"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (23 page)

Apollo 14
moon rocks. Alan Shepard (right) leans over to view a basketball-size rock being examined by Ed Mitchell (table, left).
(NASA).

“Okay, Houston, the crew of
Antares
is leaving Fra Mauro Base.”

“Roger,
Antares.”

With mixed emotions, Shepard and Mitchell closed their lander’s hatch and monitored the countdown timers as they flashed away the minutes and seconds.
Antares
’s ascent rocket shot flaming thrust into its descent-stage launch pad. The lunar module leapt from the moon and sped into the black sky, into its rendezvous orbit with
Apollo 14
’s command ship
Kitty Hawk.

The docking of the two spacecraft was perfection.
Kitty Hawk
fired up and carried its smiling crew home.

T
he legacy of
Apollo 14
went far beyond returning the lunar landing program to safe flight. The three remaining
Apollo
lunar landings, which had been on the edge of cancellation, would not be cut.

On July 26, 1971,
Apollo 15
astronauts Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and
Al Worden flamed onto the lunar highway. Scott and Irwin rode their lander,
Falcon
, to the foothills of the Apennine Mountains while Worden, overhead in
Endeavour
, began a photo survey for future landing sites.

Dave Scott and Jim Irwin became the seventh and eighth astronauts to step onto the moon. They had been given a great landing site. They stared in wonder at the Apennines, mountains towering fifteen thousand feet, as they drove the first lightweight electric car, a cross between a golf cart and a dune buggy, over the lunar surface. They drove it up and down slopes heavily laden with tools, moon rocks, and other lunar samples as well as cameras. With the ability to travel a distance of six miles, the two astronauts did little moonwalking. They increased the area to be traversed, stud
ied, and sampled. The six miles was a safety limit. If the “moon buggy” broke down, the astronauts would still have enough power and oxygen in their suits for a steady walk back to their lunar landing craft.
Apollo 15
’s Scott and Irwin spent three days at the feet of one of the moon’s largest mountain ranges.

I
n April of 1972,
Apollo 16
astronauts John Young, Charles Duke, and Ken Mattingly flew to the moon. Young and Duke left Mattingly in lunar orbit babysitting their command ship,
Casper,
while they rode their lunar module,
Orion,
to a wide plateau on the edge of the Descartes Mountains. The second moon buggy took the two astronauts through massive boulder fields, around and through craters, and through some chemical rocks with aluminum basalts. They came home with 213 pounds of samples for happy geologists.

L
ate that year, on December 7, 1972, shortly after midnight on a Cape Canaveral coast mantled in darkness, people within fifty miles thought the sun had come up. What appeared to be daylight flared along the beach, spreading outward as the
Saturn V
rocket with
Apollo 17
went to full thrust. It rose atop its own blazing fireball, leaving a light that was seen five hundred miles away atop Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Astronauts Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ron Evans were on their way to what would be the last landing on the lunar landscape for half a century. Gene Cernan had traveled the same path to the moon before on
Apollo 10
. He and Jack Schmitt, the only geologist to sink his pike into the lunar crust, landed in the Littrow Valley of the Taurus mountain region and capped the most incredible series of expeditions in the history of the human race. They spent three days on the lunar surface, including more than twenty-two hours in a trio of stunning geological journeys, riding their moon buggy to fields of enormous boulders, to the slopes of steeply rising mountains, and along the edges of precipitous gorges from where they stood in awe of the chasms torn in the moon’s surface. They managed to loa
d 243 pounds of rocks and soil aboard their lander, conduct dozens of scientific experiments, and strip away many of the moon’s secrets that had confounded people on Earth for centuries. The
Apollo 17
finds have kept scientists of many countries intensely busy well into the twenty-first century.

What emerged from
Apollo
is a picture of a moon that was born in searing heat, lived a brief life of boiling lava and shattering collisions, then died geologically in an early, primitive stage. It came into being some 4.6 billion years ago, when great masses of gaseous matter called the solar neb
ula began condensing to form the sun, Earth, and other planets and moons of the solar system. The nebula first condensed into chunks of space debris—from small pebbles to miles-wide boulders—that crashed together and fused to form celestial bodies. This compacting of debris generated intense heat that turned the lunar surface into a sea of molten lava, to a depth of several miles. The cooled lava became the moon’s primitive crust. Debris left over from the creation of the solar system continued to bombard the moon, carving out giant craters and valleys and forming mountains by piling up large piles of rocks.

The young Earth apparently underwent the same period of meteorite bombardment and volcanism that the moon did for about a half billion years. Then the histories of the two bodies diverged. The weak lunar gravity could not prevent volcanic gases from escaping into space, and the moon became a dead body where life could not exist. But the larger Earth, with strong magnetic and gravity fields, held onto its vol
canic gases, and they formed an atmosphere and oceans, creating conditions for the development of life.

America’s lunar landings learned more about the moon and our solar system than humans had learned in their species’s history. Technology advanced fifty years ahead of where it would have been had we not gone.
Apollo 17’s
flight ended the four-year stretch when twenty-four Americans, some twice, rocketed through the vacuum from Earth to the moon. Twelve of the twenty-four descended from lunar orbit to walk and drive across the small world.

NBC Radio and Television was there for every flight, from launch to splashdown. We enjoyed an out-front position and first-place ratings. Jim Kitchell, our executive producer, was simply the best. He had cut his teeth in television news by directing the first newscast put on the air by journalists, not broadcasters, who simply read what they were given. The show was the legendary
Huntley-Brinkley Report,
where Kitchell was the first to cover a breaking news event live. When it came to covering space flights, he led, we followed; and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon, Kit
chell’s space unit was given the Emmy for “Coverage of Special Events.”

But sadly, as quickly as Project Apollo had arrived, it was gone—gone for thirty-one years until January 14, 2004, when President George W. Bush dusted off its historic pages. As of this writing, astronauts not yet born when
Apollo 17
returned from the moon December 17, 1972, will head back to the lunar surface as early as 2018.

And if you should be asked, the first Martians are already here. They are your sons and daughters, and as soon as they move through the halls of learning, they’ll be saddling up to fly to our planetary neighbor on rockets and interplanetary ships named
Ares
and
Orion.

As history had its voyages to the New World, its wagons west, its Kitty Hawks, and its Lindbergh flights to Paris, Mars will be the next generation’s Apollo.

It just could be the greatest adventure of all.

A
merica was proud of its moonwalkers, but we who followed spaceflight daily knew earthlings’ first visits to the moon could have been different. Had Russian cosmonauts sustained their early lead, the number going there might have been two or three times twenty-four.

In the beginning, the competition was fierce. The Soviets had gone all out in their desperate attempts to be first. But costly failures slowed them to a halt, and then, only two weeks before
Apollo 17
returned from the moon, the Russians were down to a last-gasp hope that their giant N–1 rocket would fly. They could no longer be first, but they still struggled to get their cosmonauts to the moon in the same period in history as American astronauts had. Such a landing would restore some Soviet pride.

It was not to be.

Martin Caidin was in Russia. It was N–1’s fourth launch attempt. The mammoth rocket was to boost a heavy, unmanned lunar-landing spacecraft directly to the moon in a rehearsal for a manned landing. It rose into the Kazakhstan sky only to be ripped apart again by a series of violent explosions, its wreckage tumbling earthward while sounding the death knell of the Russians’ last, slim hope.

From the ashes of N–1, the Russians returned to their proven rockets and spacecraft and became successful in their efforts to place a space station in Earth orbit. The Salyut station led the way, while the American road to space in the aftermath of the highly successful Apollo moon landings developed potholes and detours.

A simple “breaking and entering” burglary at the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate scandal propelled this country into a self-devouring frenzy that would last until a peanut farmer from Georgia was elected President in 1976. No longer was there the driving force in the country’s space effort that had carried America to the moon. NASA’s visions were lost on the floors of a disenchanted Congress and a public that rapidly became apathetic.

Slowdown was NASA’s new marching orders. The agency’s planners and builders were replaced by a new wave of bureaucrats who swayed with the political winds, sadly short on dreams, drive, and any determination to keep forging outward beyond Earth.

NASA’s new task was to build something that could be flown again and again. It didn’t have to go anywhere but into Earth orbit and it didn’t necessarily need a mission, so bureaucrats inked their drawing boards with the STS—Space Transportation System—known as the Space Shuttle.

NASA failures were not with its equipment, but in promising that the Space Shuttle would be all things for all missions, that it would serve both civilian and military needs—and save truckloads of money in the process. The Space Shuttle program escalated swiftly in cost and decelerated just as rapidly in productivity. Weeks became months, and projects meant to take months stretched into years without a definite future.

Something had to fill the gap.

Engineers still on the job from Project Apollo dusted off the Saturn rockets and Apollo spacecraft left over from the three lunar landing missions that had fallen victim to the congressional ax. The few visionaries left in NASA proposed modifying this hardware into a modest space station where astronauts could study the sun and other stars, conduct experiments seeking pure materials and medicines, and learn to live
in space for long periods just in case someone came up with a sensible thought of going somewhere else in the solar system. The cost would not be great, and the White House and Congress agreed what was left of the great NASA Apollo launch teams should be preserved. Thus
Skylab
, the country’s first space station, was born.

The third stage of a
Saturn V
was stripped and converted into the house-size “home away from home” with racks of scientific equipment, a state-of-the-art astronomical laboratory, and more than thirteen thousand cubic feet of comfort and freedom for three astronauts. Gone were the cramped spacecraft of the past. Cooking facilities, private quarters, showers, even the astronauts’ own gym for keeping in good physical shape while spending months in weightlessness rounded out
Skylab
’s interior.

America’s first space station thundered into orbit May 14, 1973. Three successive missions of three astronauts each rode smaller Saturn 1B rockets and Apollo spaceships to NASA’s first orbiting outpost. The final crew’s stay in 1974 was extended to eighty-four days and proved that astronauts would suffer no ill effects during long weightless voyages.

In the normal course of events, the man who rode herd on the astronauts would have been Deke Slayton. But during
Skylab,
Deke was busy getting himself back on flight status. He was being treated and tested by Dr. Harold Mankin, a world-renowned cardiologist from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Dr. Mankin found Slayton’s heart was, and had been, disease free and he was placed back on flight status. No one was happier for Deke than his close friend Alan Shepard, who had taken charge of the astronaut office.

Meanwhile, the Russians and NASA were plotting a mission where the two countries would meet and dock in space. Their efforts were inspired by Martin Caidin’s novel
MAROONED,
which legendary Hollywood producer Frank Capra had made into an Academy Award–winning motion picture. In the novel, a Russian cosmonaut saved American astronauts, and it was agreed a common docking device between both countries’ spacecraft would be wise. Project Apollo-Soyuz was born.

The selection team would have been shot if they had not picked
Deke Slayton as a member of the
Apollo-Soyuz
crew. A classic party was thrown for Deke, and the happy and drunken astronaut was carried onto an aircraft with his crewmates Tom Stafford and Vance Brand. It was wheels up for training in Moscow.

Legendary Hollywood producer Frank Capra (center) at Cape Canaveral with the author of
MAROONED,
Martin Caidin (right). (Caidin Collection).

T
wo cosmonauts and three astronauts would make up the team that would meet in Earth orbit. The problems of making the Russian and American pilots function as a tightly knit unit were as formidable as the many technical issues that had to be resolved. The cosmonauts didn’t speak English, and the astronauts didn’t speak Russian. Neither side could read the markings and lettering of the equipment on the other’s spacecraft.

But world peace and p
ossibly Earth’s survival itself were riding on the
Apollo-Soyuz
mission scheduled for the summer of 1975. The goal was critical for every American and Russian. Until now, any crew marooned in space with limited oxygen and power would have been lost.
With the universal docking equipment being built for
Apollo-Soyuz
, chances of a future rescue would be almost certain.

For three years the Americans and Russians, supported by backup teams of engineers and space veterans, modified their spaceships, built new needed equipment, learned their respective languages, and practiced orbital flight maneuvers in new simulators.

The barriers came down. Russian and American suspicions waned. When cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov found themselves at Mission Control in Texas, and at Cape Canaveral’s launch pads in Florida, they eagerly waited to fly the astronauts to their Baikonur launch site to watch their big rockets thunder into the sky. In between forging the equipment needed and training to fly what they had created, there were three years of friendship-building with hot dogs and beer, borscht and vodka, swimming in the Florida surf, and wild snowball fights in the cosmonauts’ playground in Star City.

Slowly the pieces of the international puzzle came together. The
Apollo-Soyuz
teams were each firm in trusting their own equipment. Now they had gained trust in a never-flown international spaceship. Once
Apollo
and
Soyuz
were joined high above Earth, the tunnel formed by the common docking module would pressurize, hatches would open, and men who had been near enemies but now were close friends would form a union in space.

For Deke Slayton it would not be the moon, but it would be space, and what happened in the hard vacuum of Earth orbit would begin the melt of the cold war far below.