Apollo: The Race to the Moon (6 page)

On this sunny spring morning in 1959, Faget was still just a creative young engineer, and on that basis he had been chosen by Glennan to make a presentation on how a manned lunar landing might be accomplished. “It was the first time I can remember actually considering it,” Faget said later, “and I really hadn’t thought about it very much before the meeting, to tell you the truth.” But the problem seemed fairly straightforward to him, at least in its broad outlines. What you’d want to do, he told his audience, was to take it in stages. “I thought of first flying out and looping around the moon to get a look at it, at least get out of earth orbit and get a look at the moon a little bit closer. I could picture the astronauts looking down at it with binoculars,” Faget remembered, laughing. “Just gonna go whipping on by and come back. The next time, after we got that under our belts, we ought to try to orbit the moon. The nice thing about that would be that you’d be able to fly over possible landing sites and pick one out from your reconnaissance photographs.”

Finally, on a third mission, Faget told the group, the spacecraft would go into lunar orbit and check out the landing site “just like anybody that flies over a new field before they land on it. And then you would go down and land, one or two orbits later.” At that point, Faget remembered, Pickering and von Braun began objecting. What was all this business about going into orbit around the moon? “Max, you’re completely overlooking all that we’re going to learn in the Surveyor Program,” von Braun said. Surveyor, an unmanned lunar probe, wasn’t going to orbit, it would just go straight in and make a soft landing. And after that had been done a number of times, and the risks were understood, they would do the same thing with the first lunar landing.

Faget didn’t know quite what to say. Here were Pickering and von Braun—respectively, director of NASA’s most advanced engine laboratory and the most celebrated rocket engineer in the world—assuming that they would go straight in, and here was Faget, an engineer who worked for Bob Gilruth on the Space Task Group, saying to himself that this didn’t make any sense at all. He was trying to picture it in his mind. If you went straight in, you would be coming in at almost 10,000 feet per second. You’d have to conserve propellant, so you wouldn’t want to retrofire until about a hundred miles above the lunar surface. At 10,000 feet per second, a hundred miles takes about fifty-three seconds. That wasn’t a whole lot of time. If the engine didn’t fire right away…

“It would be a pretty bad day if, when you lit up the rockets, they didn’t light,” Faget observed. Pickering brushed it aside. “We’ll have done this a number of times!” he said. “We’re already working on the techniques!” And he went into a discourse on the kind of rocket they would use to slow down and the kind they would use to land. It would all be worked out. Faget, not ordinarily bashful, confined himself to murmuring, “Well, gee whiz, you know…”

“The thinking at that time was very primitive,” Faget said later. But it was interesting as hell, and Faget began to think about it more and more—especially what the spacecraft would have to do, and how it would have to be configured.

As the spring of 1959 wore on, Glennan decided that it was time to start thinking about a lunar mission in a more organized fashion. He set up a formal panel called the “Research Steering Committee on Manned Space Flight.” To history, it is known as the “Goett Committee,” after its chairman, a NASA engineer named Harry Goett. Each center was told to nominate a representative. The Space Task Group got to send a representative, too, and Bob Gilruth chose Faget. At its first meeting at Dolley Madison House in late May 1959, the Goett Committee wrote down a first cut at the list of priorities. They listed nine steps in manned space flight, in order. A lunar landing was far down the list, at number seven, for this was a sober, realistic committee, not a group of dreamers. But two members of the committee were less sober and sensible and argued tenaciously for a lunar landing as NASA’s next objective. One of them was Max Faget. He was joined by another young engineer who had come out of Lewis rather than Langley, not a member of the Space Task Group, but the man who was destined to be the guiding hand for the lunar program as a whole as Faget was for the spacecraft design. His name was George Low.

In those unbuttoned days, it was hard to tell who was running what. George Low was putatively NASA’s top man for manned space flight. Any organization chart would make that clear: NASA’s administrator was in the top box, and then below that was a row of boxes representing “Offices,” one of which was Abe Silverstein’s Office of Space Flight Programs. Under that was George Low, who was “Program Chief, Manned Space Flight”—a title that would seem to indicate that Bob Gilruth, head of the Space Task Group, worked for him.

In reality, Low was in Washington with his fancy title only because he had been dragged away from what he really wanted to be, which was an assistant division chief under Max Faget. Low had held that job for a few weeks earlier in the year, commuting happily from Cleveland to Langley, until Abe Silverstein, Low’s old mentor at Lewis, called Gilruth and told him that he needed Low up in Washington. “I’m not the Washington type,” Low said to Silverstein. “Yes,” said Silverstein, “but I need you,” and so Low reluctantly agreed, exacting from Silverstein a promise that the assignment would be temporary.

Then Low turned around and did the same thing to his old friend and colleague from Lewis, John Disher. In what Disher remembered as “one of the few slightly underhanded things I ever saw George do,” Disher was also reassigned from the Space Task Group to Washington against his will. There they were, sitting in their offices in the Dolley Madison House, supposedly managing NASA’s manned space program. But what it really amounted to, Disher remembered, was three men—George Low (“Program Chief, Manned Space Flight”), Disher himself (“Chief, Advanced Manned Space Flight”), Warren North (“Chief, Manned Satellites,” meaning Mercury)—and a couple of secretaries.

Austrian born, thirty-four years old, to all appearances the most mild-mannered and professorial of men, George Low wanted NASA to go to the moon, the sooner the better. Not only did he want to go to the moon, he wanted to land on it. After the first meeting, he lobbied his colleagues on the Goett Committee, reasoning with them in his quiet, precise voice still tinged with an Austrian accent. Manned space flight needed a goal to sustain it, he argued, a dramatic focal point. A lunar landing was that goal.

Low made converts. In its second meeting in June 1959, the Goett Committee went on record as saying that a manned lunar landing should be NASA’s next objective after Mercury. But it was one thing for a research committee to say such things, another for NASA to make it official policy, and 1959 was too soon. Low and Disher found that out in July when they tried to get Abe Silverstein to go along. They were working on a draft of a paper entitled “Space Flight Development, Advanced Technology, Manned Space Flight: Long Range Plans,” which would eventually be their official statement of plans and priorities. It included eight pages describing a manned lunar landing program, with a funding schedule that would land men on the moon by the late 1960s.

Abe Silverstein, politically savvier than his enthusiastic young assistants, read it warily. Silverstein had nothing against going to the moon. But the Eisenhower Administration was cool to manned space flight and frigid on large spending programs. There was no point in jeopardizing the programs that NASA could reasonably hope to see approved. Besides, as the latest progress reports from Cape Canaveral were showing, NASA was still a long way from being credible. Even as Silverstein’s deputies were asking him to put a lunar mission on NASA’s agenda, the Space Task Group team down at the Cape still couldn’t get its first rocket off the ground. Silverstein bounced the draft back to Low and Disher with instructions to take out the part about the moon.

Chapter 3. “Those days were out of the Dark Ages”

On June 9, 1959, the first contingent of Space Task Group engineers disembarked from a chartered D.C.-3 at the Cape. They were thirty-five strong—six engineers, a draftsman, twenty-seven technicians, and a secretary, the only woman, Emily Ertl. The little party was led by Scott Simpkinson, who, like almost all the rest of his crew, had come to the Space Task Group from Lewis Research Center in Cleveland.

Their job was to launch Big Joe, an Atlas missile carrying the first Mercury capsule. The capsule was a test article, not the real thing—what they called “boilerplate,” with the shape and weight of a real Mercury capsule but none of the electronics or environmental systems that would be installed for a manned flight. Lewis had assembled the bottom half, Langley the top half. The purpose of the test was to see whether the heat shield would keep cabin temperatures at an acceptable level during entry into the earth’s atmosphere. The capsule would be shot to an altitude of 160 miles, then the Atlas would pitch over and accelerate the capsule back into the atmosphere at a top speed of 17,000 m.p.h. Thermocouples attached to the capsule’s titanium shingles would measure the heat.

The Space Task Group had no facilities of its own down at the Cape. The Air Force, which played host to the many agencies operating out of Canaveral, was supposed to provide them. Simpkinson reported to the Air Force people in charge of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, who took him over to Hangar S in the industrial area of the station.

Hangar S had been built by the naval research outfit that had finally put up the tiny satellite on Vanguard, and they were still there working on their missiles. Never mind, Simpkinson recalled the Air Force people telling him, “you’re just a nose cone, you can go in the back.” They put up some stanchions and roped off a portion of the floor of Hangar S for the Space Task Group to use. The Space Task Group’s office space consisted of a narrow storage area barely wide enough to fit their desks end to end—whenever the draftsman at the far end needed to get out (he sat by the only window, so that he would have enough light to draw), the other engineers all had to get up, push their chairs into their desks, and walk out into the corridor to let him by.

Down on the floor of Hangar S, conditions were even worse. “Those days were out of the Dark Ages,” remembered Joe Bobik, a mechanic from Lewis who had jumped at the chance to come down to the Cape with Simpkinson. They had no White Room, the immaculately clean and protected area in which later spacecraft would be checked out and prepared for flight. The technicians were not yet dressed in the white smocks, hats, gloves, and booties that technicians always wore in the presence of a spacecraft in later years. The Mercury capsule just sat on the concrete floor of the hangar and technicians in mechanics’ overalls worked on it.

None of them had ever experienced these conditions—the day-in, day-out hours, plus the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes of the Cape in midsummer. “They had an ammonia cooling system on the launch vehicle,” Bobik recalled. “We were working sixteen, eighteen hours a day, as many hours as someone could work, and the mosquitoes were so bad at night that we’d get that ammonia and spray it around to kill those mosquitoes so we could work.” In retrospect, Bobik would be appalled (“Ammonia is dangerous! It’s toxic!”). But that’s how bad the mosquitoes were. There were other improvisations—lacking a refrigerator in Hangar S, they used the fire extinguishers to cool their Cokes. As if to show them just how far behind they had left civilization, a Florida panther came up to the chain-link fence near Hangar S every evening and sat there, peering in—“like a zoo in reverse,” one veteran commented.

The Air Force continued to treat the Space Task Group as a bunch of amateurs (which they were, in space flight) with a low official priority (which was all they had). This attitude had its positive side in averting tensions between the Lewis and Langley members of the team (“The Air Force made us get together, because they treated us like we were all incompetent,” a Langley man said). But Simpkinson couldn’t get any equipment from them. “The Air Force treated us like dogs down there,” Simpkinson remembered. “About all the Air Force would give us was pencils.” That got Simpkinson’s back up, and he began taking matters into his own hands.

It was a natural role for him. A congenital loner in a business where teamwork was almost a religion, Simpkinson had been chosen to prepare the Big Joe shot because of a strange combination of qualifications. He had a long history of testing experimental engines. He had worked with rocket-driven supersonic shapes. He was versed in pyrotechnics. Also in his inventory of talents, though less obviously pertinent, he was the proprietor of an off-hours television repair business and played the trumpet in swing bands that toured the clubs around Cleveland. Simpkinson’s work at Lewis sometimes seemed to be more his hobby than a job—his colleagues would run across his N.A.C.A. paychecks sitting in his desk drawer, uncashed, sometimes half a dozen of them at a time.

Transcending his specific skills, Simpkinson possessed an unteachable ability to “smell a problem a mile away,” as one of his colleagues put it. The technical term for his expertise was “failure-mode effects analysis,” but at bottom what it meant was that Simpkinson was an engineer who was intimately at home with the hardware. He understood machines.

Simpkinson was also tenacious as a tick and didn’t mind antagonizing people if he felt the occasion called for it. Rather than waste time trying to get along with the Air Force, he convinced Merritt Preston, his Space Task Group supervisor up at Langley, to arrange for Simpkinson to have his own $50,000 government checking account. When one of his technicians needed a stepladder or a hammer or a lathe, Simpkinson just went to a Cocoa Beach hardware store and wrote a check for it.

None of the members of the team that Simpkinson led to the Cape had ever checked out a spacecraft; none of them had ever launched one. With neither equipment nor experience, they made it up as they went along. There was the matter of getting the capsule from Hangar S out to the pad, for example. They didn’t have a vehicle for that purpose. No one had thought of it. But Jack Kinzler, the shop foreman from Langley, had just driven down to the Cape in a flatbed truck to join Simpkinson’s group. Simpkinson bought some mattresses and two sheets of plywood with his magic checkbook. They put the mattresses between the panels of plywood and then lashed the capsule onto the top. Pictures still in the files attest to the story, showing a battered pickup with a spacecraft on mattresses pulling up to the pad where an Atlas rocket stands waiting. “Of course, we got a lot of ridicule,” said Kinzler. “But it worked fine.”