Apollo: The Race to the Moon (9 page)

The capsule on this launch was no boilerplate, but a fully configured and equipped spacecraft off the McDonnell production line, and it was going to be checked out just as for a manned launch. The booster was to be the Redstone, a man-rated vehicle. The flight plan was identical to the one that would be used for the first manned flight. It was critically important that M.R.-l should succeed—for the sake of public opinion, the opinion of the President-elect, and the morale of an exhausted group of engineers and technicians who yearned for something to go right.

Everyone who was at Cape Canaveral for the brief flight of M.R.-1 seems to have remembered what happened in excruciating detail. No other event—not Al Shepard’s first manned flight, not John Glenn’s first orbital flight, not even the first lunar landing—engraved itself more deeply in the memories of those who watched.

On November 21, 1960, most of the leading figures in the American space program were gathered at the Cape. Over at the blockhouse beside the launch pad were Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus, and the rest of the senior German officials from Huntsville. Over at the brand-new Mercury Control Center were Bob Gilruth, Chuck Mathews, Walt Williams, Chris Kraft, and the rest of the fledgling flight operations team. Outside, a few hundred yards away, were all the technicians and engineers who weren’t needed for the launch. For many, it would be the first rocket launch they had ever seen.

The countdown was smooth. When the clock reached T–0 (“T–0” is spoken “T minus zero”) and the launch sequence began, everything seemed at first to be going well. The thin umbilical tower fell backward, away from the Redstone, as planned; the engine ignited and smoke billowed up from the base of the rocket. And then something took off—fast.

“I saw that thing go,” remembered Joe Bobik, “with all that smoke and fire and a big whoosh! I shook my head and I said, ‘That thing couldn’t go that fast, could it?’” Marty Cioffoletti had the same thought—he had no idea those things climbed so quickly. Sam Beddingfield was standing beside Gene McCoy, their mouths gaping in astonishment.

Over in the new Mercury Control Center, they were watching the vehicle on a television camera. They saw the smoke and flames and an object shooting upward. The camera panned up, trying to track it. Then the camera stopped, searching for the missing Redstone; finally it panned back down to the pad. And there, wreathed in smoke, the Redstone still stood, the Mercury capsule still atop it.

Inside the blockhouse, Ed Fannin was on duty at the firing panel from which the firing command is given. His dials showed that the engine had ignited and was climbing toward full power. “But then I heard all this unusual noise,” Fannin said. “I looked up and the rocket was still there. I could hear the other thing still going.” The “other thing” turned out to be the escape tower that had been attached to the top of the Mercury. It was streaking several thousand feet straight up into the sky. “Ed, get cutoff,” ordered Ike Rigell, then the networks chief. Fannin pushed the cutoff button, which was supposed to safe all the electrical circuits. “All I got were crazy indications on the panel, totally abnormal,” said Fannin.

What had happened, they later determined, was this: The main engine had fired normally. The Redstone had lifted off its supports (there were no hold-down arms in those days). As it rose the first inch, the tail plug—an electrical plug on the umbilical connected to the base of the rocket—pulled out, as it was supposed to, putting the Redstone onto internal power.

Terry Greenfield was the man who had to go out the next day and look up the bottom of the Redstone so they could find out what had happened. “That was our first big lesson in configuration management,” he reminisced years later, “how you make sure that the ‘as-designed’ drawings equal the ‘as-built’ drawings.” The tail plug, which was reused for many launches, had two prongs. During the preparation of one of the preceding Redstone launches, a technician had found that one of the prongs didn’t fit quite right, so he had filed about a quarter of an inch off the prong and didn’t tell anybody. Thus one prong of the plug disconnected a few milliseconds earlier than the other prong. A quirk in the circuitry of the Redstone was such that the engine would shut down if only one of the prongs disconnected and if the rocket was not electrically grounded to the earth. With prongs of two different lengths, the conditions for sending a cutoff signal existed during that snippet of time when the first prong had disconnected but the second prong, a quarter of an inch longer, hadn’t.

Because the tail plug had been used for many Redstone launches without a problem, no one recognized the potential danger. On this launch, however, the extra weight of the Mercury capsule now riding on the Redstone slowed its acceleration just enough to add a fraction of a second before the second prong disconnected. Now there was just enough time—about twenty-one milliseconds before the disconnect completed—for the ground circuitry to get the message through: Shut down your engine. So the Redstone obediently shut down its engine and after a journey of two inches settled back down onto its four support points, its electrical circuitry now completely unconnected with the blockhouse.

Meanwhile, up in the capsule, the spacecraft’s circuits had determined that the Redstone engine had fired normally (as indeed it had, for about three seconds). The conclusion, as far as the spacecraft was concerned, was: I’m flying. Then it got a message that the engine had shut down. Conclusion: Powered flight is over, and it’s time to do the programmed sequence of actions for the spacecraft, beginning with the ejection of the escape tower. So, zoom, off went the escape tower. Thus the confusion among the onlookers on the nearby roads.

The more experienced hands grasped the implications faster than the newcomers. Sam Beddingfield and Gene McCoy, recently arrived members of the Space Task Group, were marveling at the speed of the launch when one of the experienced Redstone mechanics standing nearby said, “Yeah, but that thing’s gotta come back down,” and crawled under a nearby truck. Cioffoletti too was mesmerized by the disappearing escape tower. “Then I turned around and there was nobody standing with me. Everybody was running over the dunes, hiding behind cars.” A few seconds later the escape tower smashed into the beach about 300 feet from where Beddingfield was standing.

Back at the launch pad, the capsule still thought it was flying. Presently, a package containing aluminum chaff (used to help in the radar search for the descending capsule) popped out of the top, as the capsule detected that it was in a gravity field (not noticing that it had never left one). Then another pop, and the drogue chute emerged. Then, at precisely the planned interval, there was still another pop as the main chute deployed, hanging down to the ground from its long shrouds and beginning to billow slightly as it filled with the morning breeze.

In the blockhouse, the launch team was coming to terms with the fact that somehow they had lost control of a fully fueled vehicle still sitting on the launch pad a hundred yards away—“Your worst contingency plan could never have accounted for that situation,” Fannin said. Their embarrassment aside, they were thinking of the half-dozen different ways in which the vehicle might blow up—most immediately, if wind filled the parachute and pulled the stack over. But even if that didn’t happen, the launch team was acutely aware that the fuel tank vent valve was going to open automatically when the onboard batteries decayed. If the bulkhead between the LOX (liquid oxygen) tank and the alcohol tank on the Redstone had by any chance cracked when the Redstone settled back onto its points, the most likely result would be an explosion when the vent valve opened. And they didn’t know how long they had before the batteries would decay.

They thought of all sorts of plans. Al Zeiler wanted to get a high-powered rifle and shoot holes in the LOX tank to depressurize it—he’d had to do something similar during World War II at the Germans’ rocket center at Peenemunde. Others considered bringing in a cherry picker to cut the shrouds on the parachute. Finally, not sure what to do, they prudently decided to do nothing.

The launch team crept out of the blockhouse by twos to minimize the casualties if the Redstone blew. The day passed, and the night, without an explosion. The next morning, having determined (they hoped) that the bulkhead had not been damaged and that all the LOX had vented, Zeiler took Fannin and a group of pad technicians out to the Redstone and safed the vehicle. Greenfield went out and found the disconnected plug. Beddingfield went out and disarmed the pyrotechnics on the capsule. Then they all went home to read the newspapers and find out what was being said about the American space program now. At NASA headquarters, everyone had the same question: How would Kennedy react?

The President-Elect’s staff had caused palpitations at NASA even before the failure of M.R.-l. By law, the President was supposed to be the chairman of a body called the National Aeronautics and Space Council. President Eisenhower had never liked the idea (he dozed off during the second meeting of the council when a debate about NASA’s logo dragged on) and had planned to drop the Council altogether. Theodore Sorensen, who began meeting with Eisenhower officials shortly after the election to plan the transition, agreed with the Eisenhower plan. The Kennedy Administration would disband the National Aeronautics and Space Council. At one stroke, NASA was about to lose its one clear channel of communication with the Oval Office and its one clear symbol of political prestige as well.

Fortunately for NASA, Vice President Elect Lyndon Johnson didn’t like this decision at all. It had been only a few months since Johnson, as majority leader in the Senate, had blocked exactly the same plan, and he wasn’t going to put up with it now. Johnson, who was fascinated by space flight and had been the space program’s best and most powerful friend in Washington since it began, met with Kennedy on December 20 and got the decision partially reversed. The Space Council would continue to exist, but its chairman would no longer be the President. Instead, the council would be headed by Vice President Lyndon Johnson—good news for NASA insofar as Johnson was such an ardent friend. But pessimists pointed out that Kennedy would not have given away the chairmanship of the Space Council if he expected space to be a center of attention.

The pessimists soon got more evidence that they were right. Kennedy appointed a number of ad hoc task forces to review policy areas. To head his Ad Hoc Committee for Space, he chose Jerome Wiesner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wiesner had served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC, pronounced “p-sak”) since Eisenhower had created it in the aftermath of Sputnik, and PSAC had not been bashful about its opinion of manned space flight. “The Science Advisory Committee was very much against manned exploration of space,” Wiesner recalled, “because it was our view that you wouldn’t gain anything, and you’d pay a hell of a price… . You put a man in space, and you suddenly have to provide a life-support system. If you have an instrument, every time that the man moves, the satellite wants to react in another direction, so you have to put in an enormously complicated stabilizing system that you wouldn’t have to even think about if you didn’t have a man.” Manned vehicles were more expensive than unmanned ones by orders of magnitude. If science was what you wanted, Wiesner told Kennedy, unmanned exploration was unquestionably the way to go. Privately, Wiesner imagined a NASA run by scientists, not by engineers; he was unimpressed by the N.A.C.A. people who still ran NASA.

Keith Glennan told his staff at NASA headquarters to put together briefing materials for Wiesner, which they did. But neither Wiesner nor any of his people asked to be briefed. From Wiesner’s point of view, the reasons were innocuous enough—they had just a few days, the people working on it were knowledgeable about the subject, and it was a fairly low priority anyway. There were half a dozen major defense issues that Kennedy wanted Wiesner to get sorted out before the inauguration, and Wiesner just didn’t have much time to think about NASA.

From NASA’s perspective, Wiesner’s disengagement looked like a calculated slight. As time went on and no one from the committee contacted the senior NASA people, Seamans began to fear the worst. In January, two weeks before the inauguration, the blow came. Wiesner and his committee submitted what came to be known as the “Wiesner Report,” a devastating attack on NASA and especially on the manned space program. The only parts of the U.S. space program that Wiesner found reasonably satisfactory were the scientific, unmanned space probes. Manned space flight, according to the report, was an expensive and risky public-relations gimmick. A confidential version of the report was especially biting on this point. It recommended that Kennedy be careful not to “endorse this program [Mercury] and take the blame for its possible failures.” The task force put the conclusion in italics: “We should stop advertising Mercury as our major objective in space activities. Indeed, we should make an effort to diminish the significance of this program.” Upon accepting the report, Kennedy announced that he was appointing Wiesner to be his Special Assistant for Science and Technology, the President’s gatekeeper for all matters having to do with space. Furthermore, Wiesner persuaded Kennedy to keep the same members for his Science Advisory Committee. PSAC would be as opposed to manned space flight under Kennedy as it had been under Eisenhower.

Morale in the upper echelons of NASA hit bottom. “I remember having lunch with Johnny Johnson [NASA’s general counsel],” Seamans said, “where we just plain discussed, ‘What is really going to happen?’ And we discussed it not from the standpoint of who the next administrator might be, but was NASA itself going to continue.”

NASA was going to continue, as the White House saw it, but manned space flight had only the most precarious of footholds. “We talked about [the manned space program] a lot,” said Wiesner of the time immediately after the inauguration. “[Kennedy] couldn’t put it aside, because he was being pressured. But I can tell you honestly that he would rather not have done it.”