Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (20 page)

Subtle diplomacy was tricky. The alternative was to be direct, but this way of doing things had led to problems with Houston's managers during Buzz's campaign for a Gemini flight, and more recently with Neil. Nevertheless Aldrin decided that being direct was worth the risk, and this time he would go to George Low, the most senior Apollo manager in Houston.

Chapter 8
A TISSUE-PAPER SPACECRAFT

While inspecting the lunar module during the third day of the flight, Buzz picked his way carefully about the cramped cabin. Plumbing and bundles of wiring lay exposed on the floor, and in places the walls were no thicker than a couple of layers of aluminium. Fragile as it was, the LM remains unique in being the world's only manned spacecraft capable of a powered landing, whether on the Moon or anywhere else.
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The Mercury capsule, the Gemini spacecraft, even the Apollo command module were designed simply to fall into water, slowed only by parachutes. The Russians also used parachutes, although their spacecraft came down over land. In touching down on the Moon, which does not have an atmosphere, parachutes would be useless. If the LM were to survive unscathed, a gentle, powered descent was critical.

As he went about his work, Buzz continued to report on what he was doing for the benefit of CapCom Charlie Duke and those watching on television.

Aldrin: 'Like old home week, Charlie, to get back in the LM again.'

Mission Control: 'Roger. Must be some experience. Is Collins going to go in and look around?'

Armstrong: 'We're willing to let him go but he hasn't come up with the price of the ticket yet.'

Mission Control: 'Roger. I'd advise him to keep his hands off the switches.'

Collins: 'If I can get him to keep his hands off my DSKY, it'd be a fair swap.'

The TV broadcast, which NASA regarded as the clearest yet sent from space, lasted a little over an hour and a half.
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During that time Apollo 11 coasted more than 3,000 miles.

Once Buzz returned to the command module, the hatch was closed and the LM was sealed shut once again. The crew then completed a round of their routine chores before sitting down to dinner, accompanied by music. Both Armstrong and Collins had taken selections on cassettes which they listened to on a portable tape recorder; Buzz had decided he would be content with whatever they chose.

Once the spacecraft had been put into a PTC roll, Aldrin looked out at the heavens rotating slowly past the windows. Suddenly, there out in space was an object that was reflecting light and which almost appeared to be shadowing them. After Buzz pointed it out to Neil and Michael the three of them gathered at the windows, each waiting for the object to swing into view as the spacecraft gently rolled on its axis. Buzz got down into the lower equipment bay and took a closer look through the sextant and telescope, but all he could say for certain was that the object sometimes appeared to be L-shaped. As flying objects go it was definitely unidentified. In Buzz's words, they 'sure as hell were not going to talk about it to the ground' for fear of the curiosity and even concern it would raise. Someone might even suggest that the mission should be cancelled since aliens were apparently going along for the ride. 'We didn't want to do anything that gave the UFO nuts any ammunition,' Aldrin later said.
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The crew had already bid goodnight to Houston, but after thinking over his choice of words, Neil contacted Mission Control.

Armstrong: 'Houston, Apollo 11.'

Mission Control: 'Go ahead, 11. Over.'

Armstrong: 'Do you have any idea where the S-IVB [third stage] is with respect to us?'

Mission Control: 'Stand by.'

Mission Control: 'Apollo 11, Houston. The S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now. Over.'

Armstrong: 'OK. Thank you.'

With the third stage eliminated, the men began to discuss other possible explanations. Sometimes the mysterious object looked like a hollow cylinder, at other times it resembled two connected rings. 'It certainly seemed to be within our vicinity and of a very sizeable dimension,' Buzz later remembered.
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When Buzz approached George Low in March, seeking an answer to the 'first out of the hatch' question, Aldrin insisted it would be in the best interest of 'morale and training' if the decision were made quickly.
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Buzz asked whether Neil's civilian status gave him an advantage, but Low told him it was irrelevant.
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Buzz was right in arguing that the matter needed to be settled soon, since Aldrin and Armstrong had to begin training for the EVA. For the moment they continued to work with the lunar module. Both had served on the backup crew for Apollo 8 and were already familiar with the LM. But the spacecraft's operational performance was largely untested and there was still much to learn. As part of their training, Armstrong and Aldrin occasionally visited Grumman's plant at Bethpage on Long Island, New York, to monitor the development of LM-5, the lunar module they would fly to the Moon.

After winning the $388 million contract to build a lunar lander in November 1962, Grumman quickly came up against a range of formidable problems. Immersed in a multitude of competing demands, the LM was to become one of the most challenging components of the entire Apollo programme. The painstaking search for solutions was led by Tom Kelly, a likeable engineer from New York. Supported by a team of 100 technicians, Kelly had been working on ideas for a lander even before Kennedy had laid down his challenge in 1961. Early on, he realised the vehicle would need to be small and light yet rugged enough to withstand the launch into Earth orbit and the three-day journey through space.

Kelly's work was to be overseen by the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in Houston. Already the head of the Apollo office, Charles Frick, was embroiled in difficulties over the command module with his counterpart at North American Aviation. When he saw them 'screaming and cursing at each other' Chris Kraft could barely believe it.
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Kraft had heard the relationship was troubled but after shifting his attention from Gemini to the lunar missions, he saw for himself that 'bad vibes from Apollo were everywhere'.
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Kraft found that lessons learned during Gemini were being ignored both inside NASA and beyond. He believed the Apollo office had begun to adopt a stubborn sense of independence, and worse, this was filtering down to North American. Soon he began to suspect Grumman was slipping in the same direction.

The lander would be carried into space by the powerful Saturn V rocket, which could lift a 125-ton payload into Earth orbit. But this distance was less than 1 per cent of Apollo 11's journey to the Moon. After carrying the spacecraft into orbit, the booster's final stage would then re-ignite for the relatively short TLI burn. There was only so much fuel the third stage could carry and during TLI this would be quickly spent. Yet within this small amount of time the stage would have to push the fully laden spacecraft fast enough to send it all the way to the Moon. These limitations meant that at launch the rocket's payload – the spacecraft at the top of the stack – could not weigh more than 50 tons. The sturdy command module, robust enough to survive re-entry, weighed more than six tons, the service module behind it weighed almost 26, and the lunar module would have to carry at least 12 tons of fuel for its round trip to the surface. After equipment, consumables for the crew and scientific experiments had been taken into account, Kelly was told that the lander itself could not weigh more than four tons. The restriction was marginally increased during the spacecraft's development, but from the start the entire project was characterised by a perpetual struggle to save weight. The Saturn's constraints had an impact on almost every element of the LM's design. Failure to accept them would end any hope of a lunar landing before Apollo 11 even left Earth.
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Despite its lightweight structure, the spacecraft would have to be strong enough to survive a rough landing on uneven and dusty ground. Its critical systems would have to cope with a hostile environment beyond all hope of assistance, and it would have to be able to successfully launch from the lunar surface on its first attempt. When Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Kennedy, 463 people sitting nearby guided the launch process and thousands of specialists were ready to resolve any last-minute problems. When the lander launched from the Moon, its two-man crew would be on their own.

In developing what Grumman initially called the lunar excursion module (LEM), Kelly's team proposed a two-stage spacecraft. The bottom half, the descent stage, contained the descent engine and associated fuel tanks. Delivering 10,000lb of thrust, the descent engine was the first large rocket motor that could be throttled up or down. This meant that the spacecraft could be flown at a decreasing speed as it slowly approached the surface. The descent would be partially controlled by a computer, allowing maximum fuel efficiency – which was critical since the LEM was carrying the slimmest margin of propellants. Only in the final stage of the descent would the spacecraft be flown manually.

Most of the top half of the vehicle, the ascent stage, was taken up by the cockpit, though it too had an engine. After the EVA, the astronauts would return to the cabin and when ready they would ignite four explosive bolts that would sever umbilical cables connecting the two sections of the spacecraft. They would then fire the ascent engine. The ascent stage would blast off from the Moon, and on returning to lunar orbit the crew would search for the command module, as envisaged in the original proposal for lunar orbit rendezvous. Armstrong and Aldrin would then rejoin Collins for the journey home.

In an emergency on the way down to the Moon, the crew could jettison the descent stage and use the ascent engine to quickly climb back up into space. Since emergencies in a lightweight spacecraft flying close to the rocky surface of the Moon could potentially be disastrous, the two engines needed to be as reliable as possible. Both were hypergolic, in that each used two types of propellant which ignited simply when allowed to mix. Neither relied on complicated moving parts such as pumps or igniters, therefore they were less likely to go wrong than traditional types of engine. The LEM's 16 thrusters, arranged in four groups of four around the ascent stage, also used hypergolic propellants.

Kelly's team originally put seats in the spacecraft, in common with almost every other flying machine. The crew were to look out of four large windows that were made of extremely thick glass and embedded in a heavy supporting structure.
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But this design came to be regarded as too heavy and two smaller triangular windows were fitted instead. These made it harder to see from the seats so bar-stools and metal cage-like structures were considered, until 1964, when two Houston engineers suggested Kelly would save further weight by removing the seats altogether. Standing during the short flight, the astronauts would be closer to the window than if they were seated, giving them a better view. 'Trolley-car configuration' astronaut Pete Conrad called it, thinking of a driver standing at his wheel. The crew would be held in place by Velcro strips securing their feet to the floor and by cables attached at the waist that were held under tension by a system of pulleys.

Now that the astronauts would be standing, the floor-space could be reduced until it was just three and a half feet deep. Looking towards the back wall, the space behind the crew positions was largely taken up by equipment casings that protruded into the cockpit. A unit on the left contained the environmental control system, while the floor in the middle of this area was raised to knee height to accommodate the ascent engine. Squeezed into the tiny ceiling above lay the hatch leading up into the command module. Despite the technological breakthroughs in the LEM's design, there was no escaping the thought that man was going to the Moon in a cabin the size of a broom cupboard. It was even equipped with a small vacuum cleaner to deal with the lunar dust.

For many months the spacecraft's torturous development process was delayed by problems, including engine instability, battery faults and leaks from lightweight pipes – and all the while the weight kept creeping up. In 1965, Houston asked for the limit of the LEM's load to be marginally raised. Headquarters consented, but Kelly knew much still needed to be done to keep within the restrictions. Grumman launched 'Operation Scrape' in an attempt to shave as much material from the structure as possible. This was followed by the Super Weight Improvement Program, implemented by a crack team of weight-saving experts personally led by Kelly. 'At one time we were paying about $10,000 an ounce to take weight off,' astronaut Jim McDivitt later recalled. Among other things, these campaigns led to a decision to scrap the panels protecting the vehicle from the Sun's heat and replace them with Kapton. Specifically developed for the LEM, Kapton – a golden, plastic foil – became one of its characteristic features. Crinkled by hand in order to reduce the transmission of heat, the foil was visible only on the descent stage since the upper half of the spacecraft was cloaked in a layer of aluminium plates, designed to dissipate the impact of micrometeoroids. The cockpit was pressurised, but as an added layer of protection during the descent the crew would wear pressure-suits.