Apollo: The Race to the Moon (3 page)

A small globe of metal with a few crude instruments weighing 184 pounds, Sputnik I was not much of a satellite by later standards. But it was the planet’s first artificial satellite, and it was not America’s. Two weeks later, the Russians compounded their triumph by orbiting Sputnik II, a much larger satellite with a dog named Laika aboard. Not only did Sputnik II carry the dog, which suggested that the Soviets were thinking about putting human beings into space, the final stage of the rocket had remained attached to the satellite—which meant, incredibly and ominously, that the Soviet rocket had managed to put a six-ton weight into earth orbit. The United States, on the other hand, was working on a grapefruit-sized satellite weighing three and a half pounds. Two months later, the Department of the Navy tried to launch this puny competitor to Sputnik in front of television and newspaper cameras from around the world. The Vanguard rocket being used for the launch rose four feet into the air, fell back, and crumpled onto the pad in a spectacular explosion. A few days later, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations inquired solicitously whether the United States was interested in receiving aid earmarked for underdeveloped countries.

The public furor surrounding these events had been immense. Sputnik was the first time the Soviets had demonstrated superiority to the United States in any technological endeavor. It was especially galling to see them do it in a field as visible, as exotic, and as potentially dangerous as rockets and space exploration. In their humiliation, Americans lashed out at a variety of targets—the educational system, the military, Eisenhower’s golf, American consumerism.

There was a disquieting edge to the furor. The Dallas News wondered whether there weren’t after all “some advantages of tight, totalitarian control.” It was a thought heard elsewhere: Maybe a little more regimentation and discipline in this country wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Life joined the clamor. In an article entitled “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky,” the author likened the American of the 1950s to “some fat Roman lolling in the baths of Caracalla shortly before the Visigoths sacked his city.”

President Eisenhower thought this was all a lot of hysterical poppycock, but he also decided that he couldn’t ignore it. The United States was going to have a space program whether or not he wanted it. That much was clear. All he could do was try to keep it within bounds.

One obvious place for the space program was Huntsville, Alabama, where the United States Army had stashed away the finest rocket scientists in the world: Wernher von Braun’s Germans, “the rocket team,” as it had been known in Germany, the men who had built the V-2. Von Braun’s team could easily have beaten the Russians to the first satellite—their Jupiter had been ready for more than a year to put up a satellite. But the Germans had been held back by a combination of jurisdictional disputes (only the Air Force was supposed to build missiles with intercontinental range) and the Administration’s lukewarm interest in rocket technology. These barriers fell quickly after Sputnik. Given the go-ahead, von Braun’s people put America’s first satellite, Explorer I, into orbit on January 31, 1958.

But Eisenhower was not willing to appoint von Braun head of the space program. There were many reasons for this—among others, it would have been embarrassing for the American space program to be so blatantly a German enterprise. As important, von Braun was tied to the Army, and Ike was adamant that the American space program not be run by the military. This former General of the Army and Supreme Commander of the largest military expeditionary force in the history of the world was already harboring fears of the military-industrial complex that he would voice as he left office.

Eisenhower found the perfect agency for his purpose in a venerable organization called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, known to its friends as the N.A.C.A. The N.A.C.A. had been around for forty years, quietly going about its business of aeronautical research. It wasn’t even an “agency” in the usual sense of the term but rather a collection of aeronautical research facilities. Ike chose to hand over the satellite business to this small, unheralded group of civilians. He submitted his proposal to Congress in April, the legislation was passed in June, and on October 1, 1958, a transmogrified N.A.C.A. became NASA, responsible for America’s space program.

NASA in the beginning consisted of four Centers—the semi-autonomous, competitive, insubordinate duchies that had formerly made up the N.A.C.A. The Lewis Research Center was in Cleveland, Ohio, a blue-collar center for a blue-collar town, a place where airplane propulsion systems were developed and tested. The Ames Research Center was just south of San Francisco, created during World War II to service the West Coast’s growing aircraft industry. It now boasted a huge wind tunnel capable of testing full-size models of new aircraft. Also on the West Coast, down south in the Mojave Desert, was Edwards High Speed Flight Station, famous for Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield, where the X-1 had broken the sound barrier and the X15 was about to fly.

Ames and Edwards would play little role in the manned space program. Lewis would contribute some critically important men to the program, but would do little of the actual work. It was left to the mother center, Langley, established in 1919, to serve as the birthplace of the manned space program. To understand how men came to walk on the moon, it is first of all necessary to understand something about the eccentric and beguiling and sometimes exasperating little world that was Langley.

In 1917, the United States government realized to its dismay that the United States, home of the Wright brothers, couldn’t build a plane to compete with the ones that England, France, and Germany were flying in the Great War. So the government created the N.A.C.A. and provided funds for a research center that, for reasons having to do with land prices and flying weather, was located near Hampton. The facility’s full name was the Samuel P. Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, but everyone called it “Langley.”

The people who decided to put it there failed to consider whether young engineers graduating from America’s best schools in places like New Haven and Princeton would want to live on the tip of a rural Virginia peninsula. As small and isolated as it may have seemed to the men arriving in 1959, it was infinitely more so in earlier years. In 1917, when Langley began, Hampton was a place where people still referred to the Civil War as “the late war.”

This isolation meant that a great many bright young aeronautical engineers did not come to Langley, instead choosing more cosmopolitan places. It also meant that the ones who did make the trek down the Peninsula tended to be highly motivated and a little odd. That was the first of the things that made Langley a world of its own.

The geographic isolation was reinforced by cultural antagonism. The citizens of Hampton, Virginians to the marrow, didn’t think much of the arriving Yankee engineers with their college educations. The Hamptonians called the newcomers “Nacka nuts,” or sometimes “brain busters,” and had as little to do with them as possible. For their part, the Nacka nuts didn’t think much of the locals. Soon after arriving in Hampton, the first engineerin-charge was invited to speak at the Rotary Club. He took as his theme the great benefits that Hampton was going to derive from having Langley nearby. Finally, he told the Rotarians, Hampton would get a little culture. One way or another, it is not surprising that the engineers fraternized almost solely with one another.

Another circumstance isolating Langley was the idiosyncrasy of a fellow named John Victory, the N.A.C.A.’s executive secretary in Washington from its founding in 1917 until its transformation in 1958. Under Victory, the ultimate fussy bureaucrat, Langley developed the wackiest administrative system in the history of the United States government. Because the executive secretary in Washington could make life unbearable for the engineerin-charge down at Langley who failed to meet his demands, the engineers-in-charge from the 1920s onward completely centralized Langley’s communications with the outside world. Every outgoing letter was reviewed by the individual branch chiefs and then sent out over the signature of the engineerin-charge himself. Incoming letters were treated in the same way, opened and read by the engineerin-charge’s office before being routed to the people to whom they were addressed. Telephone calls were subject to the same kind of regulation. And because Victory insisted on conformity to the most minutely prescribed conventions of writing style and usage, Langley soon developed a common and idiosyncratic language into which new employees were quickly indoctrinated (“We don’t say it that way here at Langley”).

The system was comically restrictive, but it created a peaceful cocoon within which the engineers of Langley lived and worked, buffered from the politics of Washington, buffered from the exigencies of a competitive aircraft industry. Buffered as well by geography, it is not surprising that the engineers out on the Peninsula soon developed their own comprehensive, seamless way of working—the Langley Way.

As the decades passed, the N.A.C.A. remained small. It wanted to remain small. “There was no one there with big ambitions of making a billion-dollar agency out of it,” one old Langley hand remembered. “The fact is, we avoided big projects.” And they went about their research at their own Langley pace. A Langley veteran recalled that one night he stayed late—not very late, perhaps six o’clock—and found himself locked in his building. He called Security, and someone came over and let him out. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he was told. “Don’t stay after working hours.” Another onetime Langley engineer remembered nostalgically that when you worked at Langley, “time was not really a factor. The question was the elegance of what you were going to create.” That, however, was a major proviso: If you were a Langley engineer, you didn’t have to work long hours, but you did have to be perfect—or, at least, never publish a mistake.

To that end, every research report that Langley published went through an agonizing review process, “almost like writing a Ph. D. thesis,” in the words of one who suffered through it many times. When an engineer had written his report, it would be reviewed by his branch chief, his division chief, specialists selected by the office of the engineerin-charge, and, finally, an editorial committee chosen specifically for each paper. At each level of review, the author would be told to make revisions. That was for the technical content. At the end, the Editorial Office would vet the paper for syntax and grammar (so the prose would conform to “the way we say things at Langley”). It could take months to get what Langley called a “Technical Note” through the process.

But if the pace was slow, the work was indeed elegant. Langley built superb facilities to do all its own development and testing. Langley never contracted any of its work to outsiders—a point of great pride. It had the best wind tunnels, the best model builders, the best technicians, and the most rigorous standards. An Air Force general, having listened to one of N.A.C.A.’s daylong technical briefings, once approached John Victory. The presentations had been superb, he said. Could Victory possibly send some people to the general’s command, to teach them N.A.C.A.’s methods? No point in it, Victory sniffed. The general’s people wouldn’t be able to use them. The Air Force didn’t have the necessary discipline.

Langley also sustained a uniquely collegial atmosphere. “What was so marvelous about that N.A.C.A. group,” said a senior NASA official who himself came out of industry, “was the opportunity to do real research and to really move things forward. I’ve heard those stories from the fellows—‘I went to work for such-and-such company and found myself on a drawing board, said, “Aw, to hell with it,” and then went down to Langley and a little later I’m working with Tommy Thompson…’” Engineers could do that at Langley—walk in as bright young kids fresh out of school and start working side by side with some of the best aeronautical minds in the country—men like Tommy Thompson, Hartley Soulé, Bob Jones, and Abe Silverstein.

In the Langley world there was a thin line between work and play. Some Langley engineers flew their own airplanes. Others designed their own houses, leading to some of the strangest-looking homes on the Eastern seaboard. But most commonly, the engineers of Langley would go home and build model airplanes—not from kits, but from their own designs, carved with their own tools, using their own hands. They had a club called the Brain Busters, after the Hampton label for Langley engineers. On Sunday afternoons they would go down to the open meadows adjoining the airfield, a senior branch chief like William Hewitt Phillips alongside a brash junior engineer like Max Faget or a local Hampton boy like Caldwell Johnson or a gangly shop technician like Jack Kinzler. Each would bring his latest creation, a marvelously crafted machine with design touches that might be years ahead of its time. They paid no attention to rank, only to how the airplane performed and how it could be improved.

From this strange mixture of ambling Southern pace and obsessive perfectionism, family-like closeness and devotion to vocation, Langley turned out gems of aeronautical research. “It wasn’t like NASA,” reminisced Caldwell Johnson, who would become one of the lead designers of the Apollo spacecraft. “The press didn’t care about it—to them, it was a dull bunch of gray buildings with gray people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards.” But to the engineers within, it was a unique and wonderful place. “Just a splendid organization,” Johnson remembered fondly, and that’s the way all the old Langley hands talked. Langley in those years became a kind of Elysium for young engineers in love with aeronautical research.

On the same day that NASA officially replaced the N.A.C.A., Keith Glennan, NASA’s first administrator, announced that the United States would put a man into space. The Russians were openly working toward this end; the United States didn’t want to be humiliated again; and Eisenhower (once again, reluctantly) went along with a small program to try to beat them. Looking for people to do it, Glennan turned to Langley and, more specifically, to an engineer named Robert R. Gilruth.