Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (26 page)

That was one kind of man around launch operations. The Director, Rocco Petrone, already quoted, was another, and he was a big massive ex-football player at West Point with thighs for forearms and eyes which suggested the compressed power of oil about to come in at the bottom of a well, his mind—by reputation—a store of endless detail. Many men who looked like him were attached to the work of the launch. It was heavy work. Over six
million pounds were going to go up in the air, and go up by the force of a fire which consumed its fuel so fast—over half a million gallons to be burned in two and a half minutes—that one might as well think of it as a controlled explosion. Where everything at MSC in Houston was drawn, wired, small, neat or locked up, the buildings without character, the technicians lunar—the structures here at Kennedy, the VAB, the Mobile Launcher, the Transporter and the Mobile Service Structure were in contrast gigantic powers gathered for a climax so rapid that months of work would have their fruition in two visible minutes across the sky, and indeed the power of commanding the flight would soon pass from the Control Center at Kennedy to Mission Control at Houston, where it would remain for the next eight days. So it was no accident that men who were strong and definite, men agile as baseball players or as isometrically bottled as guards or fullbacks should be attracted to launch operations. Indeed many of them had the kind of sullen collected hurricane violence you find in the Mexicans and Indians who work in Texas oil fields; a few of them dressed with the sportiness of Las Vegas spenders; if whisky and jazz was to be located anywhere in the ranks of NASA-men, it was in these technicians and workers whose problems revolved around pumping the million gallons of fuel into the bellies of the stages of Saturn V. If their eyes seemed tuned to the depths of fuels ready to roar into hundred-footed flames, if preparations for the launch left worry on their heavy faces, it was not because they had the kind of dread which comes from smashing taboos. No, Cocoa Beach had been wild and raucous in its time, and you could still hear such jokes in the strip bars as: “I want to commiserate with all you folks from Georgia because Governor Maddox just had a rectum transplant” … gulp … “and the rectum rejected
him
!” No, if there was dread here, it was the kind professional athletes have: will we win the game? They know they cannot even think of not winning, for luck comes in strings. If they lose, worse retribution will follow. So they concentrate upon Wernher von Braun’s mighty Saturn V, and like good athletes take the effort of raising the rocket
into their dreams, even in sleep they go over the function of each pipe and valve.

Apollo 11 had moved out of the VAB building on May 20, almost two months before, through doors advertised to be large enough to receive the UN Building, doors which left an opening forty-five stories high in the fifty-two-story-high wall of the VAB. Through that exit, inching along at about the speed a turtle can trundle down the road, had emerged Apollo-Saturn, attached next to a movable structure larger than itself, the Mobile Launcher, declared to be “the heaviest portable structure known to the Free World.” The launcher was four hundred forty-five feet tall, it weighed twelve million pounds. Its base, on which Apollo-Saturn sat, was two stories high and covered half an acre. Its vertical structure rose for forty-four stories, an open pillar of battleship-gray girders and platforms which resembled a skyscraper in early construction. Apollo-Saturn was tall, it was 363 feet high, thirty-six stories long, and it stood straight up, but the Mobile Launcher was larger, it towered above the rocket like a basketball player seven feet tall reaching over a player who is five and a half feet tall—there was even room for a twenty-five-ton-load overhead hammerhead crane to extend comfortably from the top of the Mobile Launcher over the needle-sharp nose of the Launch Escape Tower on the very top of the rocket. Below, nine retractable steel bridges, some sixty feet long, reached out like arms, umbilical cords and phalluses from the Launcher to Apollo-Saturn, offering access back and forth from the space vehicle to seventeen work platforms, some movable, some fixed in the four-hundred-plus feet of rise of the Mobile Launcher, the work platforms providing a base for loading propellant, charging pneumatic systems, checking out the instruments, and overseeing the electrical networks.

Now this huge piece of sculpture composed of shining Apollo-Saturn and the intricate girder-work of the Mobile Launcher, each embracing the other over nine bridges of steel, came crawling out of the doors of the VAB at the pace of a tortoise, or the pace of a caterpillar. The last velocity is not ill-chosen. Apollo-Saturn and
its mate were installed on a giant crawler, a six million pound behemoth of a moving fundament with four tracks ten feet high and forty feet long, each track at the corner of a two-story steel structure 131 feet in length and 114 feet wide, an area larger than a baseball diamond. This tractor, the size of three long barges strapped together broadside, had a weight in combination with its vertical cargo, forty-five-odd stories high, of over eighteen million pounds, so this caterpillar tractor had individual treads on each crawler track which measured over seven feet in width and weighed a ton. This tank which, in relation to ordinary Army tanks, made the men clustered at the feet of its tracks look like Lilliputians, this mechanical monster and marvel with its modest two diesel engines each but a fraction under three thousand horsepower, had an overall top land speed when loaded of one mile an hour, but generally it took six or eight hours to travel the three and a half miles from the VAB to Pad A on Launch Complex 39, for although the Crawlerway was a special fine highway as broad as an eight-lane turnpike with median divider, and had six feet of various kinds of hydraulic fill, crushed rock, asphalt prime coats, and small river rock for topping to support these ambulatory eighteen million pounds, the road had nonetheless a couple of demanding turns to be negotiated, and a five-degree incline to be ascended at the finish in order to reach the launch base of the pad itself, that last some forty-eight feet above sea level. Before one even begins to conceive of the terror of Apollo-Saturn and the Mobile Launcher keening their forty-five stories over some five degrees (as if to reduce the Tower of Pisa to a tortured sapling!) rest in the comfort that the crawler had a hydraulic leveling system powered by two one-thousand horsepower diesels (1,065 h.p. to be precise) which could adjust the base hydraulically within an inch, no, two inches of the horizontal while climbing the last five percent of the incline up the concrete launch hill. That was done with the aid of a sort of carpenter’s level one hundred and thirty feet long from end to end—doubtless the longest carpenter’s level in the world—so the top of
the space vehicle was kept vertical within ten minutes of arc, not bad, a deviation not much larger than the diameter of a volleyball.

One could assume that the possible presence of high winds, slow turns, and upgrades would be the reason the crawler travels at less than its full speed, travels rather at turtle speed, half a mile an hour, but since the sight of the open skyscraper and the rocket in nine-armed embrace clanking along the Cape Kennedy moors at a rate somewhat less than one foot a second is a sight no man has ever seen before he has seen it, it is indeed a moment in the symbolic pageantry of legend perhaps not unequal to that hour when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane: perhaps the exquisite sense of caution in Rocco Petrone which is reflected in the speed of half a mile an hour, instead of the possible rush through at twice that rate, is due to some secret pleasure taken in the magnified luxury of treating all the workers at the Space Center to the pleasure of watching their mighty moonship edge along the horizon from morning to dusk, or even more spectacularly at night, with lanterns in the rigging, like a ghost galleon of the Caribbean! The beginning of the trip to the moon was as slow as the fall of the fullest flake of snow.

The trip had been made on May 20, just two days after Apollo 10 had taken off—Apollo 11 was in fact on the pad before Apollo 10 had made the first of its thirty-one orbits about the moon. There Apollo 11 was to remain for the next fifty-seven days while finishing touches were put to its works, and a Mobile Service Structure even stouter than the Mobile Launcher, if not quite so high, was brought in from its parking station a mile and a half off to approach the rocket from the other side. Now two giants of gridwork, one forty-five, one forty stories tall flanked the rocket, their mutual arms encircling it from all directions, the new Service Structure employing five adjustable platforms which could move up and down, and open and close each floor like adjustable jaws. Swathed and swaddled in open air, technicians with access to her at every hatch and every port, the space vehicle was given its Flight
Readiness Test. If the components had all been tested before in vacuum chambers and simulators, if, in fact, the assembled rocket had recently been checked in the VAB via a Plugs-In Test, a full mission simulation of every moving part expected to function in flight, every switch, valve, gimbal and sensor having been activated, now again, outside, on the ground of Launch Pad A Complex 39, the Flight Readiness Test was given, the complete vehicle was counted down, the Command Module was put through an imaginary mission to the moon, all connections hydraulic and electric tested between the ground support equipment, the technicians at the base, the technicians in the firing room, and the computers buried in their insulators and shock-proof containers at the base of the Mobile Launcher, all to be coordinated finally in that Firing Room of the Launch Control Center built on a wing of the VAB, three and a half miles away. All this had been done in the intervening weeks, and then there was a last Countdown Demonstration Test, a rehearsal in full of the real countdown. This exercise required loading liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen aboard the stages, then draining the fuels after the simulated time for ignition had been reached. Yes, Apollo 11 had been filled and unloaded in order to strain every connection and joint, probe every hose and every seam for leak, and since the huge rocket was as sensitive to change as a harp taken from the cellar to the sun room, the pipes and valves shifted their accommodations subtly: launch engineers having learned to live with some sympathetic equivalent of a sense of pitch, the rocket was in effect retuned after the simulation. As the pad leader, Guenter Wendt, would put it, “The whole thing moves and groans. It has its own noises you haven’t heard before.”

It was a Promethean preparation for a Herculean task, and by its end the last week had been reached, the last ninety-three hours of countdown had begun, this count to be spread over five days, with pauses or holds designed to give time to solve unglimpsed problems or relieve crew fatigue; on they pushed now into the final tuning and tightening of preparations on the rocket, every gauge and every dial, every display and every computer on the space vehicle
now monitored in the Firing Room at Launch Control Center, the nerves of hundreds of engineers (with the experience of previous launchings to fine those nerves) were now alert for the subtlest signs of any malfunction which might first be revealed by some hesitation of a valve, some fluctuation in pressure, some recalcitrance in an electrical sensor—for five long days the count proceeded, and then with nine hours to go, over six hours before the astronauts would even approach the hatch to the Command Module, the most critical operation began, the loading of the four and a half million pounds of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen into the tanks of the three stages.

For the first and largest stage, a kerosene called RP-1 would be ignited with liquid oxygen. That fuel would fire the F-1 engines. There were five of them, each capable of delivering better than one and a half million pounds of thrust, the largest rocket engines ever designed—any one of the five motors was in itself ten times as powerful as the rocket in the Mercury-Atlas which first carried John Glenn into orbit, and all of this force fifty times greater than Mercury-Atlas, was grouped at the base of Apollo-Saturn, one engine at the center, the other four at the corners of a square, each motor eighteen feet high and with a thrust chamber or bell near to twelve feet in diameter at the bottom, thus a huge bell comparable for example to the great bell at Moscow raised by the Emperor Nicholas in 1836, or the bell at Notre Dame, or at St. Paul’s in London—the bell of the thrust chamber in these rocket motors was in fact larger by far than Big Ben or the Liberty Bell, and flames hundreds of feet long would fire from it when the oxygen and kerosene were ignited. Indeed much more than two thousand gallons would be consumed each second. That was one good reason to use the kerosene called RP-1. Since it was stored at normal temperature, that fuel was relatively easy to handle. In fact, it was even loaded into the first stage before the ninety-three hour countdown had begun. The problems of storing it in the RP-1 tank of
the first stage were no greater relatively than holding fuel oil in the heater tank of a house basement for a few weeks. While kerosene was about half as efficient by weight as liquid hydrogen (which was used with liquid oxygen in the second and third stages) the ease with which it could be stored encouraged the designers of the F-1 engine to employ it. There is a tendency in engineering design to take only one large gamble at a time; if you are planning a new machine, sound procedure suggests taking on no more untested techniques than are necessary. So, while kerosene for the first five engines would weigh almost a million and a half pounds, and the use of liquid hydrogen would save three-quarters of a million pounds in weight, still no one had ever tried to transfer that much liquid hydrogen through pipes at a temperature of 423 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. (As Marx’s Engels had been the first to point out: Quantity changes quality.) Besides, liquid hydrogen was so light in relation to kerosene that it took up more volume; it would have needed a tank five times as large, which would have taken back some of the saving in load. So the engineers designed the huge F-1 engine to use oxygen and kerosene. The additional weight would not prove so crucial at the base because one could always increase—at least up to a point—the amount of fuel, and therefore the duration, of the first stage and so lift the extra heft of the kerosene. It was in the upper stages, and in the Apollo spaceship itself, that one had no choice but to conserve on weight, for those fuels would be dead load for all of that period the first stage was burning. It was one thing for kerosene to be obliged to lift its own relatively heavy mass, quite another to have to raise kerosene which would be doing no work until later. So RP-1 was employed for the first stage, and was pumped into its tank one hundred and twenty-six hours before lift-off. (The tank, incidentally, held 212,846 gallons.)