Apollo: The Race to the Moon (8 page)

That same January of 1960, the Apollo spacecraft was baptized by Abe Silverstein, head of the Office of Space Flight Programs. Silverstein had named Mercury a year earlier (Silverstein liked the image of a messenger in the sky), and since von Braun had named his new launch vehicle Saturn, another Greek god seemed to Silverstein like a natural choice. He remembered from his grade-school days the story of the god who rode the chariot of the sun drawn by four winged horses—Apollo, the child of Zeus. Silverstein, the meticulous research engineer, went back to his old book of myths and determined that Apollo hadn’t done anything that “wouldn’t be appropriate.”

Soon after, Silverstein tried out his idea on Gilruth, Faget, and Charles Donlan, Gilruth’s deputy director in the Space Task Group. The four men were discussing the new post-Mercury spacecraft over lunch at a little restaurant near Dolley Madison House. In the middle of the meal Silverstein said suddenly, “There ought to be a name for this that stands out in people’s minds. You know, something like ‘Apollo,’ for example. I’m not saying you ought to name it ‘Apollo’ necessarily, but something like that.” And then throughout the rest of the lunch, Donlan recalled, he kept calling this new spacecraft “Apollo,” seeing how it would wear. It wore pretty well, and the spacecraft became Apollo. Silverstein didn’t have to bother with things like public relations departments. “I had the whole program,” Silverstein said simply. “I was naming the spacecraft like I’d name my baby.”

Even as NASA began to lay plans to send men to the moon, launching one man into earth orbit continued to be a struggle. The original date for the first manned flight, a suborbital flight once scheduled for January 1960, had come and gone, and the revised goal kept slipping later and later into 1960. Both Atlas and capsule were plagued with problems, and no one was promising much in the way of improvement. The chilling message that the Air Force continued to pass on to the Space Task Group was this: By mid-1961, when the first manned orbital flight was planned, the reliability of the Atlas would still be only 75 percent. The Space Task Group could expect to lose one out of four Atlases during the launch phase.

This gloomy projection seemed vindicated on July 29, 1960, when they tried to fly M.A.-1, the first time that a production Mercury capsule (not just a boilerplate model) was mated to an Atlas. They launched after a heavy rain, under overcast skies. M.A.-1 lifted from the pad, engines roaring, everything looking good. Then a minute into flight, out of sight beyond the clouds, it blew up during the period of “max q,” maximum dynamic pressure, at an altitude of about 32,000 feet. No one knew why. All they knew was that two signals to abort the flight had been sent by sensors monitoring electrical power and thrust. Their assumption had to be that both the Atlas and the Mercury were still seriously flawed vehicles.

NASA continued to plan for the future in the teeth of present adversity. The very day that M.A.-1 blew up, steps toward Apollo were being taken in Washington. NASA had called together representatives from the aerospace industry to introduce their plans for the sequel to Project Mercury. The day before the launch, they gathered in a State Department auditorium that John Disher had borrowed for the occasion—NASA wasn’t big enough to have an auditorium of its own—and Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden used the name “Apollo” for the first time in public. George Low made a speech, telling his audience that during the 1960s NASA hoped to build a space station in low earth orbit and to conduct a circumlunar flight. Perhaps during the 1970s, if all went well, NASA would land on the moon.

On the second day of the conference, July 29, even as recovery teams were preparing to retrieve the pieces of M.A.-1 from the ocean floor, Max Faget addressed the group on the topic of a lunar landing. In the middle of his speech, Faget signaled to a confederate. The auditorium dimmed to a half-light that was somewhat darker than a heavily overcast day but brighter than a moonlit night.

Faget waited while the audience murmured. When there was silence, he told them that this was what earthlight would look like to an astronaut standing on the moon in a lunar night with a full earth shining above him. It was at that moment, sitting in the twilight of the auditorium, that John Disher realized for the first time that they really were going to go to the moon—some day.

Space station and a circumlunar flight: That was the immediate agenda. To get plans moving, NASA announced in August that three $250,000 contracts would be let for design studies of the Apollo spacecraft. The Request for Proposals specified that the spacecraft had to be compatible with the new Saturn and it had to be capable of a fourteen-day mission—more than enough time to get to the moon and back. The proposals were submitted on October 9, 1960.

It was then, in the second week of October 1960, that a lunar landing moved from being an ambition to being a project. For one of the two men involved, Abe Silverstein, it was the natural next step—“the time had come,” he said later. And perhaps it was as simple as that. The other of the two men, George Low, was asked directly about it less than four years later by an interviewer. What motivated him to act then? “I knew you would ask that question,” said George Low, “and I don’t know… . This was the time, of course, that we were beginning to discuss with industry what the Apollo Program was… . And we felt it would be most important to have something in the files, to be prepared to move out with a bigger program, should there be a sudden change of heart within the Administration.”

And yet it wasn’t quite as simple as that either. George Low, the most composed and deliberate of men, had an audacious streak, a fondness for the bold gesture that would break out repeatedly throughout his career. So probably it was a little of both. The time had come, but George Low also took it upon himself to give time, and history, a little nudge. Abe Silverstein’s recollection was that Low brought him his proposition sometime during the second week of October. It was the kind of thing to which Silverstein had said no in 1959, but with planning for the new spacecraft under way and with the Saturn under development, enough had changed that they could go ahead now. The two of them came to an understanding and Low wrote it up in the form of a memorandum (“Paperwork was created to act as scenery for what we had already decided to do,” as Silverstein once put it). Sixteen years later, when Low retired from NASA, the original was framed and presented to him. It still hangs on the wall of the little study where his widow keeps his memorabilia. Presumably one day it will reside in the National Archives, for it is the closest thing the nation has to a birth certificate for the lunar landing program.

MEMORANDUM for Director of Space Flight Programs Subject: Manned Lunar Landing Program.

1. It has become increasingly apparent that a preliminary program for manned lunar landings should be formulated. This is necessary in order to provide a proper justification for Apollo, and to place Apollo schedules and technical plans on a firmer foundation.

2. In order to prepare such a program, I have formed a small working group, consisting of Eldon Hall, Oran Nicks, John Disher and myself. This group will endeavor to establish ground rules for manned lunar landing missions; to determine reasonable spacecraft weights; to specify launch vehicle requirements; and to prepare an integrated development plan, including the spacecraft, lunar landing and takeoff system, and launch vehicles. This plan should include a time-phasing and funding picture, and should identify areas requiring early studies by field organizations.

3. At the completion of this work, we plan to brief you and General Ostrander on the results. No action on your part is required at this time; Hall will inform General Ostrander that he is participating in this study.

George M. Low

Program Chief Manned Space Flight

Scrawled at the bottom of the memo is Silverstein’s handwritten reply: “Low OK Abe.” Low would later marvel that something so monumental could have begun so simply: “OK.”

Chapter 4. “He would rather not have done it”

It all depended on one’s perspective. Abe Silverstein and George Low might think it was time to begin planning for a lunar landing, but for Bob Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator, the prospects for the agency that October were looking distinctly gloomy. He was beginning to wonder whether leaving a secure and more lucrative job at R.C.A. had been a good idea after all.

When Low wrote his memo, Seamans, then forty-two, had been in NASA for only two months, brought to the agency by Keith Glennan to be its highest-ranking nonpolitical appointee. He came out of a different background from the one that had shaped the N.A.C.A. people. As a young man he had been a protégé of Charles Stark (“Doc”) Draper, the genius of inertial guidance and the founder of the Instrumentation Lab at M.I.T. Seamans had been something of a prodigy in his own right, an M.I.T. lecturer at the age of twenty-two and the designer of aeronautical control systems that later became the basis for the guidance systems used in ballistic missiles. His first task upon arriving at NASA had been to learn something about the organization, and so Glennan had sent him off on a tour of the centers.

Seamans had been dismayed when he got to the Space Task Group at Langley. In Seamans’s opinion, the manned space program was central to NASA’s future, and yet it was pathetically under-funded and under-manned. Bob Gilruth’s people “were just working their hearts out to pull the thing off,” he thought, but it was hard to imagine their succeeding unless headquarters could muster more support.

Finding support was going to be no small feat. The Eisenhower Administration continued to be unsympathetic that fall of 1960, and in fact slashed NASA’s overall budget request for the next fiscal year. One of the casualties in the budget was the second stage of the Saturn, an especially disheartening turn of events. Just ten months earlier, Ike had directed Glennan to accelerate work on the super booster; now he was reversing himself. Without the Saturn and its heavy lift capability, manned space flight was going to limp along in low-earth-orbit flights indefinitely.

Worse, there might be nothing at all after Mercury. A note attached to Eisenhower’s last budget request for NASA said that Mercury was an experimental effort, adding ominously that “further tests and experimentation will be necessary to establish if there are any valid scientific reasons for extending manned space flight beyond the Mercury program.” And this was a softened version. Originally, Eisenhower had wanted to say flatly that there should be no commitment of any sort to manned space flight beyond Mercury. “Well, it’s been very nice working for the government,” Seamans remarked after one session with the Bureau of the Budget, “but it may not last much longer.”

Then in November John Kennedy was elected President. Seamans, along with everyone else at NASA, looked anxiously to the new Administration.

During the election campaign, John Kennedy had used America’s failures in space as a campaign issue—a “space gap” to go along with the “missile gap”—but he had remained silent about what he had in mind for his own space program. Many in NASA had hoped for more. Space flight, and especially manned space flight, had the dash and drama that would have seemed to fit perfectly with the spirit of the Kennedy campaign. But Kennedy was only being honest. At that time, he really wasn’t convinced that manned space flight had a place in his vision of the New Frontier.

Jack Kennedy would become an enduring hero to the men of Apollo. Twenty-five years after his death, Robert Gilruth would still speak emotionally of how important Kennedy was to the space program and to him personally. Max Faget would still have an embassy-sized official portrait of John Kennedy behind his desk. For Rocco Petrone, the decision to go to the moon would still be quintessentially Kennedy, emblematic of the spirit and style of the man. And there is no doubt that, once the decision to go to the moon had been made, Kennedy developed a lively interest in the space program. But to Bob Seamans, trying to read the tea leaves in the weeks after the election, it looked as if manned space flight was not only not at the top of the new President’s agenda, it might not be on the agenda at all. And he was right.

Certainly Jack Kennedy the senator hadn’t been interested in space. Doc Draper, Bob Seamans’s mentor, remembered the time a few years before the election when a mutual friend had brought him together with John and Robert Kennedy for a social evening at Locke-Ober’s restaurant in Boston, hoping that he could get the Kennedys excited about space flight. The meeting had been a disappointment. The Kennedy brothers had treated Draper and his ideas with good-natured scorn. According to Draper, Jack and Bobby “could not be convinced that all rockets were not a waste of money, and space navigation even worse.” Hugh Sidey, watching the new Administration in its first months from his vantage point as Life’s White House correspondent, would come to think that space was Kennedy’s weak spot. In Sidey’s opinion, Kennedy understood less about space than about any other issue when he entered the White House. The explanation was simple, said Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science adviser: “He hadn’t thought much about it.”

Against this backdrop of changing political tides, NASA approached the first launch of a Mercury capsule on a Redstone booster. M.R.-1, as the mission was labeled, would be the critical unmanned test preceding the first suborbital manned flight, now scheduled for early 1961. Like everything else that they had been doing at the Cape, it seemed to be jinxed. They had gotten within twenty-two minutes of launch in early October, when a malfunction in the reaction and control system forced a postponement. Then they aimed for November 7, the day before the presidential election, and missed that one.

By Monday, November 21, the men at the Cape were running on coffee and adrenaline. Marty Cioffoletti, then a young engineer with McDonnell, remembered that his own record during that period, documented in his engineer’s logs, was 135 hours in one week—an average of nineteen hours and seventeen minutes per day. Exhaustion was getting to be such a problem that Walt Williams, director of Flight Operations for the Space Task Group, had to issue a directive that no one was to work for more than twelve hours in a single twenty-four-hour period.