Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (16 page)

The space was divided into two by a seven-foot-wide display panel, which incorporated a cut-away section in the middle allowing access from the forward compartment down to the lower equipment bay. In the equipment bay lay the spacecraft's computer, along with communications hardware, some of the food supplies and the waste storage facilities. Five additional storage areas, tucked into corners of both sections of the cabin, held the rest of the food along with other supplies including a medical kit, clothing, tools, survival aids, sanitary kits, camera equipment, storage bags, sleep restraint ropes, spacesuit maintenance kits and a fire extinguisher. The spacecraft carried two copies of the flightplan (each weighing a couple of pounds) together with a further 20lb of other data and documentation. The paperwork alone required an additional 5,000lb of propellant at launch.
Columbia
also contained spare storage capacity, sufficient to accommodate two boxes of lunar rocks.

By keeping the same hours as everyone at home – throughout the flight they set their watches to Houston time – the crew were able to reduce disruption to their sense of time and maintain a consistent sleep pattern. At 7.20am on the morning of the second day, biomedical telemetry suggested that they were already up although they had not yet been contacted by Mission Control. The spacecraft was now more than 93,000 miles from Earth and travelling at little more than 3,800mph. The press and popular fiction had long imagined space-flight to be a relaxing journey towards the stars, with ample time to look out of the window and ponder the mysteries of the universe – and for once they weren't far wrong. During the Gemini programme, the reality had been very different. Working hard on experiments, the crews had been kept busy amid cramped conditions while repeatedly orbiting the Earth. For those who imagined space-flight to be a trip into the unknown, with enough time for a quick visit to an unexplored destination, Apollo 11 met all the criteria.

For most of its journey to the Moon the vehicle was exposed to the Sun, with the risk that while one side baked in temperatures exceeding 250°F, the opposite side would be left to freeze at minus 250°. To protect it from these extremes, the spacecraft remained in a vertical position and gently rotated as it continued towards its destination. By completing one revolution every 20 minutes in a procedure known as passive thermal control (PTC), the Sun's heat could be evenly distributed around the vehicle. Apollo 11 was coasting for most of the trip so there was no need to make sure the service module's engine was pointing in the right direction. Collins had first established PTC shortly before settling down for the night. Now, as the crew took down the metal shades that kept the sunlight at bay, the Moon, the Sun and the Earth rotated past their windows as the spacecraft maintained a steady roll, much like a chicken on a spit. It was a practice the astronauts called 'barbecue mode'. Inside the cabin, the temperature hovered around 70°F.

To freshen up, the crew cleaned their teeth with edible toothpaste, shaved using cream from a tube, and washed with wet towels and tissues. The use of water had to be carefully controlled since it floated freely and could come into contact with electrical equipment. It was even difficult to stop water floating off their faces while they washed. By prior arrangement, Michael took on the brunt of the routine chores in order to allow Neil and Buzz a chance to rest ahead of the lunar landing. From a locker in the left-hand side of the lower equipment bay, Collins retrieved three pre-prepared bags of freeze-dried coffee, containing cream and sugar according to each man's tastes. Attaching the bags to a hot water gun he filled them up, kneaded them, passed out two and began sucking on a tube in the third. Apollo 11 carried scores of packets of food and drink, including chicken soup, ham and potatoes, and turkey with gravy, as well as Buzz's favourite, prawn cocktails (the prawns were individually chosen to ensure they were small enough to be squeezed from the bag). Buzz also liked the soup, and the cheese and meat spreads, but he regarded most of the food as bland.
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'Meal A, Day Two', for which an hour was allocated, included fruit cocktail, sausage patties, toasted cinnamon bread cubes and a grapefruit drink. Lunch that day would consist of frankfurters and apple sauce followed by chocolate pudding. While the frankfurters were listed as 'wet-pack' food, the other items were freeze-dried and needed to be rehydrated. After water was added, and the packet kneaded, a corner was cut off and the food was then squirted directly into the crewman's mouth. As well as the hot water gun, there was also a cold water gun; both were attached to long flexible tubes.
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Germicide pills were added to used food bags to prevent fermentation, and once discarded they were stored in waste disposal compartments. Throughout the two months before the launch the meals were tested by Collins, who expressed his opinions of frankfurters and other simplistic space fare in expansive gastronomic terms, ranging from 'a gustatory delight' to 'the perfect blend of subtle spices'.
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After a few brief exchanges with Mission Control regarding the flight-plan, at 23 hours and 14 minutes into the mission, CapCom Bruce McCandless read the morning's news:

Washington UPI: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew has called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on Earth. Agnew, ranking government official at the Apollo 11 blastoff Wednesday, apparently was speaking for himself and not necessarily for the Nixon administration ... Laredo, Texas, AP: Immigration officials in Nuevo Laredo announced Wednesday that hippies will be refused tourist cards to enter Mexico unless they take a bath and get haircuts...By United Press International: Initial reaction to President Nixon's granting of a holiday Monday to Federal employees so they can observe a national day of participation in the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission mostly was one of surprise. Rodney Bidner, Associated Press, London AP: Europe is Moon struck by the Apollo 11 mission. Newspapers throughout the continent fill their pages with pictures of the Saturn V rocket blasting off to forge Earth's first link with its natural satellite ... Hempstead, New York: Joe Namath officially reported to the New York Jets training camp at Hofstra University Wednesday following a closed door meeting with his teammates over his differences with pro-football Commissioner Peter Rozelle. London UPI: The House of Lords was assured Wednesday that a midget American submarine would not 'damage or assault' the Loch Ness monster. Lord Nomay said he wanted to be sure anyone operating a submarine in the Loch 'would not subject any creatures that might inhabit it to damage or assault'. He asked that the submarine's plan to take a tissue sample with a retrievable dart from any monster it finds can be done without damage and disturbance. He was told it was impossible to say if the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act would be violated unless and until the monster was found. Over.

Once McCandless had finished, Collins got ready to give fresh navigation details to the computer, a task that required the suspension of PTC. From the point of view of the crew, the Moon was approaching the Sun's position in the sky and soon it would become impossible to see.

Flying towards a moving target that was nearly 240,000 miles away and could not be seen would have been impossible without Apollo's guidance computer. A pilot flying an aircraft uses the Earth as a guide: the planet's magnetic field provides a reference point for the compass, landmarks come and go, and height can be gauged as a specific distance above the ground. In weightlessness, words like 'up' have no meaning, altitude is an empty concept, and a compass is useless. Deprived of familiar points of reference, NASA made up its own, using three imaginary lines drawn through space at right angles to one another. Between them, these lines provided an interpretation of up/down, left/right and ahead/behind. The specific positions of the 'lines' varied during successive stages of the mission (for example, the references used on the way to the Moon were swapped for a different set on the way home), but all were variations on a theme.

Using software written by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Columbia
's computer was operated by two identical keyboards, one on the main control panel and the other in the wall of the lower equipment bay. In each position, a few basic command buttons and a number-pad were fitted next to a small black display screen showing green digits – a colour combination computer displays were to maintain for the next 20 years. Together, the display and keyboard were known as the DSKY, pronounced 'disky'. Also in the lower equipment bay, beside the DSKY, a telescope and sextant were built into the wall of the spacecraft, each providing a close-up glimpse of the universe outside. Both instruments were hooked up to the computer and could be used to locate any of the 37 stars the astronauts had been trained to find. Being so far away, the stars appeared to be static and so provided a fixed source of information. When one of them was identified in the cross-hairs of the sextant, a button was pressed, allowing the computer to remember its position. By checking the location of two or three specific stars, the computer could be told about the position of the three imaginary lines in use at that particular time.

To help it remember where these lines were, the computer then aligned a device known as the inertial platform, which served as a constant source of reference. Mounted between three gimbals and supported by gyroscopes, the platform remained in a precise position for hours at a time, even when the spacecraft was rolling in PTC. Over time, however, it tended to drift, which meant that it had to be checked and corrected once or twice a day. To do this, Collins would stop PTC, put a patch over one eye, bend down to look through the sextant and search once again for the relevant stars. Occasionally he would need to act quickly, particularly when the platform suddenly lost its sense of direction. This sometimes happened when two of the three gimbals began moving in the same direction, a condition known as gimbal-lock.

Once the computer knew where the three lines were (which in NASA-speak were together known as the REFSMMAT), it was ready for a final nugget of information. For a driver on a motorway one of the three lines might represent the direction of travel, another might be a vertical line rising up through the roof and the third would be the horizontal horizon. Even so, it's only when he knows that he's doing 80mph, 20 miles north of London, that he truly understands where he is. The specific details of the spacecraft's speed and position, in relation to the lines, were sent to the computer from the ground, in a chunk of data known as the state vector. Now the computer had everything it needed to tell the crew where they were at any time.

The fact that the computer was directly linked to the command module's optical instruments, as well as other parts of the spacecraft, meant it could be described as the world's first embedded system. It relied on a 36KB memory
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– tiny by today's standards, but modern machines are only as advanced as they are partly because of NASA's driving demand during the early 1960s for small, reliable computers. Until Collins learned to build a love-hate relationship with the dark arts of MIT's software, in the months before the mission the guidance system almost drove him to despair. 'You know we have this crazy computer,' he wrote, 'and we talk to it and it talks to us. We tell it what to do and it spits out answers and requests, and it complains quite a bit if we give it the wrong information.'
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The computer program that reset the inertial platform was known as P52. Collins performed this while still in Earth orbit, repeating the exercise a few hours later. Now, just over an hour after waking, he was ready to complete the operation again. Before he started, he first had to fly the spacecraft into a position that would allow him to see the specific stars he needed. Designed with the direct assistance of astronauts, all of whom were pilots, the command module was flown in a way that replicated an aircraft. Astronauts referred to up/down movements as pitch, left/right as yaw, and rotations to one side or another as rolling. Such manoeuvres, initiated by the spacecraft's thrusters, were monitored by the computer and displayed to the crew on the main panel in front of the couches. In fact the computer itself could command the thrusters to operate, via a program serving as a digital autopilot. For the P52 operation, Mission Control worked out the degree of pitch, roll and yaw that would be needed to get into the right position and then the figures were radioed up to the spacecraft. In his reply to Houston, Collins reported the number of hours each man had slept.

'Roger. OK. We note the battery charge as soon as we get around to it, and the attitude for the P52 optics [calibration]: roll 330.5, pitch 086.3, and yaw all zeros. The attitude for the P23 as in the flight-plan is OK; and I copy your battery charge. Crew status report as follows. Sleep Armstrong: 7, Collins: 7, Aldrin: 5.5. And we've completed the post-sleep checklist. Standing by for a consumable update. Over.'

While Collins looked at the details of the P23 program, a navigation experiment, Armstrong took another call from Jim Lovell.

Houston: 'Is the commander aboard?'

Armstrong: 'This is the commander.'

Houston: 'I was a little worried. This is the backup commander still standing by. You haven't given me the word yet. Are you go?'

Armstrong: 'You've lost your chance to take this one, Jim.'