Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (30 page)

BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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Page 160
acceleration. For ten seconds these pulses surged along the length of the rocket pulses so violent that a large outside panel was ripped away.
Then, just as the center engine of the first stage shut down on schedule, the pulses stopped. Fifteen seconds later the other four engines turned off, and the first stage was jettisoned on schedule. Now the five engines of stage two ignited, propelling the rocket forward with a million pounds of thrust. About four minutes into the burn, however, one of these engines began to have trouble. Then it cut off inexplicably, followed almost immediately by the cut-off of a second engine. Normally, the loss of two engines required the ground controllers to immediately abort the flight, but somehow the rocket was managing to balance the thrust of the remaining three engines. Making a split-second decision, flight director Charlesworth and controller Bob Wolf allowed the rocket to keep flying, burning the remaining three engines of the second stage for almost five more minutes, fifty-nine seconds longer than originally planned and until its fuel tanks were dry.
33
When the rocket's third stage engine (the S4B) kicked in, the ground controllers extended its burn as well in order to compensate for the lost thrust. As a result they managed to get the spacecraft into a wobbly orbit, 110 miles at its lowest altitude and 228 miles at its highest.
After allowing the ship to make two circuits of the earth, the controllers now tried to simulate a command module's return from the moon. By firing the S4B engine they would push the command module
down
into the atmosphere, increasing its reentry speed to over 24,000 miles per hour.
Unfortunately, the S4B engine refused to re-ignite. Now the controllers were forced to fire the S.P.S. engine instead, extending its burn to almost seven minutes two and a half minutes longer than planned in an attempt to reach the desired speed. Upon hitting the atmosphere, the command module was flying only 22,000 miles an hour, and it splashed down fifty miles from its planned landing point in the Pacific.
For NASA, the assassination of Martin Luther King acted to divert attention from these problems. The failure of apollo 6 to perform as expected was hardly noticed by the general public.
Yet, with only a year and eight months before the end of the decade, not only had three engines of the Saturn 5 not worked according to plan, but

 

Page 161
one whole outside panel had been torn from the rocket, and the oscillations during launch would have been strong enough to injure any astronauts on board at the time. "It was a fascinating flight," controller Jay Greene said tersely many years later.
34
If NASA was going to send men to the moon in the next twenty months, it would have to find out very quickly what had caused these problems, and solve them just as fast.
And the pressure was building. The Soviet space program was coming back to life. On March 2nd, one month before the unsuccessful Apollo 6 mission, the Soviets launched Zond 4. Since the death of Komarov eleven months earlier, the Soviet space program had established new flight guidelines. No manned space flight would take place until an identical unmanned robot spacecraft had successfully accomplished an identical mission.
Zond 4, of a similar shape and configuration to the Soyuz crew and service modules, was intended to prove that this craft could safely return a human from lunar space. The capsule was lifted to an distance of about 205,000 miles, and then, just as had been planned for Apollo 6, dropped back to earth in order to test high velocity reentry procedures. While the launch was successful, Zond reentered the atmosphere at too steep an angle. At six miles altitude the Soviets blew the craft up, preventing it from crashing into west Africa, where they feared Western technicians might recover it.
Then, three days after the unsuccessful launch of Apollo 6, Luna 14 was launched, and after a three-day journey entered lunar orbit. According to Tass's cryptic description, the orbiter was there to "conduct further scientific studies of the near-lunar space."
35
Speculation abounded, however, that this was a test flight of a Soviet manned lunar vehicle.
The Soviets then topped this event one week later with the launch of Cosmos 213 and Cosmos 214. These Soyuz unmanned test craft successfully achieved the automatic docking maneuver that Komarov had been unable to attempt when his spacecraft failed one year earlier.
Shortly thereafter, Frank Borman met in Houston with George Low, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program. Borman, not one to mince words, described how well the capsule redesign was going. In his mind, the problems that had caused the launchpad fire more than a year earlier were solved. When

 

Page 162
construction on the first few Apollo capsules was finished in the next few months, they would be ready to take men back into space.
As soon as the meeting ended, Low decided it was time to assemble a team to see if a flight to the moon was possible before the end of the year. He wrote a memo on the subject, and told his secretary to consider that memo "007," which meant that once it was read by his superiors at NASA, she was to destroy it, not even keeping a copy for Low's files.
36
Despite the death of three astronauts only fifteen months before, despite the failure of Apollo 6, and despite the lack of any manned test flights of a Saturn rocket, George Low believed the time had come to send a man to the moon. And he was convinced that they could be ready to do it in less than eight months.

 

Page 163
Chapter Nine
"There's a Beautiful Earth out There."
"You are go for rev two. All systems are go." After an hour's careful review of the S.P.S. engine's performance, the evening's flight director, Milton Windler, had okayed a second lunar orbit for Apollo 8.
Five-forty in the morning, Tuesday, Christmas Eve 1968. Though the astronauts had catnapped during the early evening hours Monday night, none had had a full night's sleep since Sunday, and Anders hadn't even had that.
Now that they were in lunar orbit, however, there was no time for sleep. Even if everything went flawlessly, they would only be there for another eighteen hours, and they had much to accomplish in that short time.
As the sun rose on the morning of Christmas Eve in Houston, Apollo 8 slipped behind the moon for the second time.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
On earth, the three families sat tensely in their homes, awaiting the first lunar telecast scheduled for 6:30 AM. Though the men had made lunar orbit safely, this was now the period of greatest risk.

 

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After the spacecraft had entered lunar orbit Valerie Anders had tried to go back to sleep. Normally a sound sleeper, she lay in bed alone, listening to the squawk box. Once again the men's voices, rather than lulling her to sleep, kept her awake. As dawn approached and her kids began to stir she gave it up and climbed out of bed.
Marilyn Lovell had also tried to sleep, without success. She dozed in her bed, lulled by the drone of the squawk box jargon. By dawn, however, she was back in front of the television, awaiting that first telecast.
Susan Borman never even tried to sleep. She knew she wouldn't sleep until the men left lunar orbit. She sat in her kitchen, intently watching the television and listening to the squawk box.
Hidden behind the moon, the astronauts hurried to set up their 16mm movie camera. With only five minutes before they moved into daylight, the flight plan said that the camera should be running automatically as they glided over the moon's stark, colorless surface.
As the sun came up, the three men focused on taking pictures. Anders, in charge of photography, kept moving back and forth between the few good windows, alternating from still to movie cameras, while also directing the other two men in what to photograph. The work was made somewhat difficult in that three of their five windows were practically unusable, covered with what Anders later described "as purplish smears, as if a service station attendant had attempted to clean a windshield using an oily rag."
1
Anders' photography was guided by some carefully detailed reconnaissance maps, produced from photos taken by a number of unmanned lunar orbiters, both American and Russian.* These charts not only told him what parts of the lunar surface he was flying over at every moment of the flight, they also indicated what camera shutter speeds and f-stops he should use.
While the moon's major nearside landmarks were named, the far side's features were mostly nameless. To make his job easier as well as honor a number
* While there had been no cooperation between the two space programs, the Soviets in 1960 had published an atlas of the moon's far side based on photos taken by their Luna 3 probe. This data helped supplement the surveys taken by NASA lunar orbiters.

 

Page 165
of people, Bill had taken the explorer's prerogative and put names to these craters and mountains. Three craters he named Grissom, White, and Chaffee. Others he named Kraft, Slayton, Low, Von Braun, and Shepard. Some he named Mercury, Apollo, Texas, and Washington.
And shrewdly, he picked three distinct craters just on the edge of the farside's horizon, just out of sight of earth, to name Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Though the earth could never see these features directly, from his position in orbit Bill would be able to relay a television picture of them back to earth.
Soon it was time for that first lunar telecast. The flight plan called for a televised press conference the moment they came out from behind the moon. After several minutes' effort to set up the television camera, the astronauts switched it on just as they regained contact with the earth. The picture showed a bright lunar surface silhouetted by the window frame.
This was mostly Bill Anders's show. For the next eleven minutes he shifted the TV camera between two windows, describing to the world the landmarks that were slowly drifting past. Lovell studied the maps to help him identify the less well-known features, while Borman said nothing as he steered, using the hand controls to keep the spacecraft's nose pointed down so that the surface was visible in the windows.
Ever so often Anders would add other details about the surface. ''The color of the moon looks a very whitish gray like dirty beach sand, and with lots of footprints in it."
Once or twice Lovell added his own impression. "Don't these new craters look like pickaxes striking concrete, leaving a lot of fine haze dust?"
Mostly, however, Anders let the picture speak for itself. He wanted the people on earth to experience what it was like to orbit the moon.
Valerie watched and was disappointed at how bleak and splattered the moon looked.
No jagged edges,
she thought.
Marilyn Lovell watched with growing wonder. She looked at that bleak, beaten lunar surface and thought,
It's so vast; it's so empty
. There was no life there. Nothing at all.
Susan couldn't care less what the moon looked like. She just wanted Frank to succeed. Once again she closed her eyes and listened to their voices, trying to imagine herself in the capsule with him. She couldn't comprehend
BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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