Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (32 page)

On the flight of Apollo 12, there was heard, much to the quickly concealed shock of the commentator, the remark at the end of
rendezvous—“Move over so I can stick it in your giggie.”
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A docking was a docking, mechanical or no, a sweet feat in fact, equal in difficulty to two humans in a weightless environment trying to make love (with no hands) while they floated about, nothing more to direct them forward or away from each other than the wind they could expel at either end—or from their ears! What suggestion of future activities for tourists to the moon.

Actually this particular docking had a few complications. “When I started to pitch up,” said Collins, “for some reason it—it stopped its pitch rate and I had to go back … and hit … an extra proceed on the DSKY. And during the course of that, we drifted slightly further away from the S-IVB than I expected. I expected to be out about sixty-six feet. My guess … I was around one hundred or so, and therefore I expect I used a bit more [gas] coming back in.”

Pilots were notorious for being stingy. Folklore concerning them was filled with tales of waitresses who had been stiffed by a thin dime, or the woes of any airline stewardess who shared a cab with the pilot and paid the extra nickel in a bill of $5.75. So Collins now apologized for wasting gas—stinginess was a virtue in the air—birds are not the most conspicuous of the romantic figures. No, one does not waste gas. A useless move in the air burns fuel or loses momentum which may not be available later: so pilots keep clean charts and apologize for the expenditure of consumables they might have been able to save. What gives the flavor here is Collins’ generosity of manner. Whether superficial or straight from the heart, Collins had his implicit way of presenting himself as the most generous of the astronauts. Ergo, his apologies and copious remarks on the shade of this faint inefficiency have their hint of comic excess.

It was not serious, no, indeed, and after docking, work went on. The hatch back of the probe on the Command Module was removed,
the twelve locking latches on the ring which sealed the Command Module to the Lem were checked, the umbilicals for oxygen and electricity were connected, and the hatch was replaced. All this was accomplished with the astronauts feeling no sensation of motion even if they were coasting through space between four and five miles a second. And from what they could see through their windows the spaceship now looked bizarre. The realignment and docking had left the third stage at one end, the Command and Service Module at the other, and the Lem installed between. In this curious position, broadside to the direction of their flight, they traveled for a period.

The Lem was pressurized. Other adjustments were made. Then the Command and Service Module with Lem attached separated from the third stage. Four knee bolts holding the Lem’s legs to the S-IVB were exploded with enough force to push away the CSM-with-Lem-now-attached at a rate of 1.2 feet a second. Separation completed, the spacecraft was pitched around once more, and its main motor was started. The burning time was but three seconds, just enough to give a speed of twenty feet a second. At that rate, the now liberated mooncraft, consisting of the CSM and Lem, pulled away from the third stage about as fast as a modest powerboat. Then, as a result of radio commands issued from the ground, the unburned fuel still in the third stage was vented. For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. From the simple discharge of the fuel there was a shift in the direction and speed of the abandoned third stage. It was a small shift, and a small change in speed, but it would be enough to divert the trajectory of the S-IVB away from the translunar coast of the Command Module. Now the S-IVB would pass far enough away to go past the moon and on to the sun. It would never be seen again. As time elapsed, the S-IVB drifted two miles away, four miles away, was finally lost from sight. The Command and Service Module with the Lem attached in front now sailed toward its rendezvous with the lunar sphere. But for a brief midcourse correction or two, its motor would not have to be fired again until the moment came to brake
speed and ease into orbit around the moon. So on went this self-contained universe, born in high motion on the airless silences of space, born with the term of its human life dependent on the continued function of its oxygen and provisions, its human and propellant consumables, on through space it went, a bullet fired up from earth and now free of gravity and no readiness to stop.

To speak of a self-contained universe when one is only dealing with a vehicle which is self-sustaining for a short period is to trespass on the meaning. A man is a universe by that measure, indeed he is more self-contained in his ability to adapt and survive than the ship of Apollo 11. In fact the Command Module is more like the sort of universe complete in itself one glimpses in a flower cut for a vase. Such an ornament receives food, breathes, exudes, molts, can even preside over a fresh development like the opening of a bud, and presumably this cut flower is capable of sending and receiving messages from other flowers and plants (if such communication is one of the functions of a flower) but still! we know the flower will live only a few days. It is a self-contained universe whose continuation is sealed off from itself.

The same was true of the Command Module. The men in it could live no longer than there were supplies of oxygen for them to breathe, and that was for two weeks. Nonetheless, Apollo 11 was more a cosmic expression than an ornament. Its vase was space, and through space it traveled, a ship, a species of man-made comet, a minuscule planet with an ability to steer. We will inhabit this ship for the rest of the journey, we will be taken up with the activities of the men in it, we will learn—if we will not learn precisely how to fly it—still we will pick up a little of what it might be like to endure, even at times to enjoy, the near to two hundred hours of the complete round trip. So it may be best to fix these living quarters in our mind.

The spaceship, now free of the third stage, and five and a half hours out, was a most peculiar-looking object, about sixty-seven
feet long, and in a variety of widths, for the top of the Lem (that mechanical spider!) was attached to the nose of the Command Module and in turn the base of the Command Module, we can remember, was faired into the Service Module. What then could be your honest width? The Service Module all complete was close to twenty-five feet long and twelve feet ten inches in diameter, a perfect tin can in appearance but for the bell of its motor at the base which took up perhaps ten feet of that length, a large bell for a modest motor. The Command Module was ten and a half feet high and at its base identical in diameter to the Service Module, but it tapered to the top, where it was no more than three feet across. There its probe locked into the drogue of the Lem, and the Lem had a width which was most confusing. Its body was fourteen feet in diameter, but its four legs were thirty-one feet across their diagonal when extended (somewhat less when closed) and the ship, while ready to coast in every attitude, either Lem first, or bell of the Service Module first, whether with its structure broadside to the line of its flight, or canted at an angle, cocked for example to the left, cocked to the right, upside down and all but inside out (any position was possible in a vacuum), still usually coasted with the Lem forward. The spaceship was therefore a most peculiar construction, not unreminiscent now of a bullet fixed to the knotted body of a bug. Indeed it had to be an object unlike anything seen in any machine on earth for its different components were designed to function in separate compartments of the universe. The Command Module and Service Module were obliged to withstand the friction of the atmosphere at high speeds—so their skin was streamlined to help minimize heat and drag, but the Lem had been designed to function only in a vacuum, and therefore needed streamlining no more than an earth borer would need eyes, indeed its form was the perfect expression of the sum of its curious functions, just as an office skyscraper which looks like a Kleenex box on end is the perfect expression of the innate architecture contained in a one hundred million dollar bill. The Lem looked about the way the organs, arteries and veins of the human body might appear
within the human skeleton if the body lived in an environment which required no epidermis or sheath of outer muscles.

There it was—spaceship! An object without grace or unity of design, sixty-seven feet long, anywhere from thirty to twenty feet wide at the legs down to three feet wide at the joining of the Command Module and the Lem, and yet in all of this ship, the astronauts—except for that period when they would inhabit the Lem—were confined to the conical interior of the Command Module. Its interior space was not twelve feet wide, not ten feet high (indeed for purposes of standing not everywhere six feet high), and since its walls were covered with instrument panels, equipment and cupboards, and its floor when all three couches were out was all but unavailable, it had to prove a close cramped near-intolerable capsule for a claustrophobic spirit. Fifteen miles of wiring and two million functioning (which is to say sensing or bearing, protecting or moving) parts had been crammed into a paltry seventy-three cubic feet of space for each man. That is less volume than is offered to each passenger in a comfortable car. Nonetheless, it was a boy’s dream of a habitat, for the Command Module was at once a workshop, a submarine, a pilothouse, a species of Pullman compartment, a cockpit, a radio station, and a den, it was an observatory, a TV studio, a music booth, a kitchen, a lab, a bedroom, bathroom, a gym and a clubhouse. It must also have seemed on occasion hardly larger than the inside of a theatrical trunk. It was undeniably a womb for triplets. On demand, three umbilical cords could plug into three space suits. Three men could breathe through three tubes and float in an enclosed volume. Yet if they had been equipped with laser beams they might have ventured forth as a celestial gunboat. With their banks of instruments, they could entertain the illusion they were playing an electronic organ. For its aura of austerity, Collins was later to call it a mini-cathedral. With a man and woman for passengers, the Command Module, red velvet laid all out, could have served as a boudoir or, at the worst, a sultan’s most private tent.

And this object had cost—who could even calculate the precise
cost? Accountants would go to war over such a project. For how much would be apportioned to research, design, and simple error? how much to the invention of thousands of new tools without which the module could never have been built, and one had not yet begun to speak of the huge expense of creating the Mission Simulators, then improving them—did it cost a billion dollars to build the first Command Module? One would never know. Certainly, the Command Module of Apollo 11 had come a long way. Its pieces and parts assembled by North American Aviation had derived from sixty-two subcontractors and suppliers, its first models had been tested in seventy-five hundred hours of wind tunnel, it had gone into altitude chamber and airlock, been subject to tests for pressure and tests for vacuum. The prototype had been dropped free-fall with a crew into water tanks, then dropped on land to simulate the impact of unhappy parachute landings. It had undergone the laboratory equivalent of solar radiation and temperature extremes of heat and cold, its electrical power sources had been tested, it had been subjected to loads and stresses and bendings, its heat shield had passed through heat fluxes of as much as 25,000 British Thermal Units per pound in gas stream enthalpies. (That was a word not even to be found in the
Shorter Oxford English
, but enthalpies had to suggest the very entheasms of heat!) Then its radio and telemetry systems had been tortured in shock tests, exposed to dust, to sand, to rain, to salt spray and the corrosions of raw oxygen, its components were conducted through the rigors of acoustical shock, vibration, high acceleration; at Downey it had been originally assembled in the largest and cleanest clean room known to the world, a chamber longer than a football field and more than half as wide, an average of fifty feet in height, a room into which the Command and Service Module had been inserted through an air lock to keep all dust out; and therefore been put together in a volume whiter and more protected than the delivery room of a hospital, even examined by technicians wearing white smocks and sometimes white cloth masks over their nose and
mouth. In theory it had been flown through simulations by astronauts, flown through volumes of imaginary space with a six-foot globe of the earth for reference, and computers to replay the movements through the trajectory. With the Service Module it had gone through 587,500 inspection points, been checked for its conformity to 8,000 drawings and 1,700 sets of manufacturing and engineering specifications, it had even been roasted on one side and frozen on the other to anticipate the searing heat of the sun and the freezing cold of 320 degrees below zero in those shadows of space it would create for itself on its dark and sun-obstructed side. It had undergone every checkout American technology could devise and that was one full file of manned and unmanned simulations and flight readiness tests. Yes, it was some boy’s dream of a habitat. It came complete with ten major subsystems, three for such special occasions as launch escape, thermal protection (which is to say the deployment of heat shields), and earth landing (or parachutes); it had seven subsystems for use at any moment over the eight days of the trip, subsystems under the respective titles of communications, electrical power, environmental control, guidance and navigation, reaction control, service propulsion, and stabilization and control, which probably could be abstracted to three major categories: communications, life maintenance, and flight.