Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (47 page)

Of the many engineering improvements introduced on Apollo 15, among those most appreciated by the astronauts was the redesigned spacesuit, which was more mobile and flexible and easier to doff and don, allowing the crew to remove their spacesuits in Falcon’s cabin and enjoy the unfettered comfort of their flight suits while eating and sleeping. This did not help my personal uneasiness about micrometeoroid penetration of the LM’s cabin while on the Moon, but after the prior missions I was feeling more confident and worried less while they slept.

During the Apollo 15 mission, I dropped into the Bethpage Mission Support Room to watch critical mission events, and after-hours I watched the explorations, which were shown almost continuously from the rover’s camera over one of Mission Control’s channels. I saw most of the second moonwalk and felt more like a participant in the adventure than ever before. The rover climbed three hundred feet up the flank of Mount Hadley, maintaining good speed but giving Scott and Irwin concern about tipping over on the steeper slopes. At one point while both astronauts were gathering samples on foot, the rover started to slide downhill, but Scott quickly grabbed and held it. Scott panned the rover’s camera over the scene from their highest point, showing the rounded hills golden in sunlight, with the darker plain and light-walled Hadley Rille below. The LM Falcon was far away, a tiny speck in the unearthly panorama. (Mission rules limited the crew to driving no farther from the LM as they could safely walk back—about six kilometers.) The mountains of the Moon were hauntingly beautiful and mysterious, and palpably ancient.

On the way back down Mount Hadley, Scott and Irwin explored midsize Spur crater, collecting and documenting samples. An unusual whitish rock caught their eyes; when Scott brushed it off he could clearly see the white crystals of anorthosite, most likely from the Moon’s primordial crust. Knowing the value and import of the treasure they had found, Scott and Irwin displayed it before the camera and exulted with their scientist colleagues in the back room at Mission Control. (This sample, dubbed the Genesis Rock by a reporter covering the mission in Houston, was found to be 4.5 billion years old, probably dating from the formation of the Moon.) Returning to Hadley Base, Scott made another major contribution to science by drilling a ten-foot core sample tube into the surface, despite stubborn resistance and the pain of
aching fingertips, which had been pressed too long and hard inside his pressurized gloves. (The core sample was worth the effort required to collect it. Scientists identified forty-two layers of soil, the bottom layer undisturbed for half a billion years.)

Their third and final excursion took Scott and Irwin to the edge and some distance down the sloping side of Hadley Rille. They saw and photographed layering of the canyon walls from repeated lava flows, providing convincing evidence of the active volcanism that played a part in shaping the Moon’s ancient past. They collected many more rock and soil specimens and retrieved the ten-foot core sample. Before entering Falcon, Scott parked the rover nearby and pointed its camera to capture Falcon’s liftoff.

As I saw it from the MSR in Bethpage, the liftoff was amazing. The ascent stage leapt upward very quickly in a shower of silver and gold shards of torn insulation and disappeared from the camera’s field of view. For a few seconds bits and pieces fluttered to the ground, and then the LM descent stage and those ALSEP instruments in the picture were still—frozen on the Moon for eternity. I still picture them that way whenever I look up at the Moon. Six silent sentinels awaiting the return of the next wave of lunar explorers.

Ascent and rendezvous were smooth and uneventful, and Scott and Irwin were reunited with Al Worden, who had made his own major contribution to lunar science. The scientific instrument module on Endeavour had mapped and examined much of the Moon’s surface and recorded copious data on its composition and characteristics. These explorers were returning with their spacecraft overflowing with astutely selected samples and data that would add greatly to mankind’s knowledge of the origins of both the Moon and, by proximity and analogy, Earth. Safe aboard the recovery carrier
Okinawa
in the Pacific, they breathed again the cool fresh air of Earth and delighted in mingling with their fellows, the postmission quarantine regimen having been dispensed with as unnecessary.

I met the Apollo 15 crew several weeks later at a dinner in Houston. Dave Scott and Jim Irwin shared with me many details of how things felt and sounded within the LM. They described liftoff and ascent as a smooth elevator ride, with the moonscape rapidly shrinking in the triangular windows, and the flaming explosive energy of the rocket engine burning only inches behind them as a steady, nonthreatening vibration transmitted mainly through their feet. They mimicked some of the sounds aboard LM: the sharp bang of the cabin depressurization valve, the whines and hums of the ECS pumps and fans, and the abrasive grinding of the steerable communications antenna. They willingly answered all my questions and repeatedly returned to their feelings of gratitude at being able to witness such wondrous beauty in another world. Thanks to their openness and sharing, and the added dimension provided by the rover’s TV, I felt deeply involved with the adventure of this unprecedented mission. There was much more to my pleasure in Apollo 15
than satisfaction in our LM’s near flawless performance. For the first time, my fantasy of stowing aboard the LM and exploring the Moon with the astronauts had found a degree of fulfillment.

The Central Highlands: Apollo 16

In April 1972 Grumman was at a fever pitch of preparation for the space shuttle competition. NASA’s request for proposals was expected within a few weeks, and we had some six hundred engineers busy completing our studies and analyses and developing our main proposal themes. As deputy director of the space shuttle program at Grumman, I bore a major responsibility for the proposal, which meant long hours and weekend work. This left not much chance for me to follow the Apollo 16 mission as it unfolded, although I did try to drop into the Bethpage MSR after-hours to watch the mission control monitors, if only for a few minutes. Some nights I just had to settle for the truncated news summaries of the mission on broadcast TV.

Apollo 16 was targeted at the Descartes Highlands, near the center of the Moon north of the equator. The geologists thought the bright, extensive highland areas might have been created by volcanism in the Moon’s early history, predating the lava flows that created the Maria. After carefully studying highland landing sites, NASA concluded that the Descartes region, although very uneven and cratered, offered enough level areas to be safe for a lunar module landing. Scientists were eager for their first exploration of terrain that appeared representative of a major portion of the Moon’s surface.
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Apollo 16 had an all-southern crew with a “down home country” style: Comdr. John Young, LM pilot Charles “Charlie” Duke, and CM pilot Thomas Kenneth “Ken” Mattingly. They arrived in lunar orbit uneventfully and on schedule, but then an unexpected problem threatened the mission. After CM Casper and LM Orion separated and Orion preened for Mattingly’s predescent inspection, Casper failed one of the checkout procedures Mattingly put it through. When he checked the secondary gimbal control system
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in the service propulsion system, the steering gimbals oscillated instead of holding a steady commanded position. Although the primary gimbal control had checked out, mission rules required that both systems be operational before permitting LM to descend to the Moon. Casper and Orion held their positions in close orbits for more than six hours while Mission Control worked on the problem. They finally gave a mission go-ahead, based on the judgment that even with the positional oscillations of the gimbals, the secondary system could safely control an SPS engine firing.

While in the holding pattern Orion also developed trouble. Houston flight controllers noticed that the pressure in the reaction control system fuel tank was creeping upward out of limits. Grumman’s Will Bischoff, Manning Dandridge, and Ozzie Williams decided this was caused by leakage in an RCS
pressure regulator and recommended opening the ascent propulsion-RCS interconnect fuel valve. This allowed the excess pressure to relieve into the much larger ascent fuel tank and solved the problem.
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Young flew Orion to a smooth landing in rough, heavily cratered terrain, near the base of towering Stone Mountain. He and Duke conducted three highly productive moonwalks, the first two exceeding seven hours duration each, the third exceeding five hours. They drove the rover up Stone Mountain to a point five hundred feet above the plain and gazed with wonder on an otherworldly panorama. Their home base LM was not even in sight, hidden by an undulating fold of Stone Mountain’s slope. The mountain’s underlying rounded shapes recalled Mount Hadley, but Stone Mountain was more rock-strewn and rugged. They found many whitish crystalline rocks, anorthosite from the Moon’s primordial crust, like the Genesis Rock. But contrary to the geologists’ predictions, they found no evidence of volcanism in the highlands. The area appeared to have been formed by intensive meteorite bombardment in eons past. The two explorers were excited and expressive, punctuating their comments with “Wow!” and “Lookit that!” Young and Duke freely shared their sights and feelings with the world, in plain-spoken American country English, to the delight of much of their U.S. audience.
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The explorers returned more than two hundred pounds of lunar samples, a new record, plus data and photographs from the surface and from the orbiting scientific instrument module. Mattingly performed a spacewalk to retrieve film from the SIM at the base of the service module, in the daunting, spectacular emptiness of space almost halfway between Earth and Moon, an experience forever seared into his memory.

Grand Finale: Apollo 17

Joan and I and our three youngest children, Christopher, age twelve, Jennifer, nine, and Peter, seven, waited for hours in the bleachers of the VIP viewing area through prelaunch holds in the countdown of Apollo 17, the first nighttime launch to the Moon. As the December chill and dampness deepened, we watched the Apollo stack in the distance on Launch Pad 39A, bathed in the glare of floodlights and exhaling streams of white vapor, as though nearly bursting with stored energy. The children grew restless and ran around the parking lot, emptying the small cooler of snacks and finding beetles and other insects in the weeds. Well after midnight, when the countdown passed the planned twenty-second hold, silence fell over the watching throng, and I squeezed Joan’s hand for reassurance.

The dazzlingly bright yellow-white plume spilled out from beneath the Saturn booster and, as the black-trimmed white cylinder cleared the tower, expanded until it looked like the rocket was riding astride the Sun. The nighttime darkness vanished in the harsh light of a klieg-light white dawn, showing
the flat expanse of dunes, wetlands, and tropical scrub growth to the far horizons. I gaped open mouthed at this manmade wonder, and forgot about the oncoming shock of sound until it hit my ears with staccato fury and sent earth tremors up my legs. Then as we stared in wonder, the Sun slowly transformed into a brilliant star and the shrinking rocket came less distinct in its glare. For several minutes our eyes were riveted skyward, until the sound bombardment faded to a distant rumble and the departing moonship was a dimming star. Darkness reclaimed its rightful reign over southern Florida, but the curving trail of fluffy white exhaust cloud, luminous in the light of the target Moon, attested to the reality of the miracle we had all witnessed.

As we waited on the bus after the launch, stuck in the traffic of a million departing viewers, our kids were so excited by what they had seen that they chattered endlessly, not settling down for sleep until long after we returned to our motel. Before finally dropping off, little Peter asked if the astronauts were sleeping too in their spaceship. For all of us it was a night to remember.

I had come down to Kennedy Space Center a day before Joan and the children to watch the final launch preparations from Grumman’s Mission Support Room in the Operations and Checkout building. In the afternoon before launch, Grumman’s KSC director, George Skurla, told me this story: NASA’s Apollo launch director, the hard-driving Col. Rocco Petrone, had called Skurla into his office a few months earlier and asked what he was doing to maintain morale and discipline among the Grumman team at KSC. With no follow-on space work, the Grumman people were literally working themselves out of their jobs on Apollo 17, which worried NASA management. Would their quality and dedication be sustained at the same high standards of prior launches? Skurla told him, “Don’t worry about my Grummies, they’ll do just fine.”

On launch day Petrone summoned Skurla into his office and showed him a poster left on the platform on the launch tower outside the white room and the command module, where it was hoped the astronauts would see it as they boarded their spaceship. “Don’t your people ever learn? This is a violation of the rules,” he said. On a previous mission he had demanded that the perpetrators of a similar infraction be fired.
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On this final Apollo launch, his displeasure was more measured. He looked at the poster with Skurla, which was signed by each member of the Grumman launch team: “This may be our last LM, but it will be our best!” Petrone’s face broke into a half-smile and he admitted that he admired their spirit.

Earlier that day I had rendezvoused with Joan and our children at a large prelaunch luncheon sponsored by Grumman. Several astronauts’ wives attended, including Jan Evans, wife of Apollo 17’s CM pilot, Ron Evans, with whom Joan was acquainted from prior mission visits in Houston. Some NASA officials also attended, including Bob Gilruth and his wife, and Gen. and Mrs. Carrol “Rip” Bolender. Gilruth offered brief remarks praising Grumman for its outstanding contributions to the Apollo program. Jo Evans, wife
of Lew Evans, who had died suddenly in June, also said a few heartfelt words thanking Grumman’s LM people for keeping Lew’s spirit alive. The group faced the upcoming launch confidently, with pride and relief, and regret that this was the finale.