Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Rocco Petrone turned to Albert Zeiler with a grin on his face and said, “Al, we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

A few days later, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations inquired solicitously whether the United States was interested in receiving aid earmarked for underdeveloped countries.

Max Faget addressed the group on the topic of a lunar landing. In the middle of his speech, Faget signaled to a confederate. The auditorium dimmed to a half-light that was somewhat darker than a heavily overcast day but brighter than a moonlit night. Faget waited while the audience murmured. When there was silence, he told them that this was what earthlight would look like to an astronaut standing on the moon in a lunar night with a full earth shining above him. It was at that moment, sitting in the twilight of the auditorium, that John Disher realized for the first time that they really were going to go to the moon—some day.

Scrawled at the bottom of the memo is Silverstein’s handwritten reply: “Low OK Abe.” Low would later marvel that something so monumental could have begun so simply: “OK.”

After Kennedy’s speech, finding a site was the first item on the agenda. NASA already had use of the Air Force facility at Cape Canaveral; the obvious course would be to graft the Apollo facility onto it. But in many ways Cape Canaveral was not a good place to launch large rockets. In 1961, the local labor force was too small to supply the manpower that would be required for the construction. The Cape coast was prone to rain, lightning, and strong winds throughout the year and hurricanes during the fall. Worse yet, the weather was unpredictable, a nasty problem with a large vehicle sitting out in the open on a launch pad. Even when the weather was sunny, the humidity and the salt air corroded metal and insinuated gremlins into delicate electronics. Cape Canaveral was not an ideal place. 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.). This meant, first, that the site had to be large enough for its facilities to be built at safe distances from the launch pads. It had, in fact, to be huge. Second, the site had to be distant from major population centers, so that if an errant Saturn did “get outside the gate,” as the engineers euphemistically put it, it would not immolate a large number of people. Third, because things could go wrong at any time in the ...

“Well, you’re probably crazy to even build that thing,” they would say to Buchanan, “but then we know you’re crazy when you say you’re going to move it.”

Testing a part millions of times wasn’t possible. It wasn’t necessary, either, in the view of most of the engineers in the program: Design it right and fabricate it per the print, and the component will work, every time. Engineers of this persuasion, Faget among them, argued that their time was much better spent searching for design flaws than mindlessly running tests.

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.”]

people have a way of getting to a very rational conclusion in a very irrational manner.”

It didn’t make any difference what your specialty was. Shea’s maxim was that if you understood it, you could make him understand it—and once he did, you never had to explain it again.

John Paup, North American’s program manager for the Apollo spacecraft, found himself in an awkward situation. North American, holding the main contract for the command and service module, had a corporate interest in earth-orbit rendezvous. If earth-orbit rendezvous were chosen, presumably North American would build the expanded spacecraft. If, on the other hand, lunar-orbit rendezvous was chosen, there was a good chance that a separate contract for the lunar lander would be written and that some company other than North American would get it. Paup and Harrison Storms, general manager of North American’s Space Division, had been stubbornly arguing for earth-orbit rendezvous and resisting every suggestion that the command and service module might have to be adapted for an L.O.R. mission. But now Paup had to wonder whether it made sense to keep on fighting it. Abruptly, he spoke into the silence: “I’ve heard all these good things about lunar-orbit rendezvous,” he said. “I’d like to hear what sonofabitch thinks it isn’t the right thing to do.”

In addition, they decided that for testing purposes they must “be able to initiate this instability at our command,” as Castenholz put it. Nature, left to herself, wasn’t producing instabilities frequently enough for the team to learn how to control them. Therefore, they decided to explode a bomb in the combustion chamber while the test was in progress—if that didn’t drive the engine into instability, then nothing would, they reasoned.

In Shea’s mind, nothing was sacred about the specs for the individual components of the spacecraft. There were only three sacred specs, and they were man, moon, decade.

As the meeting was winding down, Gus Grissom asked for the floor and pulled out two photographs from a large envelope. They were identical, but with different inscriptions. The picture showed Grissom, White, and Chaffee seated behind a table on which a small model of the Apollo capsule rested. Their heads were bowed, hands steepled in a caricature of prayer. Grissom gave the first copy to Stormy Storms, general manager of the North American Space Division. “We’ve got one for Joe Shea also,” Grissom said, and passed the second photograph down the table to him. “Joe advised us to practice our backup procedures religiously, so here we are practicing.” There was loud laughter. The picture, signed by all three astronauts, was inscribed, “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”

he kept the photograph that the crew of Apollo 1 had given him displayed prominently near the front entrance of his house. Shea would not let himself so much as enter or leave his own home without passing by the inscription: “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”

In personal manner, Low was unassuming to the point of diffidence. Back in the late 1950s, Caldwell Johnson reminisced, when they were fabricating the first Mercury capsule in the Langley shops, they roped off the area immediately around the capsule so that visitors wouldn’t get in the way of the engineers and technicians. One day Johnson noticed that a fellow was right up next to the capsule, even running his hand over the metal shingles. Johnson went over and reprimanded him. “You know you’re supposed to stay behind the ropes, don’t you?” Johnson said belligerently. The man apologized and did as he was told. Johnson returned to his work. Another engineer came over and whispered to him. “You know who you were talking to?” Johnson didn’t. “That’s George Low!” Johnson looked over again, and he was still there, peering intently at the spacecraft—a young man with a kindly face, thin, a little stooped. He was NASA’s program manager for Manned Space Flight, and he was standing quietly behind the ropes. He never lost that quietness. Later, in the days when he ran ASPO, subordinates would sometimes call the Low home late in the evening for advice on some new problem, and they would hear a soft voice answer the phone. “May I speak to your father?” they would ask George Low.

Petrone kept his hand near the button that would close protective louvers over the windows if the Saturn V blew up, though he always suspected that, if it happened, he would just keep watching instead.

Kraft looked for a particular kind of person. He wasn’t worried about grades—a B or sometimes even a C average could be good enough. In fact, the straight-A student wasn’t likely to be right for Flight Operations. Kraft wanted people who weren’t locked into a standard engineering career path. He wanted people who enjoyed nosing around in many different areas, and who knew that they were going to have to work hard to succeed. Most of all, he looked for applicants who were fascinated by space flight and who couldn’t believe their good fortune when they were given the opportunity to work sixty-hour weeks at a Civil Service salary—as long as they were working for the space program.

Next to the O&P officer sat the assistant flight director, filling the least popular job in the MOCR. “I hated it,” remembered one man who was briefly in the position. “You weren’t really an assistant flight director, you were assistant to the flight director.”

Even within the walls of the MOCR, Llewellyn had his own way of doing things. For example, Retro was supposed to count down to retrofire in the usual “ten, nine, eight . . .” pattern, but with Llewellyn, you never knew. Once he started at fifteen. Another time he began “ten, eight,” and, when the puzzled FIDO looked over at him, quickly added “nine, seven . . .” Sometimes he got behind, and so the count would end up “five, four, one, retrofire!” But he always got to “Retrofire!” at the right time, and was otherwise an exemplary Retro—inside the MOCR. Outside was another story, or dozens of stories. He is said to have broken a few bones falling from a collapsing drainpipe as he climbed back to his motel room after the front door had been locked on him at the Nigerian remote site—or was it in Australia? He is said to have found a man with his lady friend, thrown him out of a second-story window, and then, intent on inflicting further damage, jumped out after him. There are at least three different stories, involving three different bodies of water, in which Llewellyn submerged cars. Llewellyn himself was no help in sorting out truth from fiction in all this, smilingly denying someone’s account of a Llewellyn escapade, then suddenly throwing in a correction that was more improbable than the original version.

For the flight controller, that was about all there was to it. All he had to do was recognize a problem hidden in his displays, assess it correctly in the context of a mass of additional information, be neither too precipitous nor too hesitant in reporting it to the flight director, and be prepared to do all this instantly for hours on end.

So it wasn’t just the authority and the visibility that set the flight director apart, but the job itself. It was the flight controller’s job writ large: Know in technical detail one of the most complex machines ever made. Master a complex flight plan and a huge body of mission rules. Piece together tiny and often unconnected bits of information from multiple sources coming to you at the same time. Do all this under the gaze of the world in situations that might give you only seconds to make life-and-death decisions. If it was not a job for just anybody, it was also a job that had no equal. Reminded of all the ways in which working in the MOCR was tiring and even physically painful, Lunney once replied, “I can only say that I loved it. I thought it was wonderful. Remember the Patton movie? He’s standing by the tank with the battlefield full of dead soldiers and he says something like, ‘May God help me but I love it.’ And when he said that I said to myself, ‘I can relate to that.’”

Tindall recognized that what matters most to people is not that they get their way, but that they feel they have had a chance to make their case.

Once in a while, however, an AstroSim would carry things too far. There was, for example, the AstroSim who, during a Gemini sim, was asked by Guido to look out his window and report the position of a particular star. The AstroSim, with no idea where that star was supposed to be, claimed that he was unable to comply with Guido’s request because of cloud cover. That one didn’t wash.

Through the intercom, they could hear CapCom Gerry Carr say, “Apollo 8, you are riding the best bird we can find.” Jim Lovell replied, “Thanks a lot, troops. We’ll see you on the other side.”

As the spacecraft disappeared behind the moon on its last revolution, the one when it would fire the S.P.S. to free itself of lunar gravity, the MOCR once again filled with off-shift controllers. Once again the room fell silent. Chris Kraft later reported that waiting to reacquire the signal was his most apprehensive moment since he had joined the space program, worse even than Glenn’s entry after the heat shield problem. FlDO Jay Greene reported the news: “Flight, we have U.S.B. [upper side band] data. Initial residuals look good.” Then came the first words from the crew. “Please be informed,” astronaut Jim Lovell intoned across the 240,000 miles, “there is a Santa Claus.” In the FIDO flight log, Greene wrote in small, neat writing, “Burn status: Burn time 3 + 23. Ignition on time. Attitude nominal. Vx –.5. Vy+.4. Vz 0.” And below that, in big, sloppy, joyous script, “WE IS COMING HOME.”

Other astronauts caused months of fretting. One, a cheerfully uninhibited fellow who used four-letter words as grace notes to his everyday conversation, was a special project. Look, they finally told him, hum instead of talking. (Another version of the story is that NASA actually sent him to a psychologist, who hypnotized him and left him with the posthypnotic suggestion: Hum.) That’s why, in the tapes of his mission, one Apollo astronaut can be heard going “dum-te-dum-te-dum-te-dum” as he bounces across the lunar surface.]

Then there was the difficulty with the PGNS (Primary Guidance and Navigation System, pronounced “pings” because sometimes the acronym was informally spelled PNGS). In the descent, if the PGNS found that the trajectory was deviating from nominal, it was supposed to keep balancing two competing desirable states of affairs: landing at the assigned target, and landing softly. During the simulations, the PGNS, given a choice between the two, had an unnerving tendency to decide to get to the target, come what may. “On occasion,” Kranz said, “if you were far enough off in your navigation state, [the PGNS] would point the LEM directly at the target and try to approach it in pretty much the same fashion that you would fire a projectile.” This made for an extremely hard landing, the kind that was euphemistically called dinging the spacecraft, less euphemistically known as a fatal crash.

Kranz switched from Flight’s loop to an auxiliary loop that the people in the viewing room couldn’t hear. The tape of what he said is lost. As best he can recall, what he told his controllers went something like this: “Hey gang, we’re really going to go and land on the moon today. This is no bullshit, we’re going to land on the moon. We’re about to do something that no one has ever done. Be aware that there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know about the environment that we’re ready to walk into, but be aware that I trust you implicitly. But also I’m aware that we’re all human. So somewhere along the line, if we have a problem, be aware that I’m here to take the heat for you. I know that we’re working in an area of the unknown that has high risk. But we don’t even think of tying this game, we think only to win, and I know you guys, if you’ve even got a few seconds to work your problem, we’re going to win. So let’s go have at it, gang, and I’ll be tagging up to you just like we did in the training runs. Forget all the people out there. What we’re about to do now, it’s just like we do it in training. And after we finish this sonofagun,we’ll go out and have a beer and we’ll say, ‘Dammit, we really did something.’”

As Kranz sat and waited to begin the descent, the NASA photographer in the MOCR caught a shot of him. In it, Kranz is leaning forward expectantly, calm and cool. Behind the console, hidden from the camera, Kranz lifted his hand from a sheet of the flight plan and left behind a perfect, soaking-wet image of his palm.

“Houston, Tranquility base here,” Neil Armstrong announced. “The Eagle has landed.” “Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

Arabian didn’t give a damn about what anybody else thought. He had his own ideas about how things ought to be, and he was sure he was right, and he didn’t care if everybody else in the room thought differently. “See, I’m one guy a lot of people are afraid of,” Arabian said, accurately. “There’s a reason for it, because if anybody does anything technically that’s not according to physics, that’s bullshitting about something, I will forever be death on them. I mean, you’d better be exact, you’d better show technical elegance. It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, you’d better not ever prostitute physics.”

The Rendezvous Section was notable for including a woman. Her name was Cathy Osgood—the first woman we have mentioned whose role was something other than wife or secretary. There were just a handful of others (Rita Rapp, who ran the nutritional program for the astronauts, was apparently the highest ranking). Women engineers were exceedingly rare either in NASA or on the contractors’ staffs.]

With the lunar ascent, “there were no decisions to make, so in that sense it was easy. You just say, ‘Well, let’s light this sumbitch and it better work.’”

The MOCR was jammed with people, waving small flags and smoking the traditional splashdown cigars. The large center screen, which for the past eight days had been showing trajectories to the moon and lunar-orbital tracks, went black. In a moment, it lit again, with these words: 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. —John F. Kennedy to Congress, May 1961 Since Columbia had splashed down, the right-hand screen had been displaying the mission patch of Apollo 11. As the helicopters lifted Eleven’s crew to safety, these words appeared above it: Task accomplished. July 1969.

Kapryan silently asked himself, as he would in the last minutes before every launch he directed, What am I doing up here? Isn’t there a better way to make a living?

“Okay, now we’ve straightened out our problems here,” he reported cheerily. “I don’t know what happened; I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.” The crew had seen a bright white light at the time their problems began. A few seconds later, the irrepressible Conrad was back. “I think we need to do a little more all-weather testing,” he said confidentially. “Amen,” replied CapCom Carr. “Amen.”

“The one thing we missed was the Ben Franklin situation,” Petrone mused. “Somehow that had never entered into our discussion.” What they had done, they realized later, was to launch a 363-foot lightning rod, with the equivalent of a copper wire in the form of a trail of ionized gases running all the way down to the ground. Even though there was no lightning in the vicinity before launch, Apollo 12 could create its own. And that is exactly what it did, discharging the cloud into which it had entered.

It was then that Liebergot looked up at his screen, and suffered yet another shock: The pressure on his other O2 tank was falling. In preparing for disasters during flight, the world of flight control began with certain verities. One was that structural materials like lines and bulkheads had a reliability not just of .9999 or even .999999, but 1. Most of them had margins that protected them well beyond the worst-case design requirements. A second verity was that while two of the mechanisms of the spacecraft might plausibly fail simultaneously, it was not plausible that two redundant elements within the same system would fail simultaneously. This confidence was based on simple mathematics. With thousands of parts in the spacecraft, even very small probabilities of failure in the individual components added up to a reasonably large probability that some two of those thousands of mechanisms would fail at the same time. But if there are two completely independent oxygen tanks and each of them has a reliability of .9999 (for example), then the chance that both of the oxygen tanks will fail is .0001-squared, or one in a hundred million. The likelihood of a dual failure within any of the handful of major systems—electrical, oxygen, water, propulsion, and the like—was therefore exceedingly small. Until the moment that he saw the pressure on O2 Tank 1 falling, Liebergot (if he believed his unbelievable screens) had been looking at a double failure in the fuel cells plus an oxygen t...

CapCom Jack Lousma, feeling a little apologetic that the MOCR didn’t seem to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat tonight, called up to the crew. “Thirteen,” he said, “we’ve got lots and lots of people working on this. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first to know.” There was a pause of several seconds, and then back from Odyssey came Jim Lovell’s voice, as dry as the 200,000 miles of vacuum it had crossed: “Oh. Thank you.” It was classy, it was cool, and it reminded his listeners: This episode might be a strain on you folks in the MOCR, and that’s too bad, but three of us up here have a unique interest in how it all comes out.

The LEM was now fully operational, with an alignment stored in its guidance system. It had been two hours and forty-three minutes since Swigert had first reported a problem, about an hour and twenty minutes since the MOCR had first realized the crew would have to use the LEM. Right after Apollo 13, John Aaron recalled, F.O.D. prepared special checklists for activating the LEM as a lifeboat, and during the sims for every mission that followed, the flight control team was thrown at least one massive Thirteen-type failure on a translunar coast. But no matter how good the new checklists were, and no matter how much they practiced, Aaron said, “we never did it that quick again.”

Within hours, Apollo 13 also became a story that engaged the attention of the outside world as nothing else about the space program had done except the first lunar landing. When a Grumman engineer hurrying to Bethpage was stopped for speeding and explained where he was going, the police gave him a high-speed escort down the Long Island Expressway, sirens screaming.

Finally, after almost nine years of manned space flight, the Retros were going to have a chance to use their expertise in aborts.

Finally, at 2:43 in the morning, Lovell pushed the ignition button and the DPS engine ran at low throttle for thirty seconds, putting the spacecraft into a trajectory that, even without a second burn, would bring it down in the Indian Ocean not quite four days later. Lovell was relieved. He wasn’t completely confident that the burn provided them a survivable entry, but at least the spacecraft would intercept the earth’s atmosphere. In his mind, this was much better than the alternative they had just avoided—orbiting the earth indefinitely, in a lonely revolution with an apogee of 240,000 miles and a perigee of 3,000 miles, a “perpetual monument to the space program.”

For Glynn Lunney, standing alongside Kraft, the reaction of the men in the viewing room was inspiring. The option Kraft was recommending had the obvious disadvantage of leaving the crew at risk for twenty-four hours longer than the alternatives, but there was no quibbling. Lunney: “These men who we all grew up thinking were kings, absolute tops in our business, sat in this room and said to us, ‘Look, we’re here to support you guys, and we just want to hear what’s going on and we want you to know that if there’s anything at all that you need, you just let us know.’” Then and in the days to come, Lunney recalled, “they never second-guessed, never reversed anything, never even came close to that. No cover-your-ass. The whole set of interactions was one of the most supportive and reassuring you can imagine.” The gathering quickly ratified Kraft’s choice: The Apollo 13 crew would come home more slowly, but, they hoped, more surely.

The creation of the checklist was a controlled frenzy in which solutions were developed, rejected, and replaced in such rapid-fire sequence that it was difficult at any one moment to be sure how far they had to go. On Thursday, when the Apollo 13 crew inquired about progress, CapCom Joe Kerwin assured them, deadpan, that the checklist would be ready “by Saturday or Sunday at the latest.” Splashdown was Friday.

At 10:43 Friday morning, the crew of Apollo 13, together in Odyssey for the first time since they had evacuated it three days earlier, jettisoned Aquarius. “Farewell, Aquarius,” Lovell said quietly, “and we thank you.”

You can still hear the voices of the Apollo controllers, recorded for posterity on the tapes kept at Houston and in the National Archives. You can hear the voices from the back rooms and the fainter voices of the astronauts themselves. What you cannot hear are the background noises of flight control—the microphones on the controllers’ headsets were too highly directional to pick up extraneous sounds. Thus, at the point after the first lunar landing on Apollo 11 when Kranz had to call for quiet in the MOCR, the listener must imagine the hubbub for himself. On the first night of Apollo 13’s troubles, when Lunney had to call for quiet, the tapes reveal nothing of the commotion that was distracting him. But three minutes and fifty-three seconds after Jack Swigert’s “Okay, Joe,” the screen at the right front of the MOCR lit up with a television image of Odyssey, its main parachutes safely deployed. That moment, you can still hear. No microphone could have filtered out that pandemonium.

Apollo came to mean many things to the people who were part of it, but it began as Jack Kennedy’s Apollo. Kennedy’s Apollo was not a spacecraft, not an engineering project, not a means of adding to man’s scientific knowledge. Kennedy’s Apollo was a heap of chips pushed to the center of the table. Kennedy’s Apollo came out of a long and honored tradition of great American boasts—that we could whip the British, cross the Rockies, build taller buildings, grow more corn and make better mousetraps than anyone else. Childish boasts, some would say, for there was never anything subtle about them: “Anything anyone else can do, America can do better.” But there was always an added clause that gave them weight and dignity: “If you don’t believe it, just watch us.” Kennedy’s commitment was the quintessence of this tradition, right down to the gratuitous deadline, “before this decade is out.” Kennedy’s Apollo came to an end with the landing of Apollo 13. It hadn’t been planned that way, but, as it turned out, Thirteen was the pinnacle of the spirit behind Kennedy’s commitment. It was a spectacularly American response to crisis—unorganized (in a way), with people in a hundred different places across the country racing to do their parts; youngsters taking charge; improvisation in minutes and invention in hours; courage; indomitability; and then, afterward, a good deal of shrugging it off—“Hey, it was no big deal, we knew after the first half hour we could do it.”

No matter what happened to the space program in the future, it could never be like this again. As was his habit, Petrone thought in terms of history: Any number of Pilgrims might follow, but there could be only one Columbus.