Apollo: The Race to the Moon (37 page)

On August 26, the crawler carried the 501 stack to Pad 39A. Petrone announced that the Countdown Demonstration Test (C.D.D.T.) for flight 501 would begin on September 20. A week later, he rescheduled it to begin on the 25th. It actually began on the 27th.

For later flights, a C.D.D.T. for a Saturn V lasted four days—sixty hours of actual tests and thirty-six hours of planned holds. Expecting some first-time delays, Petrone planned for this first C.D.D.T. to take six days. It took seventeen.

As in the old days with the early Atlases and Redstones, nothing worked quite the way it was supposed to. The devices for regulating the flow of propellants and gases into the Saturn’s tanks kept giving them problems because the regulators were designed for such heavy flows that they didn’t know how to handle small ones. The piping had to be modified to trick the regulators into behaving properly. Computers were now in charge of monitoring the propellant loadings, and the software was full of bugs. The Instrument Unit, the brains of the Saturn V, wasn’t keeping the black boxes of electronics as cool as planned. Cable connections on the S-II stage shorted out because of humidity and moisture around the pad. It wasn’t any one thing, but an unending series of delays in almost everything they tried to do. “If I asked a guy how long something would take, he’d tell me ten minutes and it would come up maybe an hour,” recalled Rocco Petrone, who was directing it all. “Everything about the Saturn V was bigger. Getting anywhere was bigger. If you had to pick up a valve, you couldn’t pick it up by hand, you had to get a forklift truck! Everything was one or two dimensions bigger.” Petrone began planning his schedules in terms of what he called the “Saturn V minute,” which he calculated was about five times a normal minute.

For Ed Fannin, who was by then chief of Mechanical and Propulsion Systems for Launch Vehicle Operations, it began to seem as if the C.D.D.T. had been going on all year. The delays were especially tough on the propellants team. Loading propellants was an intricate operation, with dozens of procedures required to prepare the cryogen lines for LOX and liquid hydrogen, pumps, regulators, and the tankage. All of the valves and settings at the pad had to be set so that the actual loading, the most dangerous part of prelaunch operations, could be conducted by remote control from the Firing Room. Once loading began, there were dozens more procedures, and the process took hours—after all, they were pumping the equivalent of 144 trailer-truck loads of kerosene, liquid oxygen, and liquid hydrogen into the equivalent of a thirty-six-story building. Then, every time the C.D.D.T. hit a snag and had to be stopped, and most of the others on the launch team went off to get some rest, the propellants people had to stay in the Firing Room and offload, which was even more tedious than loading. For them, the low point of the C.D.D.T. came on October 4, the eighth day, when they got to T–45 minutes, tantalizingly close to the end. Then a computer failed, and they had to offload 502,000 gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen from the first stage.

Exasperated, Grady Corn, chief of Fannin’s Propellants Branch, wasn’t even sure that the effort was going to accomplish anything. By his own admission, he was one of the Cape’s “great disbelievers.” Standing at the top of the tower, he would look right straight down along the great length of the rocket to the launcher 363 feet below and know there would be no way in the world for that thing to lift off. He was not joking, and he was not the only person who worked on the Saturn V who felt that way. It just didn’t seem possible that something that big, that complicated, with so many things that could go wrong, would really work when the time came to light it.

Day after day, the C.D.D.T. crept on. The launch team would gain a few hours, encounter a new problem, gather in the woodshed (a little conference room off the Firing Room, so called because of the nature of the encounters people tended to have with Petrone when they were called there), devise a fix, set the clock back, and return to the count.

On October 9, thirteen days after the C.D.D.T. had begun, the count was again getting close, to within T–5 hours, but the launch team was nearing exhaustion. Petrone himself began to lose track of time. He looked down at the consoles in the Firing Room and saw Ernie Reyes, one of the senior engineers for Spacecraft Operations. The spacecraft people were having a comparatively easy time of it—they had already struggled up their own learning curve on the three unmanned Apollo flights launched on Saturn IBs. Petrone marveled at Reyes—he looked so clean! Reyes told Petrone that he’d gone home, slept all night, shaved, and come back to work. Petrone hadn’t noticed that by now he and many of the launch vehicle people were in the twentieth hour of one long shift.

“We just can’t go any further,” Petrone told them, and sent the launch team home for a two-day recess. They came back to work on October 11, whereupon a battery heater in the S-II stage failed. It was about then, Rigell recalled, that the question had to run through your mind: Can we ever get that baby off? Can we ever get all the green lights at one time?

On the afternoon of October 13, the count kept getting closer to T–0. It passed the T–45 mark, their previous best. Then it passed the completion of the power transfer test at T–26. Then it began the chill down process for the thrust chambers in the S-II and S-IVB engines. Then, miraculously, they were at the beginning of the automatic sequence at T–3 minutes 7 seconds. Petrone sat back in Management Row, the raised row of consoles at the back of the Firing Room, and watched the clock get closer to T–0. At this moment, the Saturn V on the pad was a fueled, checked-out, fully operational vehicle, doing everything it would do on launch day except light the igniters. As the clock counted down toward T–14 seconds, the point at which the countdown was to be halted, Petrone turned to Ike Rigell. It was an informal tradition between them at this moment in countdown demonstration tests. “Ike,” Petrone said, “are you sure we got all the igniters out of there?” And Rigell assured Petrone, as he always did, that the igniters were out and this bird wasn’t going to fly away just yet.

The long ordeal had finally come to a close. The men in the Firing Room, too weary to celebrate, drifted out to go home—except for the propellants team, who still had to unload all the propellants. Finally, twenty-eight hours after he had come on shift, Grady Corn announced to Ed Fannin that the propellants were offloaded. “I think I’ve suffered permanent brain damage,” he added.

“We got through it,” Petrone said, describing the C.D.D.T. as one might recall a battle which one had unexpectedly survived, “and we learned a lot. I mean, we learned.” For Petrone, it was a historic event, whether or not the rest of the world knew about it. At the Cape, those seventeen days were when “the program came to fruition.” They were the days when Launch Operations came to terms with the Saturn V.

At 10:45 on the night of November 8, 1967, not yet ten months after the 204 fire, the first Saturn V stood on Pad 39A awaiting a launch time of 7:00 the next morning. As every night, the tower and the vehicle were bathed in lights, set off by searchlights that intersected at the apex of the stack. To a New York Times reporter, the Saturn looked like a crystalline obelisk. To visiting Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Saturn and the red umbilical tower with its swing arms were a white maiden clasped by a monstrous lobster. Rocco Petrone was reminded of a cathedral.

Petrone watched through binoculars from across the marshy lake that separated the Launch Control Center from Pad 39A. The wind was blowing hard out of the north. Even from where Petrone was standing, he could see the wind meter spinning at the top of the tower and bits of debris swirling around. The winds were exceeding thirty-two knots, too high to launch, but Petrone’s weather chief assured him that they would be within limits by launch time. Petrone ordered the propellants team to begin loading. He remained at the Launch Control Center throughout the night, watching the tower. An hour before dawn, the wind began to fade.

When they had launched the first Redstones in the early 1950s, Albert Zeiler had crouched beside the slit window in the little blockhouse by the pad and watched as the engine fired up in pre-stage (with too little thrust to move the vehicle). He was deciding from the color of the flame whether the mix of fuel and oxidizer looked right. If the color was wrong, Zeiler told Debus (who stood beside him—the whole blockhouse was only a dozen feet square), and they shut down the engine and tried to figure out what the problem was. For the first launch of a Saturn V, 450 engineers and controllers were assembled in the Firing Room at the K.S.C. Launch Control Center, working at eight rows of consoles in a room 150 feet long and 90 feet wide. There was no human within three and a half miles of the vehicle itself, nor had there been since Corn’s team had begun to load the propellants eight hours earlier.

George Mueller waited in the large glassed-in viewing area set off at an angle toward the back of the Firing Room. Four years and one week had passed since he had sent his teletype to Marshall instructing them to fly the first Saturn V all-up. With Mueller sat others from headquarters, Seamans and Phillips among them. Not Webb, however, who always considered it his job to remain in Washington to cope with the political heat if something went wrong.

In the large Marshall contingent, sitting near Wernher von Braun, was Arthur Rudolph. Rudolph had been with von Braun for almost thirty-five years. The two of them had shared bachelors’ quarters in the early 1930s, and talked about going to Mars before they could even get their first liquid-fueled rocket, four and a half feet long, off the test stand. Today was Rudolph’s sixtieth birthday.

Like everyone else at Marshall, Rudolph had thought that the all-up decision was madness—it was Rudolph to whom Mueller had said, “So what?” But whether all-up was madness or not, Rudolph was the man who had to implement it, for he was the program manager for the Saturn, and therefore he was to Marshall and the Saturn what Shea and now Low were to Houston and the spacecraft. To get to this moment, Rudolph had surmounted years of engineering crises—the combustion instability on the F-l, the immature technology of the hydrogen-fueled J-l engines in the upper two stages, endless difficulties in the construction of the S-II stage. Ever since Mueller’s decision, Rudolph’s worries had been augmented by the knowledge that, when this day came, he would be flying two stages that had never flown even once and a third stage that had never flown in this configuration. He hoped that he had been wrong and Mueller right.

Petrone was watching the countdown from his command post on Management Row. After the trials of the C.D.D.T., this countdown was proving to be startlingly smooth. In fact, as they approached T–3 minutes 7 seconds, they were right on schedule.

Some of the press buses didn’t leave the motels in Cocoa Beach until 6:00 that morning, but no one on board seemed worried about being late. Even if they got held up in traffic—not unlikely, considering the number of people trying to get onto Merritt Island to see the launch—it was inconceivable that A.S.-501 would launch on time, if it launched at all that day. During the last few months, everything involving the Saturn V had been late. As 7:00 approached, the buses were still inching their way up Route 3.

At T–3 minutes 7 seconds, control of the launch process was turned over to the computers. For almost three more minutes, Petrone would be able to stop the launch manually if he had to, but now the Saturn V was busy preparing itself to fly, receiving through the umbilical hoses still connecting it with the ground the helium that created the pressures within the propellant tanks necessary to feed the propellants into the pumps. At T–30 seconds, the 55,000-horsepower turbine that drove the S-IC’s five engines powered up. At T–8.9 seconds, an electrical signal was sent to the igniters, and four small, silent flames lit within the combustion chamber of each of the F-ls.

From that moment through liftoff, there was nothing Petrone or anyone else in the Firing Room could do. If something went wrong, the sensors would know it before the news could reach the Firing Room, and the Saturn V would shut down its engines without waiting for sluggish human beings to instruct them. So now the men in Management Row simultaneously swiveled around in their chairs—they got stuck if they didn’t do it at the same time—and put binoculars to their eyes. Through the bank of windows at the back of the Launch Control Center, they watched Pad 39A. Petrone kept his hand near the button that would close protective louvers over the windows if the Saturn V blew up, though he always suspected that, if it happened, he would just keep watching instead.

As soon as the sensors within the combustion chambers of the F-1s determined that the igniters were lit, the main LOX valves opened, releasing liquid oxygen into each combustion chamber where it combined with a fuel-rich combustion gas, an exhaust product from the turbine. The gas was comparatively cool—only 800 degrees Fahrenheit—and would help cool the nozzle during flight; now, it prepared the interior of the chamber for the thermal shock to come. This process took three seconds. The combustion of the exhaust gas produced a thick orange smoke.

At T–5.3 seconds, as sensors within each combustion chamber determined that the pressure at the face of the injector had reached 20 pounds per square inch, the main fuel valves opened and a torrent of kerosene burst through the painstakingly sized and angled orifices of the injection plate, past and through the copper baffles that had been redesigned so often. The streams of kerosene (a ton per second per engine) and liquid oxygen (two tons per second per engine) then impinged, formed their fans, and, mingling, ignited.

The viewing area for the press and V.I.P.s was across the road from the Launch Control Center. Bleachers were set up, with a corrugated iron roof to ward off sun and rain. At the top of a slight rise beside the bleachers, looking like so many unpretentious beach cottages built for a view of the sea, stood the little wooden studios with picture windows in front that the television networks had built for their launch coverage.