Apollo: The Race to the Moon (36 page)

“A bellerin’ type,” said one of the spacecraft inspectors, who were perpetually at war with him. “He was a driver, a real driver,” said Buzz Hello. “There are very few people down here that work as hard as Tom O’Malley, and woe be unto the man who tries to pass some short story off on him, because he has probably been there himself a little earlier in the morning and stayed a little later at night. Feeding him a short story is …” “Death?” asked Hello’s interviewer. “It’s worse than that,” said Hello. “It’s torture and death.”

There was not a whole lot of this “tough but fair” business about Tom O’Malley, either. On the contrary, “he tended to form opinions [about people] on limited data points sometimes, which bothered me,” said a Cape engineer who worked closely with him. “He got on fine with me because we’d been together a lot in the past, so he had me calibrated and I had him calibrated. But sometimes if a guy didn’t say the right thing the first time he met him, that guy was doomed.” What O’Malley had going for him was a ruthless integrity about getting the job done, as well as an absolute indifference about whom he offended in the course of doing it. And that’s why Hello hired him.

O’Malley soon decided that North American had been running what he called a “country club” down at the Cape. One of the first days after he took the job, an engineer came to him to get a routine signature on a travel order—he was going out to a convention of retired Air Force officers in San Francisco. O’Malley told him that they weren’t doing business that way any more. The engineer was outraged—those conventions were an important way for a company like North American to tie into the old-boy network, and such trips had always been one of the perks. He got hold of an ex-general who was a senior executive at Downey. The ex-general complained to Bill Bergen. Bill Bergen chewed out the ex-general for interfering with O’Malley, and said that anyway O’Malley was right. The word quickly spread that the old days were over.

O’Malley was out at the pad one day, watching liquid oxygen being pumped from a tank up onto the umbilical tower. He asked the engineer where the LOX was being pumped to. “It beats the hell out of me,” the engineer replied. “Once it gets up there, I don’t know what happens to it.” Shortly after that, O’Malley called a meeting. Thenceforth, every engineer was expected to learn everything about the system he was running—where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. And they did. “You understood it from the very beginning of the tank farm to the last nut and connector in that system,” said one engineer, “and you could just about close your eyes and draw a schematic of the electrical and mechanical systems by heart. Everybody had a thing called a ‘Smarts Book,’ and in that Smarts Book each system engineer had every fact that you could possibly collect about that system that you worked on… . You understood that system from womb to tomb and there was nothing in that system you couldn’t recite by heart, including torque values, safety wire specs—you name it and a system engineer down there could tell you what it was. Those guys were terribly intense.”

If O’Malley was not always the most judicious and fairest of men, he was nonetheless the most loyal when he respected someone. “If I’d asked my guys to push that V.A.B. building over, they’d be out there trying to do it,” O’Malley said. “You couldn’t get a bunch like I had.” And those who worked for O’Malley assumed that, if he had asked them to push over the V.A.B., somehow that’s what they would do. “O’Malley is unique in this program,” said John Tribe, who worked for him from Mercury days through Apollo. “He’s rough, bluff, crude, calls a spade a spade, language is pretty bad at times, but by golly, he knew what had to be done in 1967.”

Out at Downey, Bill Bergen went looking for John Healey, another of his old colleagues from Martin. Bergen had decided to put a senior manager in charge of each vehicle, “one guy who was Mr. Spacecraft 101, one who was Mr. 102, and so forth.” For the first manned vehicle, spacecraft 101—upon which not only North American’s future but the future of the Apollo Program depended—Bergen chose Healey, a 45-year-old engineer. As Bergen reminisced, “John became really quite a controversial person for a while …”

There was, for example, Healey’s first briefing of North American’s Apollo management team in Downey on September 29, 1967, when “to get their attention for the century,” as Healey put it, “I said, ‘Hey, I think you guys are full of shit. You’re in trouble, and you ought to stop acting like it’s going to go away.’” There was, for example, Healey’s first meeting with NASA four days later, when he announced to Phillips, Mueller, Low, Rees, and Gilruth—most of Apollo’s senior management—that NASA had an unworkably unwieldy system, with multiple directions and parallel activities. Effective that day, Healey said, NASA had a choice. Either they could let the subsystems people call him direct or they could assign one guy to work with him. But nobody who had anything they wanted done with spacecraft 101 could go through anyone but Healey. And by the way, Healey added, he was tired of all these modifications that NASA kept asking for. From now on, no more “If you’re willing to pay for it, okay, Mr. Customer.” If NASA wanted the spacecraft built, Healey told them, they had to stop asking for so many changes.

“And then,” Healey recounted, “I turned around and looked at all the North American guys smiling, and said, ‘Now let me clear some things up for you guys. You can’t keep on freely reacting to the customer’s directions just because they seem to agree with your own idea of what you want to do. You think they’re a problem? Well, you’re an equal problem.’” And so on. Healey had a wonderful time that day—“rammed all kinds of new assholes,” he said.

Out on the assembly facility, Healey came to grips with a peculiar reality of assembling a spacecraft: “The thousands of people involved in the program were jammed right up into a small opening in a funnel of five people in the command module”—for that was the most that could fit into the spacecraft. Healey figured that at any given moment, the time of those five was more precious than anyone else’s, and he went down onto the shop floor and told that to the technicians. No longer would they have to get out of the command module to find a new drawing or tool or part. He, John Healey, would make sure that they got the support they needed so they wouldn’t have to waste that kind of time. “I told the working people that, and they kind of smiled. I said, ‘No, I mean it. I’ll do it.’” And he did. If a welder working in the spacecraft had a question that needed to be answered by the chief engineer, then the chief engineer would break off whatever he was doing, get himself down to the assembly room, climb the steps up to the door of the command module, and deal with it. “I had vice presidents chasing plans so the workers could stay in the command module,” Healey recalled.

The momentum picked up almost instantaneously. Just a week after Healey came on board, Low was writing to Gilruth regarding some of the problems that Grumman was having with the lunar module and saying that Grumman “needs a Healey” to get things back on track. On May 29, 1968, eight months after Healey took over spacecraft 101, it left Downey on a transport plane and arrived the next day at the Cape. A few days later, the receiving inspectors reported to Houston that they had found “fewer discrepancies than any on any spacecraft previously delivered to Kennedy.”

Telling the story of North American’s recovery from the fire from the vantage point of Bergen, Hello, O’Malley, and Healey captures only one small fragment. There is Kenny Kleinknecht’s story, as he became ASPO’s point man for the C.S.M. Or the story of Max Faget’s engineers, who worked through the redesign issues after the fire; or of Frank Borman’s tiger team; or of Eberhard Rees’s team from Marshall. The measure of all their successes is this:

Spacecraft 101 was the first of fifteen manned Apollo spacecraft launched from the Kennedy Space Center. Those fifteen spacecraft functioned in space for a total of 280 days—in earth orbit, lunar transit, lunar orbit, docked with Skylab, and in rendezvous with a Soviet spacecraft on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. One was hit by lightning during the launch phase, another (through no fault of North American) lost most of its electrical power halfway to the moon, had to be shut down for more than three days in the cold of space, and was powered up again just before entry. All the astronauts returned safely, riding a spacecraft they had come to love.

Chapter 17. “And then on launch day it worked”

The stages for the first flight of the Saturn V began arriving at the Cape in August of 1966, even before the fire. The third stage, the S-IVB, arrived by air in a special bulbous plane called the Super Guppy. The S-IVB was the only stage that would arrive by air; indeed, the other two stages couldn’t arrive even by ground. They were too big to be transported by either truck or train, so they were barged in—the S-IC from the big plant built especially for Apollo at Michoud, Louisiana, and the S-II from North American’s facility at Seal Beach, California.

On September 12, 1966, Ike Rigell, Petrone’s right-hand man for launch vehicle operations, watched as the S-IC stage of the Saturn V arrived on the barge Poseidon at the Saturn Unloading Facilities on the Banana River. Teams of technicians swarmed over the S-IC, checking to make sure that none of its elaborate wrappings and protections had been damaged during transit. The sole, specialized task of the men Rigell watched was to meet Saturn and Apollo hardware when it arrived at the Cape and see that it was safely transported to the O&C Building (for the spacecraft) or the V.A.B. (for the Saturn).

Only about ten years earlier, Rigell reflected, he and a dozen or so others in Kurt Debus’s launch team had done the whole thing themselves, from loading the rocket up in Huntsville to the launch itself. A couple of them would stay with the Redstone as it snaked its way down through the little country towns of Alabama and Georgia on a long Army flatbed truck. The rest of the group would stow the launch consoles in the trunks of their cars and drive down to the Cape, where they would meet the Redstone, check it out, launch it, and go home. But it had been a different kind of bird in those days. Four men could stand at the base of a Redstone and join hands around it. Now, Rigell stood beside the S-IC lying on its side, his eyes at the level of the exhaust nozzles of engines 1 and 2 Engines 3 and 4 were two stories above his head.

NASA’s official designation for George Mueller’s audacious first-time all-up test was A.S.-501: “5” for the launch vehicle, “01” denoting the number of the flight. Within NASA, the flight was being called simply “five-oh-one.” To the public, the forthcoming flight was known as Apollo 4.*

[* Apollo people refer to the manned flights simply by the sequence number known to the public. For the rest of the book, a capitalized, spelled-out number will be our way of mimicking that custom. Thus “Eight” will mean Apollo 8, for example. As for why the first flight in the Apollo series was Apollo 4: The Grissom crew’s flight was A.S.-204 (fourth Apollo flight on a Saturn II). After the fire, at the widows’ request, “Apollo 1” was reserved for the flight that never took place. Then Low suggested retroactively naming the three unmanned Apollo/Saturn II flights Apollo 1A, Apollo 2, and Apollo 3, respectively. While that was being considered, A.S.-501 was named Apollo 4; subsequently, NASA headquarters decided not to rename the earlier flights after all.]

The S-IC was taken first to the Low Bay of the V.A.B., where the components that would become inaccessible when the Saturn was stacked were examined and tested. After the test conductors from Launch Vehicle Operations were satisfied that the first stage was ready, it was moved into the High Bay, where lines were attached from the crane far overhead and the S-IC was slowly lifted into place aboard the mobile launcher. Later the second stage, the S-II, went through the same preliminary checkout in the Low Bay.

On February 23, 1967, they stacked the two stages, an operation that epitomized the extremes of large and small in the Cape’s work. First the S-II, 90 feet long, was lifted by crane 280 feet into the air. Then it was settled down onto the top of the S-IC with a precision measured in millimeters and ounces—the crane operators were trained to lower the hook with such delicacy that the hook could be stopped after it was touching the object below, but before it exerted even the pressure that would crack a raw egg. (Or at least that’s the story that the people at the Cape love to tell. They never tried it with real eggs.) Once the two stages were aligned, it took a team of engineers and technicians eight hours to join the S-IC and the S-II. The two stages were joined not with welds, but with pins: three 12-inch pins at 120-degree intervals around the periphery of the stage and 216 1.5-inch high-strength fasteners at 6-inch intervals.

This process was repeated for the third stage, the S-IVB. Then came the tests of the assembled launch vehicle’s electrical networks, fire detection, telemetry, tracking, gyroscopes, onboard computers, pumps, engines, transducers, valves, cables, plugs, and hydraulic lines. There were 456 such tests altogether, and they took weeks—just how many weeks depended on how things went. In the case of 501, a new vehicle with birthing pains, the tests took almost four months.

In the O&C Building, the command and service module for the first Saturn V flight, the same spacecraft 017 that Joe Bobik had examined with such indignation after the fire, was undergoing its own exhaustive tests. On June 20, 1967, five months after the fire, spacecraft 017 was gingerly loaded into its specially designed cradle—no more plywood and mattresses—and transported from the O&C Building to the V.A.B., where it was mated to the top of the stack. For the first time, there was now a complete Apollo/Saturn flight article.

The tests and the inspections in the V.A.B. went on for another two months. By now the test conductors were checking to see how the components and subsystems of the launch vehicle, spacecraft, and ground support equipment worked together. Suppose that at the moment of launch one of the umbilical tower’s nine swing arms failed to disconnect. Could the vehicle shut down safely? Answering that question required ten separate tests. Suppose that the hold-down arms failed to release. Another set of tests. Were the hundreds of wires connecting the three stages correctly joined? Weeks of tests. Was each pin among the hundreds in the umbilicals’ electrical interfaces connected to the correct socket within the vehicle? More tests. Slowly, laboriously, the verification seals and the sign-offs accumulated as each of the thousands of items was checked off the list.