Apollo: The Race to the Moon (13 page)

By this time, they had considered eight locations: Merritt Island (adjacent to the existing Canaveral facilities); an offshore site near Cape Canaveral (to be built over the water, like an oil-drilling rig); Mayaguana Island in the Bahamas; Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia; a mainland site near Brownsville, Texas; White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico; Christmas Island in the mid-Pacific south of Hawaii; and South Point on the island of Hawaii. The Debus-Davis report said that Merritt Island was by far the best of the lot—or, as Jim Webb stated at the time, Merritt Island was the worst place in the world except for everywhere else. The facilities on Merritt Island would be known as the Merritt Island Launch Annex, or MILA (pronounced “mile-a”).

The more difficult task facing Petrone’s Heavy Space Vehicle Systems Office was figuring out how to prepare and launch a Saturn. It was a complex task made still more complicated by Debus’s and Petrone’s determination to use a radically new launch system.

A year before Kennedy’s speech, von Braun’s Future Projects Office in Huntsville, envisioning a large space program and costs-per-launch that might drop as low as $10 million, had told Debus that he should be prepared to launch as many as a hundred C-2 Saturns a year. In retrospect, the prediction seems absurdly high. At the time, Debus thought it was at least possible; and if not a hundred vehicles, then the total might easily be thirty or forty. The lowest plausible figure in the Future Projects Office’s projection was twelve per year—and even that number could barely be handled by the Cape’s current and planned facilities.

This prospect set Debus to thinking about how the Launch Operations Directorate might cope, and that in turn led him to reminisce. Just over fifteen years earlier, in Germany, Debus had been launching large numbers of V-2 rockets quite efficiently despite continual Allied bombing. He had done this by preparing the rockets in a hangar. After a rocket had been checked out, it was loaded horizontally onto a Miellerwagen and trucked out to the launching pad where it was erected, fueled, and launched in a few hours.

Debus had continued to do some of the preparatory work in hangars with Redstones and Jupiters in the United States, but the process had gotten slower as more and more work had to be done on the pad. His team could set up a Redstone on the pad and get it off in about a month, maybe three weeks if everything went well. But for the Saturn I they were planning to do all the assembly and checkout on the pad itself, and they were looking at a launch cycle of twelve weeks. For the larger launch vehicles to follow, they had to expect that the cycle would slow still further. Debus wondered whether something like the mobile launch system at Peenemünde might not be used at the Cape for the Saturns.

Then in December of 1960, around Christmastime, Debus’s musings were jolted by intelligence reports that somehow the Soviets were recycling their large launch vehicles on a much more rapid schedule than the United States. This got under the skin of Debus’s young Army associate, Major Petrone, who had not been at Peenemünde but had seen a lot of airplanes take off, and who knew that you didn’t try to check out the airplane on the runway. You checked it out in the hangar, and only when it was ready did you take it out to the runway, rev it up, and send it off. Petrone wanted to do the same thing with rockets—including the Saturn.

The idea of a mobile launch system for the Cape began to move from informal shoptalk to a rudimentary plan. In February 1961, Debus called his team together and assigned one of his associates, Georg von Tiesenhausen, to prepare a detailed discussion of mobile launch alternatives. It was a lucky thing, Petrone thought later. If the mobile launch system had still been a brand-new idea on May 25, they would never have considered it—mobile launch would have been “introducing another unknown into what already was a big unknown” at a time when it seemed imperative to simplify. But when the lunar frenzy began in late April and Debus was summoned to Huntsville to confer with Bob Seamans and von Braun, he was able to go to Seamans with von Tiesenhausen’s plans in his briefcase.

Debus briefed Seamans on April 25. The Associate Administrator was receptive to the mobile concept. The atmosphere was dramatically different from earlier meetings, when every new plan had to be scaled back because of the difficulties of getting funding from the Administration. Now, when Debus went through the cost comparisons of mobile and fixed systems, Seamans waved them aside. The way things were shaping up, he told Debus, the most important thing was to come up with a system that was going to be able to launch large boosters on a rapid schedule. Cost was secondary.

By summer, Petrone was pushing ahead with plans for a mobile launch system, but by doing so he had locked himself into a set of requirements that were increasingly absurd. The flight article was getting bigger and bigger, more and more demanding, and harder and harder to satisfy.

One requirement led to another. The point of a mobile launch system was to prepare the rocket away from the pad. For V-2s and Redstones, this meant a low building where these vehicles could lie horizontally while technicians bustled around them. That was now out of the question. “With the size of the vehicle we were looking at—over 360 feet long—and the umbilical tower it had to have,” Petrone said, “we just could not see a way to prepare it horizontally and then in its entirety put it up vertically.” There would be bending effects, all kinds of stresses on the vehicle. And they had no choice but to put it up in its entirety, because if they disconnected the umbilicals, then they would lose much of the work they had done in preparing it.

So they needed a place that would accommodate not just a 363-foot vehicle standing vertically, but its assembly as well. Huge pieces of hardware would have to be lofted to great heights by a crane that itself would have to be considerably above the height of the entire assembled stack. “The height was really dictated by what we call the ‘hook height,’ the need to have that hook [of the crane] at a distance of four hundred and sixty-five feet above the floor,” Petrone said. Add in the structure and the roof, and you’ve got no choice: “Once you decided to do it vertically, that set the height. So we’ve got a 525-foot building.”

But what kind of building? “We asked ourselves the question, must it be enclosed?” Petrone continued. “Could we just build large derricks to which you could bring the launcher?” No, that wouldn’t work. They would be working where winds of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five knots were common, and such winds made it difficult to perform delicate assembly operations on a 363-foot vehicle—never mind rain and thunderstorms. Furthermore, it had to be a building with elaborate shops and support facilities, for this would not be a simple matter of hooking together some stages and setting the spacecraft on top.

“You must remember that the stages never see each other until they arrive at the Cape,” Petrone said. “You’ve got stages and hardware coming from all over the country.” The stages had to do more than just fit together (as the old Mercury heat shield and the Atlas in M.A.-1 had not); they had to talk to each other. The Instrumentation Unit of the Saturn, its brain, was located at the top of the third stage. Thousands of signals and sensors and micro switches from the top of the stack down to the bottom had to make their connections without electrical interference or change of signal strength. All this was bound to take a matter of a few months, including the checkout and test, even after they got good at it.

So some kind of enclosure was essential. How many Saturns should they be able to handle at one time indoors? Here, Kennedy’s goal forced the issue. Reaching the moon by the end of the decade had clear implications for test schedules and launch rates: The building had better be big enough to prepare at least four Saturns at a time.

Hence Rocco Petrone found himself recommending to Kurt Debus and headquarters that NASA construct the largest enclosed space in the world on top of sandy soil in a place periodically swept by hurricanes. The flight article had dominated.

The result—the Vehicle Assembly Building, the V.A.B.—is one of the man-made wonders of the world, but at the time of Apollo it was celebrated mostly for things that weren’t true. The most widely accepted legend was that the V.A.B. was so huge that it had to be air-conditioned to prevent clouds from forming inside. Wrong on both counts: The V.A.B. was not air-conditioned, and clouds didn’t form anyway. It was also generally believed that the V.A.B. was designed to accept the Nova, the monster launch vehicle that was on the drawing boards for a direct ascent to the moon, which is why the V.A.B. was so much taller than any rocket that ever occupied it. Wrong again. It was assumed in 1961, when the V.A.B. was being planned, that the Nova would be assembled on a fixed pad out on the beach, feasible because only one or two Novas would be launched per year.

It is ironic that the most accurate legend, the building’s sheer, unbelievable size, is at once both the most factually correct and appears to be the least so. The building is immense. Its floor covers eight acres. Its walls extend upward 525 feet (the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet high). Each of the four doors of the V.A.B. is 456 feet high, tall and wide enough to admit the United Nations’ headquarters building. The V.A.B. is secured to Florida bedrock by 4,225 piles driven down 160 feet to prevent it from taking off like a box kite in a hurricane.

Yet conveying this size in ways other than numbers turns out to be impossible. Ray Clark, who ran the Cape’s support facilities in the 1960s, recalled that as the V.A.B. was nearing completion, NASA wanted to show the public how big it really was. But nothing their photographers produced captured the immensity. NASA got in touch with Life magazine, whose editors replied loftily that NASA need not worry, Life’s photographers knew how to do that sort of thing. The Life photographers flew down and set up shooting positions from every conceivable angle. They shot hundreds of rolls of film and went back to their labs in New York. “A while later they came back to see us,” Clark remembered. “They said, ‘We don’t know how to do it either. There’s just no way to portray photographically, or any way we know of, what the building’s really like.’”

For there is no scale. The V.A.B. sits out on the flatlands of Merritt Island, surrounded by a few small buildings. Approaching it, the human mind converts what it sees to a comprehensible set of dimensions. There is, for example, an American flag painted on one side of the V.A.B. The Kennedy Center tour guide tells visitors that each stripe in the flag is wide enough for a Greyhound bus to drive on it. But the mind can’t grasp the reality—the flag looks like an ordinarily large flag on an ordinarily large building. “Nope,” said Clark, “there’s no scale. If you could see a man in a photo, that might do it—but to get the whole building, you’ve got to get back so far you can’t see the man.”

The logic that Petrone and the other planners had to bring to their job had an Alice in Wonderland quality to it. They were required to believe any number of seemingly impossible things every day. If they wanted a vehicle big enough to send a spacecraft to the moon, then it had to be the size of the Saturn. If they wanted a vehicle the size of the Saturn, then they had to have a building with the size and capabilities of the V.A.B. And if they wanted to use a mobile launch capability for this vehicle, then there was the one remaining problem that had been on everyone’s mind from the beginning. It was elementary, as Petrone pointed out: “You gotta move the bird.” More specifically, the system required that they take a vehicle the size of a navy destroyer, stand it on end, transport it three and a half miles, then set the whole stack on the launch pad.

Rocco Petrone went to an engineer named Don Buchanan and told him to design the appropriate equipment for doing all of this. “And let me tell you,” Petrone said later, “he’d rather not have drunk from that cup.” Buchanan’s first reaction was that Petrone must be out of his mind to want to move that thing. “Well, Don,” Petrone said to him, “we’ve got to do something different.” He urged Buchanan to consider the glory of it all: Nowhere else in the world would there be anything like it. Buchanan suggested perhaps there was a reason for that. “Don was a bit negative,” acknowledged Petrone, but Petrone kept at him, for he considered Buchanan the best designer of ground support equipment anywhere. Finally Buchanan accepted what Petrone thought of as the heart of the burden in preparing the Cape for the Saturn: the design of the crawler and of the launcher.

Don Buchanan was a great rarity, perhaps unique, in being both a Langley man and a Marshall man. He worked at Langley from 1949 to 1956, and then transferred to Huntsville where he remained until he became part of K.S.C. in the 1960s. A Virginian—the name is pronounced “Buck-anan”—he was a gentle man who looked as if he might be the president of a small-town bank and whose only eccentricity was an astonishingly large repertoire of limericks, mostly unprintable. In his professional life, Don Buchanan was the kind of engineer of whom other engineers say, “He works with a sharp pencil.” No matter how large his office became, it always had a drafting table in the corner where Buchanan spent most of his time. He was a man with a vocation, utterly absorbed in the practice of designing workable machines for unlikely tasks.

He was still living in Huntsville, forty-one years old, when he got his assignment from Debus and Petrone. Altogether, Buchanan had the responsibility for designing the launch platform itself (Buchanan called it simply “the launcher”), the umbilical tower, the flame deflector, the support arms, the hold-down arms, and whatever it was that would transport the Saturn V from the V.A.B. to the pad. Later, he would also take over what proved to be one of the most difficult tasks in the entire inventory of ground support equipment, the swing arms that connected the umbilical tower to the launch vehicle.

As with a Chinese puzzle, one piece was the key to assembling the rest. In the case of the launcher, the key was the flame deflector. When a rocket was launched, something had to deflect the engine’s flames so that their back pressure (a bouncing effect) did not destroy the base of the ascending rocket. For the Redstone, the flame deflector was a little iron pyramid with four sides that a strong man could pick up and carry. For the Saturn V, the flame deflector was a metal wedge almost forty-eight feet wide, seventy-eight feet long, and more than forty feet high. The size of the deflector then dictated the dimensions of the elements in the launch complex which had to fit over it: umbilical tower, mobile service structure, and launcher.