Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (10 page)

Although the clock number issue created much discord within Grumman Engineering, we also felt respect growing for the LM program within the company. Eight aerospace companies had bid for the LM, and by winning this hotly contested prize Grumman had gained greatly in prestige, business base, and future competitiveness. Within Grumman we were no longer perceived as oddball “space cadets” but as a major part of the company’s future.

Thanks to a coincidence, word spread quickly at Grumman and on Long Island about the Apollo program. I served on the program committee of the Long Island section of the aerospace professional association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Before Grumman’s LM proposal preparation began I made arrangements with NASA for air force major Dick Henry, who was assigned to the Apollo program office in NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to speak on the Apollo program at an AIAA dinner meeting to be held at Grumman-Bethpage in November 1962. When the long-planned day arrived, I was not able to attend because I was in Houston for the negotiations. Due to the timing—two weeks after the announcement of the LM award to Grumman—the response was overwhelming. An average Long Island AIAA dinner meeting drew fifty to sixty attendees; this one had more than five hundred reservation requests.

Grumman decided to accommodate all who wanted to come, seating about three hundred people in our largest speaker-equipped cafeteria, the overflow watching on closed-circuit TV in a second cafeteria. Many of the attendees were from local aerospace suppliers and machine shops, wondering how they could get some LM business from Grumman. For them the Grumman Procurement Department announced that a lunar module supplier day would be held at Grumman as soon as the LM program’s needs were better defined. Local press and TV also attended Major Henry’s briefing, and the
widespread publicity attracted a flood of job seekers to Grumman’s employment office, helping us to hire skilled people to staff the LM program.

The LM program became the talk of not only Grumman but also all Long Island. Neighbors and acquaintances went out of their way to congratulate me and to wish Grumman luck on the new venture. I knew we had arrived, however, when one day in mid-January I went onto the Engineering floor to look at the area that was being set aside as interim space for LM. There in a large side corridor I could scarcely believe what I saw: tall stacks of brand-new IBM Selectrics in their cartons, reserved for the LM program! Recalling how I had scrounged to get three of those machines to write the proposal, I was astonished. I did not stop bragging within Grumman about that discovery for weeks.

On 14 January 1963 Gilruth visited Joe Gavin at Bethpage. They resolved the outstanding negotiation items and agreed upon a price and final contract wording. NASA then issued direction to Grumman to proceed with LM development. We were on our way! The contract was not formally signed until early March, at a revised cost figure of $387.9 million.
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After the announcement of the LM contract award to Grumman by NASA, we received friendly overtures at all management levels from North American Aviation, which had been chosen a year earlier as the Apollo spacecraft contractor.
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North American Aviation was responsible for designing and developing the Apollo spacecraft, consisting of the command and service modules, and for integrating the lunar module into the complete Apollo spacecraft stack and ensuring compatibility of the spacecraft with the launch vehicle.
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North American Aviation designed and built the spacecraft/LM adapter, a truncated conical structural shell that housed the LM atop the Saturn booster at launch and upon which the CSM was mounted. They developed the launch escape system (LES), with its solid rocket and tower of tubular struts, the purpose of which was to snatch the CM with its astronauts safely away from the Saturn if it exploded before or shortly after launch. Together with NASA-Houston, they planned the Little Joe 2 solid-rocket program to flight-test the CM’s parachute recovery system and the LES.

North American Aviation was unquestionably the senior partner in the Apollo spacecraft development team, consisting of North American Aviation (CSM and spacecraft integration), Grumman (LM), MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (spacecraft guidance and navigation), and General Electric (Apollo reliability and quality assurance [R&QA] and ACE). NAA was the first aerospace contractor selected for the Apollo spacecraft and was a much larger company than Grumman, and we were very pleased by their welcoming attitude.

Joe Gavin, Saul Ferdman, and I visited NAA’s facility at Downey, California, where we were graciously hosted by John Paup, the company’s Apollo program director, Norm Ryker, the Engineering manager, and Charles Feltz, the project engineer. They showed us through the aging World War II aircraft factory buildings, which had been used by Consolidated Vultee to build B-24 Liberator
bombers during the war and were being spruced up with cleanser and paint for Apollo. The general appearance of these buildings was not unlike Grumman’s World War II factories. Upon entering the adjacent Apollo Conference Center, however, the dreary world of wartime leftovers was forgotten in a tasteful display of modern functional elegance.

A large reception area, thickly carpeted and decorated in designer shades of brown, orange, and beige, led into the main Apollo meeting room, a combined conference room and briefing theater designed to hold 150 people. It was carpeted and comfortably furnished and contained the best audio-visual and climate-control equipment then available. Paup advised us to provide such a facility; NASA insisted upon comfort and efficiency in their conference centers, as meetings took up so much of their time.

Back home Gavin and Ferdman had a set of renovation plans drawn up, which, although not the equal of North American Aviation’s, were a major improvement over what we had. Nothing happened, though, because top management, usually Titterton, Schwendler, or Towl, was very skeptical of the need for such opulence. The company fathers and their navy customers had grown up and worked in spartan, austere surroundings. They cherished the “hair-shirt” image of frugality and conservatism, which had always suited the navy. How, they asked (not unreasonably), could we expect the navy to be content with second-class facilities at Grumman if they saw a luxurious NASA center right in Bethpage? Did not NASA and the navy both work for the same U.S. government? There also seemed to be an unspoken suspicion that we in the LM program were simply seeking to inflate our own status and egos.

Not until the disastrous LM-1 Customer Acceptance Readiness Review in June 1967 was it obvious that the austere image that played so well with the navy was alienating the NASA management of Apollo. We finally did what our Apollo teammate had recommended more than four years earlier, but by then it was too little and too late.

2

Designing, Building, and Testing

5

Engineering a Miracle

Congratulations—you certainly look happy.”

“It’s wonderful. Good luck!”

“You look so excited. I’m really glad for you.”

Good wishes poured forth from my relatives and friends during the ten-day Christmas holiday break, further stimulating a dizzy feeling of excitement that I could scarcely contain. I had the aerospace engineer’s dream job of the century. Not only would I design and build the first spaceship to land men on another heavenly body, but I was encouraged by NASA to let my imagination run wild and question everything we and they had done in prior studies and the LM proposal. I could start fresh, with a clean sheet of paper, using our past work as a point of departure. Such freedom! Now I could probe some puzzling questions more deeply: With no aerodynamics, why did we propose a smoothly contoured LM? Why not just let its form follow function as it will? How would we fly the landing, and what would we find to land upon? Could two men alone safely launch a rocket ship from the Moon? There were so many fascinating issues to explore—it would challenge every bit of ingenuity and talent I could muster. I longed for the holiday break to end so we could start redesigning the lunar module.

In mid-January 1963 we moved into Plant 25, our new LM Engineering building, built on what had been the softball fields on the north side of Plant 5, the red-brick World War II building that housed Grumman Engineering, Preliminary Design, and the Experimental Shops. With 190,000 square feet on three floors, the empty new building seemed huge. In Grumman style it was plain, even austere, with cinder-block walls painted a light beige, reinforced concrete floors covered with speckled beige-and-black vinyl tiles, and white suspended ceilings with row after row of recessed fluorescent lights. But it was fresh and clean, the polished floors gleaming as bright as our hopes for the audacious project we were beginning. On each floor an almost continuous
narrow window ran along each outside wall. The steel-partitioned offices on the periphery had half-height glass panels on their inside walls to allow natural light to penetrate the interior. Half-height partitioned offices were erected across an aisle from the windowed offices in some locations, but mostly the interior floor space was open to accommodate the typical aerospace “bull pen” mass-seating arrangement. The office areas for the group leaders whose engineering groups were scheduled to move in first were in place, along with neat rows of new and shiny beige metal desks and chairs.

Bill Rathke and I moved into a large window office on the second floor in the middle of the south wall facing Plant 5. We had decided that as LM Engineering manager and project engineer we must work together hand-in-glove and felt that sharing an office would enhance communication between us. Our beige metal desks and chairs, the same as those on the floor, faced back-to-back, Bill’s looking toward the window and mine facing the Engineering floor. There was a large metal table at the end of the room and a blackboard and corkboard on the adjacent metal partitioned wall. On the other side of the partition was a large conference room primarily for our use. It was filled with new furniture: a metal table at one end in front of a blackboard on the wall, and several rows of not-uncomfortable straight-backed metal chairs with vinyl-upholstered seats and backs.

I had come to know and respect Bill Rathke since he had been assigned to the LM program during the proposal. He was in his mid-forties, short and stocky, with wavy dark brown hair and square, rimless eyeglasses. His quiet demeanor made him seem solemn, unless you noticed his eyes, which were often merry and twinkling. His steady, amiable disposition and dry sense of humor made him easy to work with, and his wealth of aircraft design and project leadership experience provided me with much to learn and emulate.

Bill Rathke came to Grumman in 1943 with a freshly minted degree in mechanical engineering from Iowa State University. He had never been east of Iowa in his life and was greatly relieved to find that Long Island was not the same as New York City. Living accommodations were scarce in Bethpage and other nearby villages, so Rathke found a room in a boardinghouse that catered to Grumman people. A few months later he and three other newly hired engineers rented a former summer house near the water in Huntington Bay Hills.
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Rathke loved sports and at Iowa State had hoped to play football. His short stature, flat feet, and poor eyesight made that impossible, but he became the Iowa team’s manager, looking after the players’ gear and traveling to games. Even the wartime draft would not take him—he was 4F—but they urged him to get a job in the defense industry. He had taken courses in aerodynamics and aircraft design and eagerly interviewed with the airplane company representatives who recruited on campus.

At Grumman he started in structural design, but he showed an ability to
design other systems as well and obviously had leadership talent. He soon became project engineer of the W2F antisubmarine aircraft, one of Grumman’s earliest successful airborne electronic weapons systems. Rathke had more than once taken a complex aerospace project from preliminary design through development, manufacturing, and into flight—the route we now had to follow with LM. Knowing his impressive credentials, I was delighted that he was modest and unassuming as well.

We soon developed an effective partnership for running the LM Engineering Department, keeping each other fully informed through morning and evening discussions so that we could function interchangeably. We divided the work along whatever lines our backgrounds suggested but tried to avoid becoming specialized.

The one factor I had not considered when I suggested to Bill that we share an office was that he was a heavy smoker of cigars. A nonsmoker myself, I found the smoky atmosphere in our office unbearable because my eyes teared and my eyelids became red and itchy. We got Building Maintenance to install an exhaust fan in the ceiling behind a louver directly above Bill’s desk. This solved the problem. I watched contentedly as the clouds of gray smoke swiftly vanished into the louver, leaving the air in the office largely smoke free.

Eagerly I tore into the design work facing us. At the LM contract negotiations NASA had made clear that in selecting Grumman for the job they were not buying the design that we had presented in the proposal. Now that we were under contract they wanted us to redo the preliminary design, using more conservative assumptions on weight and redundancy, and with NASA’s extensive advice and approval. Rathke and I got the former LM proposal team together, along with the newcomers to the program, and laid out a three-month program to reexamine and rework the proposal design using new assumptions. The primary new assumptions were an increase in the fully loaded LM target weight from twenty-two thousand to twenty-five thousand pounds and an emphasis on assuring that no single failure in LM would affect crew safety—to be achieved by redundancy or by design simplicity and safety factors. I challenged our people to start afresh and rethink the design, because this time what we designed was what we would
build
and
fly
to the Moon: “This is no longer a proposal drill—this is for real!”