Apollo: The Race to the Moon (19 page)

This kind of independence was a hallmark of early Space Task Group behavior. In the early 1960s, NASA headquarters was theoretically like headquarters in any large bureaucracy, which is to say that it established policy and enforced it. In practice, from the viewpoint of the centers, headquarters was an object of disdain. “You’d do everything you could to keep headquarters from knowing what the hell was going on,” one Space Task Group engineer said, “or letting them participate in it, if you could help it.” Later, Owen Maynard couldn’t even remember what the official headquarters policy toward the mode was supposed to have been during that period. “Well, headquarters did what they did,” he said pugnaciously. “And I didn’t give a shit. I had no respect for these people in faraway places.” He would design whatever seemed to work, as long as Max Faget and Caldwell Johnson didn’t mind, and what Maynard knew after struggling with this beast of a spacecraft was that earth-orbit rendezvous was a lousy way to try to get to the moon and direct ascent wasn’t much better. He wasn’t looking at trajectories and propellant loads and liftoff weights in the abstract. He was trying to design a real, functioning flying machine, and that dose of reality made a big difference.

Maynard was in that frame of mind when, in January of 1961, Caldwell Johnson told him to go listen to a presentation by Houbolt. Johnson didn’t say much more than that, positive or negative—“They didn’t tell me to do it, or even give it special consideration,” said Maynard. “It was just one more of sixteen thousand ways of getting to the moon.” So Maynard and Kurt Strass and Bob O’Neal went to one of Houbolt’s many briefings. “I guess that a minute after the meeting we probably thought it wasn’t a very good idea,” Maynard said, and Bob O’Neal wrote a memo afterward saying so. But Maynard, struggling with his sketches, kept coming back to the L.O.R. idea, and he found that “when you take all of the different ways of doing things into consideration, when you’ve got a chance to digest them, and ask a few thousand more questions, it begins to make more sense.” As the weeks passed, he and Houbolt chatted from time to time.

Maynard began to realize that lunar-orbit rendezvous was not so much harder than some of the things he was already considering. He had lately been playing with the idea of leaving the propellant tanks in lunar orbit—they were heavy, so why not leave them up there instead of carrying them all the way down to the surface and back up again? He had liked the idea, except that as he explored it he found that if he wanted to rendezvous with a propellant tank, he had to devise some sort of docking mechanism, plus a lot of other complexities. And if you were going to have to add that much complexity anyway, why not go Houbolt’s route? You might as well build a completely independent second vehicle with a separate set of displays and controls that were just for landing on the moon and coming back up again. It wouldn’t need a heat shield. It wouldn’t have to survive aerodynamic pressures. It wouldn’t have to have any aerodynamic controls. It could be small and light and maneuverable—that sports car he was looking for, instead of the Mack truck.

“I got convinced pretty quick,” Maynard said, “within about a month of that date in the Bob O’Neal memo.” He was much too far down the ladder to worry about selecting the mode, so he kept making sketches that eventually led to the lunar crasher, but he was sketching some lunar modules on the side.

Maynard also remembered Gilruth listening sympathetically to his problems in designing a workable spacecraft, and that Gilruth was becoming intrigued by L.O.R. soon after Maynard himself did. That jibes with Gilruth’s own memory of an exchange with Faget shortly after the Kennedy speech. Gilruth had discovered that Faget had told people at headquarters that the Space Task Group wasn’t interested in lunar-orbit rendezvous, and he was uncharacteristically abrupt: It wasn’t Faget’s prerogative to tell them that, Gilruth recalled telling the designer—and besides, they ought to be looking hard at L.O.R. themselves. Later, Gilruth would say that it wasn’t until he became convinced that lunar-orbit rendezvous would work that he truly began to believe that they could get to the moon by the end of the decade.

Al Kehlet and Chuck Mathews began some new in-house analyses for the Space Task Group on the lunar-orbit rendezvous option and convinced themselves that there was a lot to it. As Faget watched Caldwell and Owen struggling with ways to make one spacecraft do all the different functions of a lunar landing, he too began to appreciate the merits of having a second, specialized spacecraft to make the landing. He still thought that Houbolt’s figures on weights were wrong, but lunar-orbit rendezvous was turning out to be the more elegant engineering solution. If Faget was opinionated and stubborn, he was also irresistibly attracted to elegant solutions. Faget, formerly the apostle of direct ascent, the man who had so grievously insulted Houbolt, began to come around to the conclusion that, in his own words, “lunar-orbit rendezvous really looked like the thing to do.” Houbolt could never get over Max’s gall—not only did he become an advocate, but a few years later at cocktail parties, Faget would come up to him and say, “Oh, anyone who thinks about it for five minutes can see that lunar-orbit rendezvous is the way to go.”

These conflicting views about the mode were still being untangled when Caldwell Johnson drove out to Langley on Tuesday, September 19, 1961. It was overcast, a gloomy fall day. Hurricane Esther was moving up the coast toward Hatteras and storm warnings were out for the Tidewater area. But Johnson was in good spirits. He had recently moved into his dream home, situated on a bluff over the mouth of the James River, looking out over eight miles of water, with good fishing off his dock and his duck blind five minutes away.

He was scheduled later that morning for a briefing by some engineers working on Surveyor, a project to soft-land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon and send back information about the lunar surface. The engineers had come to Langley to ask what the Space Task Group needed from Surveyor. As it happened, Johnson needed a great deal. Regardless of whatever mode was eventually chosen, the craft that touched down on the moon was going to need landing gear, and Johnson had been fretting about how to design it.

He had been getting bizarre advice from high places. One eminent lunar scientist had come forth with the opinion that the mare—the flat “seas” on the lunar surface—were deep pools of dust: If anything lands in one of these, Johnson remembered being told, “it’ll just sink down to the bottom. Boom, and it’s gone.” Another scientist, more eminent yet, a Nobel laureate no less, had speculated that the mountains were nothing but friable webs of rock that would crumble at even light pressures. “Well, that’s a hell of a note,” Johnson said. “How in the hell were we gonna design a landing gear if the mare are nothing but pools of dust and the mountains are nothing but blown-glass fairy castles?”

Furthermore, Johnson realized, it was hopeless to try to get the scientific community to straighten the thing out. They would argue for five hundred years. “So Owen and I got together one morning and we said, ‘It’s got to be like Arizona! The moon has just got to be like Arizona! Can’t be nothin’ else. So let’s design a landing gear like it was.’” That’s what they had been doing when the Surveyor people arrived on that Tuesday. They remained worried, however, about what might happen to the astronauts if they were wrong and the moon wasn’t just like Arizona.

Before the Surveyor briefing that morning, there was one other meeting to attend. Brainerd Holmes, head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, had flown in from Washington, and Johnson joined the rest of the senior staff of the Space Task Group in the cramped conference room on the second floor of Building 58. What Holmes had come down to tell them was, first, that the Space Task Group was going to become a full-fledged center, to be called the Manned Spacecraft Center. And then he told them that this center was going to be located twenty-five miles south of Houston, Texas.

Still digesting this awful news, Johnson was not at his most gracious when he got to the Surveyor briefing. The poor Surveyor fellows were asking what they could do to help the Apollo people, Owen Maynard recalled. “They were sitting there with their pens poised ready to write our answer down, and Caldwell said, ‘Crash into the moon and smash all to hell and then at least we’ll know we don’t have several meters of dust on it.’” It was pretty deflating for the Surveyor guys, who were just trying to be helpful, “but Caldwell was really torqued off, let me tell you.”

Why Houston? just about everybody in the Space Task Group asked plaintively. The word got around quickly that the new site in Texas was a flat, treeless plain. The temperature was in the nineties from February to November. “I was so upset about going to Texas, I wouldn’t even let them send me the free subscription to their goddanged newspaper,” said one of the Space Task Group engineers. “It was my intention never to go to Houston.” Hampton might not be perfect, but most of them had homes there, and children in school. There was the Chesapeake Bay nearby, and Norfolk across the new bridge. And if they couldn’t stay in Hampton, why not go to Florida, or Denver, or somewhere nice?

Why Houston? Well, Tom Markley once explained with a straight face, there were these criteria that NASA had established for the site of the new Manned Spacecraft Center, and, lo and behold, Houston won. For example, the site had to have water transportation. “Clear Lake had a foot and a half of water in it, so Houston met that one.” And it had to be, as the site selection committee put it, in a climate “permitting year-round, ice-free water transportation.” No problem—“I guess Houston, with ninety-one degrees average temperature and a hundred percent humidity, met that criterion,” said Markley.

There was more. For example, another criterion was the availability of a thousand acres of land—and, by what the official Apollo history calls a “politically arranged gift,” an oilman just happened to offer precisely a thousand acres of salt-grass pastureland south of Houston to Rice University if Rice would in turn agree to donate it as a site for the Center. The oilman, as it happened, also owned several other parcels of land adjoining the site. But it wouldn’t cost a penny out of the taxpayers’ pockets.

In truth, there were eight criteria and a solemn selection process. But it was also true that Albert Thomas, the chairman of the House Independent Offices Appropriations Committee—NASA’s appropriations committee—came from Texas, and his district included Houston. And the Vice President of the United States, the space program’s staunchest ally, was named Lyndon Johnson. Yes, acknowledged Charles Donlan, deputy director of the Space Task Group, they dutifully went through this site selection process, “but it’s as though you went through a maze knowing all the time what door you were going to come out.”

Rumors that Thomas and Johnson made money out of the choice of Houston through land deals circulated in NASA from the day the decision was announced, but they remain only rumors. Thomas’s influence over the decision is generally conceded to have been enormous, however, and was probably even greater than Johnson’s. George Low later recalled a meeting in Abe Silverstein’s office when Silverstein observed that Apollo gave them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a facility like the manned spaceflight center and then said, “I wonder where Albert Thomas’s district is?”

So Houston it was, and off they went, seven hundred engineers and their families, from Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas, in the middle of the most frenzied period of Project Mercury (they were trying to launch John Glenn on the first manned Atlas), and just as the Apollo Program was beginning to grow exponentially. Caldwell Johnson went too, leaving his native waters and his beautiful new home behind. For one thing, he had overheard a senior Langley engineer speculating that Johnson would never agree to leave Hampton. Johnson didn’t like being predictable. Also, he figured, “I’d eat my heart out if I stayed there and let all these other guys come to Houston and do this. I would’ve kicked myself fifty thousand times.” So Johnson went to Houston. Almost everyone in the Space Task Group did.

Two days after Christmas, Tom Markley arrived in Houston to oversee the transition. “Okay, Tom,” Gilruth had said to him, “you get down there and take over the site while we get our arms around Mercury.” Gilruth and the others would stay at Langley until the Glenn flight had gotten off. Markley had said okay—since his house had already been sold anyway and his household goods were being packed up for shipping to Baltimore. It wouldn’t be hard to reroute them to Houston. “What are we doing?” his family asked. A change in plans: “We’re going to move to Houston, Texas!” Markley told them. “What’ll we do with your stuff?” the Mayflower moving people asked. “I don’t know! Take the truck down there, and I’ll call you when I get there!” said Markley. “So we took off and went to Houston, Texas,” as Markley recounted it later. “Got down there, and the place was chaos. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”

In 1962 alone, M.S.C. would hire 2,000 new people, nearly quadrupling its size. When Markley arrived, hardly any of the supervisors were in place to interview the candidates. People were being selected by matching their academic records against the qualification lists. By comparison, it made the previous hectic hiring at Langley look like a carefully reasoned process—“Anybody who knew how to spell ‘Apollo,’ we took them,” said one veteran of those days.

Meanwhile, the skeleton staffs that had been sent down to Houston were independently rummaging through the Houston real-estate market trying to find places to put all these new bodies. When Markley sat down for his first day at the job, he kept getting calls from people he’d never heard of saying something like, “Well, you just acquired two thousand more square feet of rental space out here in…” Chaos. “My God, what’s going on?” Markley asked himself. “So I go back to my diktat from Gilruth and it says, ‘Take charge!’ I called a staff meeting in one of the hangars down there and said, ‘Will you guys all introduce yourselves? Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.’ God’s truth. So they did, and I said, ‘Okay, well, first thing is, where do we have office space now?’ They started showing me a map, and I couldn’t believe it. We were all over that town.” During February and March 1962, as the rest of the Langley staff migrated down to Texas, Markley sometimes felt like the wagon master for a particularly unruly train of settlers.