Apollo: The Race to the Moon (12 page)

The next day, Kennedy held another press conference. This time when he was asked about space, his tone from the week before had shifted dramatically. Now he said, “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.”

Jim Webb found himself on a roller coaster. Just days earlier he had been fighting for a bigger space program against the resistance of a skeptical White House. Now he was faced with a Lyndon Johnson who was racing ahead faster and farther than Webb was prepared to go. Johnson was impossible to control. “He just picked up the phone and called everybody that he thought was tops, independently,” said Webb. “He called in Wernher von Braun without even asking me yes or no about it.” Johnson also sent a copy of Kennedy’s April 20 memorandum to General Bernard Schreiver and Vice Admiral John Hayward, asking them for replies. Then he called in three close personal friends: CBS president Frank Stanton, Donald Cook of the American Power Corporation, and George Brown, head of a large Houston construction firm.

Johnson brought them all together for a meeting on Monday, April 24. Von Braun, Schreiver, and Hayward made presentations. After they finished, the group talked for a while among themselves as Wiesner and Webb looked on in disbelief. Wiesner would laugh about it later: “Johnson went around the room saying, ‘We’ve got a terribly important decision to make: Shall we put a man on the moon?’ And everybody said yes. And he said ‘thank you’ and reported to the President that the panel said we should put a man on the moon.” To Webb, this kind of pressure was disturbing. “Johnson had them in a meeting room… around the table talking about what should be done, and [Johnson] pressing for action,” Webb remembered. “I’m a relatively cautious person. I think when you decide you’re going to do something and put the prestige of the United States government behind it, you’d better doggone well be able to do it.” This wasn’t the way to decide, Webb thought.

But as Webb talked to Seamans and Low about the pieces they had been putting together that spring, it became increasingly clear that they could in fact do it. If the Saturn booster worked, and von Braun said that progress was going well, then landing a man on the moon wouldn’t require any new technological breakthroughs. All it required was a lot of money, and all that required was a lot of congressional support.

On May 2, the prospects for a lunar-landing program had reached the point where Webb and Seamans decided to appoint William Fleming to chair the Ad Hoc Task Group for a Manned Lunar Landing Study, a thirty-day crash effort that would take all that had gone before, synthesize it, and tell the President whether NASA could get to the moon and how much money it would take. If Webb had had his way, he would have waited for the results of that study before making a recommendation to the President. But he was not to get his way. By the meeting on May 3, according to Webb, “the Vice President was very close to demanding that we come forward with definitive programs.” The Vice President would be leaving for a two-week tour of Southeast Asia on Monday, May 8. He must have a set of formal and detailed recommendations to give to the President by then.

Two days later, John Disher was at Dolley Madison House, sitting in on a meeting the likes of which he could have only fantasized about six months earlier. He and the others were being briefed by Seamans, and he scribbled furiously. “Next 30 days. Fleming will chair this effort. Rothrock 2nd. Administrator wants to be better informed as each day goes by. UN Conference Room, H Bldg. ABSOLUTELY DISCREET!”

Seamans repeatedly emphasized the need for self-discipline. They were to come up with a bare-bones program based on what must be done to get to the moon, not on what they would like the program to do. The schedule was breathtaking. Twice a week, they would hold an intermediate program review. Once a week, they would have a full-blown program review with Abe Silverstein. They could expect Abe to make decisions and sign off on their work as they went along.

Next Seamans described the guidelines that were being passed down: They should assume direct ascent to the moon—one rocket, carrying a unitary spacecraft with the built-in capability of landing on the lunar surface and returning to earth. The target date for the first landing was 1967. The plan had to be honest (Disher wrote that down in capital letters)—no over exuberant promises, no wishful thinking. They weren’t to throw up an abbreviated flight schedule. This was not going to be some one-shot deal, but a systematic series of flights with all prudent intermediate steps in between. They should not spend any time thinking about nuclear-powered engines; the technology was too immature. But they hadn’t made up their minds yet on liquid versus solid fuel; they should look at both.

Disher’s penciled scrawl got bigger and bigger, until finally these last two notes took up the whole page: “WHAT IS MINIMUM AMOUNT NEEDED IN FY 62 TO DO JOB? 9:00 AM TOMORROW DEADLINE ON EVERYTHING.”

The remaining hurdle was the first U.S. space shot, Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight. If that failed, coming after the one-two punch of the Gagarin flight and the Bay of Pigs, no one could anticipate what direction events might take.

It did not fail. Shepard was launched the next morning and landed safely after a flight of fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. With the Shepard flight safely behind him, Kennedy’s decision to go to the moon was for practical purposes a foregone conclusion. “Kennedy found himself confronted with three choices,” as Wiesner summed it up later. “Quit, stay second, or do something dramatic. He didn’t think we could afford to quit, politically, and it was even worse to stay second. And so he decided to do something where we had a chance of really beating the Russians.” But the merits of the decision continued to bother him. At a state dinner for Tunisia’s president Habib Bourguiba the day after Shepard’s flight, Wiesner was standing in a corner chatting with Bourguiba when Kennedy joined them. “You know, we’re having a terrible argument in the White House about whether we should put a man on the moon,” Kennedy said to Bourguiba. “Jerry here is against it. If I told you you’d get an extra billion dollars a year in foreign aid if I didn’t do it, what would be your advice?” Wiesner watched as Bourguiba stood silent for several moments. Finally Bourguiba said, “I wish I could tell you to put it in foreign aid, but I cannot.” “Kennedy went around probing like that all the time, to get a feel for what he was doing,” Wiesner said. And the probes kept coming back with the same answer. The United States did not have the option of withdrawing from the space race.

Wiesner was resigned to the inevitable. The decision to go to the moon was “a political, not a technical issue,” as he would later put it, “a use of technological means for political ends.” Wiesner made certain that he met his professional responsibility as the head of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, telling Kennedy that PSAC “would never accept this kind of expenditure on scientific grounds.” Subsequently, he would take some satisfaction in noting that the President hardly ever tried to justify Apollo for its science.

Three weeks later, Kennedy stood before the joint session of Congress and asked the nation to go to the moon, and the engineers at NASA began to understand that the frenzied activity of that spring wasn’t going to stop. During the summer and fall of 1961, NASA moved decisions through the system with a speed that today seems unbelievable.

In June and July, detailed specifications for the spacecraft hardware were completed. By the end of July, the Requests for Proposals were on the street.

In August, the first hardware contract was awarded to M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo guidance system. NASA selected Merritt Island, Florida, as the site for a new spaceport and acquired 125 square miles of land.

In September, NASA selected Michoud, Louisiana, as the production facility for the Saturn rockets, acquired a site for the Manned Spacecraft Center—the Space Task Group grown up—south of Houston, and awarded the contract for the second stage of the Saturn to North American Aviation.

In October, NASA acquired 34 square miles for a Saturn test facility in Mississippi.

In November, the Saturn C-l was successfully launched with a cluster of eight engines, developing 1.3 million pounds of thrust. The contract for the command and service module was awarded to North American Aviation.

In December, the contract for the first stage of the Saturn was awarded to Boeing and the contract for the third stage was awarded to Douglas Aircraft.

By January of 1962, construction had begun at all of the acquired sites and development work was under way at all of the contractors.

The speed was startling even to the people who were doing the pushing. John Disher finished the statement of work for the guidance contract and turned it in just one day before he left for a brief vacation. Not a week later, reading a newspaper on a beach at Lake Michigan, he saw an article reporting that M.I.T. had been awarded the guidance contract for the Apollo moon project. “I could hardly believe we could move that fast,” Disher recalled. “In those days, you could do things with a half-page memo.”

BOOK II. BUILDING

When they said, “Let’s go to the moon”—hell, everybody didn’t stand around saying, “What am I supposed to do?” or “Send me a directive,” or “What’s the procedure for going to the moon?”

—Thomas (Jack) Lee

Chapter 6. “The flight article has got to dominate”

For Rocco Petrone down at Cape Canaveral, June and July of 1961 were so many lost weeks. It was a time so frantic, he recalled, that meetings were scheduled for 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning. “I only wish we’d had someone sitting in the corner taking notes,” he said wistfully. Petrone, a history buff, wanted to reconstruct the events of that period, but couldn’t “because so much happened and it happened so fast. It was almost like being in an accident.”

For Petrone himself, the summer of 1961 was the pivotal moment in his career when he emerged from obscurity to become Kurt Debus’s point man for Apollo. When the Huntsville organization had joined NASA, Debus, head of von Braun’s launch team, had become head of Marshall’s Launch Operations Directorate at the Cape. Now he put Petrone in charge of the newly created Heavy Space Vehicle Systems Office. Petrone, the Army major who gave up his military career to stay at Canaveral, was the son of Italian immigrants and a West Pointer. Ebullient and blunt-spoken, he looked the way his name sounded—big and strong and Italian. His new assignment was to oversee the planning and construction of the ground facilities that would be required to put a man on the moon. As of June, Petrone suddenly had three gigantic tasks before him: Decide on a site, decide on a launch system, and then get everything built.

The launch vehicle—the “flight article,” in Cape parlance, in contrast to a mock-up “test article”—would come to seem anthropomorphic to Petrone, as if it were a giant to whom Petrone and the thousands of workers at the Cape were bound like servants to an imperious master. “You can’t be saying to him, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t have that much propellant,’ or ‘You can’t have that much juice or that much wiring,’” said Petrone. “He’s going to get what he wants. The flight article has got to dominate.” And because Goliath’s demands were going to be so outrageous, the machines for tending him would have to follow suit. Launching Saturn Vs involved the management of extremes—the biggest and the smallest, the hottest and the coldest, wispy fragility and colossal strength—and in the design of the Launch Operations Center, form followed function. But they were bizarre forms to fit an outlandishly extravagant function.

After Kennedy’s speech, finding a site was the first item on the agenda. NASA already had use of the Air Force facility at Cape Canaveral; the obvious course would be to graft the Apollo facility onto it. But in many ways Cape Canaveral was not a good place to launch large rockets. In 1961, the local labor force was too small to supply the manpower that would be required for the construction. The Cape coast was prone to rain, lightning, and strong winds throughout the year and hurricanes during the fall. Worse yet, the weather was unpredictable, a nasty problem with a large vehicle sitting out in the open on a launch pad. Even when the weather was sunny, the humidity and the salt air corroded metal and insinuated gremlins into delicate electronics. Cape Canaveral was not an ideal place.

But alternative sites with better weather and larger labor forces had to be considered with this in mind: The destructive equivalent of a fair-sized nuclear weapon might one day explode on the premises (the Saturn V had the explosive potential of a million pounds of T.N.T.). This meant, first, that the site had to be large enough for its facilities to be built at safe distances from the launch pads. It had, in fact, to be huge. Second, the site had to be distant from major population centers, so that if an errant Saturn did “get outside the gate,” as the engineers euphemistically put it, it would not immolate a large number of people. Third, because things could go wrong at any time in the first few minutes of flight, the site had to border on several hundred miles of uninhabited space downrange—an area so vast that only an ocean would do. Moreover, the ocean had to be to the east of the launching site, because, for reasons of orbital mechanics, it was much more efficient to launch eastward with the rotation of the earth than to launch westward. Also for reasons of orbital mechanics, the closer to the equator the site could be, the better.

There were more restrictions. For security reasons, the site had to be in an area under the control of United States. For cost reasons, it had to be within reasonable proximity to the manufacturing facilities that would be producing the launch vehicles and support equipment. For logistical reasons, it had to be adjacent to a deep harbor or large river, so that it could receive barges carrying the huge components of the Saturn.

On April 25, as the Administration shoved NASA into high gear, Bob Seamans told Debus to begin looking for some place better than Canaveral. During May, the criteria for a site were developed and Cumberland Island in Georgia came under serious consideration. In June and July, Petrone and the other staff members analyzed the options.* On August 1, after another of their all-night marathons, they flew up to Washington with their report.