Apollo: The Race to the Moon (50 page)

All this led Webb to two conclusions, mixing loyalty and political canniness. If something did go wrong, he wanted to be able to defend NASA and his engineers aggressively. If he were administrator, anything he said would sound self-serving. Also, there was nothing to gain by staying. If C-prime were a success, it would not add much to his experience at NASA; if it were a failure, he would not only be the obvious target of recriminations, he would have to respond without the resources of the administrator’s office to support him. Staying with NASA as of the fall of 1968 was for Jim Webb a high-risk, low-gain proposition.

On September 16, Webb went over to the White House and renewed a suggestion he had made before, that perhaps it was time for him to retire. L.B.J. took him up on it, suggesting that Webb resign immediately. Webb was surprised that Johnson wanted to do it that very day, but he was glad to be released. James E. Webb, NASA’s second administrator, its longest-tenured, and, in the minds of many, its finest, left NASA on October 7, 1968, four days before the first men flew in an Apollo spacecraft. He was replaced by Tom Paine.

Rocco Petrone was sitting with Sam Phillips and George Low in the Firing Room, watching a dry run with the Apollo 7 astronauts, when the news of Webb’s resignation came over the wire. It had been a rough day, Petrone remembered—the dry run had encountered the usual series of problems, unpleasantly reminiscent of another dry run with the crew of A.S.-204, nineteen months earlier. Everybody was edgy. Then Jack King, the Cape’s public information officer, came over to Petrone’s console and told them that Jim Webb had just announced his retirement. It came as a surprise to all of them; this was, they recognized, the passing of an era. Still, there was another side to it. George Low turned to Sam Phillips and said, “This makes C-prime possible.”

It had already been announced that a new mission was going to be inserted between Schirra’s flight and Jim McDivitt’s test of the LEM. Phillips had given a press conference in late August, revealing that the new Apollo 8 might be more than just a low-earth-orbit flight. NASA was preparing a “flexible mission,” he said. Perhaps the spacecraft would have a high earth orbit, with an apogee several thousand miles out. Conceivably, Apollo 8 could involve a circumlunar flight, but Phillips buried that possibility under so much talk about the “flexible mission” that only Tom O’Toole of the Washington Post put the circumlunar option in his lead. Most of the others came away from Phillips’s briefing thinking that a lunar mission was such a remote possibility that they didn’t even mention it.

By the time that Apollo 7 was launched on a Saturn IB with Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele on October 11, 1968, the press had discovered that the possibilities of a circumlunar flight were greater than they had realized. Then Apollo 7 turned out to be close to a perfect mission, discounting the head colds that plagued all three astronauts and some wrangling between the crew and ground. The eleven-day flight gave the controllers a chance to wring out all of the Apollo spacecraft’s environmental and control systems. The S-IVB that would have to push Apollo 8’s spacecraft into a translunar orbit worked perfectly. So did the S.P.S. engine on the service module that would slow the spacecraft into lunar orbit and later speed it out of lunar orbit and back toward the earth.

After Schirra’s crew landed on October 22, the speculation about a lunar flight for Apollo 8 was fully in the open and sometimes being treated as certainty. Within NASA, however, a final decision had yet to be made. Mueller had continued to play a skeptic’s role throughout the fall, unconvinced that the gains were worth the risk. But the people at Houston kept coming up with counters to his objections. On October 28 and 29, a critical review was held. After two long days of briefings, Mueller said tersely that he had concluded “there is no technical reason not to fly Apollo 8 as a lunar-orbit flight.”

But still he was dissatisfied. On November 4, Mueller sent a letter to Bob Gilruth urging one long last look. “There are grave risks to the program as a whole, not just to the Apollo 8 mission,” he wrote. He was satisfied that the risks “from a purely technical aspect are probably reasonable and acceptable,” and he recognized that “the greatest single advantage” of flying Apollo 8 to the moon was the way it had galvanized people. “Yet,” Mueller pointed out, “you and I know that if failure comes, the reaction will be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a trip at this point in time.”

Mueller got the additional long last look he wanted, but by this time the psychological momentum had built. On November 7, the C-prime Crew Safety Review Board came in with its favorable recommendation. On November 10, the Apollo executives were briefed by Phillips, Low, and other senior NASA managers on the benefits and risks of Apollo 8, and unanimously went on record in favor of a lunar flight (with the McDonnell-Douglas representative recommending that it be circumlunar instead of lunar orbit). On November 11, there was a NASA management meeting to go over everything one more time, then a smaller meeting of Paine, Mueller, Phillips, and the center directors, then a third meeting of just Paine, Homer Newell (the associate administrator), and Mueller. The next morning, Tuesday, November 12, 1968, Acting Administrator Paine appeared at a press conference and announced that Apollo 8 would be a lunar-orbit mission.

Reflecting on it years later, Mike Collins wondered whether the most historic moment in the Apollo Program might have occurred not on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon, but at 9:41 A.M. C.S.T., December 21, 1968. On that morning, Collins was CapCom. If it hadn’t been for a bone spur requiring surgery the preceding July, Collins would have been up there himself—he had been a crew member on Apollo 8 until the surgery had made him lose too much training time. Collins had been reassigned to a later mission, Apollo 11.

Now, they were two hours and fifty minutes into the flight of Apollo 8, carrying Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. So far, George Low’s imaginative leap had been vindicated. There had been no pogo during launch, no premature engine shutdowns, no problems with the SLA. The spacecraft had been checked out in orbit and its attitude had been meticulously aligned and double-checked for the next step, the procedure known as translunar injection. As CapCom, it fell to Collins to pass up the word. “Apollo 8,” Collins said into his headset. “You are go for T.L.I.” From the spacecraft, Jim Lovell answered, “Roger, understand. We are go for T.L.I.”

Collins, a man with a sense of both poetry and history, felt even as he spoke that the words weren’t enough. Here is one of the most historic things we’ve ever done, may ever do, he thought to himself, and there ought to be some recognition of it. And what do I say? “Apollo 8, you are go for T.L.I.” But in the MOCR, that’s the way you said, “Mankind, the time has come to leave your first home.” The S-IVB relit as programmed, firing for five minutes. It increased the spacecraft’s speed from 25,000 to 33,500 feet per second, sufficient to take the spacecraft out of earth’s gravitational field.

The flight to the moon was outwardly serene. During the third night of the translunar coast, the boys in the Trench entertained themselves by calculating the precise moment when the spacecraft would reach the “equi-gravisphere,” the balance point between the gravitational fields of earth and moon. When the spacecraft reached that invisible point in space at 2:29 P.M., C.S.T., December 23, they called up hard copies of their displays for mementos. But other than that, all seemed quiet. The course was good and the television newscasts told that all was well until the next big event, insertion into a lunar orbit.

Elsewhere in the Control Center, however, there was a degree of concern. The first night out, CapCom had received a cryptic message from the crew of Apollo 8 to listen to the dump of the onboard crew conversations (periodically, the data recorded on board, including the crew’s conversation, were transmitted—“dumped”—back to earth). Charlesworth didn’t get to it right away. A while later, the crew repeated its suggestion, and so Charlesworth went to a back room and listened to the playback. The message the crew had recorded on the onboard tapes, so that it couldn’t be monitored by the world at large, was that the commander of the mission had a medical problem—vomiting and diarrhea. Because Borman didn’t seem a likely candidate for space sickness—he had never been ill on his fourteen-day Gemini mission—one of the first explanations that occurred to Charlesworth and medical director Charles Berry was that Borman’s illness had something to do with the radiation belts Apollo 8 had traversed as it headed outward toward the moon. Much of the next day was spent playing through the implications if either of the other crew members were to come down with the same symptoms, and rethinking the abort rules for medical problems. But Borman recovered, and the crisis passed.

By that time, however, the design engineers were getting fidgety about the status of the Service Propulsion System, the S.P.S., the engine that had to work to take the spacecraft into and out of lunar orbit. Just two days before launch, engineers doing ground tests on the S.P.S. engine had brought Aaron Cohen a disturbing piece of news. The S.P.S. engine had two legs, or routes, for feeding propellant into the combustion chamber. Either alone would be adequate to do the job, but mission rules demanded that both be functional before the flight director committed the crew to lunar orbit. The problem was that tests showed a high spike—a potential detonation—if they initiated both legs without first wetting the combustion chamber. Wetting, which was not difficult, consisted of firing the engine for a brief period, but no one had been asked to incorporate the kind of wetting they needed—using each leg separately—into the flight plan, nor had any provision been made for firing the S.P.S. en route to the moon if the firing wasn’t needed for a course correction. They would have to be ready to fire the engine (a “burn”) twice, using each leg separately, and to arrange the two burns so that they canceled each other out. Such a requirement should have been planned and incorporated into the flight plan and the mission software weeks earlier, and Aaron Cohen had a few tense minutes when he told George Low about it. In fact, recalled Cohen, the usually calm and measured Low “chewed me out something royal.” Still, there was nothing else to do but incorporate the two corrections into the flight plan, and so at the last minute they did.

When they did perform the two burns, they got a jolt when the data revealed that the engine had not performed up to expectations: The degree of acceleration, known in the Control Center as delta-V, was a little short (delta for change, V for velocity). Teams at Rockwell and Houston spent “a pretty active three days,” as Charlesworth put it, while Apollo 8 was on its way to the moon, assuring themselves that it was a minor problem. Helium bubbles that had been loaded with the propellants were causing the engine to miss during very short burns.

Ed Pavelka was sitting at the FIDO console when the time came to pass up the data for the burn that would put Apollo 8 into lunar orbit. This was done by voice. Pavelka provided the numbers to CapCom, CapCom read them to the crew, and then the crew read them back to the ground to verify. Pavelka had done it many times before during simulations, but he had a funny feeling about giving out the numbers for real. It was, he decided, a sobering feeling.

It was a time for getting nervous about things they knew they shouldn’t be nervous about. Hitting the moon, for example. The people in MPAD had calculated the trajectories to fractions of degrees and independent computer programs were constantly checking their answers. The algorithms themselves had been tested and retested. “I know we have figured this right,” Charlesworth kept telling himself. “And I know all our guidance systems are accurate, and we tracked it properly, and all the mathematicians in the world have looked at this thing…” Still, sixty miles was, in Charlesworth’s mind, pretty close when you scaled sixty miles to the diameter of the moon, and Charlesworth, who was off duty for that shift, continued to pace nervously in the back row of the MOCR.

John Mayer, director of MPAD, was in a back room that night—MPAD staff supported the consoles in the Trench—and he found himself the center of attention. “Suddenly Mueller and Gilruth and Kraft came walking into the room, saying, ‘How sure are you we’re going to miss the moon?’” Mayer remembered. “I’m real sure,” he answered, laughing.

Emil Schiesser, one of Mayer’s young navigational whizzes, couldn’t figure out why people were so edgy. “Shoot, we had been to the moon with unmanned spacecraft on a number of occasions, had flown the lunar orbiter, and they were worried about us hitting the moon!” Schiesser said. “They never once asked us how we were gonna not burn them up when we came back, and nobody had ever come back [from the moon] before. I thought that was funny. Why were they so concerned about us smattering them all over the moon and not worried about us burning them up?” Schiesser was referring to one of the most delicate phases of the mission, the entry back into the earth’s atmosphere, which would occur at an unprecedented speed of 25,000 m.p.h., and which required the navigational system to bring the spacecraft into a narrow, ten-mile-wide corridor. But somehow the entry was familiar, at least psychologically. The flight controllers had brought lots of astronauts back to earth before, ever since they had sweated out John Glenn’s landing from orbit during Mercury. Entry was known terrain, whatever the new complexities, whereas consigning a crew to lunar orbit was not.

Mayer could understand why it seemed tricky to a layman. It was comparable to taking a rifle outside his office in Building 30, he would acknowledge, and aiming it at a basketball in downtown Houston, some twenty-six miles away. Actually, it was even tougher than that, more like aiming at a point that was one-sixteenth of an inch to the side of the basketball. So, yes, Mayer could see why a layman might think it was tricky. Pavelka, who was not a layman, decided it was legitimate to be nervous. “We had simulated the hell out of the stuff, but there was never proof that it all really fit together, you know?”