Apollo: The Race to the Moon (55 page)

“Rog,” Kranz replied to Bales. “Did you get the throttle down, CapCom?” Kranz had already put the alarm aside and was now checking to make sure that, in the midst of the excitement, the 6-plus-25 time had been passed up to the crew.

A different computer alarm came back again later, just after Kranz announced—he couldn’t keep a note of triumph out of his voice—that they were go for landing at 3,000 feet.

“Understand, go for landing 3,000 feet,” said Aldrin. “1201 alarm.”

“Roger, 1201 alarm,” said CapCom.

“1201 alarm,” said Kranz, an implied question in his voice.

Bales had already been talking to his back room: “What alarm, Jack?”

“Same type, we’re go.”

Bales began to speak even before Kranz finished. “Same type,” he said, confidently now, no stammer. “We’re go, Flight.”

“Okay, we’re go,” Kranz said to CapCom.

“Same type, we’re go,” said Charlie Duke to Armstrong and Aldrin.

Listening to his words echo through the network, Jack Garman, sitting in obscurity in the Flight Dynamics back room, had a feeling of being, for that brief and crucial moment, truly connected to the astronauts.

For the next minute Garman listened as the crew performed the final maneuvers before landing. The adrenaline rush that had swept him during the program alarms faded, leaving him drained, with a detached sense of watching events in slow motion. It was then that he heard Aldrin in Eagle say, “Forty feet, down two and a half. Picking up some dust.” Garman was startled out of his trance. Everything else had felt exactly like the simulations until then. But Aldrin had never said “Picking up some dust” before. The image of the dust blowing up around the LEM made it real, and the enormity of it began to sink in.

Armstrong and Aldrin brought Eagle to the surface with a fuel tank that was nearly dry. With thirty seconds of fuel left, CapCom Charlie Duke had made the only call that Kranz was permitting at this point of intense concentration, a fuel call—“Thirty seconds,” is all Duke said—and from then on it had been agonizing for the MOCR. Perhaps they didn’t have even thirty seconds—they calculated fuel remaining based on the average throttle setting during hover, and the crew had started throttling well before hover. If the fuel went dry, the computers would automatically try to abort the landing and fire the ascent stage—a maneuver that, this close to the surface, left no margin for error at all. Every controller in the MOCR knew all this, and watched the clocks. Or most did. An off-duty Guido sitting on the ledge behind the Trench just buried his head in his hands.

“Contact light. Okay. Engines stop.” Buzz Aldrin followed this with the string of procedures he and Armstrong were carrying out, “safe-ing” the vehicle.

“We copy you down, Eagle,” Duke said.

“Houston, Tranquility base here,” Neil Armstrong announced. “The Eagle has landed.”

“Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

Even as CapCom was saying to Eagle, “We copy you down,” Kranz was already on the loop to the controllers:

“Okay everybody. T1, stand by for T1.”

There were circumstances under which the LEM might have to launch immediately from the lunar surface, so the flight controllers had to make stay/no-stay decisions at touchdown +1 and touchdown +2 minutes (called simply “T one” and “T two”). But at this point Kranz had to speak loudly, because the viewing room had erupted. The V.I.P.s behind the glass cheered and stamped and applauded, and then the off-duty people inside the MOCR broke into cheers as well. Kranz could no longer fight off the emotions that were sweeping over him. He knew he had to be getting ready for T1 and T2. But he couldn’t make himself do it. He couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t move. The crisis over, Gene Kranz froze. His left hand was clutching the handle on the front of the console, his right was holding the pencil with which he wrote his tidy little telegraphic notes. Now, in his frustration with himself, he smashed his right arm down on the desk of his console, breaking the pencil and bruising himself from elbow to wrist. That broke the spell, and he could begin again.

“Okay all flight controllers, about forty-five seconds to T1 stay/ no-stay.”

He was back to normal. A few seconds later, irritably:

“Okay, keep the chatter down in this room.”

At four o’clock that afternoon, the White Team came off shift. Steve Bales was told to go along to the press briefing in Building 1. As he emerged from the Control Center, blinking in the harsh sunlight of a Houston July, he saw a group of demonstrators, kids about his age, out on the grass beside the duck pond. They weren’t making a fuss; they just were trying to get attention for their cause, which was more food for hungry people, or something like that. It was 1969, but Bales had been preoccupied for the last few years and had never seen demonstrators before, though he had heard about them. They were a great curiosity to him. He gawked surreptitiously at their sandals and the slogans on their T-shirts and their long hair. It is unlikely that they noticed Steve Bales as he hurried by, with his white shirt, his neatly tied tie, his NASA badge, pens in his pocket, square as could be.

Chapter 25. “Well, let’s light this sumbitch and it better work”

The events of the rest of that day were watched on television by a worldwide audience estimated to be in excess of a billion people. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin told flight director Milt Windler that they wanted to postpone their planned rest period and proceed directly to the E.V.A. Kraft, not surprised that the crew didn’t feel sleepy, agreed. Cliff Charlesworth’s Green Team, which had trained for the lunar surface activities, was hurriedly brought on shift (not difficult, since most of the team had been hanging around Building 30 all day anyway). At 9:56:15 P.M., Central Daylight Time, July 20,1969, Neil Armstrong hopped from the bottom rung of the LEM’s ladder onto the lunar surface, proclaiming, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” That, at least, is what Armstrong intended to say. A communications glitch made it sound as if he had said “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong was nonplussed when he returned and found how his historic first words had been heard, pointing out that without the “a” the sentence made no sense.

Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface. Together they spent two hours and forty minutes gathering twenty-one lunar rocks and deploying some simple experiments. It wasn’t a long time, but the first landing was considered to be primarily a test of equipment and procedures; the scientists would get more attention in the later flights. Then they returned to the Eagle to rest fitfully for six hours—the LEM, with its systems gurgling and whirring, was a noisy place to sleep.

When the E.V.A. ended, it was after midnight for most of the United States. While the nation went to sleep at the end of a momentous day, a group of Apollo engineers were working throughout the night. They had had no time to celebrate the landing or to watch the moon walk. Nor would they be able to rest any time soon. Even as the LEM’s stay on the surface seemed to move serenely forward, the support network labored furiously to keep the mission from self-destructing.

Every manned space flight experienced what NASA called “anomalies.” The signal that misrepresented the condition of John Glenn’s heat shield had been a classic anomaly: Something potentially disastrous had happened, but no one had known exactly what that “something” was. Anomalies continued to occur on the Apollo missions, but, like everything else in Apollo, they became more complicated to diagnose.

The ground’s first response to an anomaly, in Apollo as in Mercury, had to come from Mission Control. Only the MOCR and its back rooms were equipped for instant reaction. After their initial response, however, the MOCR could turn elsewhere. Sometimes they needed to have a better idea of what had really gone wrong (why did the S.P.S. engine show slightly less than its rated thrust during that course correction burn on Apollo 8?). Sometimes they needed a prediction of what was going to happen in the future (how long could the ailing fuel cell on Gemini V be expected to limp along?). Often, the MOCR needed a way of actually fixing whatever was wrong.

Such was the case during Apollo 11 after the Eagle had landed. In quick succession, Eleven was faced with three important anomalies. To resolve them, the MOCR turned to two other rooms in Houston, SPAN and the MER, and to two distant rooms in Bethpage, Long Island, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Out the main door of the MOCR and around two corners was the room called SPAN. SPAN stood for Spacecraft Analysis, but no one referred to it that way—Scott Simpkinson always swore he had worked there for three years before he found out what “SPAN” meant.

SPAN was staffed by a small but extremely senior group of engineers and controllers. Simpkinson, by this time George Low’s Assistant Program Manager for Flight Safety, directed SPAN’s activities and was on shift as SPAN operations manager during the landing of Apollo 11. Sitting beside him and across the table were two senior engineers from each of the major contractors. The night of the landing, they were the men who knew their respective spacecraft better than anyone else: George Jeffs, North American Rockwell’s chief engineer for the command module, and Tom Kelly, Grumman’s chief engineer for the lunar module. Also at the table were equally senior representatives from M.I.T., where the guidance and navigation systems had been developed, and from MPAD. Behind them was a row of consoles manned by supervisory controllers for Flight Dynamics, the C.S.M.’s systems, and the LEM’s systems.

SPAN was an interface—the jargon is precisely descriptive in this case—which linked three distinct entities: F.O.D., ASPO, and the contractors. True to Apollo’s cavalier attitude toward hierarchies, these senior managers were tucked away in a nondescript back room essentially to act as traffic cops and dispatchers.* If any of the contractors or someone from F.O.D. or ASPO saw an anomaly (the screens available in the MOCR were available to them as well), the report went to SPAN, to be assessed and passed on to the appropriate parties. SPAN’s staff, therefore, had to have sufficient technical knowledge and be senior enough to deal instantly, without negotiation, with their own organizations and to reach agreements among themselves without need for approval from higher-ups.

[* The indifference of many Apollo-era managers toward their status was one of NASA’s most endearing traits in those years. During one of the later Apollo missions, Jerry Bostick was in SPAN, working the Flight Dynamics position. SPAN, like the MOCR, always had visitors, and one of them, an unassuming gentleman who looked, someone once said, like a carving of a Black Forest elf, was sitting between Bostick and the pneumatic tube (P-tube) that Bostick used for sending messages to the MOCR and back rooms. Finally Bostick said. “Look, I don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re doing here, but you could make yourself useful and help get the messages out.” And so the man took off his coat and sat there the rest of the shift stuffing messages into the P-tube at Bostick’s direction. The next week one of Bostick’s friends, just returned from a trip to Huntsville, told him a story. Bostick’s friend had attended the weekly staff meeting of Eberhard Rees, who by that time had succeeded Wernher von Braun as Marshall’s director. “Dr. Rees,” someone asked, “how did you enjoy being over at Houston for the launch?” Rees is said to have replied, “Well, they had me in this little room, and to be quite honest, I felt in the way, it was so crowded. But then this nice young man gave me a job and I really felt useful.”]

SPAN took the incoming information and, as necessary, honed it into a precise statement of the problem, with a question to be answered. Once that question had been defined, SPAN went out to search for an answer. If it wished, SPAN could go directly to the manufacturers’ plants. During missions, North American in Downey, Grumman on Long Island, and M.I.T. in Cambridge each had rooms with engineers standing by twenty-four hours a day, with access to all of their plants’ archives and testing facilities. The dozens of subcontractors scattered around the country also maintained on-duty staffs. If, for example, Grumman wanted to know the testing history of a particular LEM battery manufactured by Eagle Pitcher in Joplin, Missouri, somebody would be standing by in Joplin who could give Grumman the answer.

But whether or not they phoned the contractors, SPAN’s first response when confronted with a new anomaly was to write up a chit describing the problem and give it to a messenger who carried it 200 yards across a courtyard to the third floor of Building 45. This was the Mission Evaluation Room—the MER—the domain of Mad Don Arabian.

“The MER was famous,” said one of Arabian’s deputies, which was both true and false. The public had never heard of it. To them, Houston was synonymous with Mission Control. But it was famous among Apollo design engineers, for whom it was the equivalent of Mission Control. Indeed, many of them considered the MOCR to be comparatively trivial. In the view of these partisans, when a mission had a real problem, the place that solved it was the MER.

Crowded, sometimes noisy, apparently disorganized, the MER was everything the MOCR wasn’t. During a crisis, up to a hundred engineers might be crowded around the MER’s six rows of folding tables, the kind used for church suppers. Each system and subsystem in the spacecraft was represented by an engineering team. The contractors assigned some of their top technical people to this room, as did ASPO.

Dozens of telephones littered the tables, for, as in SPAN, the engineers in the MER were constantly on the line to their own backup rooms, elsewhere on the M.S.C. campus or, for the contractors, around the country. The difference between SPAN and the MER was that SPAN roughly identified the nature of a problem, whereas the MER was supposed to understand it and solve it while the spacecraft was in flight and before the effects of the problem became critical. If, as was sometimes the case, that meant mobilizing thousands of engineers nationwide, so be it.