Apollo: The Race to the Moon (23 page)

In addition, they decided that for testing purposes they must “be able to initiate this instability at our command,” as Castenholz put it. Nature, left to herself, wasn’t producing instabilities frequently enough for the team to learn how to control them. Therefore, they decided to explode a bomb in the combustion chamber while the test was in progress—if that didn’t drive the engine into instability, then nothing would, they reasoned. Then they could concentrate on making the engine damp out the instabilities they had induced.

The Combustion Devices Team set out to master the peculiar art of exploding a bomb inside an inferno. It wasn’t easy. The bombs they made were little cylinders about three inches long containing a black powder charge, heavily insulated to keep them from burning up before they were exploded. But even so, it was a problem to get a bomb inside an operating F-l engine and detonate it at the right time. “We tried to pop ’em up through the throat, and that didn’t work very well,” recalled Castenholz, so they eventually devised a way to insert the bomb inside the combustion chamber ahead of time, running the detonating wires through a tube that extended from the injector plate down six or eight inches into the combustion chamber. They attached the bomb to the end of the tube, stood back, and started the test. The bomb would go off and the chamber pressure would suddenly jump from 1,150 to as much as 4,000 pounds per square inch. It was a terrific way to induce combustion instability.

Getting the F-l to run under normal conditions had been an unprecedented challenge; now they were trying to design an F-l that would run normally even if someone set off a bomb in it. It was an extraordinarily severe test to put to their new designs, and simply modifying the hydraulics would not be enough. By the spring of 1963, the Combustion Devices Team was ready to acknowledge that they must completely redesign the injector plate.

They began by inserting baffles—copper plates extending from the injector plate into the combustion chamber that would interrupt the rebounding waves. They tried using thin, uncooled blades at first, “and it bent those baffles over like a tornado went through,” said Thomson. They replaced the thin blades with massive “dams” of solid copper protruding about four inches from the injector plate, more than two inches wide at the base and tapering to about half an inch at the top, cooled by kerosene flowing through orifices in the baffles just as kerosene flowed through orifices in the injector plate. “Everyone thought that the baffles would be enough,” said Thomson. But they weren’t. They did help, and, if unperturbed, the new design worked quite well. But the bombs could still induce runaway instability.

“That’s when we tried every trick that we could think up,” said Thomson. He lost count of the design modifications they tested—forty or fifty of them, maybe. They would have one that they thought was going to be good, and in the first tests it would work. Then, unpredictably, it would fail. One of the Marshall engineers who specialized in sensors, Jim Mizell, was sent out to Canoga Park to help measure what was going on inside. He watched as the combustion instability team kept trying to find a fix that worked. “It got so bad that the engineers couldn’t come up with a theory for the plate that they hadn’t tried before,” he recalled. “They turned it over to a bunch of craftsmen in back of the plant.” Mizell was out there one night and saw them “boring holes like crazy.” Mizell finally said to them, “What are you guys doing?” They replied, “Well, we’ve got this plate and we’re supposed to bore holes in there until we get tired, and you guys are going to take it out to the test stand and fire it for us.” They had code-named this particular injector plate The Kitchen Sink, they told Mizell.

Jerry Thomson bristled when it was suggested that things ever went that far. “We resorted to prayer but not to anything quite that wild,” he said. “We had engineering logic for all those things that we tried. Now you can say that the engineering logic wasn’t very scientific, and that I do admit, but we weren’t just punching holes to see what happened.” As the months went on, though, and a solution continued to elude them, Thomson and Castenholz sometimes wondered whether it might come to that.

By now, it was the middle of 1963 and the Apollo Program was foundering. Or at least that’s what The New York Times said, with a headline for its article of July 13, 1963, that read “LUNAR PROGRAM IN CRISIS.” The trigger for the outcry wasn’t the unsolved combustion instability. However crucial to the success of the program, that kind of problem was too esoteric to get much attention unless NASA publicized it, something that NASA was not about to do. Rather, the uproar in the press was over Brainerd Holmes’s resignation in late June.

Holmes, head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, wanted authority to run Apollo with a free hand, the same kind of authority that Abe Silverstein had sought and been denied in 1961. Holmes and Webb had been sparring for months, with Webb continuing to refuse Holmes’s key request, that the center directors report to him. Finally, Holmes took a stand on an issue (he wanted Webb to submit a $400 million supplemental budget request) on which Webb had the President on his side. Holmes tried to force the issue and lost. Isolated and demoralized, he left under circumstances that were officially described as Holmes’s personal decision to return to private life for financial reasons.

Holmes was highly regarded in the engineering fraternity and had gotten a good press as well. Time had put him on its cover, billing him as the managerial mastermind behind the BMEWS early-warning radar network, as a “restless, dynamic worker … a scientist who [is] not afraid to work with his own hands,” and as a man under whom “ambitious workers” were “clamoring to work.” So when a politician like Webb ousted this eminent engineering manager, much of the press inferred that Webb was jeopardizing the best interests of Apollo out of personal pique. Missiles and Rockets entitled its editorial about Holmes’s resignation “An American Tragedy.”

But Holmes’s loss to the program was only part of the story. The larger reality was that the nation’s romance with Apollo had cooled. In the press, in the public opinion polls, and even in the White House, people were asking why all this money had to be spent so fast on such a distant goal with so little payoff. Congress had held a series of hearings that spring where a parade of scientists had derided the Apollo Program’s scientific value. The competitive urge had faded as the Soviets failed to show signs that the United States was in a race. There were obviously other priorities that needed money (in mid-1963, cancer research and foreign aid topped the list; poverty would not become an issue for another year). Why not move at a more leisurely pace? Why not, perhaps, rethink whether the nation really wanted to do this at all? “It is probably too much to say, as some of NASA’s more panicky partisans have, that the whole U.S. space program now stands in mortal peril,” began an article in Fortune that fall of 1963. “Nevertheless, NASA and the space program have reached a critical stage.”

It was in this context that an engineer named George Mueller moved into Holmes’s office in September to take over the Office of Manned Space Flight. John Disher, one of the few who had been in O.M.S.F. through both the Silverstein and Holmes regimes, was still there, working in the Advanced Projects Section. A few days after Mueller arrived, he went to Disher’s office.

Mueller—he pronounced it “Miller”—had an assignment for Disher. It was to be fast turnaround, utterly discreet. Disher and another old hand at headquarters, Del Tischler, were to conduct a private assessment of where the Apollo schedule stood. They were not to pay any attention to the official schedule. Mueller wanted realism. Disher and Tischler were to make their best estimate, based on everything they had learned from Mercury and Apollo so far, on how long things would really take.

For two intense weeks, Disher and Tischler worked on their commission. On September 28, they went into Mueller’s office to brief him on their findings. For a program already under siege, those findings were devastating.

After running through an elaborate analysis of tasks and schedules, costs and probabilities, they came to the last page of their briefing, the one headed “Conclusions and Recommendations.” The first conclusion on their list was that “lunar landing cannot likely be attained within the decade with acceptable risk.” The second one was that, in their best estimate, the first attempt to land men on the moon would probably take place in late 1971. The two engineers added their own personal guess that the odds of getting to the moon before 1970 were about one in ten.

They finished the briefing. Then “George took Del and me hand in hand and we went over to Bob Seamans’s office,” Disher remembered. “He wanted to give the report to Seamans, obviously just to say, ‘Well, here’s the status of things as I’m taking over.’” Disher and Tischler went through their presentation again, and once again came to that stark last page of conclusions.

Seamans listened without comment. When it was over, he told Mueller he wanted to speak with him privately and Disher and Tischler left the room. In a few minutes, Disher recalled, Mueller came back alone and told them that Seamans wanted them to destroy the material. Seamans didn’t remember asking anyone to destroy material, but he did remember thinking the results were unsatisfactory and telling Mueller to go back to the drawing board. Trying to hold NASA together in a time of troubles, Seamans needed something a lot more imaginative than a study saying that NASA couldn’t get to the moon before 1971.

George Mueller, on the other hand, was content. Disher and Tischler had just given him the two-by-four he needed. He was about to ram through the most radical decision in the whole of the Apollo Program, a decision that was instrumental in getting the United States to the moon by the end of the decade.

Chapter 11. “It sounded reckless”

Engineering is rightly regarded as one of the most pragmatic of professions, but even engineers have their creeds and dogmas. Thus when Joe Shea once was asked to adjudicate a Marshall-Houston dispute over the correct way to do a certain type of soldering, he declined. “That’s not technology,” he said of the warring views. “That’s theology.” Now George Mueller was going to propose a plan for rescuing the Apollo schedule that would horrify Marshall and Houston in equal measure, for it would violate a taboo.

Looking back on the program as a whole, Shea would see Apollo as the story of three cultures. The differences among the groups he had in mind went far beyond just “points of view” or “schools of thought.” There were the Germans from Peenemünde, the old N.A.C.A. hands from Langley and Lewis, and the systems engineers from the I.C.B.M. world, each band with its own tribal history and folkways and prejudices and dialect.

In the early days of the space program, the Germans and the N.A.C.A. hands lived together peacefully if suspiciously. True, the Germans had seniority and the N.A.C.A. people struggled to achieve parity, but they had in common not only their love of engineering and of things that flew, but also a tradition of craftsmanship. The Germans and the N.A.C.A. hands were essentially builders of fine machines.

Mueller, like Holmes and Shea, was part of the third tribe, the invaders from the world of systems engineering, socialized by the experience of building missile systems and early-warning radar systems for the Department of Defense. They, too, were craftsmen, but of a different sort. Their craft was not building hardware, but machining the managerial equipment for huge, highly technical, highly complex tasks.

Another difference that separated the systems engineers from the Germans and the N.A.C.A. hands grew out of the disparate circumstances under which their crafts had evolved. The Germans had grown up alongside the rocketry they were inventing. There was no such thing as rocket technology when the young Wernher von Braun teamed up with the young Arthur Rudolph and Walter Reidel and Bernhard Tessman. They had only embryonic ideas and grand ambitions. They had to inch their way forward. Failure was their tool for making progress. Furthermore, the Germans began at a time when the equipment for diagnosing failures was still primitive, and telemetry of data was almost unknown. When rockets failed, they did so spectacularly, in fireballs, obliterating recording equipment and sensors in their explosions. Often, the Germans found, you couldn’t even be sure what had failed, let alone why.

One of their reactions to this experience was their fabled conservatism, giving each part and each system within the rocket a generous margin of extra strength or capacity. Another reaction was to compartmentalize their testing and development programs into the smallest possible packages, so that each new step involved testing just one new item. Each step was repeated many times before going on to the next. Their procedures were methodical, Germanic—and successful.

The N.A.C.A. hands grew up in the flight-test business. Unlike the Germans, N.A.C.A. engineers had the advantage of working with an already reliable machine, the airplane. Their chief shaping influence was the fact that human beings rode in their machines. Failures, however rare in statistical terms, were tallied in human lives, and so the N.A.C.A. engineers too learned to proceed on a painfully slow incremental schedule. They wouldn’t think of taxiing the prototype of an untried design out to the field and taking off. First the pilot would run up the motor, and the engineers would gather test data to be taken back to the office for analysis. Then, another day, the pilot would taxi the aircraft, and the engineers would look carefully at all those data. Then, on still another day, he would reach near-takeoff speeds. Finally, cautiously, on a day with perfect weather conditions, the plane would lift into the air on its first flight. And this would be true even with a plane that had performed superbly in the wind tunnel, not all that different from other designs that had been flying safely for years. Out of their different experiences, the N.A.C.A. hands and the Germans came in the end to similar points of view on flight-testing.

The systems engineers looked upon this philosophical alliance with a certain disdain. “The systems guys were given a very different chore,” as Jim Elms once put it. “Their chore was, if we have a billion dollars and five years, what’s the best way to get the most pounds of atomic bombs over some place like Moscow? They had a choice like, ‘Let’s see, we can build a thousand missiles with a reliability of seventy-five percent. That means we can get 750 of those missiles to actually go there for that billion dollars. Or if we want to make them perfect, we might be able to get twenty of them over there.’ So their goal was to figure out where they wanted to be on that reliability scale.”