Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (36 page)

Three-quarters of an hour of silence followed. It was the first long silence since awakening. When they came out of it, Capcom had a long thoughtful anticipation prepared for them on the functioning of the Passive Thermal Control, which conversation was followed by queries from Apollo 11 about clouds which had moved over the Gulf of Mexico. Was it raining in Houston, they asked? Yes, it was raining in Houston. Armstrong replied, “Well, it looks like it ought to clear up pretty soon from our viewpoint. The western edge of the weather isn’t very far west of you.”

Now Capcom came back with a report that the flow-rate sensor on the oxygen tank was in fact malfunctioning, but that it was a minor malfunction.

Time went by. The charge on Battery A was terminated about seven hours after it had first commenced. There were updates in the data necessary for going around the moon if they were obliged for any reason to return immediately to earth. The new data was a reflection of the change in velocity acquired in the three-second midcourse correction burn that morning. Now, the astronauts focused their television camera on the Display and Keyboard of the computer, and the big antenna in Goldstone, California, reported its ability to read the numbers.

The White team came on duty at Mission Control. Of the White, the Green, and the Black teams, the White team was obviously the most important on this mission, for its shift would be on duty Sunday, the fifth day of the trip, when the Lem would separate from the Command Module and descend to the moon. So their responsibility would be the greatest, and their tension the most. Today the spacecraft greeted them cheerfully, “How’s the old White team today?”

“Oh the old White team’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We’re ever alert down here.”

“Ever alert and ready,” came back the spacecraft.

It was the self-conscious kind of joking one could expect when old drinking buddies were carrying on a conversation in the full hearing of churchgoers.

But these fine spirits were replaced by a long sober discussion of flaws in the TV transmission. For the next half hour a dialogue about horizontal bonding and strayed lines, or bending of vertical lines followed by waviness in horizontal bands progressed back and forth—word eventually arrived that the TV people consulted on earth had said such aberrant lines were inherent in the design of the camera. Then the oxygen purge was terminated. Omnidirectional antenna was checked out for television transmission and found to be unusable. So only the high-gain antenna would be employed. That meant Passive Thermal Control must be halted. A complex discussion of the shift from PTC to the best TV attitude continued for a time, and was eventually decided. The PTC was terminated, the move was made, the earth was where they wanted it. The high-gain had its unobstructed line. Here came the TV.

The show went on further, it was on in America and the world for thirty-five minutes, and was watched by the astronauts’ families in Houston. Aldrin spoke for a while on stellar navigation and showed the instruments and Armstrong said very little. During the telecast, reporters in the homes of Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Aldrin, and Mrs. Collins took notes. The comments of the wives and children were put down in all the fullness of History recording itself, caught in the act of laying out a groaning board of gold plate and Melba toast, Irish linen and Hawaiian punch. “They look great, don’t they,” said Mrs. Collins. “Look, Mike is growing a mustache!”

The day went on to its close as it had begun. PTC was recommenced after TV, and Guidance and Navigation data came up the miles from earth to be duly repeated by the astronauts before entrance into the computers. Verbs and Nouns were sent to them for further installations in the same computer. The programs with their Verbs and Nouns were, of course, demands upon the computer to be in readiness to give answers to certain kinds of problems for which the data had already been inserted. It was as if in a program designed to measure the size of rations in an Army kitchen, data consisted of the multiplication table and the inventories of food, the Verb was an order to divide, and the Noun directed the Verb toward what it should divide, which in this case happened to be the portions for supper. Apollo 11’s programs were naturally more complex. There was room for ninety-nine Verbs and ninety-nine Nouns in the computer, such Verbs for instance as those which called for Display or for Monitor, for Load, Request,
or Recycle, for Mark or Calibrate, Update, Initialize or Start, Reject, Enable, Perform. The Nouns specified just what would be the subject of the operation, be it the Address in the computer, or the Alarm Data or Alarm Codes, the Time of an Event or the Time
from
an Event, the Apogee or Perigee of an orbit, the Angles of the Vehicle, the Change in Velocity, the Pitch of the S-Band Antenna. Naturally, Apollo’s programs concerned whole hierarchies of phase like Prelaunch, Earth Orbit Insertion, Coasting, Thrusting, Alignment, Moon Entry, and Abort—there would be, for example, seven distinct programs on Moon Entry covering each particular condition of separation from the Command Module through entrance into detectable moon gravity including several programs to choose for the moon landing itself, programs to offer much or little control by the pilot as he descended in collaboration with the computer.

So a host of numbers were passed back and forth again. Then the astronauts proceeded to report the amount of radiation they had been subjected to while passing through space that day. It was within proper bounds—no more than the radiation offered by the dentist who takes an X ray of your teeth—no medication was suggested. As usual, Armstrong had received the most radiation and Aldrin the least, but this was characteristic—Armstrong’s pulse rate and heartbeat were always the highest of the three.

Now came final instructions for the night on the cryo heaters and fans. The liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were required to be heated before reaching the electrodes, but any excess heat was obliged to be dissipated. The process of warming and cooling, adjusting the flow, and purging the lines, went on constantly, and commands to turn specific heaters and fans on or off had come up to the astronauts all day. Collins had a comment later:

In fact the fuel cells were very funny things—they were an element as untried as any piece of equipment in rocket engineering for they derived their power from the mysterious ability of hydrogen and oxygen atoms to travel as hydrogen and hydroxyl ions through melted potassium hydroxide at close to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of four atmospheres, a careful balance to be all the while maintained between the formation of water vapor and the building of electrical potential—no easy matter to strip electrons from oxygen and pass them over as a voltage loading to the hydrogen electrode—the fuel cells were still another step into the caverns of not completely charted electrical phenomena.
^*

Now their day was finally done and the crew had supper and went to sleep about 9:30 at night, eastern daylight time, with the spacecraft 134,000 nautical miles from earth. They had traveled a little over forty thousand miles in their working day, and would travel another 25,000 nautical miles during the twelve hours of sleep. There was at this stage so little to do that no call was put into them until 8:40 in the morning at which time they had approached within 64,000 miles of the moon.

The morning of the third day proceeded like the morning of the second day. Let us live with that routine once again. Batteries were charged and waste water was dumped. Midcourse Correction Number 3 was canceled. Capcom reported consumables of fuel, hydrogen and oxygen; spacecraft answered with their own percentages, which had been independently measured. Then a report on the hours they slept: Armstrong 8, Collins 9, Aldrin 8. Good,
but not a record. The Apollo 10 crew had reported ten hours of sleep one night. Next a description of what could be seen on earth. Then a discussion of PTC mode.