Apollo: The Race to the Moon (71 page)

Now, for the landing of Seventeen and the last lunch, Arabian had taken charge and decreed that they would have gumbo—not just for the dozen who usually were invited to the lunches, but for everyone in the MER, plus assorted invitees from Building 30, about two hundred people in all. Fulton Plauche, a Louisianian from the cryo and fuel-cell post in the MER, was named chef. The Crew Services Division contributed two gigantic pots. Jack Kinzler’s Tech Services Division made up some wooden stirring paddles. Plauche began with a chicken-and-sausage gumbo, but people in the MER also contributed deer sausage, ducks, rabbits, squirrels, and anonymous game that became the subject of grisly rumor. By the time Apollo 17’s command module was approaching the entry interface, a line of people waiting to get their rice and gumbo and ice cream snaked around the MER.

Owen Maynard, the Canadian who driven his family down to remote Langley and the infant Space Task Group thirteen years earlier, was at Raytheon’s plant in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Maynard had left NASA in hopes that he could do something on the outside to push the space program forward, to get some exciting new Apollo going. Joe Shea, now head of engineering for Raytheon, had heard that Maynard was available and recruited his old ASPO colleague to join him, putting him to work on a breathtaking project—designing a solar-powered satellite, a monster with wings covering twenty-five square miles that would generate up to 50 gigawatts of electricity on earth.

Maynard didn’t watch the splashdown. From the time of Alan Shepard’s first Mercury launch, he had never watched any of the flights live. Maynard didn’t like to admit it to anyone, but to watch them live was an agony of worry and suspense for him—he got very emotional about these things. Some of the others at the Sudbury office crowded around a television, but not Maynard. He kept to his office and his drafting table.

Bob Gilruth was in the viewing room behind the MOCR. Early in the year he had stepped down as M.S.C.’s director to take a job as “Director of Key Personnel Development” for NASA—a pleasant way to end a historic career. Gilruth shared Maynard’s apprehension during missions, however, and he was glad to see Apollo come to an end without having lost an astronaut in flight. He had never been enthusiastic about the H and J Missions anyway, thinking that the risks of lunar exploration were awfully high. He still hoped that NASA would concentrate on a space station, a project that had been his personal favorite since the Space Task Group began.

Scott Simpkinson, still M.S.C.’s gypsy, had most recently spent three months in Huntsville sitting on the contractor selection board for the space shuttle’s solid-fuel boosters. Simpkinson was about to spend a year at Langley helping to prepare the unmanned Viking mission to Mars. But today he was taking his last shift as manager of SPAN, where he had been for all of the Apollo missions. The end of Apollo didn’t bother him. Simpkinson had never been sorry to see anything end. He figured there was always something better going on somewhere else.

In the MOCR, as the clock moved past 1:00 P.M. and the spacecraft America approached entry, Flight Neil Hutchinson was presiding over a nominal landing. The room was crowded, as was usual for a landing, and the viewing room was full, but the atmosphere was relaxed. They had done this many times now.

Rocco Petrone watched from his post in the fourth row. Petrone’s star was still rising—he had recently learned that in January he would move to Huntsville and replace the retiring Eberhard Rees as Marshall’s Center director.

At this moment, however, Petrone was not looking ahead. He couldn’t even concentrate fully on the present landing. For Petrone, it was a moment for remembering. It seemed a very long time since he had been an Army major sitting with Al Zeiler in a car in the rain outside the Cape Canaveral cafeteria, trying to make out John Kennedy’s words through the static. The years in between had been unforgettable ones, and Petrone felt a wave of nostalgia as he watched the television image of America descending under its parachutes. No matter what happened to the space program in the future, it could never be like this again. As was his habit, Petrone thought in terms of history: Any number of Pilgrims might follow, but there could be only one Columbus.

At 1:24:59 Houston time on the afternoon of Sunday, December 20, 1972, Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific four miles from the carrier Ticonderoga. Counting from Apollo 8’s launch on December 21,1968, the first age of lunar exploration had lasted exactly four years.

After the splashdown, the geologists in their back room watched the recovery operation for a while, some of them lighting up cigars in the tradition of the flight controllers in the MOCR. They eventually drifted away, exchanging goodbyes with Dick Koos, who stayed behind to finish up some post-flight paperwork. They were just getting good at this lunar surface business, Koos thought. It had taken time, because you never knew exactly what the terrain was going to be like or what the astronauts would discover. Lots of improvisation was required. But by Apollo 17, Koos had become quite adept at determining where the astronauts were and coordinating with his scientists where and how they should proceed next. It was too bad that they had to stop now, just as they were getting the hang of it.

Koos walked out into the high corridor of the Control Center, his footsteps echoing in the quiet. On impulse, he stopped at the door of the MOCR and walked in. Everyone had gone to the splashdown party, leaving the MOCR’s consoles littered with books, logs, checklists, headsets, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and half-smoked cigars. Some of the controllers had left behind the little American flags that everyone waved when the spacecraft splashed down.

Koos climbed the steps to the flight director’s console and looked out over the deserted room. The big screens at the front of the room were black. The controllers’ C.R.T.s showed no flickering columns of numbers, no messages about the health and welfare of men and machines in deep space. They were just small, turned-off television screens. The banks of caution lights were dark.

There were no murmuring voices on the headsets. There was no sound at all anywhere in the room. It was as perfectly silent as the plains and valleys 240,000 miles away where six descent stages sat. Strange to think of them still up there, Koos reflected. Even the footprints. Strange to think that men might return to those places to look at footprints made by Neil Armstrong or Pete Conrad or Gene Cernan.

It was stranger yet to think that this was the end of it all. From the balky Mercury trainer that Koos couldn’t get to work in the spring of 1961 to this—and it had all happened in less than the time it was taking his daughter, born early in Apollo, to reach adolescence. It had come and gone too fast. John Aaron, that philosopher of the MOCR, would say later that it was like gulping good wine. It would have been nice to have had more time to savor it, he said, but “we drank the wine at the pace they handed it to us.”

Today they had drunk to the bottom of the glass. There would be Skylab and eventually the shuttle, but Dick Koos, like Rocco Petrone, understood that an Apollo came only once, and he felt immeasurably sad. Koos walked slowly down the steps and out into the corridor, closing the door behind him.

Epilogue. Twenty Years after the First Landing

I will admit that I walk out every now and then in the morning to get the paper when the moon happens to be up, and say, “By God, we were there.”

—Rod Loe

Looking back twenty years after the first landing, many of the people of Apollo agree with John Aaron’s sentiment—it was a little like gulping good wine. Few had the time to step outside of events and assess what was going on until later. “It was funny,” Rod Rose reminisces. “Just a little while ago, when I retired, people asked me to ‘look back,’ and all that. And it was not until then that it came home to me—‘My God, I’ve been involved in the first quarter of a century of manned space flight!’”

Another veteran notes that when his children come to visit and look through his memorabilia, they ask him why he doesn’t have autographs of the astronauts and presidents and celebrities who came to watch him at work. “You were right there!” they say. But he was always so busy, he tells them, he just didn’t pay any attention. “We knew we were doing something, but nobody really felt the impact of what was really going on.” The job was too consuming for that—“almost a crusade,” said another veteran, nothing like any other job he ever had.

Some are unhappy that the rest of the country has never truly comprehended the historic nature of our first journey to another world. Most people think of Apollo as just another episode in the tumultuous sixties, secondary to the Vietnam War and America’s social upheaval, not as something that will still figure large in the history books when Vietnam and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are consigned to footnotes. But the failure to understand goes beyond that, argues Rocco Petrone. “We’ve had a lot of reporting of how big the rocket is, how much noise it makes, pictures of guys on the moon. But what was the real meaning of Apollo? What did it symbolize? What were we after?” For a few short years, Apollo was almost like a Renaissance, Petrone thinks, but nobody wants to confront that kind of possibility now—to do so would make the nation recognize how much it abandoned so casually.

The dark side of the experience was the sacrifices it required of the Apollo families. Rod Rose again: “If had to tip my hat to the unspoken heroes of the Apollo Program, it would be to the wives and families of the engineers. The wives were widows. They had none of the glory, none of the kudos—they were the ones left behind with the kids, the bills.” Many of the men of Apollo look back at their youthful selves and are appalled at what they took for granted. The same phrases keep recurring—“My wife was a saint,” or “I don’t know why my wife didn’t leave me,” or “I didn’t see my kids grow up.” “Boy, if I hadn’t had the kind of wife I had,” said tough old Tom O’Malley, “and some of the rest of us who were in the same boat didn’t have the wives they had, [Apollo] would have never come off.”

In many cases, families didn’t survive the stress—during the mid-1960s, the towns around K.S.C. had the highest divorce rate in the country. At the program’s height, one Cape engineer counted up the divorces among just the people he knew: seventy-eight of them in the preceding six months. Houston wasn’t far behind. Gran Paules pulls out a picture of a party at his house after Apollo 8 landed. Within a week of the party, he says, four of the couples there had revealed they were getting divorced. And yet in 1989 it is striking how many of the people who made the biggest contributions to the program are still married to the same person who, a quarter century ago, came with them to the wilds of Merritt Island or Clear Lake. The consensus is that this is no coincidence. Under the heat of Apollo, your marriage either melted or annealed.

The same may have been true of individuals. Apollo no doubt took in its share of miscreants and time-servers and self-aggrandizers, but the program had a way of getting rid of them through self-selection. Among the people who remained, Apollo seems to have counted an extraordinarily high proportion of gentlemen—“gentlemen” in the uncomplicated sense of being straight shooters and hard workers and not show-offs.

Perhaps this can be explained by the nature of the challenge they were ready to take on and by the unworldly rewards with which they had to satisfy themselves. For whatever reasons, the remark Joe Shea made about Houston when he arrived—that he’d never seen a place like it, where no one was jockeying for position, everyone was just trying to do his best—seems to summarize the program’s character in the other centers as well. Moreover, the people of Apollo seem to have retained those qualities since. Bill Tindall’s insistence that he didn’t do anything himself is an only slightly exaggerated version of the generosity of spirit that is common among the Apollo veterans. Not everyone was a hero and most certainly not everyone was a saint, but, twenty years after the first landing, the people of Apollo have as a group aged remarkably well. There is nostalgia among them, but no post-Apollo stress syndrome.

Inevitably, some have departed. Wernher von Braun died in 1977, Kurt Debus in 1983, and George Low in 1984. Other less famous characters in the story are also gone. Dan Klute died of a heart attack a few months after the combustion instability problem on the F-1 engine was resolved, worn out, many of his friends believe, by the unremitting strain of that effort. NASA later named a lunar crater in his honor. Others who are not here to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first landing include Tecwyn Roberts, the first FIDO; John Disher, who was part of the first planning for a lunar landing; and George Bliss, of the EECOM back room during Apollo 13.

But many of the famous names of Apollo—famous within NASA anyway—are very much alive. James Webb lives in retirement in Washington, D.C. He still likes to talk, and still does so with all the energy and political insight that he applied to the administration of NASA. Robert Gilruth lives near where it all began, in a little town on the water forty-five miles north of Langley, with a hydrofoil sailboat of his own design tied to the dock. Abe Silverstein divides his time between Cleveland, close to Lewis Research Center, which he directed after leaving NASA headquarters, and his retirement home in Florida. Sam Phillips retired to the seaside south of Los Angeles. His successor, Rocco Petrone, is only a few miles away, newly retired from Rockwell. George Mueller is up the coast in Santa Barbara. Chris Kraft is still in Houston, Eberhard Rees still in Huntsville. Walt Williams lives in Tarzana, California, but it is easier to locate him in Washington, the Cape, Huntsville, or Houston—he still consults for NASA. John Houbolt is in Williamsburg, and still keeps an office at Langley, as does the mentor to so many in the Space Task Group, William Hewitt Phillips.

Robert Seamans has for many years been on the faculty of M.I.T. Jerome Wiesner, with whom he tangled in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, is president-emeritus of M.I.T., still working in his office in the Jerome B. Wiesner Building. In 1989 they got a new colleague, Joe Shea, who is taking some time off from his senior vice-presidency at Raytheon to teach a course there.