Apollo: The Race to the Moon (2 page)

But the Post that morning also had harbingers of things to come. “MISSISSIPPI JAILS 27 RIDERS” read the banner headline, referring to two busloads of Freedom Riders who had been arrested in Jackson, Mississippi. Their offenses consisted of trying to use the whites-only restroom and eat in the whites-only cafeteria. In other front-page news, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had gone out to Andrews Air Force Base to welcome Lyndon B. Johnson back from his first overseas trip as Vice President. Johnson had been to Southeast Asia. There had been rumors that the United States might send troops to the troubled region, but Johnson firmly denied them. “Nowhere in Asia was there a call for American troops,” he told reporters, although he of course “would not want to forever foreclose the possibility.”

A military adventure was the last thing Kennedy wanted, in Asia or anywhere else. For one thing, he didn’t want to spend any more money than he had to. In 1961, the federal government was planning to spend almost $95 billion, a huge sum, and Kennedy’s economic advisers were warning him that the budget deficit might exceed $3 billion. Also, military adventures had not been working out very well recently. Five weeks earlier, a C.I.A.-sponsored brigade of Cuban refugees had landed at the Bay of Pigs. They had been stopped on the beach and killed or imprisoned, and the United States stood condemned for being at once reckless and irresolute. The very phrase “Bay of Pigs” was already entering the lexicon as a synonym for debacle.

The failed Cuban invasion was not unrelated to another of the Post’s front-page stories, regarding a speech the President was about to make. “President Kennedy will address a joint session of Congress at 12:30 today on ‘urgent national needs’ in what will amount to a second State of the Union message,” read the Post’s lead. The story speculated about what the President might say and then turned to his motives: “Ever since the Cuban invasion fiasco the bloom has been off the bright rose of the early days of the new Administration,” and today’s speech, the Post explained, was part of an effort to recover the élan of the early spring. That Kennedy was going to Capitol Hill to deliver the speech personally—a step usually reserved for the State of the Union Message and the most momentous of occasions—indicated how seriously the new Administration viewed the situation. It was a recent decision. Kennedy had originally planned to send Congress a written message; not until the day before had he sent word to House Speaker Sam Rayburn to call the joint session.

Eight hundred miles south of Washington, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the morning was typically warm, humid, and sunny. But by the time the President began speaking, the Cape’s volatile weather had changed. Dark clouds gathered in the eastern sky and lightning was beginning to flash offshore.

Rocco Petrone was driving to lunch at the cafeteria near Hangar S. Petrone, a thirty-five-year-old Army major, had just put a lid on his military career. Too absorbed by rockets and space travel to leave the Cape, he had turned down a chance to go to the Command and General Staff School. He was now head of the Heavy Space Vehicle Systems Office in Kurt Debus’s Launch Operations Directorate. On this day, Petrone was preoccupied with working out last-minute changes to the launch complex at Pad 34 that would be used for the new Saturn rockets.

Sitting beside Petrone in the car was Albert Zeiler, a member of Wernher von Braun’s German rocket team and now one of Petrone’s colleagues at the Cape. Petrone suggested to Zeiler that he turn on the radio. President Kennedy was scheduled to address Congress, and rumor had it that Kennedy would say something about the space program.

Kennedy was already speaking. When they reached the cafeteria, Petrone and Zeiler stayed in the car, rain beating against the roof as they listened. It was a long speech, and the part they had been waiting for didn’t come until near the end. By that time there was so much static from the storm that Petrone and Zeiler could make out only part of what the President was saying—something about “achievements in space” and “longer strides.” But Rocco Petrone did hear the important part, the passage that he remembered forever after as words that moved a nation. What he heard John F. Kennedy say was this: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

Rocco Petrone turned to Albert Zeiler with a grin on his face and said, “Al, we’ve got our work cut out for us.” Petrone, a man of theatrical flair, loved the drama of a nation undertaking this enormous challenge in full public view. He thought of it as saying to the world, “Here’s the line we’re going to cross.”

Inside Hangar S, members of the Space Task Group that was in charge of America’s manned space program were preparing a Mercury capsule for Gus Grissom’s mission. Just three weeks earlier, Al Shepard’s suborbital flight had given the Space Task Group their first fifteen minutes of experience in manned space flight. Merritt Preston, chief of the Group’s contingent at the Cape, walked into the cramped office portion of the hangar and announced, “Well, we got it. We got the moon flight.” Scott Simpkinson, who was in no mood for jokes after months of sixteen-hour days wrestling with the capricious Mercuries, growled something like, “Shut up, I ain’t got time to be joking with you,” and continued with his work. Simpkinson hadn’t heard anything about this moon business. And Kennedy wanted them to do it by the end of the decade? He didn’t take it seriously—“Hell, no.”

Sitting at a nearby desk, Sam Beddingfield, the engineer responsible for the pyrotechnics and the recovery systems on the Mercury capsule, looked up at Preston. Beddingfield took Preston seriously, but he didn’t get excited. He thought of himself and his fellow engineers at the Cape as ditch diggers: They would be glad to dig any ditch anybody wanted when someone told them how wide, how deep, in which direction, and by when. Beddingfield figured that Kennedy had given them a good by-when. He didn’t know whether they could actually get to the moon before 1970, but it was useful to have a fixed schedule to work to. It helped organize things.

Dick Koos, a youngster of twenty-four, was out on the floor of Hangar S that afternoon, trying to get the procedures trainer to work. The procedures trainer drove the dials and switches in a mockup of the Mercury capsule that the astronauts used for practice. By now it was supposed to be simulating orbital flights, but the trainer was a balky creature, full of bugs and glitches, and it always broke down while the astronaut was still putatively over Madagascar or some such place. When he heard the news, all Koos could think of were the television newsreels of rocket launches he used to watch in the enlisted men’s day room at Fort Bliss back when he was an Army Pfc. Every time, it had seemed to Koos, the rockets would dance around on the pad and then blow up. He was still getting used to the idea of putting a man on top of one of those things—and now came word about the President’s speech. It was more confusing than exciting. Here they were trying to get the procedures trainer to run for three hours at a time, and Kennedy was saying, “Go to the moon”? Somebody, Koos thought, must know something he didn’t.

A man who knew a lot that Dick Koos didn’t, Robert Gilruth—head of the Space Task Group, chief operational officer of the American manned space program—was flying over the farms of the Mississippi Valley on his way to Tulsa when the speech began. He had asked the pilot to set up a radio patch so he could listen. Gilruth had known for a month that the President wanted to do something dramatic and he was looking forward to hearing the President ask for an enlarged and accelerated space program.

Unlike Rocco Petrone at the Cape, Robert Gilruth could understand the words easily enough. The reception was quite clear. The problem lay in what he was hearing. An accelerated program, yes; Gilruth had wanted that. A lunar landing, yes, in an orderly fashion, with time to work through all the difficulties that such an enterprise was bound to encounter. But not this. As the words sank in, as he realized that the President of the United States was asking an enthusiastic Congress to commit the nation’s honor to getting a man to the moon and back before the end of the decade, Robert Gilruth, the man who was supposed to make good on it, was—he could think of just the one word for it—aghast.

Eight years and eight weeks later, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module Eagle onto the Sea of Tranquility. This is the story of what happened in between, and something of what went before and came after. It is not a history, but the tale of a few of the people of Apollo. Some of them held high positions; some worked in the trenches. A few were in the public eye; the rest were not. They have in common that they remained on the ground (for this is not a story about the astronauts) and that each played a part, large or small, in putting men on the moon and returning them safely to earth. These few must stand for all the others, for Apollo was an epic, and epics must be captured in miniature.

BOOK I. GATHERING

I talk to people who say, “Gosh, John, all we gotta do is think back twenty-five years ago and we can go to Mars the same way.” I say, “No, you can’t. It was a unique set of circumstances that lined up all those dominoes.”

—John Aaron

Chapter 1. “That famous Space Task Group is akin to the Mayflower”

On an April Saturday in 1959, a young Canadian engineer named Owen Maynard and his family crossed the United States border at Niagara Falls and made their way south. Five of them were crowded into their new green and yellow Plymouth—Maynard, his wife, Helen, and three small children in the back seat—plus enough luggage to set up housekeeping. Maynard, a trim man who claimed to be five foot seven “on a good day,” had a perpetually curious, boyish look that made him seem younger than his thirty-four years. He was also a man with an adventurous streak—in World War II, still in his teens, he had been the youngest pilot to fly the high-performance Mosquito—and this was one of the qualities that had drawn him to this migration.

The Maynards drove all day on the narrow two-lane highways, out of a wintry Canadian April, across New York and Pennsylvania into Maryland, around Washington, D.C., and over the Potomac River into a full-blown Virginia spring. The next morning they continued south to Richmond, where they turned off busy Highway 1 onto a narrow two-lane road, State Highway 60, heading southeast. The towns were fewer now, and smaller. Fifty miles outside Richmond they came to the only sizable town on the route, Williamsburg, and after that it seemed there was nothing but forests and marshland and an occasional farmhouse.

This was the Peninsula, as it was known locally, a stretch of land bounded by the James River to the south, the Chesapeake Bay to the east, and the York River to the north. The rivers still had few bridges in 1959, and the sense of moving away from the rest of the world, even back in time, was unsettling. “You felt as if you were going to the end of the world,” said one of the other Canadians who came south during that period. “Of course, it was like the end of the world to everybody who went there, because you couldn’t get anywhere. You got down onto the Peninsula and that was it.”

In mid-afternoon the Maynards reached the tip of the Peninsula and their destination, a town called Hampton. It was still a backwater fishing town in those years—crab boats floating in a brackish tidal river, sea gulls shrieking overhead, ramshackle boat yards. The dilapidated Langley Hotel was the only place to stay in town, so Maynard’s new employer had arranged for them to put up at the Hotel Chamberlain at Old Port Comfort, a few miles east. It was an improvement over downtown Hampton, but still a far cry from the tidy residential neighborhood in Bloordale, Ontario, that the Maynards had left behind.

That Monday morning, Owen Maynard drove a few miles northward from Hampton to report to work. His new employer was situated on a large government reservation divided into an East Area and a West Area. Between them lay a large airfield operated by the Air Force. Maynard was directed to the eastern and older half of the facility. The drive hugged the curve of Back River, opening out onto the Bay, with open water off to his left and broad empty fields on the right. On the outskirts of the East Area, Maynard came to his first indication that this was an unusual sort of place, a wooden shed coming in off the water. The shed was a quarter of a mile long.

Past the hydrodynamic testing tank—for that’s what the shed was—he came to a cluster of brick buildings that looked almost like a college campus, with neatly trimmed lawns and fields and tree-shaded streets. But interspersed among the dignified old buildings with their broad porches and elaborate brickwork were exotic ones of inexplicable shapes, huge spheres and structures with U-shaped appendages made of what looked like vacuum-cleaner hose—vacuum-cleaner hose twenty or thirty feet in diameter.

These latter buildings were the wind tunnels that Maynard had seen so often in his aeronautical engineering journals. Because he had heard and read so much about all this over the years, it felt familiar to him, as if this were a dimly remembered home to which he was finally returning. And in a sense he was coming home, as, in a sense, was any man in his profession who came to this place. For this was Langley, North America’s oldest aeronautical research center and mother to all the rest. Owen Maynard, aeronautical engineer, had come south to be part of Langley’s latest offspring, the U.S. manned space program.

The reason an American space agency was recruiting Canadian engineers went back to November of the preceding year, when a new agency called the “National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” instantly shortened to “NASA,” was cobbled together by Congress and President Eisenhower. The reason NASA had been created went back another year, to October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I and triggered an American reaction resembling panic.