Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (27 page)

The liquid oxygen and the liquid hydrogen, the Lox and the LH
₂
, were a different matter. They were gases converted to liquid and therefore highly unstable. The physics was basic. In the same way boiling water becomes steam, so every liquid will convert to a
gas if it is given enough heat; in turn, every gas will concentrate itself into a liquid if the pressure upon it is high enough, or the temperature sufficiently low. As rocket fuels, oxygen and hydrogen were used in liquid rather than natural form because more oxygen and hydrogen could be kept in the same space once the gas had been compressed to become liquid. But what problems to contain it! What higher powers of hydrodynamics were now demanded to pump it! For it had to go from its storage tanks through a quarter-mile of pipe all the way to the bowels and belly of the rocket, and that at a rate which must be so high at times as ten thousand gallons a minute, more than a hundred-sixty gallons a second of a liquid down 423 degrees below zero had to pass by any given point—what an icy rush of sludge! Yes, hydrodynamics, that sturdy engineering science of plumbing, pipes, valves and pumps, had taken its own leap to create Saturn V—the world of technology had been shifted in its natural evolution by the development of the moonship, whose inbuilt emphasis on hydrodynamics and electronics had altered the balance of technological achievement as much as our conception of man might be staggered by a new species whose capacity to think and pass food through his system had raced far ahead of his ability to walk, run, play, work, or do anything else. The pipes which carried the liquid hydrogen were vacuum-jacketed tubes of stainless steel, pipes fifteen hundred feet long, ten inches in diameter and pushed from storage tank to rocket tank by a pressure so great as sixty pounds per square inch, which once one recognizes how light is liquid hydrogen—hardly more than half a pound a gallon, half a pound a gallon!—is certainly at sixty pounds a square inch, one mighty push on such froth. Each pipe proved to be a pipe within a pipe, a vacuum installed between to maintain the insulation of the extreme cold, and indeed the speed of the pumping was doubtless to reduce the risk of the leak, for vacuum or no, that kind of cold fuel, that intensely low cryogenic liquid energy, was bound to warm if it tarried in the pipes. It would then expand, leaks would spring. “We can live wiz some leak,” Kurt Debus, the Director of the Space Center, had
said in his fine Junker accent, leaks in such high pressure pipes were the order of procedure, indeed every pipe and valve in the whole plumbing combine of Apollo-Saturn, the Launch Pad and the storage tanks was redundant, which is to say that for every pipe there was another unused pipe equal to it and ready to be used if the leaks in the first could not be found and controlled, leak they could live with—if it were modest—but everything in their technology looked to remove the likelihood of such conditions, and so they rushed the fuel through the pipes, through the ingeniously fitted double pipes and valves jacketed to keep the vacuum intact, past the jacketed couplings, through the insulated umbilicals, up into the insulated tanks of the rocket stages, there to sit, and boil, and boil off, a small percentage of this million gallons of varied fuels stirring in their icy containers, turning to gas, and then being vented into the air to form the clouds which clung to Apollo-Saturn through the early morning and on into the dawn of the day of its launching. As the fraction boiled off, they topped it with new fuel, kept up the topping, kept it up indeed until the last of the countdown minutes was ticking.

Now, nine hours earlier, they had cleared the launch area for the loading of propellants, all of that blast area which could go up in conflagration if the rocket blew. But it was beyond the imagination to conceive of a million gallons of fuel suddenly ignited. Such an explosion would bear comparison to the early atom bomb. So no one was in the area while the fuel was transferred, no need, the loading was done by automation, Saturn V sitting silently, ship of space on her pad. The Service Structure having been drawn down the road by the crawler at lift-off minus 10 hours, Apollo-Saturn was alone again with her Mobile Launcher. For four hours and thirty-seven minutes, from lift-off minus 8 hours and 15 minutes to lift-off minus 3 hours and 38 minutes, first the liquid oxygen and then the liquid hydrogen and associated cryogenics (or low-temperature fuels like liquid helium, liquid nitrogen) were loaded into the stages of Saturn V, and into the fuel cells and thrusters of the Service Module, the Command Module and the Lem, floodlights
playing on the white skin of the spaceship, hints of the dawn beginning to breathe over the ocean. Back at MSOB, eight miles away, they awakened the astronauts at four-fifteen in the morning and gave them a last quick medical examination before they proceeded to breakfast on orange juice, toast, steak and eggs. Then silver chloride electrodes called biomedical sensors were pasted in place, taped to the skin—at least four had to be worn by each astronaut in order to monitor his heartbeat and respiration, the wires running into a bio-instrumentation harness, a belt each astronaut wore which had little radio transmitters called signal conditioners, each the size of cigarette packages. Equipped with a built-in power converter, the bio-instrumentation harness sent constant signals to an electrocardiograph and an impedance pneumograph in the spaceship. Therefore, the astronauts did not have to be plugged into any socket for a medical record to be kept. Plugged in they would be in other ways, by hoses from their space suit to oxygen supply, by electric cable with a twenty-one-socket connector which ran from earphones and microphones (worn in a black and white helmet on their head) to their garment. But then they even wore film packs on their legs and dosimeters on their arms to measure the belts of radiation through which the spaceship would pass, yes, space suits donned, and thus installed with detectors on every flank, they picked up their life-support systems, which fed oxygen to their helmets, and life now passing into them through the umbilical hose attached to their suit, passed, helmets on, through the aisle of reporters and photographers waiting for a glimpse of them and rode in the crew transfer van to the Launch Complex, where they arrived a little after six-thirty, rose up in the elevator to the 320-foot station, entered the Command Module over the highest of the nine swing-arms, a view below thus vertiginous that they might as well have been walking along the cable of a bridge, and settled in, Armstrong in the left seat, Aldrin in the center, Collins at the right for the last two hours and forty minutes.

It was a time for checking out the last of the tests. A crisis had
occurred already and been solved: a liquid hydrogen line serving the third-stage engine of Saturn V had begun to leak, but the line was shut down. Its twin, hitherto redundant, was now opened to serve. The problem had been solved. If there was a psychology to machines, it was not unduly in prominence this morning. Tests with the astronauts proceeded. Pushes of current were sent out to activate certain needles, then checks of secondary dials could be made, for they were obliged to react to the first dials. There was a list of tests to be made by each astronaut: if rocket safety was designed on any principle, it was built on the idea of precautions founded on other precautions. If there were six hundred and thirteen laws to the Talmud which could not be broken, restraints or fences had been built into the traditional customs to avoid getting near a situation where one might be able to break one of those six hundred and thirteen laws. If you were not supposed to engage in adultery with your neighbor’s wife, the safest precaution, the fence, was never to look at her. Wherever else this construction of safeguards to inhibit even the approach to taboos had entered the Judeo-Christian heritage, certainly it had entered engineering practice. There safety factors abounded. You calculated the greatest stresses a bridge could ever receive, and then built it five times stronger than it needed to be. So now the Emergency Detection System of Apollo-Saturn heaped attention on the whisper of a clue that a slight deviation from the norm could, if it continued to be unbalanced to the tenth of a hundredth of an acceptable degree … the launch was not about to be called off because things were wrong to the tenth of a hundredth, but the dials were there to measure such deviation. The readiness to intercept crises before they began to develop was nowhere richer than in launch systems. Thousands of rockets had not been launched for nothing; the safety precautions were enormous, and they were articulated. There were capacities to abort the mission on the ground and in the air, by automation and by decision, by the crew and by Mission Control. Checks sat upon precautions and points of no return abounded where choices had to be made for GO or NO GO,
choices to continue or abort. The limits tolerable to each instrument were laid out, were red-lined on every dial.

Nobody had forgotten the fire. The memory of Grissom, Chaffee and White was always most intense when the crew were in the Command Module and waiting for a lift-off. Virtually trapped at the top of the stack (for even the high-speed elevator would take them thirty seconds to the ground), a gondola had been rigged at Swing-Arm 9 of the Mobile Launcher to slide down a wire to a point on the ground over two thousand feet away. No veteran of roller coasters would necessarily take it in stride, but if fire broke out at the base, and the elevators seemed too slow, the astronauts, lumbering along in heavy space suits, could still work out of their hatch exit, clamber into the gondola, and take the quick ride along the wire to that bunker seven hundred yards away where presumably they would live through the explosion. That was one means of egress in emergency, the elevator was another, but their best means, once the close-out crew had departed in the hour before lift-off, was by means of the Launch Escape Tower, that extra rocket on top of the total stack of Apollo-Saturn. Once the swing-arm could be pulled back, the Launch Escape Tower was ready to be armed. Now if something went wrong, the Command Module would be cut loose instantly from the Service Module by explosive bolts and the Launch Escape Tower, with only the Command Module attached, would zoom off from the rest of Apollo-Saturn and go flying out to sea, there to float down by parachute in the midst, ideally, of a flotilla of Range Recovery ships already waiting, even as the
Hornet
and its attendant ships were already moving into position in the Pacific for splashdown eight days later.

The thirty-one minute mark was passed in the countdown. A test checked the batteries and fuel cells once again. In all the tests of all the systems and subsystems which went on during the countdown, all the tests of propellants and purge systems, of abort and detection and destruct systems, all monitoring of the loading of
the liquid gases, Lox and LH
₂
, all monitoring of the loading of nitrogen and helium for those purge systems which would put pressure on the fuels to move once inside their rocket tanks, and would trigger some of the valves, and clean out systems already used, yes of all the functions of purge and ullage performed by the helium and nitrogen, functions which had to be constantly tested and monitored through the hours of the countdown, and the tests to measure boil-off of the stored fuels, the checkoff of tests for the integrity of the structures, tests for the environmental control of air and the purging of used air in the cabin of the Command Module, the check-out of environmental control in the Lem, the checks of the ability of the motors to swing on their gimbal rings (for Saturn V would direct itself by turning its heavy motors through six degrees of arc), yes and tests of flight control with the small rocket motors called thrusters, tests of instruments already tested, everything proceeding through its place in the countdown, no factor was necessarily more sensitive or more studied or of more concern than the inert nonmoving potentialities of the fuel cells and the batteries, for a rocket had no pistons and no propellers, no belly nor hold for men to move about in, no gears and transmission—it was a ship designed for space, to travel through space, and so it was a curious ship, a braincase on the tip of a firecracker: ultimately it was nothing but fire for force, and electricity for thought, for direction and dialogue between itself and the heavenly body it left, and the heavenly body it would explore. Electricity was half its existence. Without fire it could not move; without electricity it could not think. Say, once up, it could not even light every new fire. So, it came as a surprise to recognize that all the electrical power in Apollo-Saturn was derived from fuel cells and batteries only. A ship the size of a destroyer suggested huge generators, but they would have weighed too much, so the power for Saturn came from batteries, and for Apollo from batteries and fuel cells which used Lox and liquid hydrogen as solution for the electrodes, and therefore was able also to employ the water formed as waste product for the astronauts to drink, an elegant conversion.

While the spark to ignite the mighty motors of Saturn V did not come from the batteries, but from a cable on the ground, the batteries were all there was of electrical power to feed current to the instruments in the first stage and the other stages once in flight, all there was to ignite the five J-2 motors of the second stage, the single J-2 motor of the third stage. Yet these stages and Instrument Unit were powered by only eleven batteries, two fifty-six-volt batteries, nine twenty-eight-volt batteries, their combined weight perhaps not a thousand pounds, and of it all, only two twenty-eight-volt batteries, weighing twenty-two pounds and fifty-five pounds, would serve for all the functions of the mammoth first stage, 33 feet in diameter, 138 feet tall, weight when loaded five million pounds and more—just seventy-seven pounds of battery, total of fifty-six volts, to take care of all that mass, but of course the fuels in the first stage would be consumed at almost three thousand gallons a second, and life in the flight would be only two minutes and forty seconds before the motors would shut down and the giant empty stage cast loose to fall in the sea. So fifty-six volts would doubtless suffice for two and a half minutes of instrument life.