Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (33 page)

Each system was designed with parallel and complementary functions, the equivalent of a network of roads between any two cities. A variety of routes existed whenever it was desired to shift some system in Apollo 11 from one condition to another, just as one always has a choice of superhighways, highways, country roads, feeder roads, and in emergency, simple dirt lanes in transit from one place to another. So the electrical system had three fuel cells for powerplants, which each drew on two separate supplies of hydrogen and oxygen and had for products electricity, water, and heat. There was actually need for only one fuel cell, but they were relatively delicate (as Apollo 13 would once again prove), so for safety not two but three were installed, and since any one of them
could be used at any moment, while the tanks of hydrogen and oxygen were doubled, there were in consequence six combinations for one source of power.

Every part of every system which might be switched into other systems was capable of being employed that way. The oxygen tanks for the fuel cells were also piped into environmental control to provide a breathable atmosphere. The waste product of the electrical process, we may remember, became drinking water, for the electricity had been generated by the action of hydrogen and oxygen on electrolytes.

It was the same with other systems. Guidance and Navigation was complete in itself; it had a gyroscope, a computer, and optical data, but Stabilization and Control, a system which enabled the crew to guide and navigate the ship, was also capable of taking over every function of the first and larger system, just as there were batteries charged by the fuel cells which could in emergency maintain the electrical load for a period. The Service Module had a complete set of little motors called thrusters to tip the ship, lift it, depress it, change its attitude of travel and its ability to roll—so did the Command Module have an independent set of thrusters which could do the same work, and in certain conditions where the main motor of the Service Module might fail to function, so the combined forces of the Service and Command Module thrusters plus the motor on the Lem could be employed to achieve an equivalent result. There were two methods of voice transmission, by Very High Frequency and by S-band, which was Ultra High Frequency. The transmission was controlled either by a push-to-talk switch in the astronauts’ umbilical cable or by an automatic relay circuit triggered by the voice. For emergency transmission, the push-to-talk switch could be used like a telegraph key. If the VHF tended to be employed during the near-earth phases of the mission, and the S-band in deep space, still the VHF would serve for communications between the Command Module and the Lem when they were separated. It was composed of two complete and separate transmitter-receivers in one unit while the S-band equipment had
primary and secondary transponders as well as an FM transmitter, and also had primary and secondary power amplifiers. Duplicates were everywhere. The VHF had two antennae, the S-band had five, consisting of one which was high-gain and four which were omnidirectional for backup. The more one pursued the details, the more they led into one another; it was apparent the aim of all design had been to allow the maximum of alternate routes around every conceivable malfunction. As if in imitation of the brain, each of whose lobes are capable under duress or injury of appropriating most of the functions of the other lobe, so redundancy was built into every aspect of every system and had become one of the basic words at NASA. Where English students might shudder at the comment “Your style is redundant,” aerospace made redundancy a virtue. But we can listen again to Collins:

If a car had been made whose motor had two carburetors, a double set of tappets, two sets of dual spark plugs, two batteries, two generators, two coils, two distributors and condensers, a double bank of mufflers and twin exhausts, a gear shift and an automatic transmission, a double set of valves and tappets, a set of auxiliary axles and auxiliary wheels and tires to drop out of the chassis when a tire blew, a horn and a siren, a steering wheel and a control stick, a left foot brake and a right foot brake, a hand brake, and a transmission parking lock, horizontal windshield washers and vertical windshield squeegees, a door which could be opened and locked from inside and outside with two sets of locks functioning in connection or independently, and windows which were automatic or hand-operated, as well as a gas tank with two reserve gas tanks, an air-conditioning system for the front seat and another for the rear seat each capable of being used for the entire car, heaters which worked off the battery and heaters warmed by the temperature of the motor, double radiators, double air filters, a hood which lifted from the front, and motor panels which lifted from the side, seat belts and fenders built in eggcratelike compartments to absorb collision, an AM radio, an FM, a stereo, and a radiotelegraph system, all of which components were capable of sending back to the garage all available information on the rigidity of the chassis, the wear and heat of the tires, the temperature of the driver, his nearness to sleep, the octane level of the fuel, the conversations of the passengers, the compression of the engine, the fade of the brakes, this radio and telemetry in link with communications from garage back to car as well, if we think of what a wonder such a car would be, so too are we obliged to wince at its weight, its cumbersome solutions, its engorgement of available space, its difficulty to drive—we have not even given a word to the monitorings and alarums of its dashboard! But it would be safe, yessir! as safe as human ingenuity could make it, and its chances of getting through to its
destination would have to be greater than the odds on the average car. If on the ground such safety was hardly necessary since one expected to take a few uncertainties into a long car trip, Apollo 11 was on the contrary moving through space, and it did not have three thousand parts like a car, but two million. And it was disrupting God knows what Valhalla of angels and demons, what eminences of benignity and eyries of the most refined spook essence—the future of the rate of acceleration of technology itself was at stake with what trillions of dollars and commitments of soul no historian of a later century could count, no, the value of the lives of the astronauts were not to be measured by ordinary lives, for the shock to the continuation of the technology of the world if the astronauts were killed on the mission would be greater than the shock to the Church if a maniac succeeded in murdering the Pope, or at least as great as the ripple of unrest through the nation if a dog were dismembered for an audience at peak time on television—and Cronkite for comment to follow. Yes, the trip was dangerous enough, the very conception of landing on the moon was blasphemous if the marriage of technology and the heavens was not part of God’s design, decades of reverberating horror and indecision could result from a sudden mysterious and catastrophic end to the flight of Apollo 11. So the redundancies were obliged to go beyond that fine and impressive balance one sees between risk and safety in race cars and unmanned rocket ships; redundancy became a value in itself. Later, risks could be taken, men might be lost, but for the present, the fact itself was gamble enough: a ship was on its way to the pale graveyard of sleep, and in the awe engineers felt before men so free of primitive taboo as these pioneer astronauts, there was no precaution taken which could be great enough: upon the success of the flight now rested nothing less than the alleviation of dread in technicians whose libidos were enmeshed in all the winding nets of number.

The Lem, plus the Command and Service Module, had completed its separation from the third stage of the launch vehicle at Ground Elapsed Time of five hours and six minutes into the mission. At that time the S-IVB, it may be recalled, was sent off in a slingshot maneuver to take it behind the trailing edge of the moon and on to solar orbit. The astronauts’ last view of that empty lonely bucket was therefore about twenty thousand miles out from earth, the object seen across the glare and the haze and the rosy darkness of bright sun in black space. Given the light reflecting in all directions from the golden-bronze foil of the Lem and the polished steel of the Command Module, they could hardly be certain it was the S-IVB. It hardly mattered. They were settling in for the flight.

The hours would now pass in a fifty-wide variety of repetitive chores and duties. The thousand subdetails of routine rocket housekeeping were upon them, the plethora of tests, measurements, precautions, anticipations, routines, alerts, passing malfunctions and jokes which make up the schedule of their hours. Their radio communication was constant, which is to say that with the exception of their hours of sleep, not many periods of fifteen minutes passed in a day when they were not in conversation with the earth, and rare was the hour which did not have twelve or fifteen call signals to initiate conversation from ground to space or from Apollo 11 to Houston, then dialogue back and forth. So on an average, sixty or eighty separate transmissions took place each hour. If the first five hours of flight had been spent in just such conversation, ranging over such subjects as the check-out of their color TV and the alignment of their inertial table with the stars, communications occupied in turn with describing the sights below and copying down computer data delivered up from the ground, testing their thruster systems, repeating commands on the burn for Trans-Lunar Injection, then comments afterward on the splendid qualities of Saturn V, if the last of these first hours was spent dealing with the multitudinous details of the Lem extraction and the slingshot, a less eventful routine began on the long coast upward.
They spent the rest of their day in battery charging and fuel-cell purging, in new star sighting and TV transmission, in descriptions of the workings and idiosyncrasies of the cryogenic fans and heaters. They talked about the functioning of the separator which removed the chlorine bubbles from the drinking water, and discussed the angles for deadband control. That was a complex matter which would have to be readjusted again and again. Much of the work in this phase of the journey consisted of setting the angle or attitude at which the spacecraft traveled so that the particular antenna employed would have an unobstructed line to earth. That was not so simple as it seemed. Since the sun would always remain on one side of the ship, a program had been set up to fire the rocket thrusters now and again in order to roll the ship around its own axis like a carcass on a barbecue spit. At a rate between two and three times an hour, the spacecraft rotated slowly about this axis, the better to keep itself toasted equally on all sides by solar rays rather than to suffer the heat to port and freezing to starboard which would ensue from voyaging with one side always in the sun, the other in darkened space, for such inequalities of heat and cold could affect the performance of the ship. These revolutions, called Passive Thermal Control, or PTC—this was the acronym used most perhaps on the flight—were usually conducted with the ship traveling Lemfirst, and the S-band antenna (which was employed most often) projected out from the rear of the Service Module, and so had an unobstructed line to earth. But there were also periodic star sightings to take close corroborations of the settings of the gyroscopes and inertial tables—these sometimes demanded a fixed position where the ship did not revolve. Besides, the star sighting was sometimes obstructed by glare. So the ship had to be turned through a large angle and would proceed for a while tailfirst with the Service Module in front. Now the angle of the antenna would present a problem. Therefore, numerous conversations proceeded back and forth on the best angles for setting the ship and setting the antenna, then further conversations on the best way to resume PTC. So passed the first day with dialogues on star sightings, waste-water
dumps, and attitude settings, gyroscope settings, Verb and Noun settings for the computer, and Passive Thermal Control modes. Teams of men came and went on eight-hour shifts in Mission Control. They had names: the White team, the Green team, the Black team. Radio readings were exchanged and comments sent back and forth on the quality of the TV.

Finally the day came to a close. It had been an extraordinarily long day for the astronauts. It was now 10:30 p.m., eastern daylight time, and they had been up since four in the morning and in space for thirteen hours. Doubtless they were ready for sleep. The center couch was dismantled and stowed under the left couch. The astronauts stretched out in sleeping bags under the left couch, under the right couch, on top of the right couch, and zipped themselves in. If the temperature of the cabin was an equable air-conditioned seventy to seventy-five degrees, they were still weightless and so the bags were obliged to be strapped down and the astronauts restrained from floating up and bumping the walls. Yet it was still their first night in space this trip. Not so quickly did they fall into sleep. By virtue of the bio-instrumentation belt, telemetric data sent to earth monitored their slumber. Given the rate of their heartbeat the onset of sleep could be gauged, and if Collins was quickly out, the others stayed awake for awhile, listening perhaps to the pumps and the quiet clickings, the tickings, the sound of the fans, the sense of silence vibrated by a hundred intent mechanisms all pursuing the routine of their much-studied functions, the life of the men as dependent on a few of those machines as the pushings and dilations of their own hearts, pumping now perhaps at the thought (first time this busy day) of the oncoming adventure of the moon. On the fourth day would they land. Only the most stolid of minds, insulated altogether from imagination, could be indifferent to the possibility that in four days they might be dead or by the moon fundamentally altered, by the moon in some as yet unknown fashion, yes, fundamentally altered. “I hope I don’t get a tender foot,” Aldrin had said at the press conference in Houston eleven days before.