Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (15 page)

Apollo 11 climbs towards orbit. This photo was taken with a telescopic camera mounted in an air force EC-135N aircraft.

Officials relax in the Launch Control Center following lift-off. Second from left is Dr. Wernher von Braun, looking at George Mueller who stands beside Lt. Gen. Samuel Phillips, Director of the Apollo Programme.

Chapter 6
GROUNDED IN SAFETY

Flying through a vacuum in a pressurised spacecraft involves risks that can never be eliminated, no matter how well the vehicle is tested. Of the two million parts in the command module, the thrusters, life-support system, electrical power, water supply and navigation systems could all perform flawlessly throughout the mission – but if the parachutes failed to open minutes before landing, the crew faced serious injury or worse. No spacecraft was more dangerous than a prototype, a fact not lost on Gus Grissom, who once said, 'If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the programme. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.'
¹

In the autumn of 1966, Grissom had been battling with the problems plaguing his command module, which was a basic 'Block I' design, an early version of the vehicle that would be flying to the Moon, the 'Block II'. At the same time, Michael Collins was working on another Block I command module, serial number 014. Following the cancellation of 014 at the end of the year, Collins and his crew were reshuffled in a move that had far-reaching implications for all involved.

With the crew in need of a new command module pilot, they were joined by Bill Anders. But Anders, who had not yet flown in space, was considered too inexperienced to be placed in charge of the command module – on a mission to the Moon he would have to operate alone while his two crew-mates departed aboard the lunar lander. To avoid this, a swap needed to be made. Anders became the lunar module pilot, and the command module role went to Collins. In this position Michael began to acquire a depth of experience that later came to be recognised and respected by his peers. 'Years later,' Collins wrote, 'I have answered a thousand times the question "How did you and Armstrong and Aldrin decide who was going to stay in the command module and who was going to walk on the Moon?" I have answered it a hundred ways, none of them completely honest, but then it's so hard to say, "Listen, lady, when they cancelled 014 I lost my chance."'
²

The fire changed everything. During the subsequent investigation, the Apollo programme stalled as NASA and North American Aviation swapped accusations. The contractors pointed to the pressure they'd been under to complete the spacecraft quickly; in return, NASA attacked what it perceived as North American's lax procedures and shoddy workmanship.
³
'Everybody was going around pointing fingers at everybody else,' Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton said.
⁴
There was truth on both sides. The official report, released on Friday 5 April 1967, blamed faulty wiring, and although it wasn't able to identify the precise source of the spark, it established where the fire had begun. It also found hundreds of failures in the design and construction of the spacecraft, and recommended 11 major hardware and operational changes.
⁵
As well as a crisis in confidence, the Apollo programme faced other equally serious difficulties. The lunar module was behind schedule, the Saturn's second stage was in Gene Kranz's words 'an engineering and production nightmare',
⁶
and awkward questions were being asked in Congress. 'We were going too fast,'
⁷
Deke later conceded. Michael Collins asked himself, 'Would one disaster follow another, just as airplane accidents seemed to occur in clusters ... how could NASA get going again?'
⁸

The return to work was led by Slayton. On the Monday after the report was released,
⁹
Deke called NASA's most experienced astronauts into his office. 'Eighteen of us returned to Houston from our various training activities around the country,' Buzz remembered. Without any elaborate preamble, Deke simply announced that 'the guys who are going to fly the first lunar missions are the guys in this room'.
¹⁰
Five manned flights were scheduled, labelled C, D, E, F and G. The first would be led by Mercury veteran Wally Schirra, who would test-fly the Block II command module. Then Jim McDivitt (the commander who had attempted the first Gemini rendezvous) would test both the command and lunar modules in low Earth orbit. The E mission would repeat these tests in deep space, 4,000 miles from Earth. This flight would be commanded by Frank Borman, who had helped investigate the fire. Borman's crew included Michael Collins, while the backup crew consisted of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell. After Borman's flight, the F mission would stage a full dress rehearsal of the landing, while the G crew would make the first attempt to reach the lunar surface.

None of these flights was to be known as Apollo 1, the name being reserved in memory of Grissom, White and Chaffee. Under a revised schedule, drawn up after the fire, there was to be no Apollo 2 or 3, and Apollos 4, 5 and 6 were to be unmanned tests. Schirra's crew would use the call-sign Apollo 7, McDivitt's Apollo 8 and Borman's Apollo 9. In naming the crews, Slayton went no further than the first three flights, leaving everyone to privately rate their chances of flying to the lunar surface. Anyone in a backup crew stood a good chance of joining the first mission to the Moon, and based on Deke's rotation system Pete Conrad looked likely to go first.
¹¹
A veteran of two Gemini flights, Conrad lived the kind of flamboyant lifestyle the press envisaged all astronauts enjoyed. As the Apollo 8 backup commander, he would theoretically skip two missions and then fly Apollo 11. Armstrong looked set to attempt the second landing.

Yet all the missions would be delayed until NASA and North American (known from March as North American Rockwell) settled their differences and produced a reliable spacecraft. The work was managed by George Low, who in 1961 had led the debate on how to reach the Moon, and who now replaced Joe Shea as the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. Under Low, 1,341 design alterations
¹²
were made to the command module at a cost of $75 million,
¹³
including new wiring and better safety systems. The over-complicated hatch that had sealed the fate of the Apollo 1 crew was replaced with a simpler design which could be opened in less than ten seconds. Much of the aluminium tubing was replaced with steel, emergency oxygen masks were installed, the cooling system was equipped with nonflammable liquid, the communications system was modified, and flammable materials were replaced. The amount of Velcro was also reduced, and a decision was made to discontinue the use of 100 per cent oxygen while a spacecraft was on the ground. At launch, the astronauts would breathe oxygen through their enclosed suits, but the cabin itself would be filled with 60 per cent oxygen and 40 per cent nitrogen.
¹⁴
In later years, many believed that without the improvements prompted by the fire, NASA may never have reached the Moon in time.

With demands for safety and reliability underpinning the redevelopment work, confidence slowly returned, and NASA began to move forward. To help everyone release some steam, a party was organised by Pat Collins, Joan Aldrin and Deke's wife Marge. Despite the fact that they underestimated the cost, forcing Deke to fork out $200, in Buzz's estimation the party was a great success since it generated 'enough arguments and gossip to get everyone going again'.
¹⁵

Still, the pressure continued. The Block II spacecraft wasn't going to be ready until at least the summer of 1968, leaving just a year and a half to make Kennedy's deadline. Meanwhile, George Mueller, the head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, pushed Wernher von Braun into testing the new Saturn V rocket as quickly as possible. The safest thing to do would have been to separately test-fly each stage of the booster. But under a principle known as 'all-up testing'
¹⁶
it was decided to fly the entire rocket in a single unmanned mission. Apollo 4 – the first Saturn V – bellowed into the sky above the Cape on 9 November 1967, its awesome power astounding those who saw it. The sound of the five F-1 engines tore corrugated metal sheets from the roof of the press stands, and brought ceiling tiles down upon Walter Cronkite in the CBS newsroom.
¹⁷
Michael Collins felt that 'this machine suddenly reaches out and grabs you, and shakes, and as it crackles and roars, suddenly you realise the meaning of 7.5 million pounds of thrust'.
¹⁸
After much soul-searching, NASA had returned to space.

Next to launch, nearly a year after the fire, was Apollo 5. On 22 January 1968, an unmanned lunar module was lifted into orbit by the Saturn IB that was to have been used by Grissom's crew. Operated by controllers on the ground, Grumman's ungainly assembly of metal, foil and glass fired its engines in a near-perfect simulation of a lunar mission. Ten weeks later, on 4 April, Apollo 6, the second unmanned test of the Saturn V, launched. Carrying a greater load than Apollo 4, the rocket suffered dangerous vibrations that caused some structural damage. Two of the five engines on the second stage shut down early, and the third-stage engine failed to ignite a second time, preventing a simulation of TLI. There was talk of using the next available Saturn V to mount another unmanned test, but under continuing time pressures it was decided to correct the problems and stick with the programme as planned.

The unmanned tests completed, by the autumn of 1968 Schirra's crew was ready to test-fly the Block II command module. They would be launched into orbit aboard a Saturn IB, since the next Saturn V was reserved for the first manned test of the lunar module. But the LM's software and electrical systems were behind schedule
¹⁹
and the spacecraft was not yet cleared for manned flight. McDivitt would have to wait, and so would the missions lined up behind him.

Without a LM, George Low and Chris Kraft began to look at how they might maintain momentum once Schirra had flown. There was no sense in sending McDivitt into space for the sake of it – he and his crew had been training for their mission for months. While they waited, it was decided that another crew should fly ahead of them. Next on the list was Borman, who was training for a flight into deep space for a second test of the LM. Again, without a LM there was little point going to an empty point in deep space and no point at all in repeating Schirra's mission into Earth orbit. For Low and Kraft, only one option was left: Borman's crew would be launched on a course that would take America to the Moon months earlier than planned. By July 1968, Borman, Collins and Anders looked set to be sent on a daring trip taking the new command module into deep space, in the first manned mission of the Saturn V. All-up testing was being pushed to the limit.

( )

Apollo 11's Block II command module had been named
Columbia
following a suggestion by Julian Scheer, NASA's head of public affairs. It was a name that resonated with the
Columbiad
, the fictional cannon that launched a spacecraft from Florida in Jules Verne's novel
From the Earth to the Moon
. The name also had associations with American history, not least Columbus, and to Collins it fitted the bill perfectly.
²⁰

Whenever Michael had seen
Columbia
on the shop floor at North American Rockwell, it was always resting with the top of the cone pointing up.
Columbia
had a ceiling and walls and not much in the way of floor-space. During the weightless conditions of space-flight, however, to Collins the spacecraft seemed strangely unfamiliar as if its parts had been 'stuck together at different angles'. The crew could rest as easily on the ceiling as they could on the floor, so that
Columbia
seemed more roomy than it had ever done before. Michael found that his legs had a habit of heading up into the ceiling and curling around the tunnel, which took some getting used to.
²¹
With a living space roughly the same size as a people carrier,
Columbia
was to serve as a bedroom, bathroom, office, observatory, dining room and recreation area for three men for more than a week.