch process was turned over to the computers. For almost three more minutes, Petrone would be able to stop the launch manually if he had to, but now the Saturn V was busy preparing itself to fly, receiving through the umbilical hoses still connecting it with the ground the helium that created the pressures within the propellant tanks necessary to feed the propellants into the pumps.
At T–8.9 seconds, an electrical signal was sent to the igniters, and four small, silent flames lit within the combustion chamber of each of the F-ls. From that moment through liftoff, there was nothing Petrone or anyone else in the Firing Room could do. If something went wrong, the sensors would know it before the news could reach the Firing Room, and the Saturn V would shut down its engines without waiting for sluggish human beings to instruct them.
Now, receiving the signal from the I.U., a helium-gas pneumatic device actuated the release, which occurred in all four arms within fifty milliseconds. If the pneumatic actuator had failed, an explosive bolt in each hold-down arm would have triggered the release.
As the Saturn V moved off the pad, the sound finally reached across the marsh and slammed into the viewing area. It came first through the ground, tremors that shook the viewing stand and rattled its corrugated iron roof. Then came the noise, 120 decibels of it, in staccato bursts. People who were there would recall it not as a sound, but as a physical force. In the C.B.S. broadcast booth, the plate-glass window began to shake so violently that Walter Cronkite had to hold it in place with his hands as he tried to continue his commentary.
