Apollo: The Race to the Moon (56 page)

The MER was not a high-tech room (“We didn’t need any fancy damn consoles or anything,” Arabian proudly declared). Some of the engineers wore headsets and could plug into their choice of loops. Ten television monitors with telemetry data hung overhead along the far wall. One of the MER’s staff was assigned to take Polaroid photographs of any particularly interesting screens, and those were the MER’s hard copy. The engineers brought in binoculars so they could make out what the distant numbers were—during a busy part of the flight the MER presented a strange sight, with dozens of men wearing white shirts and ties, sitting in a closed room, holding binoculars to their eyes.

The assets of the MER lay not in the technology of the room, but in the brains of its members. Assembled in that one room was a vast storehouse of knowledge about how the spacecraft worked and how to jury-rig a fix that would pull the mission out of trouble. And no one embodied the no-sweat, we-can-do-that confidence of the MER more than its leader, Don Arabian.

“Mad Don” was only one of several appellations for him. Variations included “The Mad Man,” “The Wild Man,” and “The Wild Arabian.” His real name was Donald Dionysios (that’s the way his father spelled it) Arabian. In 1949, he had gone directly from the University of Rhode Island to work for Langley, where he relished the precise and elegant engineering-for-engineering’s-sake that characterized Langley. Then in 1960 he moved over to join the Space Task Group. In 1967, shortly after heading up one of the panels for the 204 Review Board, he was chosen to be head of Houston’s Test Division, part of ASPO.

During a flight, Arabian ran the MER. After the flight, he orchestrated the preparation of the sacred text for each mission, the Mission Evaluation Report, and personally spent most of his time on one chapter in it, the “Anomaly Report.” This chapter informed F.O.D., the rest of ASPO, and the contractors which of the fifty-odd anomalies reported during a typical mission were hardware malfunctions and which were procedural errors by the crew or ground. The Anomaly Report analyzed each of the true anomalies and reported on what had been done to rectify the situation, ending each section with the imperious pronouncement: “This anomaly is closed.”

Arabian had a raised platform just inside the doorway of the MER from which he could look out over the long, narrow room. When a new problem came over from SPAN, he would holler in his pronounced, nasal Rhode Island accent, “All right, folks, we gotta problem here we gotta work, let’s get goin’ on it!” Then, having assembled the people who would work on it for a preliminary assessment, he would prowl back and forth in front of the blackboard, tall and lean, wide white grin, flashing blue eyes, waving the chalk, stopping periodically to scribble on the board, talking rapidly, contemptuous of grammar. Once in a while he would stop suddenly, head cocked, eyes withdrawn, as he attacked some new line of thought.

Arabian was known as Mad Don partly because of his ideas and partly because of his unrestrained enthusiasm in expressing them. According to an engineer who worked with him, when there was a meeting to hash out a technical issue, “everybody always shuddered when you got around to Arabian, because we knew it was either going to be back to square one or off into left field—you never knew exactly where he was going to come from.” But he was too good an engineer for the others not to listen, no matter how crazy his latest notion sounded at first.

Arabian didn’t give a damn about what anybody else thought. He had his own ideas about how things ought to be, and he was sure he was right, and he didn’t care if everybody else in the room thought differently. “See, I’m one guy a lot of people are afraid of,” Arabian said, accurately. “There’s a reason for it, because if anybody does anything technically that’s not according to physics, that’s bullshitting about something, I will forever be death on them. I mean, you’d better be exact, you’d better show technical elegance. It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, you’d better not ever prostitute physics.”

Physics was the one entity that Arabian would forbear from antagonizing. Good-natured and generous in his personal relationships, he had pungent, mostly critical, opinions about everything in his professional life. Organization was just a nuisance (“You find out what the rules of the game are, then you determine how to get around the ones that are detrimental to what you want to do”). People were problematic. A few, mainly Low and Kraft, had his boundless admiration. Arabian also liked and freely praised certain other engineers—Faget, Jeffs, people like that, and most of the contractor engineers who were assigned to the MER. But Arabian thought that just about everybody else was in the way. This tended to include his own subordinates in the Test Division (“I never wanted people to work for me. It just takes away from you”), NASA executives from headquarters (“Hubcaps,” useless ornamentation), senior executives with the contractors (“Their goal is just to make a buck”), flight controllers (“They spend most all their time coming up with flight rules. Then when something happens, they haven’t the foggiest idea what you need to do”), astronauts (“A lot of them aren’t too damned swift”), and, perhaps most eloquently, the Cape. This is vintage Arabian on Launch Operations:

“Those thousands of people in the Firing Room at K.S.C. are not needed. We went and landed on the moon. Strange place, never before been there. Didn’t know where the landing spot was gonna be. [Imitates the sound of the LEM’s engine shutting down.] They got out, they messed around, ate lunch and everything else, and when they’re ready to go they kick the rocks out of the way, brush themselves off. [Acts out parts of both astronauts.] They have no white coats on, there’s no ground support equipment, there are no consoles or anything else, and one says, ‘Okay, you ready to go?’—‘Yeah, I’m ready to go.’—‘Okay, you put the sandwiches away.’ And when they’re ready to go they press a button. They call up Houston and say, ‘Houston, we are go for liftoff.’ Houston says, ‘You’re go.’ If there’s something wrong, Houston couldn’t have done a damn thing. That was all on their own, two guys, okay? And they did it six times—launched from the moon, strange environment, without any firing rooms or anything else. Then you say to yourself, if they did it there, what the hell’s going on at K.S.C.?” All of these heterodox opinions were expressed with a big grin, without personal animosity—and with absolute conviction, anywhere, any time.

Arabian’s particular disfavor was reserved for anyone who tinkered with hardware once it had been properly designed and built. He was a relentless foe of the kind of testing they did at the Cape, which in his opinion accomplished nothing except to take operational life out of the systems. Note that the word “test” is being used for two different meanings. At the Cape, the test conductors tested to see whether the hardware for the next flight was operating according to specs. Arabian’s Test Division was charged with testing the equipment relative to functions it was supposed to fulfill. Or to put it another way, the Cape tested the flight hardware while the Test Division tested the design. But either way the word was used, Arabian played no favorites. He also took potshots at his own Test Division. The Test Division shouldn’t exist, Arabian said. Reliability and efficiency in a piece of equipment had to be designed in. There shouldn’t be a separate organization to check that kind of thing. Build the hardware right to begin with, and you won’t have to bring all these unreliable human beings into the act later.

And there, finally, Arabian’s view of the cosmos rested: He had faith in hardware systems and in designs that obeyed the laws of physics, and a deep distrust of human performance. “See, the brain is very clever,” Arabian said to all who would listen. “It can perceive things, it can create things, and all that. But it’s the most undependable, unreliable, unpredictable device that exists.” Arabian included his own brain in the indictment, citing the time he forgot to lower the landing gear in his little Beechcraft as proof of the brain’s treachery.

With regard to his own flying, it must be said that some small inconsistency in Arabian’s position may be discerned—namely, he seemed to believe that some benign providence would rescue him from just about anything. Arabian flew himself everywhere during the Apollo years, but mostly alone, because he tended to make passengers nervous. Scott Simpkinson remembered sitting in the copilot’s seat one day when they got out to the end of the runway and discovered that one of the plane’s magnetos was out. “Don’t worry about it!” Arabian shouted to Simpkinson over the noise of the engine as he proceeded to take off anyway. On another occasion, after some mysterious episodes in which the Beechcraft’s engine had been sputtering and backfiring, threatening to quit altogether, Arabian decided that he needed to do some systematic troubleshooting. So he took the little plane up near its ceiling, about 15,000 feet, where he would have, in his words, “plenty of time,” and proceeded to induce the engine problem, testing out alternative explanations. It was perfectly safe, he said. He made sure he was within gliding distance of an airport.

Arabian’s passionate allegiance to physics was invaluable for his role at the MER. When an ambiguous problem came in, he wouldn’t settle for an explanation unless it fit all the conditions. He was always aware of the brain’s propensity to jump to convenient conclusions. “If something goes wrong, let’s say, and there are ten conditions that must be satisfied, and this one thesis satisfies them all precisely, see, except one, okay? Then that ain’t it. It’s not ‘almost.’ You’re either there, or you ain’t there.” Time and again during Apollo, Arabian’s cheerful intransigence turned out to be crucial. Often the situation that the MER had to deal with was indeed a problem for which there seemed to be an excellent explanation that fit all of the facts, all of them but one, and Arabian would refuse to accept it until that last small, unimportant anomalous fact was understood—when, frequently, it became clear that the problem and its solution were quite different than had been previously thought. In Houston, Arabian was sui generis—“a legend in his own time,” Chris Kraft once wrote. A knowledgeable observer in the Flight Operations Directorate that Arabian disdained, thinking about the people at M.S.C. who made the Apollo flights successful, decided that four men ultimately stood out: Kraft, Low, Tindall—and Arabian.

The anomaly that caused the highest pulse rates during Apollo 11 occurred a minute after the landing. It was not mentioned in the press coverage or in the official NASA history, probably because nothing came of it, but for a few minutes it scared the living daylights out of the handful of people on the ground who knew what was happening.

On TELMU’s screen in the MOCR and on the lunar module systems screen in SPAN, readings showed that pressure and temperature were rising alarmingly in one of the descent stage’s fuel lines. After the engine had shut down, a blockage had apparently occurred—almost certainly, Grumman’s Tom Kelly in SPAN believed, because liquid helium had frozen a slug of fuel left in the pipe. As they watched the screens, the residual heat from the engine (which had been operating at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit when the Eagle had landed) was moving up toward the frozen fuel, and the question bothering Kelly was what would happen when the trapped fuel suddenly got much warmer. “There’s no telling what it will do,” he told Low, who by this time was on the phone with Kelly. The fuel was unstable when heated, and Kelly saw a real possibility that the frozen fuel would explode like a small hand grenade.

The MER and the Grumman control center at Bethpage had seen the same pressure readings. Men in both rooms were on the phone to each other, trying to estimate what would happen if the fuel exploded. The best guess was that even a small explosion was likely to squirt fuel or oxidizer into the combustion chamber, which was still thousands of degrees hot.

Some of the people at Grumman argued for an immediate abort, launching the ascent stage and leaving the problem behind. But besides ruining the rest of the plans for the first landing, an immediate launch was impossible: By the time the problem occurred, Columbia was out of position for a rendezvous. An option favored by Kelly was to burp the descent engine—restart it at ten percent power for a split second—and relieve the pressure. By now all the phone lines were open—Low in the MOCR, Simpkinson and Kelly in SPAN, Arabian in the MER. Arabian argued against burping the engine, at least until they knew more about the attitude of the LEM on the lunar surface. If Eagle was already tilted at an angle, even a slight thrust from the descent engine at one-sixth gravity might push the LEM over on its side.

As they talked, they saw the pressure in the fuel line start down, edge up slightly once more, then fall abruptly and for good. The blockage had melted or the line had ruptured without damaging anything essential. In either case, the crisis that had flared so suddenly was over as quickly as it had begun. It was an object lesson in Kraft’s precept about not doing anything if you don’t know what to do.

The second anomaly occurred when Neil Armstrong, trying to maneuver in the LEM with his pressure suit and backpack on, backed into the circuit breaker for the ascent engine’s arming switch and broke it. This was not a trivial matter, for the ascent engine ignition button wouldn’t work until the ascent engine had been armed. Neither, however, was it a crisis. The Eagle didn’t have a backup arming switch, but it did have such redundant wiring that, given time, the Grumman engineers would be able to work out a sequence of switches that would reroute signals in such a way as to arm the ascent engine, even without the arming switch. The MER and Bethpage figured out how to do it while the astronauts were walking on the moon. While the astronauts rested, they simulated the new sequence and passed the solution on to SPAN, where it was reviewed and given to the MOCR for transmission to Eagle.

The anomaly that resisted solution the longest concerned the program alarm. The people in the MOCR and the MER understood what had triggered the alarm—the computer was failing to keep up with its work—but even after Eagle was on the ground nobody in the MOCR, SPAN, the MER, or at M.I.T. knew why. In a few hours, that same computer would be called upon to perform a lunar rendezvous, and the possibility that troubled everyone was that the computer failure would recur in a more serious form.