Apollo: The Race to the Moon (15 page)

The problem facing the Space Task Group was that, to know whether a part truly functions eighty times out of a hundred, they had to test it several hundred times. In fact, the individual parts of the spacecraft were supposed to have reliabilities of .99999, or .999999, or sometimes .9999999. On a probability basis alone, there was no way to make such claims on the basis of statistical evidence unless the engineers tested the parts millions of times.

Testing a part millions of times wasn’t possible. It wasn’t necessary, either, in the view of most of the engineers in the program: Design it right and fabricate it per the print, and the component will work, every time. Engineers of this persuasion, Faget among them, argued that their time was much better spent searching for design flaws than mindlessly running tests. On the other hand, when you have tens of thousands of parts and are working with high-energy systems and are trying things that have never been tried before, the chances that something is going to break down somewhere along the road are high. “Max was sort of all for saying, ‘Gee, if we are successful half of the time, that would be well worth it,’” Caldwell Johnson remembered. Gilruth said that fifty percent was a little too low. When it came to completing the mission successfully, nine out of ten seemed about right to him. As far as the safety of the crew was concerned, he hated to put a number on it, but to lose one crew out of a hundred sounded reasonable, given such an intrinsically hazardous mission.

About that time, Walt Williams, the Space Task Group’s deputy director for Flight Operations, joined the discussion in Gilruth’s office. He thought that they were being ridiculous. Losing one crew out of a hundred was a reasonable goal but they couldn’t afford to say so—it didn’t put enough pressure on the contractors and the operators. The Range Safety people use one in a million, Williams pointed out, in deciding what chance they would accept of a rocket landing in a populated area. Why not use that?

Gilruth thought that was unrealistic. “You ought to say what you honestly want,” he reasoned. “In the long run, that’s a better way than to try to kid yourself. It’s like setting your clock up when you know you’re going to be late.” They compromised. The probability of getting the crew back safely was set at three nines, or 999 times in 1,000. The probability of completing the assigned mission was set at two nines, 99 times in 100.

And that, Johnson recalled, is how it happened, in a ten-minute conversation. “We wrote those numbers down, and they had a most profound effect on the cost of the program. If you took one decimal point off of that thing, in theory you could probably cut the program cost in half. If we’d added one more, there’s no way in the world we could ever have done it —there’s not enough money in the world to do it.”* But having set the requirements for the spacecraft’s reliability in getting to the moon and back did not help to answer the deeper question: How the hell were they actually going to do it?

[* The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, “Is there any reason why it won’t work?” to which they answer: “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, “Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines.”]

A truism about NASA during the Apollo years is that thousands of people were involved in everything, and this was as true of the design of the Apollo spacecraft as anything else. Still, at the core of the spacecraft design was the unique presence of Max Faget, and always at Max Faget’s elbow was his closest collaborator, Caldwell C. Johnson, Jr. “Collaborators” isn’t really an adequate word. They were sometimes Wilbur and Orville Wright, sometimes Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and sometimes Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Caldwell Johnson—the first name is pronounced “Cadwell” in the Virginia manner—was small and slight like Faget and just as blunt and opinionated. They were both men whom other engineers called “intuitive.” But Johnson was a man of the Tidewater peninsula from birth, the sort of fellow who looked at first glance as if he ought to be whittling a stick on the porch of a country store. Twenty-five years after moving to Houston, he would still talk in a rich Virginia accent and an untamed down-home vernacular.

Johnson, who didn’t have an engineering degree (he dropped out after his first year at the University of Virginia, partly for financial reasons and partly because he was bored with school), had grown up within shouting distance of Langley. He had watched the Brain Busters and imitated them, and in the process he became an unexcelled builder of model airplanes. With a minor reputation even in aeronautical engineering circles as the kid who had won a variety of awards in model-building competitions, he was hired as a model-builder for P.A.R.D. at the age of eighteen. In later years, it was a recurring headache for Bob Gilruth to promote Johnson to the next Civil Service level. The Civil Service people kept insisting that because he was not an engineer he couldn’t go any further. After all, it was right there on his resume: just a high school diploma.

That sort of obsession with credentials made Johnson cranky (“The kind of stuff you learn in school ain’t worth a pinch of shit anyway”), but in any case his resumé never seemed to bother the engineers who worked for him. As Owen Maynard, who had become one of Johnson’s section chiefs, said, “You didn’t go around stumping Caldwell on some little piece of physics or aerodynamics that you’d learned in college.” But mostly, people remembered Johnson’s ability to take an idea and translate it into an elegant design. “Caldwell’s the sort of guy who’s the artistic designer as opposed to the engineering designer,” remembered one colleague. “He says, ‘Well, dammit, if it doesn’t look right, it’s not right.’ And he’ll come up with something that looks right and it’ll work.”

Working for Johnson was not like working for a run-of-the-mill engineer, especially during the early days when the Space Task Group was still back on the Chesapeake Bay and Johnson’s home fronted on the James River. Owen Maynard used to get to work and find a note on his desk. “There’s three ducks and five flounders in the refrigerator for you,” it might say, and alongside that would be another note listing half a dozen technical tasks for Maynard. Johnson had been out on the water before daybreak, doing his thinking on the boat. Often, the notes were in the form of drawings. Johnson’s ability with a pencil was legendary in NASA—Johnson drew freehand sketches that looked like engineering drawings and engineering drawings that were works of art.

Johnson detested higher authority every bit as much as Faget did and he instinctively disagreed with anyone whom he considered a smartass. When they were youngsters together in P.A.R.D., Faget discovered how to get Johnson to do his best work for you. If you just gave him a sketch and asked him to work it up into an engineering drawing, your work would languish on the bottom of his stack—Johnson was swamped with engineers wanting him to do their drawings for them. What you had to do was to design something yourself in detail—down to the last nut and bolt—and then tell Johnson, “I’ve got a pretty good design here, just draw it up the way it is.” Johnson couldn’t stand that. “It would inevitably bring out the best in him,” Faget recalled, as Johnson set out to show Faget how he should have designed the goddamned thing. He was, Faget concluded, “undoubtedly one of the orneriest guys you could work with.”

Of his long and spectacularly successful partnership with Faget, Johnson once said, “We need each other. He has some pretty good big ideas, and he really isn’t too red-hot in turning them into good engineering things. And I’m pretty good at turning big ideas into good engineering things. I don’t like to go around dreaming up new big ideas.” Many observers have been surprised that two people so opinionated and so ready to argue were able to work together for more than forty years. But Owen Maynard, who watched them during Apollo, shrugged off such considerations. What you have to understand, he said, is that Faget and Johnson couldn’t have a real disagreement. “Their minds are almost interconnected.”

Caldwell Johnson was once reflecting on the accounts he had read about the design of the Apollo spacecraft. “The way the history books say things came about,” he said, “they didn’t come about that way. The official records and all, that’s a long way of explaining a lot of things. It turns out that the thing was done by people, not by machines, and people have a way of getting to a very rational conclusion in a very irrational manner.”

By the time they began to design the Apollo spacecraft, Faget and the others who had been doing the preliminary work were told that this time, unlike the early Mercury days, they couldn’t just lay out the design they liked and let a contract for somebody to build it. This time, they would be more systematic. This time, they would take advantage of industry’s accumulated expertise.

First, they would complete their own preliminary studies, developing some broad guidelines. Then NASA would put out study contracts with three private aerospace firms, and these firms, each with its own team of engineers, would independently develop their own more detailed configurations. And then, with all these options in hand, Faget’s division would assess the situation, choose the best design, and prepare the Request for Proposals that would lead to the final design and production contract.

What actually happened adhered to the letter of the process, but just barely. Faget’s division produced a preliminary design for a spacecraft. Then NASA awarded the three study contracts to Convair, General Electric, and Martin. But while these firms were earnestly going about their work, Faget’s division was continuing to develop its own design.* The others never had a chance. “We had no intention of ever using the other three, as far as I know,” said Johnson. “At least, I didn’t.” Of course, Johnson added, “we couldn’t lose. We could watch all three of them but they couldn’t watch each other or us. So everything good they did, we would steal. But everything good that we had, they didn’t know about.”

[* Faget and Johnson agree that it is impossible to specify precisely who designed the Apollo spacecraft, but, still omitting many who played an important role, these men were also central to the effort: Bob Piland, Kurt Strass, Owen Maynard, Bob Chilton, Jack Heberlig, Alan Kehlet, and Bryan Erb.]

When it came to the choice of the Apollo shape, they didn’t even wait to see what the contractors came up with. Before the study contracts had been awarded, Faget called them together and said, “Let’s quit messing around and arguing about lenticular shapes, or this shape, or that shape. We’re going to pick one.” And the one they picked was the gumdrop-shaped spacecraft known to history, with its three-man crew, gently rounded corners, and gleaming metallic skin. By the end of October 1960, seven months before Kennedy’s speech, Johnson had drawn a picture of it that to a layman is indistinguishable from the spacecraft that flew to the moon.

When after six months the three firms presented their painstakingly developed proposals, Max Faget accepted them, thanked the contractors for their hard work, and announced that the Space Task Group would use its own design. “It was kind of a gutsy thing to do,” Faget acknowledged, “to say, ‘Well, we paid them all this money to tell us how to build this thing, and they each came out with a different design, and we still want a design just like the one we’ve been using all the time.’ But that’s what we did.”

Not everyone was happy with that bit of Faget chutzpah. “It was a real shock to the people who had worked on the studies,” said one man close to the process. “Their Apollo shape had no real maneuverability. As it turns out, we didn’t need it. They didn’t realize that then, though… . A lot of these things were just gut decisions on the part of people like Caldwell Johnson and Max Faget, saying, ‘We don’t have time for that’ or ‘It’s going to cost too much money’ or ‘We don’t like it’ or ‘Congress won’t buy it’ or something. But they had no technical basis.”

Max Faget told anyone who wanted to listen why this kind of talk was nonsense. On maneuverability, he said, they had good evidence from preliminary guidance studies that the spacecraft would be entering the earth’s atmosphere within a narrow ten-mile corridor. “Matter of fact, it was a damned good thing we didn’t put more maneuverability in it than we did,” Faget said. “We really spent most of the time getting rid of the damn lift-to-drag ratio by banking back and forth.” And through the backward-looking lens of history, Faget had the strongest of all arguments on his side: The spacecraft he wanted got built and flew successfully within the time schedule. Still, Johnson’s own point about history and the way decisions got made (“People have a way of coming to a very rational conclusion in a very irrational manner”) also had a lot to do with the process.

The choice of a three-man crew, for example, turned out to be perfect. Two men were needed for the lunar exploration activities and a third man was needed to operate the command module while the other two were on the lunar surface. But at the time they were making decisions about the size of the crew, the designers hadn’t thought about such things as lunar modules. They just figured that they would run the duty shifts as the Navy did, four hours on, eight off, which meant they needed three astronauts to ensure that an astronaut would be on duty all the time. By the time Apollo flew, the flight controllers on the ground could monitor the cabin systems continuously and the astronauts could follow a more natural pattern of sleeping and working at the same time, so they no longer needed the third man to keep watch—but they did need him now to carry out the lunar-orbit rendezvous.

An even better example of Johnson’s principle is the way that Apollo came to have those gracefully rounded corners. “You’ll talk to some aerodynamicists, or some heat transfer people, and they’ll explain to you the marvelous characteristics of this rounded corner, and why it was this way, and all,” said Johnson. “That’s a bunch of nonsense. When I first laid that thing out, it was a cone like Gemini and Mercury. And there’s a good reason for it, too. That’s a nice clean separation of flow on those sharp corners.” And, imperatively, the diameter of the bottom of the spacecraft was no bigger than the diameter of the third stage of the launch vehicle that Marshall was developing—160 inches.