Apollo: The Race to the Moon (4 page)

Gilruth, forty-five, avuncular and balding, was the prototypical Langley engineer. As a boy in Duluth, Minnesota, Gilruth had made model airplanes out of balsa with rubber-band engines. By the time he was in his teens, he was writing to the N.A.C.A. for technical papers on wing sections. At the University of Minnesota he helped design and build the Laird Watt, the fastest airplane in the world. He went to work at Langley in 1937 and was assigned to Flight Test Engineering. By the time World War II began, he ran the division.

Unlike Wernher von Braun, who had been fascinated by space flight from the time he was a teenager, Gilruth got into the space business by accident. It was the middle of World War II, and Gilruth was receiving urgent requests for data on drag at transonic speeds. The Langley wind tunnels couldn’t provide it, because wind tunnels in those days were all closed-throat, and closed-throat tunnels choked at about Mach .85. Since Gilruth couldn’t get data on transonic speeds in the wind tunnel, he had to create something that actually went faster than the speed of sound.

Gilruth calculated that a properly streamlined shape dropped from a sufficient height would break the sound barrier. He and his engineers created such a shape, added some instrumentation, and dropped it from a B-29 at 30,000 feet. The bomb-like shape achieved a velocity of Mach 1.2 and Robert Gilruth provided the American aviation industry with its first good look at the transonic flight environment. Then it occurred to Gilruth and his engineers that they could drive the Mach numbers much higher if they mounted their supersonic shape on a rocket. That was an attractive prospect to the N.A.C.A. and the Air Force, because the X-1, the first plane intended to fly faster than the speed of sound, was already on the drawing boards. In early 1945 Gilruth was given a small supplementary appropriation to open a testing facility. He chose a site at Wallops Island, Virginia, a deserted stretch of Atlantic coast across the Chesapeake Bay seventy miles northeast of Langley. Space flight still had nothing to do with it. Gilruth, now running a unit called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (P.A.R.D.), was just trying to get data about heat transfer at high Mach numbers.

But there wasn’t much to do at Wallops in the off-hours, and Max Faget had a collection of Astounding Science Fiction that everybody kept swapping around, Gilruth as enthusiastically as anyone. Besides, it was impossible to fire rockets into the sky for long without beginning to think about space flight. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, as P.A.R.D. began working with multi-stage rockets, Gilruth and his engineers became the American civilians who knew more than anybody else about how to build a craft that could be put on top of a rocket and survive the dynamic stresses of launch and then the heat and deceleration of entry.

When Eisenhower decreed that military experts on these topics were out of bounds, Gilruth became the natural choice for the person to lead an effort to send a man into space. He was appointed director of a small new entity created on November 5, 1958, called the Space Task Group.

“That famous Space Task Group is akin to the Mayflower,” one man who wasn’t a member pointed out, “considering how many people tell you they were in it.” As a matter of historical record, there were just forty-five in the first boat. From Langley, there were twenty-seven men (all engineers) and eight women (all secretaries and “computers,” as the women who worked the calculating machines were called). Another ten engineers were assigned to the Space Task Group from Lewis Lab in Cleveland.

From the beginning, the Space Task Group had a catch-as-catch-can quality. Half of the men assigned to the Space Task Group from Langley were handpicked by Gilruth. But Tommy Thompson, the director at Langley, didn’t want his laboratories stripped of their best men. Gilruth recalled later that Thompson “was all for me, because he knew that if we didn’t succeed, NASA wouldn’t succeed. But when I gave him my memo of all the people I wanted he said, ‘Okay, Bob, but for every one that you want to take from Langley, I want to add one that I want you to take from Langley.’” And so that’s how it worked out. “All of them to this day wonder which half they were in,” Caldwell Johnson wryly observed.

Practically everyone was young. At forty-five, Gilruth was the old man. His deputy, Charles Donlan, was forty-two. The head of engineering, Max Faget, was thirty-seven, as was Chuck Mathews, head of flight operations. The rest were mostly in their early thirties or twenties, all the way down to the baby of the original forty-five, Glynn Lunney at twenty-one.

They were uniformly young partly because so few of the senior staff from the old N.A.C.A. wanted to be part of the Space Task Group. In 1958 and 1959, manned space flight did not look like the kind of venture on which to bet one’s career. So far, Congress and the President had authorized only Project Mercury, in which a man riding in one of the Space Task Group’s capsules atop one of von Braun’s Redstones would be lobbed into the upper reaches of the atmosphere; on subsequent Mercury missions, he would be launched into earth orbit on the Air Force’s Atlas. No one knew what was supposed to happen after this initial series of launches. No one even knew whether men could function in space. No one knew whether there was anything useful for them to do even if they could function. And the whole thing was going to be unspeakably expensive, with no obvious return on the investment. To most of the senior engineers at Langley, manned space flight had the earmarks of a fad.

Nor was it just that manned space flight was a risky career path. To many of the Langley engineers, it was an unattractive way to spend one’s time. “You must remember,” said Chris Kraft, the man who would later become famous as the manned space program’s director of Flight Operations, “that ‘space’ was a word that wasn’t even allowed in the N.A.C.A. library. If it was anything that had to do with space, that didn’t have anything to do with airplanes, so why were we working on it?” To one young engineer in P.A.R.D., it seemed as if the people who went to the Space Task Group were outcasts. A senior Langley engineer came to him and told him not to go with the Space Task Group. “I have a job for you in my division,” he said to the young man. “You don’t want to ruin your career. There’s nothing going to come of this, and you’re going to be hurt by it.”

It just wasn’t the Langley Way, this business of “implementing a manned satellite project,” as the order creating the Space Task Group charter had phrased their mission. Langley didn’t “implement” things; Langley did research, and it did everything itself. This manned space project was going to contract work to the outside. It would turn its engineers into bureaucrats. Gilruth remembered colleagues coming up to him during the first years and asking him, “Well, have you let any good contracts today?” Far from envying him his new position, most of his peers thought that he had chosen “a horrible fate,” and none of them took the same road. Not one of the other engineers of Gilruth’s age or older transferred into the program. “They wanted to support us,” said one engineer who went to the Space Task Group, “but through the traditional research avenues.” Thus, in the years that followed, old-line Langley personnel would affect the decision on how to get to the moon and would help to develop the lunar-landing trainer at Langley. But they did not join up.

The Langley engineers were right to be suspicious. The Space Task Group was going to cut corners and ignore protocol in ways that pained those trained in the Langley Way. It was going to contract out much of its work. And it was going to abandon airplanes, the only proper flying machine for a Langley engineer to work on. The Space Task Group was going to do something that had never been done before.

Glynn Lunney later realized that the ignorance of these early days was bliss. “A lot of the senior engineers thought the project was crazy, and they were knowledgeable enough in the ways of the world to ask whether they wanted to risk their reputations,” Lunney recalled. “I fortunately was unknowledgeable in the ways of the world and said, ‘Gee, that looks like it would be a hell of a lot of fun to me—let’s go do that!’”

Jack Kinzler reacted the same way. In the year before the Space Task Group was formed, Kinzler, one of the master craftsmen in whom Langley took so much pride, had begun to get excited about space. Wernher von Braun had come up from Huntsville to Langley and given a talk about space flight. P.A.R.D. had given some in-house seminars. “I got so consumed with space I was just waiting for somebody to initiate an actual program,” Kinzler said later. “So when I was asked to join the Task Group with Bob, I said I would drop anything to do that.” As the word spread, Kinzler was overrun with applicants. “I’d have fellows come up to me and say, ‘I want to go with you, Jack, I’ve been reading about it, I’ve been hearing about it.’ So I got the dedicated guys who read all the space magazines and cared about the program.”

Sometimes, it wasn’t such a calculated decision. The workload facing the Space Task Group was so overwhelming that it exerted a kind of gravitational pull. John Mayer, one of the original forty-five, had formerly been part of the Aircraft Loads Branch, along with Carl Huss and Ted Scopinski, who weren’t. But no more than a week after the Space Task Group had been formed, Mayer was back visiting the Aircraft Loads Lab in the West Area, asking his friends to do some computer runs for him. The branch chief of Aircraft Loads said okay, Carl and Ted could bootleg a little work to help out Johnny. And within another two weeks, Huss and Scopinski were doing more work for Mayer than they were for Aircraft Loads. “Ted and I sat across from each other at the same desk,” Huss recalled. “One day we looked at each other and asked why we didn’t transfer over to the Space Task Group. So we did.”

The first group was young and enthusiastic, but it was also tiny for such an ambitious project. By February 1959, the original forty-five had grown to just over a hundred people, and yet they were supposed to put a man into space. Moreover, “there was this gap,” as Lunney put it. “We had these super generals and these super privates who were learning how to be corporals. But we didn’t have a hell of a lot of guys in between.”

And that’s where Owen Maynard came in. In the spring of 1959, as the Space Task Group’s burden was threatening to overwhelm it, the Canadian government unintentionally gave the American space program its luckiest break since Wernher von Braun had surrendered to the Americans.

For several years, the Canadian aircraft corporation A.V. Roe, known as AVRO, had been designing and building what was expected to be the most advanced interceptor in the NATO inventory: a long-range, all-weather, fly-by-wire aircraft with an initial combat speed of Mach 1.5, to be increased eventually to Mach 3.0. The plane was called the Arrow, known to the engineers as the C.F.-105. A prototype had flown its first test flights in October 1958. By February 1959, the Arrow had reached a speed of nearly Mach 2.1 and was within a few more test flights of setting several world’s records. But then the Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker won a parliamentary majority and replaced the Liberal government. The new government decided to cancel the Arrow. The decision was announced in Parliament on February 20, 1959, at eleven in the morning. Four hours later, AVRO, in a move that was intended to embarrass the government and force the issue to a head, announced over its P.A. system that 14,000 employees—virtually everyone associated with the Arrow—were being laid off. The government responded by forbidding AVRO to spend another cent on the project. Within a few days, crews with cutting torches were in the Malton hangars, slicing up the Arrows for scrap.

The cancellation turned into a political scandal of huge proportions and brought anguish and economic hardship to many of the 14,000 employees at AVRO. But there was a bright side, if you happened to be Bob Gilruth and desperately short of talent. Four thousand engineers who had designed the most advanced supersonic airplane of its day were suddenly looking for jobs.

Jim Chamberlin, head of design for the Arrow, had visited Langley a few years earlier. It had been during the flying saucer craze, and Chamberlin, who had designed a real flying saucer, a pancake-shaped thing with jets, went down to Langley to talk about it. When the Arrow was canceled, Chamberlin thought of the Space Task Group and talked to his chief engineer, who got in touch with the Canadian government. The Canadian government got in touch with NASA, and within a few weeks it had been concluded that some of the AVRO engineers would spend two years working for the American manned space program before returning to AVRO (when, presumably, AVRO would have new work for them). This would be good for the United States, which needed the talent, and good for Canada, whose engineers would return with experience in a new technology.

AVRO let Chamberlin put together a book with background information on approximately 150 of the best people in his design team to take down to Langley. Gilruth, Donlan, and two other Space Task Group managers flew up to Ontario and interviewed seventy-five of the candidates. They offered jobs to thirty-five of them.

One of the thirty-five was Owen Maynard. Maynard was interviewed on a Saturday morning. On Sunday morning, he got a call from Gilruth offering him a job and asking if he could please let them know whether he would be accepting the job by, say, 1:00 that afternoon? It didn’t take Maynard that long—not only did he want to help build the Mercury capsule, he wanted to fly it, and he enthusiastically touted his experience with the Mosquito. No, Gilruth said hastily, they weren’t recruiting flight crews on this trip. But they were glad to sign him on as an engineer.

Others hesitated. “You have to understand,” Rod Rose, one of several Englishmen in the group, pointed out, “there’s considerable prejudice north of the border about coming south of the border. South of the border is a big ogre.” So at first Rose refused the offer, but Jim Chamberlin gave him a two-hour pep talk and persuaded him that his future lay at Langley.

Twenty-five of the thirty-five accepted jobs right away and another five came along later—in all, thirty men were added to the Space Task Group, which at that time still numbered not many more than a hundred people. Gilruth and his interviewers returned from Canada elated. However improbably, Project Mercury had skimmed off the top layer of talent at AVRO. Tecwyn Roberts, a Welshman, remembered Gilruth laughing about it later. “We thought of taking more of your crowd from AVRO,” Gilruth said to Roberts, “but we figured twenty-five percent aliens in the American space program was sufficient.”