Apollo: The Race to the Moon (7 page)

After they had hauled the capsule to the top of the Atlas with a crane, they found that the capsule wouldn’t seat. Somehow, the heat shield had been made about half an inch bigger than the diameter of the Atlas. When they tried to lower it onto the rocket, it perched on the top like a bathtub plug slightly too large for the drain. By now it was the end of June and Big Joe was supposed to launch on the Fourth of July. If they sent the heat shield back to its maker, the General Electric Corporation in Philadelphia, it would be two or three weeks before they got it back again.

The solution that Simpkinson and Kinzler contrived in 1959 would have been unthinkable even a few years later. As they stood on top of the gantry and contemplated the oversized capsule, it occurred to them that only the heat shield was too big, not the capsule’s metal frame. The heat shield was made of a kind of plastic material. It didn’t contain any electronics. It wasn’t carrying any structural loads. So Simpkinson and Kinzler called for the crane, lowered the capsule to the ground, and transported it back to Hangar S in the pickup. Simpkinson jumped in his station wagon, drove to the Sears store in Orlando, used his checkbook to buy a router, and drove back to the Cape. Meanwhile, Kinzler had made up a device with a pivot mount in the center of the heat shield. Kinzler attached the router to the pivot mount and hand-walked the router around the perimeter of the heat shield, measuring and routing, routing and measuring, until he had shaved off half an inch. They took the capsule back to the pad and hauled it up again. It fit, and they went on with the preparations for launch.

Despite these heroic improvisations, Big Joe was launched two months behind schedule after all. The power supply had been improperly designed: The first time they hooked up power to the capsule, transistors popped, readings were crazy—nothing worked the way it was supposed to. They had to send the capsule back to Lewis, and it wasn’t until September 9, 1959, that the flight finally took place.

“And of course it failed,” Simpkinson sighed. The first stage of the Atlas performed beautifully, lifting off into a clear night sky. But the Atlas didn’t stage properly, the nitrogen thrusters on the capsule didn’t get a chance to demonstrate that they could align the capsule properly for entry, the entry speed wasn’t as high as it was supposed to be. Nothing went quite right. The preparation and launching of spacecraft at the dawn of the space age turned out to be a laborious business, and the participants were still amateurs sitting at the bottom of the learning curve. “We were green as thumbs,” Merritt Preston used to say.

Two months after the flight of Big Joe, on November 2, 1959, President Eisenhower signed an executive order transferring Wernher von Braun’s rocket engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville to NASA. It was the indispensable step for making NASA legitimate, giving that young and uncertain agency an infusion of talent it could have gotten nowhere else.

The division of responsibility was clean: The Space Task Group had jurisdiction over the spacecraft while the people at Marshall had jurisdiction over the launch vehicle.* The development of the working relationship took time, and there would always be rivalry. But with the addition of the Germans, it became possible to go to the moon.

[* Here, in one place, are the genealogies and official nomenclature of the NASA centers principally involved in the space program: (1) For the spacecraft: The manned space program began at Langley Research Center, where the Space Task Group was an organizationally independent entity. In November 1961, the Space Task Group became the Manned Spacecraft Center (M.S.C.) located at Houston, Texas. In 1973, M.S.C. was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (Johnson, or J.S.C.). (2) For the launch vehicle: In the 1950s, von Braun’s group was part of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1959, when von Braun joined NASA, it became the nucleus of the newly named George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (Marshall, or M.S.F.C.). (3) For launch operations: The area around Cape Canaveral served as a launch area for all of the armed forces during the 1950s. The initial launch group from Huntsville was called the Missile Firing Laboratory. In 1959, when Redstone Arsenal became Marshall, the Missile Firing Laboratory became the Launch Operations Directorate, still administratively under von Braun. In 1962, the Launch Operations Directorate became an independent center, the Launch Operations Center. It was renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center (Kennedy, or K.S.C.) at the end of 1963, immediately after Kennedy’s assassination.]

By 1959, von Braun’s rocket team had been in the United States for thirteen years following their surrender to the U. S. Army at the end of World War II. At first they had been sent to White Sands in New Mexico, where they were put to work showing the Americans how the V-2 worked. Then in 1950 the Army decided that an inland site was too confining, a decision prompted in part by an unfortunate occasion when the German team put a V-2 into a cemetery south of Juarez. From then on, the larger rockets were launched out over the ocean from Cape Canaveral. The von Braun team itself was moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where the Germans used the facilities of the Redstone Arsenal.

In contrast to the uneasy relationship between the engineers at Langley and the local Virginians, the Germans and the Alabamians got along fine from the beginning. The Germans were delighted to be out of the arid Southwest and in a wooded, hilly area that reminded many of them of the German countryside. The Alabamians were intrigued by these foreigners and entertained by their eccentricities. The assimilation was extraordinarily fast. By 1952, only two years after the Germans had arrived in Huntsville, former Luftwaffe sergeant Walter Wiesman was president of the Huntsville Junior Chamber of Commerce, elected by a membership that was 70 percent World War II veterans (“So am I!” Wiesman pointed out). As time went on, Huntsville became intensely proud of its Germans, and especially of its most famous German of all, Wernher von Braun.

Von Braun was the only non-astronaut in the space program who became a household name. In Congress, his prestige was enormous. Movie-star handsome, with an expansive smile and European charm to which he added a touch of Alabama folksiness, he could dominate a congressional hearing as easily as he dominated the media. Other senior people in NASA envied him and in some cases resented him (“That damned Nazi,” one was known to mutter when he had had several drinks), intimating that von Braun spent too much time worrying about his public image and that the real work at Marshall was done by others. What was hard for some of his NASA peers to swallow was that von Braun was a natural. He was exceptionally good at being a public person, and none of the other engineers of Apollo could compete.

With the fame came a price. In some circles, von Braun was assumed to be a Nazi who had escaped judgment only because of his value to the United States. In fact, his history reveals a man whose passion from his teens was rockets and space travel, a man as oblivious to politics during the 1930s as America’s Apollo engineers were oblivious to politics during the 1960s. During the height of the war, von Braun was briefly jailed by the Gestapo for insufficient ardor in making weapons. But even among those who bore him no ill will, jokes were inevitable, given the contrast between von Braun’s activities during the war and his transformation into an American hero. When a movie about von Braun was entitled I Aim at the Stars, the underground version of the title quickly became I Aim at the Stars but Sometimes I Hit London.*

[* It was an awkward situation to which the Germans remained sensitive long after they had become naturalized American citizens. During the early years of racial integration, an American engineer once overheard someone asking Hans Gruene, head of Launch Vehicle Operations at the Cape, how he felt about having a black live on his block. “I have no problem,” Gruene replied. “I wonder what he thinks of an ex-Nazi living on his.” By that time, many of the Germans had become more American than the Americans. Ray Clark, Kurt Debus’s deputy for administration at the Cape, recalled gatherings after work at which Gruene and Debus would get into conversations about America’s heritage and its future that more than once went on until dawn—they knew more about the United States than he did, Clark often thought.]

Von Braun was not a creative genius—to that extent, the public image misrepresented him. It is not possible to think of “von Braun concepts” that changed the development of rocketry in the same way that “Faget concepts” changed the development of spacecraft. Instead, he was a natural leader and technical manager. Karl Heimburg, chief of the Testing Lab, explained how von Braun went around looking for new ideas, which he would then take to his associates. Heimburg would listen unimpressed and explain to von Braun why something wouldn’t work. And then Heimburg would find himself saying, “But we could do it in this other way,” and an innovation that he had not considered would have opened up before him.

In general, von Braun seems by the testimony of people who worked for him, ranging from senior colleagues to technicians on the pad, to have been just about as good as his publicity made him out to be. He won from them loyalty and affection as well as professional respect. “He was a noble type of man,” said one American at Huntsville. “That’s the only word I can think of to describe him.”

Ultimately, von Braun won admiration, though sometimes grudging, even from his peers in the other centers. Robert Gilruth, who got far less attention from the press and who in the early days had to struggle to keep the Space Task Group from being eclipsed when von Braun was brought into NASA, had ambivalent feelings about his counterpart at Marshall. But once, after von Braun died in 1977, Gilruth was listening to another senior NASA official talk about a technical problem on the shuttle. “I wish Wernher were still around to ask about this,” Gilruth broke in suddenly. “You know,” the NASA official reflected, “that was probably the greatest tribute von Braun ever got.” And then the NASA official proceeded to give von Braun his own tribute, the only compliment that really counted in the Apollo fraternity. When you ignored all the P.R. stuff, he said, “von Braun was actually a pretty good engineer.”

The working end of the rocket team at Redstone Arsenal was divided into eight laboratories, and a German headed each of them. Another German, Kurt Debus, headed the Missile Firing Laboratory at the Cape. They ran these labs in a way that often seemed to caricature the public’s image of Teutonic scientists. Their colleagues were “Mister” or “Doctor,” rarely “Chuck” or “Bill,” even when they had been working together for years. Everything had to be done with meticulous exactness and order. Debus, for example, was known for making the rounds of his subordinates’ offices after hours, sweeping papers and books from desks that didn’t meet his standard of neatness.

The Germans were extraordinarily conservative in their designs, with margins that were lavish even by aerospace standards—every component had to be able to bear far more weight, tolerate far higher temperatures, withstand far higher dynamic pressures than the rated performance of the vehicle required.* When preparing the hardware, the Germans for many years had no separate inspection function. Each engineer inspected the work of his own technicians, and he was expected to be a good enough machinist or electrician or hydraulics mechanic in his own right to be able to know whether the work was done correctly. The Germans’ testing programs were excruciatingly thorough, “to the point of being ridiculous,” said one American observer with both exasperation and envy.

[* When during Apollo the spacecraft kept exceeding its weight limits, NASA officials from headquarters went down to Huntsville to find out whether there was any way that von Braun’s people could cut some weight from the launch vehicle and thereby raise its performance beyond its original rating. Sure, one American remembered them saying—“We can cut three thousand pounds, four thousand pounds—it won’t make any difference.” This was at a time when the spacecraft people were trying to shave ounces. The German margins also let them uprate the performance of the engines of the first stage of the Saturn V from 7,500,000 pounds of thrust to 7,650,000. This reservoir of extra performance that the Germans built into the launch vehicle came to the program’s rescue more than once during Apollo.]

What made this Germanic conservatism and precision remarkable was that by the late 1950s most of the people from Huntsville who were behaving this way weren’t Germans at all, but the Americans who had been hired to work with them. Most of them were men from the small towns of the Deep South, graduates of nearby engineering schools like Auburn and the University of Mississippi and Georgia Tech. The result was a combination of Germans like Eberhard Rees or Karl Heimburg or Walter Haeussermann—distinguished and courtly, talking about “ze vay ve do sings,” very models of the rocket scientist—and Americans like Alexander A. McCool of Vicksburg, Mississippi, an esteemed propulsion expert, talking about “that thang” (meaning the rocket) which “hauled tail.” Somehow, everyone understood what everyone else was talking about.

Coincidentally with the addition of von Braun’s team to NASA, momentum for a lunar program began to build. On the same day that Eisenhower signed the executive order creating Marshall, Bob Gilruth held a management meeting at Langley. It was time to begin the preliminary design of a multi-man spacecraft, he told them. They should think in terms of a crew of three. The mission would probably be a circumlunar flight, but they should keep other possibilities open. Bob Piland would direct the group.

A few months later, on the first Thursday of the new year, 1960, Keith Glennan gave his approval to the Goett Committee’s final conclusion. Henceforth, the agency would take the position that, following Mercury, NASA should aim in the direction of a manned lunar landing. Just one week later, Glennan got a letter from Eisenhower: “You are hereby directed,” Eisenhower wrote, “to accelerate the super booster program for which your agency recently was given technical and management responsibility.” That meant the Saturn. It was the first signal that Eisenhower might support a manned space program beyond Mercury.