Apollo: The Race to the Moon (27 page)

In Shea’s mind, nothing was sacred about the specs for the individual components of the spacecraft. There were only three sacred specs, and they were man, moon, decade. “If those are the real three things you’ve got to do, then everything else can be traded off underneath,” he would tell them, and so he kept going back to the why of things: Why these numbers and not others on the spec? Was the product good enough to do the job it was supposed to do? Was the job it was supposed to do in the spec the job it would have to do on the flight? “Because if we fail a qual test and if I have to send it back to redesign,” Shea explained, “then I have a less mature product when it comes back than I had already gotten up to that point.” The better is the enemy of the good.

Again and again he preached: “Hey, it isn’t that complicated. It is very understandable. The engines work this way, the guidance system works that way, the transistors work this way, so don’t get yourself in a state of mind thinking that it’s too complex. It really is very simple. It’s piece by piece.” It’s awfully big, that’s all, Shea kept saying. Piece by piece, it’s simple.

Sometimes it seemed a losing battle, as contractors became so obsessed with the specifications that common sense got lost in the shuffle. Honeywell, for example, was late in delivering the autopilot for spacecrafts 012 and 014. The reason, they told ASPO, was that they were redesigning some connectors and printed circuits to pass Shea’s humidity spec. How badly had it failed? Shea asked. Well, actually, they hadn’t even tested it against the humidity spec. What they were doing was immersing the connector board in water, so they would be sure of passing the humidity test when they got to it, and they were having trouble getting it to survive the immersion.

Keep it simple. Keep to the schedule. Do your job or get out of the way. Shea’s methods could be abrasive and tough, but they could be exhilarating. It all depended on your point of view, and the people down in Houston had all sorts of opinions of Joe Shea.

He was too hard on people, too hard-driving. “Reminds you of a military guy,” said one engineer: “Take that hill and don’t worry too much about the casualties.” No, said another. “If you came in and had the right story, and if you didn’t try to bullshit him—because he was too darned smart to be fooled—he treated you pretty well.” That was the key, said another. “Shea had a big ego, but he was extremely sharp and he was fair. He just wanted to know that you knew what you were talking about.” Wait a minute, another said: “Shea was an egotist, very much so. If you buttered him, you got the gravy jobs.” But he was watching from afar, he added, and “other people that I got to know real well after I transferred over to ASPO thought he was great.” Yes, but he was pushing too fast on the hardware, said others. He’d be out at Downey during the graveyard shift, signing off on things just to keep to the schedule. That’s right, said one of the inspectors: “He was out there telling North American, ‘Hey, hurry up, don’t worry about that little stuff, those little things.’ Joe was pushing kind of hard.” But then, of course, he added, “You had to. They’d have never got anything out of that plant if he wasn’t pushing.” At least, said still another, there was no doubt about who was running ASPO: “Shea wanted complete control, and he had it.”

And what of Joe Shea and Max Faget? “Well,” said Shea later, a little abashedly, “Max grew on me.” Despite their rocky beginning, Shea and Faget forged a friendship. Professionally, they worked out a system whereby Shea in ASPO tapped into Faget’s expertise over in Engineering without either of them stepping on the other’s toes. And it turned out that Nancy Faget and Berry Shea liked each other too, so as time went on the families became friends.

It was always to be a friendship with an edge, as could hardly have been otherwise with two men as competitive as Faget and Shea. One time, after Faget had started jogging in his spare time, they were on a plane to Washington and Faget announced to Shea that, although Shea might once have been a runner in school, Faget was getting pretty fast himself. In fact, Faget thought that he could beat Shea. Shea doubted that. Later that day, pedestrians walking near the Georgetown Inn could see two men in early middle age, one tall and one short, racing up the crowded sidewalks of Wisconsin Avenue in a hundred-yard dash. Shea won. “It was that kind of relationship,” Shea said, and they had a lot of fun with it.

So Joe Shea became part of Houston, and as time went on he thought of himself less and less as a headquarters man. He found himself liking the N.A.C.A. hands, even though he insisted on continuing to call them the “Fly-Boys,” and liking the organization. “Houston was the only place I’ve ever seen,” he recalled, “where every guy was comfortable in his job. He didn’t want a promotion. There was no jockeying for position, there was real rapport.”

Shea never became fully part of the Space Task Group family—that was probably impossible for anyone who hadn’t been at Langley or Lewis—but it wasn’t necessary. These were Joe Shea’s glory days, and whatever the swirl of opinions about this gifted, enigmatic man, he was taking an effort that had been foundering and driving it forward. This, said Tom Markley later, was the reason Shea walked into a staff meeting one Monday morning to find everybody sitting there, feet up on the table, all with red socks on. “What that showed was our love for the guy,” Markley said. He paused to reconsider his choice of words. Not “love” exactly—Joe didn’t let many people get that close to him. They wore the socks out of deep respect and admiration for Shea, he said. “He was a walking encyclopedia, a design guy, a systems integration guy, and not only that, but he could understand contract negotiations. And he could handle senators and congressmen when they came down, just as well as he could handle his own design people.” Joe Shea could do it all.

When the pressure got too high, they had one other thing going for them. “Down at Houston we could argue like hell,” Shea recalled. “But afterwards we would be out in the parking lot and look up at the moon and say, ‘You really want to go there?’” And the answer was always yes.

Chapter 13. “We want you to go fix it”

In the first half of 1964, while Joe Shea was taking hold of ASPO, the Combustion Devices Team out at Canoga Park doggedly continued to work on the injector plate for the F-l. Management at both NASA and Rocketdyne began to wonder whether some sort of compromise might be possible. The combustion chamber with the baffle usually worked—not on every test, but on a high proportion of them. Jerry Thomson began to hear things like, “Why not just accept that once in a while one will go unstable?” This school of thought held that a failure was unlikely in the first place, and that even if an engine did fail, the first stage of the Saturn V had an “engine-out capability”—it could continue to fly on four of its five engines. The mission might be jeopardized, but the crew would be safe.

But the vehicle would continue to fly and the crew would be safe only if a runaway engine shut itself down before it caused an explosion—which it might or might not be able to do, depending on the nature of the instability. Thomson thought the danger was substantial—“If you had gone unstable on the F-l engine, you’d have lost the bird.” He and Paul Castenholz continued to insist that they would deliver a dynamically stable injector that would damp in no more than 400 milliseconds.

They were now pursuing another line of attack, borrowing from some test results on another engine, the H-l, which had been developed for earlier versions of the Saturn. Though much smaller than the F-l, the H-l had also been troubled by combustion instability. The problem had finally been solved by changing the impingement angle of the propellant streams. The angle of the holes through the injector plate had been altered so that the fans of LOX and of kerosene were formed farther down in the combustion chamber.

There were some disadvantages to this modification, mainly involving the efficiency of the engine. The farther down the streams impinged, the less completely they burned before being expelled through the throat. It was not a trivial loss—when the Combustion Devices Team tried this fix with an appropriately modified injector, they did indeed find they had cut the efficiency of the F-l by a few percent. But some decrease in efficiency could be tolerated (that German conservatism once more gave them precious leeway), and with the new angle of impingement, plus the redesigned baffles, they found that they had reduced the occurrence of instability substantially.

More months went by, and much fine-tuning. They modified the angle again and they increased the orifice size by a fraction of an inch. They fiddled and nudged, and the incidence of instability decreased still further until, by late 1964, they weren’t getting it anymore. The bombs would explode, the pressure in the combustion chamber would skyrocket—and then the engine would be running smoothly again, not just within the 400-millisecond goal the team had set for itself, but within 100 milliseconds.

The men who had worked so single-mindedly and so long on solving the combustion instability problem in the F-l had no moment of triumph, no equivalent of the splashdown party that other people in the Apollo Program enjoyed. They never knew for sure that they had finally won. “There was an apprehension that something would happen that you didn’t know about,” Castenholz said. “I think you’ll find that with almost all rocket engineers.” For Castenholz, it lingered throughout Apollo, even after the lunar landing. It wasn’t as if they had ever managed to write the equations that explained exactly how combustion instability could be done away with. All they had done was redesign until it was gone. But though they could not know it then, it truly was gone, never to reappear in any F-l that ever flew.

In January 1965, the injector for the F-l was rated flight-ready by Marshall Space Flight Center. On April 16, 1965, five F-l engines, mounted together as they would be in flight, were ignited on the Huntsville test stand. During 6.5 seconds of ignition, they generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

At the Cape, the last half of 1965 and the beginning of 1966 saw the pieces of the launch complex finally begin to come together. In October, the first portions of the High Bay in the V.A.B. were occupied. In January 1966, the crawler, which had been giving Don Buchanan fits for almost four years, successfully returned the mobile launcher to the V.A.B. (for six months, the launcher had been stranded a mile and a half away, where the crawler had taken it and then broken down). In March, the first stage of a full-sized Saturn V test article, called the Saturn 500-F, with the same tankage and umbilical connections as a real Saturn V, was lifted to a vertical attitude in the V.A.B. Ten days later, the second stage of the 500-F was lifted 200 feet into the air and mated to the first stage. Five days after that, on March 30, 1966, the crews in the V.A.B. mated the third stage, then a test-article version of the C.S.M., and for the first time the people of Apollo saw what a Saturn V really looked like when assembled—all 363 gleaming white feet of it, standing under the harsh lights of the V.A.B. On May 8, the last of the swing arms that had caused so much trouble was installed on the umbilical tower.

On May 25, 1966, five years to the day after John Kennedy had made his speech promising the moon within the decade, the giant doors of the V.A.B. slid open and the crawler emerged, bearing on its back a launcher, an umbilical tower, and a full-sized, full-weight mockup of the Saturn V. The crawler took its load out to Launch Complex 39, reaching Pad A at dusk. Five weeks later, Rocco Petrone, leaving his job as program manager for the Apollo facilities at the Cape, moved over to become director of Launch Operations. If Marshall could give them a vehicle and Houston could give them a spacecraft, Stage Zero was ready to fly.

By August 1966, Joe Shea’s ASPO was nearing achievement of Houston’s part of the bargain. During 1964 and 1965, eight boilerplate spacecraft had flown on Saturn Is and Big Joes. Only one was a failure, and that one only because the launch vehicle blew up. In 1966, three unmanned command and service modules had been launched so far, their flights including a high-altitude abort test, a test of the compatibility of the spacecraft and the launch vehicle, and an orbital test of the S-IVB third stage. All three had been unmanned versions of what were called Block I spacecraft, meaning that they couldn’t link up with a LEM.

ASPO still did not have a lunar module ready to fly, nor did it expect to have one for another year. There had been a multitude of problems with the LEM; indeed, after the F-l problem was resolved, the LEM had become the “pacing item” in the program, the one that would hold back all the rest unless it made up time. But Grumman was by common consent the finest prime contractor that NASA had. When problems arose with the LEM—no surprise in a vehicle so unprecedented in its function and design—ASPO found that Grumman got on top of them as fast and as energetically as anyone could wish. Within NASA there was confidence that, one way or another, the LEM would be arriving pretty much when Grumman said it would, and that when it arrived, it would work. One NASA observer wondered whether Grumman’s performance had something to do with geography. “You could look across the country from the East Coast to the West Coast and watch the personality change” among the contractors, he thought. Contractors on the East Coast (Grumman was headquartered on Long Island) had a go-get-’em, do-it-right attitude, the people in the Midwest (McDonnell was in St. Louis) were somewhere in the middle, “and the folks in California—well, we had to push them a lot in California.”

The relationship between ASPO and North American had reached a modus vivendi. At the engineering level, some close working relationships had been established. Shea found that Dale Myers, who had replaced John Paup as the contractor’s program manager for the spacecraft, brought the same frame of mind to Downey that Shea brought to Houston. They had joined forces during the first year to define the Block II spacecraft—“ganged up on the rest of the world,” Myers recalled, “and said we’re going to have some specs [for Block IIs] that are right and meaningful.” They had pushed them through, and subsequently had seen the Block II spacecraft come close to completion.