Apollo: The Race to the Moon (70 page)

The more tangible result of the diminished public interest in the space program and the growing political hostility was a cut in the number of moon landings. When Apollo 13 flew, seven more Saturn Vs were ready or under construction—six more for lunar missions, Apollo 14 through Apollo 19, and one to launch Skylab, a large orbiting manned facility. Before Apollo 14 flew the following January, the last two of those six lunar flights had been cut. The Saturn Vs that were to have launched them were built, complete with engines, pumps, and instrumentation units, but they were never used. Instead, they became what must be among the world’s most expensive museum exhibits, resting at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. (The Saturn V still on display at K.S.C. is a test article.) The budget for manned space flight, which had been falling since 1966, fell to less than a third of its peak in purchasing power, where it remained throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

After Thirteen, Apollo moved quietly into the voyages of scientific discovery. Apollo 14, which flew at the end of January 1971, was a transitional flight. A few changes had been made to the service module as a result of the Thirteen accident, most notably a third oxygen tank located far from the other two, but the LEM was essentially unchanged, permitting Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell to spend only a little more time in surface exploration than had Conrad and Bean on Twelve—nine hours and seventeen minutes compared to seven hours and forty-five minutes. But the Fra Mauro site, a highlands area, was geologically more interesting than the previous landing sites, which had been chosen primarily out of safety considerations.

The true science missions were Apollo 15, 16, and 17, known within NASA as the “J” Missions. Each used a modified LEM designed to support an extended stay on the lunar surface and carried in its descent stage the Lunar Rover, a battery-powered vehicle that let the astronauts leave the vicinity of the LEM and drive for miles across the surface. The result was three missions that were unrecognizably different from the tentative first landing of Apollo 11. Armstrong and Aldrin had spent two hours and forty minutes on a single E.V.A., never moving more than a few hundred feet from the LEM. Apollo 15’s lunar astronauts, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, spent nineteen hours outside the LEM and traversed seventeen miles exploring the terrain around a 15,000-foot mountain. On Apollo 16, John Young and Charlie Duke descended to the lunar highlands and remained on the surface for three days. On Apollo 17, Gene Cernan and Harrison (Jack) Schmitt spent even longer in the Taurus Littrow area, traversing almost twenty-two miles during more than twenty-two hours of E.V.A.s.

The scientific work of these expeditions involved much more than astronauts picking up rocks, or even exploring and observing. Each flight carried two packages of experiments, either one of which dwarfed the scientific instrumentation carried in the earlier flights. One was the ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Science Experiment Package), an expanded version of the ALSEPs carried on Apollos 12 to 14. Containing equipment including seismometers, magnometers, heat-flow probes, and solar wind collectors, weighing about 1,200 pounds, the ALSEP was carried down to the lunar surface in the descent stage of the LEM and deployed during E.V.A.s. The other was called the Scientific Instrument Module (SIM), stored in a bay in the service module that was larger in volume than the command module itself. The SIM-bay’s remote sensing equipment—spectrometers, cameras, laser altimeters—studied the surface of the moon from lunar orbit. After years of paying lip service to the scientific value of the manned space program, NASA was doing serious science on the moon.

One of the curious developments in this process was the scientific contribution of the astronauts. The test pilots among them—which meant all but a handful—were by temperament just about as different from the pure research scientist as it is possible to get. But if their assignment was to bring home scientific knowledge, then that’s what they were going to do. With only rare exceptions, they burrowed earnestly into their geology training—by the time he flew Apollo 17, Gene Cernan had completed 125 hours of classroom instruction and 300 hours of geological field trips—and some became quite competent amateur geologists. It was striking to watch the best of the astronauts on field trips, remarked Bevan French, a NASA geologist: They had become not only skilled observers, but also highly objective ones, without the specialist’s tunnel vision. “They were damn sharp,” French said, and they saw things that a specialist might miss.

If the public was bored by the later Apollo flights, the scientists weren’t. Some of them had been speculating and arguing about the moon and its geological history for decades. Then the first surface missions had brought home lunar samples—labs all over the world were still settling in for years of work on those. Now, full-scale lunar experiments, planned in a mood of unreality, were actually being put into operation on the moon, and sending a rich stream of electronic data back to the earth.

Some of these data were ambiguous, adding glorious new complications to the existing scientific controversies. When newspaper reporters asked Isadore (“Izzy”) Adler, one of the astrophysicists working a J Mission, what the moon was really made of, now that they had made all these new analyses of its chemistry, Adler answered, “Silver.” What are you talking about? they asked. It must be silver, replied Adler: “Everyone who sees our results sees his own reflection.”

But occasionally there was the moment when everything fell into place and a new truth was established. One of Adler’s co-experimenters, Goddard physicist Jack Trombka, described such a moment that happened during Apollo 15. CMP Al Worden was running their remote-sensing experiment from the command module orbiting the moon. The experiment’s purpose was to determine the chemical composition of the lunar surface by analyzing how it radiates solar-excited X-rays back into space. It was 2:00 A.M., and Trombka was plotting the data that had begun pouring in from his instruments in the SIM-bay. He began by plotting the concentrations of aluminum on the lunar surface. Glancing up from his work for a moment, he saw a plot just like the one he was working on, already finished and hanging in the front of the room. Astonished, Trombka cried out, “Who got our aluminum results before we did?”

In fact, what Trombka mistook for his own results were the results from another remote-sensing experiment, the laser altimeter, which had been measuring the altitudes of lunar surface features. That plot matched the one he had been drawing because—as had become suddenly clear—the composition of a lunar feature depended on its altitude. In particular, the higher the altitude of a feature, the higher its aluminum content. Instantly, a central argument about the moon’s history was resolved. After more than a century of debate about whether the moon had always been dead and cold or had a history of heating and cooling, Trombka knew the answer: Lighter elements flow to the top of a landscape only if they are molten; therefore, the moon must once have been hot. From a scientific perspective, this discovery (soon amplified by the analysis of the heavier elements, which were concentrated in the lunar lowlands) had a major impact on astronomers’ understanding of the whole solar system. For Jack Trombka, working in a discipline where progress usually comes in bits and pieces, it had been a unique “Eureka!”

Just as the astronauts set out to become competent amateur geologists, the Flight Operations people set out to become sponsors of science. John Hodge, once Blue Flight, the second man to become a flight director after Chris Kraft himself, headed the planning for the J Missions. Apollo Program Manager Rocco Petrone became as enthusiastic about the esoterica of lunar science as he had ever been about giant rockets, constantly dropping into the science back rooms and watching over the scientists’ shoulders as they examined the incoming data.

During the J Missions, the irrepressible INCO, Ed Fendell, became Captain Video—the man who controlled the television camera during the E.V.A.s. At first Fendell couldn’t imagine having to work with scientists, having found it impossible to communicate with the ones he’d met. But the geologists he encountered during Apollo—people like Lee Silver from Cal Tech, Gene Shoemaker from the U.S. Geological Service, Bill Muehlberger from the University of Texas—were exceptions. They didn’t talk like intellectuals and they weren’t stuck up. They just assumed that Fendell didn’t know anything about rocks, and walked him through what he needed to know. Fendell went with them to Warm Springs, Nevada, to look at the lunar-like impact crater there. Later, with Fendell in the MOCR and the geologists in their back room, they ran integrated sims of the E.V.A.s, twelve and fourteen hours at a time, with the astronauts in full kit, deploying the equipment and maneuvering around a mockup of the lunar landscape.

During the missions, their work became a complex exercise in scientific curiosity at long range. When the astronauts first got the television camera set up, Fendell started with a wide-angle pan, working his way around the horizon by increments. In the back room, the geologists took a Polaroid picture of each segment, then assembled them into a mosaic. Studying the patchwork panorama, the scientists told Dick Koos—once the most devious of the SimSups, now the lunar surface experiments officer—which local features they wanted the astronauts to concentrate on. Koos worked with Flight and CapCom and maps of the lunar geography near the landing site to get the astronauts where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to do.

Sitting with them in the lunar surface back room, Koos acted as the scientists’ guide to and intermediary with the world of Flight Operations. The scientists badly needed such guides and intermediaries—and interpreters as well, it sometimes seemed—for to them Building 30 was a strange new world. Some of them came to the Control Center from academic environments where experiments could be redone if something went wrong. Some were accustomed to geologic field trips where specimens could be taken back to the camp at night and pondered for days or weeks if necessary. At the Control Center, they found themselves indoctrinated into the discipline of real time, whereby every step in every procedure and virtually every movement that the astronauts made had to be mapped out long in advance. They learned that they had to anticipate all the things that might go wrong with their experiments and work out detailed fixes and fallback positions. Then they discovered the extraordinary nature of simulations, which were not just practice sessions but make-believe that for some of them got mixed up with reality. One scientist remembered a colleague who was livid when his equipment kept being subjected to simulated failures. The man finally wrote a memo to Chris Kraft complaining that the Flight Operations people weren’t running this mission properly if his experiment was breaking down so often.

The flight controllers were particularly exotic to the scientists. “This one fellow, we liked him lots, but we hated him, too,” Jack Trombka recalled. He was the one in charge, and he had a phenomenal memory. During the simulations, when something would go wrong with Trombka’s equipment and Trombka would report to the front room that he didn’t know what to do, this guy would be on the intercom saying something like, “Well, on such-and-such a date, at such-and-such a time, you gave us such-and-such a remedy for this problem. Go do it! Now!” He caught every mistake and seemed never to sleep, and so one day during a simulation it came as a great shock when Trombka was watching the television monitor showing Mission Control and saw this fellow yawn. Up and down the hall from the other science rooms there came the sound of clapping and yells of “He’s human!” Trombka could not remember his name, but he had a very short crew cut and during missions he always wore a white vest….

Trombka’s daughter, then a high school senior, went down to Houston for Apollo 16 and helped punch data. She recalled that her father and the other scientists sometimes joked about the controllers, who seemed to them like something out of the Wild West. But she also noticed that after a few weeks these scholarly men began inserting “Rog” and “We’re go on that” into their conversations. Another culture had joined Shea’s original three, and it was having the time of its life. Maybe nobody in the outside world was paying much attention, but the J Missions were magical for the people involved. Through them, planetary science was transformed.

The last Apollo flight lifted off from Pad 39A at half past midnight on December 7, 1972. It was the only Saturn V ever launched at night. Many of those who witnessed it said it was the most beautiful launch, an explosion of light that brought a false dawn to the Florida sky, a column of fire that was visible from as far away as North Carolina to the north and Cuba to the south.

Apollo 17 was commanded by Gene Cernan, veteran of Gemini IX and Apollo 10, the only man besides Jim Lovell and John Young to go twice on a lunar journey. His CMP was Ron Evans and his LMP was Jack Schmitt, a geologist with a Ph.D and the only scientist to be on an Apollo crew. The command module was named America; the lunar module, Challenger. On the early afternoon of December 11, Cernan and Schmitt landed Challenger in the valley of Taurus Littrow. Seventy-five hours later, at 4:54:37 P.M., Houston time, December 14, 1972, they left the lunar surface and rendezvoused with America for an uneventful last journey home.

As Apollo 17 approached the earth, the people of Apollo observed the end of the program in characteristically different ways. Max Faget and Caldwell Johnson barely noticed. Both of them were still at M.S.C., both of them still doing what they had always done best, working in tandem, designing flying machines. Faget was still as blunt and opinionated as ever, Johnson still as ornery. By the end of 1972, they had been living in the world of the space shuttle for three years already. Apollo was part of their past.

Apollo wasn’t history for Don Arabian over in Building 45. He was still running the MER for the final shift of Seventeen. But in these final hours of the first lunar era, he was supervising a huge gumbo party. Over the past few flights, as the crises and anomalies became fewer, life in the MER had become too tame for his taste. To liven things up, he had started a lunch competition. Each day during a flight a table was set up in Arabian’s office and the designated engineer (who may never have so much as heated a can of beans) prepared, or had sent in, the menu of his choice. As time went on, the competition grew intense. Some opted for the outré. One lunch had consisted primarily of enormous banana splits. Sid Jones had arranged for music and candlelight.