Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (28 page)

The minutes went by. The closer they came to the moment of lift-off, the less there was to do. Each test was designed to begin at the earliest moment its function could fit into the chain of the process, but everything which could be finished in less than the time allotted was gotten out of the way; this countdown had moved smoothly. At Launch Control Center, in the big firing room three and a half miles across the moors and bogs were rows and rows of consoles with technicians in front of them, television screens, lights, gauges, charts and graphs, TV pictures of Saturn V from sixty possible angles feeding sixty television cameras with different views of the ship and the Launch Pad in operation, and hundreds of technicians before hundreds of gray consoles in a dozen and more rows, key events in the time-line of the launch up on display, and the completion of each event signaled on the screen by a rectangle lit up with the name of that event. All the tests, check-outs,
and readings of all the systems and subsystems now funneled into a climax, an apocalypse of communications for the last few minutes. As the tension of the previous weeks burned into the clear life-giving ozone of these critical instants, these superlivid adrenalins, as each of the systems-engineers reported in on the status check their men had made of their banks of instruments, as each chief responsible for engines, for computers, for commo, for guidance, for abort, for stabilization, for propellants, for purge subsystems, for environmental control came in with GO, GO for the first stage, GO for the second stage, GO for third stage, GO for the Instrument Unit, GO for the Lunar Module, GO for the Service Module, GO for the Command Module, GO for the Launch Escape Tower, GO for the astronauts, the system moved over from man to machine. For the last three minutes the countdown would be automatic; the machines would come in with information so quickly that they would monitor their own systems, approve their own systems, give their own signal for GO or NO GO, the computer was supervising the last hundreds and thousands of events in the last three minutes.

“Good luck and Godspeed from the launch crew,” Paul Donnelly called out on his microphone, and Armstrong, from three and a half miles away answered, “Thank you very much.” Quietly, he added, “We know it’ll be a good flight.” There was confidence between them, the confidence of missionaries, the very air of messianic love—that love which, like Robert Frost’s cube of ice, traveled on its melting.

Automatic sequence, and the members of the launch team stood at their dials looking for red-line values, looking for some last crisis or betrayal, some silent scream of the needle across the red line. The sequence was automatic, but the men were still considered more trustworthy than the machines themselves: the last control, the control above all others was a manual abort. Automatic or no, there was still the psychology of machines to be feared; so, man was still entitled to have the final say if some event which was incomprehensible to the machines occurred, and someone human
must decide if the mission proceeded or stopped. On went the sequence. The gas generator valves in the base of Saturn V now closed on command, the main fuel valves from the Mobile Launcher shut off, the Emergency Detection System was activated in every circuit, the exhaust igniters came forward, the explosives for a destruct in midair were made potential, the hydraulic pressure in all systems were checked at once—OK; the voltage in all systems—OK; Instrument Unit ready for firing—OK; check-out valves in ground return position—OK … OK … OK … Oxidizer tanks in the upper stages now pressurized. Transfer to internal power on entire spacecraft. Astronauts report in. They are GO. The guidance system for controlling the ship in flight is now on full internal power. Seconds go by. Fifteen seconds to lift-off. Twelve seconds. The swing-arms begin to pull away. Five hundred volts pass through a cable still attached by its umbilical and goes into the bowels of the rocket to ignite the turbopump exhaust gases which burn the igniter links which trigger an electrical signal to open a four-way valve which opens the main Lox valves and propellants flow into the combuster. In seventeen separate split-second steps are gases ignited into fires which ignite other gases whose exhaust pressures open giant valves which release the orifice in the main tanks and on the fire of other fires are the rocket engines lit.

Eight and nine-tenth seconds before lift-off, the first flames burst out of the base of the rocket motors and vault down a concrete flame trench on the pad, a trench fifty-eight wide and forty-two feet deep. At its center is a cusp of metal concave on both slopes, a flame deflector forty-odd feet high and one million three hundred thousand pounds in weight. It receives all of the fury of the heat and blast as the five engines of the first stage build up in nine seconds to their seven and a half million pounds of thrust. Refractory concrete, volcanic ash, and calcium aluminate are the heat-protective skin for this flame deflector, which proceeds to divide the fires and send them away on each side down the trench to break into open air a hundred feet away on either side. Nozzles in
the walls of the flame trench spew thousands of gallons of water a minute to cool the deflector, fifty thousand gallons a minute pour over the Mobile Launcher as the spaceship goes up, steam and smoke worthy of a volcano rise into the sky.

But for the moment the spaceship does not move. Four giant hold-down arms large as flying buttresses hold to a ring at the base of Saturn V while the thrust of the motors builds up in the nine seconds, reaches a power in thrust equal to the weight of the rocket. Does the rocket weigh six million, four hundred and eighty-four thousand, two hundred and eighty pounds? Now the thrust goes up, the flames pour out, now the thrust is four million, five million, six million pounds, an extra million pounds of thrust each instant as those thousands of gallons of fuel rush every second to the motors, now it balances at six million, four hundred and eighty-four thousand, two hundred and eighty pounds. The bulk of Apollo-Saturn is in balance on the pad. Come, you could now levitate it with a finger, but for the hold-down arms. Now in the next second and the next, the thrust is up to full launch, to seven and a half million pounds, more, more than one million pounds of surplus force is now ready to push upward. And still the rocket is restrained. The hold-down arms, large as buttresses, still retain the ship for two more seconds before lift-off. The last check-outs race through the automatic sequence and GO comes back, and the hold-down arms—what engineering in those giants!—pull back, and Apollo-Saturn rises inch by inch in those first seconds, pulling tapered pins through dies to slow the instant of its release. Inch by inch, then foot by foot, slowly, story by story, swing-arm by swing-arm, the swing-arms pulling back in the last five seconds, the last two seconds, umbilicals snapping back, slowly Apollo-Saturn climbs up the length of the Mobile Launcher, the flames of apocalypse no more than the sparks of its chariot, and spectators cry, “Go, baby, go.”

As Aquarius continued to write in later days and weeks, and then in the months after Apollo 11 lifted off from the pad at Cape Kennedy and began its trip to the moon, as he continued to brood about the chasm between technology and metaphysics, the psychology of machines and the dreams of men, the omens of the future amid the loss of taboo, the horror of the ascent and his fear of the heavens—was the Devil chief engineer of the ship which went to the moon?—he came at last, through the nice agency of a friend, upon a passage in Revelation, Revelation itself! The passage, 8:6
et sequentia
, reads:

Apollyon was not Apollo, no more than ’Aπoλλύωυ is equal to ’Aπoλλωυ. Apollo was in fact the god of light and Artemis, his twin sister, was goddess of the moon. But Aquarius ignored the fact that Apollyon was not Apollo and took it as a sign. However, he also ignored the last two of the seven angels, and so ceased quoting before the sixth blew his trumpet and by fire, smoke, and sulphur was a third of mankind felled by plague. Nor did Aquarius know “that in the days … sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God … should be fulfilled.”

If there is a crossing in the intellectual cosmos where philosophical notions of God, man, and the machine can come together it is probably to be found in the conceptual swamps which surround every notion of energy. The greatest mystery in the unremitting mysteries of physics must be the nature of energy itself—is it the currency of the universe or the agent of creation? The basic stuff of life or merely the fuel of life? the guard of the heavens, or the heart and blood of time? The mightiest gates of the metaphysician hinge on the incomprehensibility yet human intimacy of that ability to perform work and initiate movement which rides through the activities of men and machines, and powers the cycles of nature.

Still, the laws describing the behavior of energy are sound, they are usually simple—they may be called fundamental for their results do not vary. If, on consideration, it might still be a mystery why a liquid, a solid, or a gas can store energy which is capable of prodigies of work once the forces are released, still the precise results of such liberation of energy have been well studied. In three
centuries, physics has moved out of the rough comprehension that shifts in matter from solid to liquid, or liquid to gas, involve discharges of energy, to an application of that knowledge onto half the working technology of the world. So the employment of such principles in the design of rockets has been no great work for physics. The physics is simple.

The burning gases which push out of the throat of the rocket engines push back against the rocket itself. Therefore, the rocket can rise, thereby can it defy gravity once the push produced by the expansions of the burning fuel is greater than the pull of gravity upon the ship. Therefore it does not matter if the rocket is on the ground or in the clouds—it does not lift by pushing against the earth, or in flight by pushing against the air, no, it is rather the simple push of the escaping flames against the ship itself which gives thrust to the voyage. Once entered into that bay of space between the earth and the moon where the effects of gravity are hardly to be noticed, so the weight of the ship and the men in it are hardly to be noticed.

But that will be later. On the ground, the full force of gravity is present: if the ship weighed six and a half million pounds, it would need as much force, and a little more to lift it. In fact, its thrust would be designed to reach up to seven million seven hundred thousand pounds in those nine seconds before the four hold-down arms were released and the rocket began to rise. It could have risen with less force, it could theoretically have drifted upward at the very moment the thrust was minutely greater than the force of gravity, but that was an impractical mode of ascent, for the smallest loss of thrust at such a critical moment would have obliged the rocket to collapse back and topple on its pad. It was the life experience of such rocket engineers as Von Braun, rather than the laws of physics, which decreed that Apollo-Saturn be chained to its base until the thrust upward was a million two hundred thousand pounds greater than its weight. For that reason, it was manacled by four giant metal hold-down arms. You can be certain there had been cracks in the early forgings of test metals of the hold-down
arms for they were not easy to design, being massive in size yet required to let go their million-pound grip on the split part of an instant. The unlatching interval for the four arms had to be all but simultaneous—the separation was geared not to exceed one-twentieth of a second for its duration: in fact if any of the four arms had failed to complete their operation in more than a fifth of a second, the liberation would have been effected by properly placed explosives. With one million excess pounds pushing it, Saturn V was hardly to be kept back on one side while being released on the other—it would have begun to pitch over—yet note that even with all four hold-down arms sprung at once, the rocket ship was still restrained for the first few inches of travel. Something exactly so simple as eight tapered pins had each to be drawn through its own die—as the vehicle rose through the first six inches of flight, each die was obliged to straighten the taper in its own iron pin—the eight dies to travel up with the ship, the eight shucked pins to be left in their fastenings on the hold-down brackets. If not for such a simple mechanism, Apollo-Saturn might have leaped off its pad fast enough to set up a resonance, then a vibration strong enough to shake the ship and some thousands of its instruments too critically. For consider: if when empty, the space vessel weighed less than half a million pounds, it was now carrying a weight of fuel twelve times greater than itself. But there were no bones or muscles in this fuel, nothing in the fuel to hold the ship together, just liquids to slosh and shake and seek to distort the rigidity of the structure. Most of the spaceship was nothing but its own fuel tanks, and there were few places where the hide of the rocket was more than a quarter of an inch in thickness and sometimes so thin as one-twenty-fifth of an inch, and aluminum alloy at that, places where the fuel tank was literally the skin. Of course the ship had corrugations in its surface for stiffening and bulkheads for bracing, which also served neatly as baffle plates to reduce the sloshing of the fuels. Even so, one would look to reduce every quiver in so delicate a structure—the restraining pins performed just such a function for the first half-foot of ascent.