Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (49 page)

Collins had said, “The most dangerous items are the ones we’ve overlooked.”

Yes, it was not possible to anticipate everything. Not by time, not by cost, not even by space. More than sneak circuits were sitting upon the descent. It was for example impossible to use a real rendezvous radar in the simulator, for how could one maintain a real situation for hours on earth in which two moving vehicles might be anywhere from two feet apart to two thousand miles apart and moving with velocities which varied from inches a second to thousands of miles an hour, no, a project close to the size of the Space Program itself might be necessary to create a real equivalent of rendezvous radar, and yet it was only necessary to make certain that the amount of data coming in by rendezvous radar and landing radar would not overload the Guidance Computer. Therefore, a conceivable set of received signals was written up in electrical code and piped as rendezvous and landing radar data into the computer during these simulations. No overload occurred. Not in the simulations.

Still, there was hardly a sense of security at Mission Control. Decisions would have to be taken on the floor in the course of the descent. Order after order would have to be given to the astronauts on whether to continue with the mission, or abort. Each engineer working a console on the floor of the Mission Operations Control Room was an expert on the limits which could be negotiated by elaborate equipment if things began to go wrong, but the decision to say GO or NO GO might have to be taken in some arena of crisis where the answer would not be clear. So each man on that floor knew he could enter a stricken instant, a cauldron of adrenalin, a failure of nerve which could lay a shadow upon all the hours of his life: an order to abort the mission which later proved to be
unnecessary, or an injunction to go ahead which resulted in death would have to leave an isolation of the soul. Suicide could be the neighbor at one’s elbow for many a year. No wonder technicians at NASA so often had hands clammy to the touch.

Therefore, the man who would be Flight Director during Eagle’s descent to the moon, Gene Kranz, had taken his flight controller’s crew through a series of planning sessions the month before, a field seminar which could well have been termed the Engineering of Emergency Situations, for Flight Control proceeded to trace out the connotations of every alert and every alarm the computer could show. How quickly, they inquired, would a particular situation deteriorate into disaster after the first alarm was sounded? What might be the symptoms of each deterioration? what were the remedies? what the partial remedies? for which functions could Mission Control substitute for Pings, given those few seconds of lag? which were the functions Mission Control could not support? And then—no small matter—into which consoles, and before whose desks would these alarms terminate? Who would be required to make each final decision on the floor of the room? What would be the feasible criteria to encourage one to go ahead through a minefield of alarms, yes, under which conditions could the torpedoes be damned? It was more intricate to answer than to ask. Not all factors were known. Some variables would have to be estimated, some guesses taken. The Lem would be up at fifty thousand feet when the descent began. From that distance a pilot could hardly fly it to the ground, for he could not compute the fuel consumptions quickly enough, and the Lem was going to burn some large part of eighteen thousand pounds of fuel on the last leg down. So a pilot could probably not take it in from thirty thousand feet, nor from twenty nor ten, probably not even from ten. At NASA the official guideline was two thousand feet. If the computer ceased to function above two thousand feet, the directive was to abort. Kranz had a private estimate of seven thousand feet. Tall, rough, hard-driving, looking like one of those lean hard-running quarterbacks who play in Southwest conferences, he
was built for touchdown, he was looking to go all the way: these sessions were geared to find modes to bring Eagle in if necessary on half a computer, and yet bring her down safely so that she did not find herself one hundred feet in the air with no fuel left, no time to abort, and a crash to the moon ground, first lunar explorers dead or, worse, left alive on a craft too damaged ever to ascend again. At Mission Control they must all have felt as if they were breathing through oxygen masks when the hour of descent approached.

“How does it look?” asked the Capcom.

“The Eagle has wings.”

Eagle came back over the hill an intimate distance apart from Columbia. Pads and updates vibrated on the radio waves while the moon passed below. Each ship made little adjustments for trim, two spacecraft passing sixty-odd miles above the craters of the moon.

From the view of the Command Module, the Lem was floating with its legs in the air. Collins took a photograph here. The Lem swims toward us out of some darkness of space, a tropical fish with extraordinary red-gold antennae and a lead-gray skin to its body. The wrapped pads on its feet shine like gold in the sun. “You guys take care,” said Collins. By radio across the hundred feet of gap, Armstrong said, “See you later,” and Columbia gave a burp to its motors and pulled out at a few feet a second until it was almost a quarter of a mile in front.

“Going right down U.S. 1, Mike,” said Armstrong. An earlier flight of astronauts had given this name to the route, and some shade of the loneliness of driving a highway at night must have
been in the voice, for they were onstage, the curtain had at last gone up—there was a glare to the footlights. Into that glare they would walk. Only it must have been more like some dream of theater within theater, as if to step before an audience would transport one to still another theater, the stage was dividing, the walls turned out, they were on a new stage, an entrance further within—some sense of their passage into an isolation within the isolation must have come upon them in the trip up from earth, and now alone in the Lem going down Highway One; in another half-revolution they would begin to descend, another stage would appear, the footlights would shine upon the floor of the moon. Was there time in all the rapt transmissions of future data—lunar surface data pads already on the way up—was there time to taste the dimensions of their new anxiety, its pleasures of risk, its throttled fear like the sensuous tremorings of a fall in a dream? Through aisles of quiet fear the psyche would descend.

But nervous they were. Nervous they all were, Eagle, Columbia, Capcom, and the controllers of the flight. The landing was now two hours off, and Collins called down that he had unexplained roll thruster activity. “I may have bumped the hand control.” A little later Capcom was stumbling on instructions. “Give us a mark when you’re at seven miles—I mean seven-tenths of a mile.” Collins started to call “Houston, Apollo,” and quickly corrected to “Houston, Columbia.” They went over the hill, the Loss of Signal occurred. The flight controllers in Mission Operations stood around in little groups. Now Eagle was firing her thrusters on the far side. Her bottom flipped forward like a runner sliding spikes first, she ignited her descent motor and let it burn for a half-minute—29.8 seconds. That braking of her momentum would slow her into a smaller swoop about the moon. Now her orbit would be no longer a rough circle but an ellipse fifty-seven miles by eight and a half miles above the surface, and when she swung down to the lowest reach of her orbit, some fifty thousand feet from the Sea of Tranquility beneath, a decision would be made;
GO or NO GO. Either she would fire her motors again to slow her speed still further and thereby begin that descent where her motors continued to burn until her legs touched the ground, or if something seemed amiss she would pass, and motors not fired, would fling out into another orbit fifty-seven odd miles by eight and a half, perhaps to descend next time around.

The viewing rooms at Mission Control had begun to fill. Every notable and high official in NASA was now there, Dr. Thomas Paine and Rocco Petrone, Von Braun and Debus, Chris Kraft, Sam Phillips, Seaman and Low, John Houbolt. There was George Mueller and Dr. Gilruth and John Glenn, Deke Slayton, and Cernan, Conrad, McDivitt, and Lovell, and others, and then others. Name an astronaut. He was there. The high society of NASA was a group as closed to superficial penetration as a guild of Dutch burghers in the Seventeenth Century—no one but the men in that room would ever begin to know the novels and dramas of conflict, the games of loyalty, and what captures and frustrations of power had played back and forth among these men in the last ten years—it was another of the great novels of the world which would never be written. And was the world a little more polluted for that?

Since they were also a most sophisticated audience, they were now to go through a half hour of excruciating theater, that high theater of symbolic languages and masks and incantations where no word is familiar to the uninitiate and the motions of the actors are communicated from behind a screen. An observer unfamiliar with the technical terms of the subject or stranger to the small reserved gestures of the flight controllers on the floor would have gathered nothing of the dramas developing—merely the tension which constricted the air of the room.

There would have been enormous tension in any case—ten years of work would now be concentrated in an hour—but as Eagle came over the hill for the last time, gliding down in its reduced orbit to the point of decision at fifty thousand feet, so the radio began to give trouble:

The Capcom was Charley Duke, the man who had been Capcom during the lunar rendezvous of Apollo 10, a thirty-three-year-old astronaut who had been accepted for the program as late as the spring of ’66. Armstrong had asked him to be Capcom for Apollo 11. “I would have liked to say,” Duke later remarked, “that I was on a crew and wouldn’t have time to do it, but I wasn’t on a crew.” So Duke was the Capcom even if he had never been up in space.

Later he would talk about the moment their radio went bad.

Yet Eagle continued. The decision to land would not be taken until they were at fifty thousand feet. If the radio was still bad they could take another orbit. So they went on. Sometimes data came, sometimes it was out again. One can hardly divine the tension from their dialogue:

The steerable antenna, sensitive as a finger wet for the wind, the steerable antenna charged, for all one knew, with some unknown charisma, had been oscillating, and no one was about to be certain just why.

Good communication was reacquired just three and a half minutes before ignition. Mission Control could take air into their lungs again. It is the first cliché of tense activity. We do not breathe, as if we are afraid to alter the benevolent dispositions of the universe by the evil emanations of our heart. Or is it rather the thought of freezing one’s existence at the instant so that everything good in the heart can be deposited to the credit of the protagonist we watch? The questions are without answer, but then as equally are many serious questions about the curious functioning of a radio. They could talk—Eagle to Columbia—from as little as ten feet away; they could call across a quarter of a million miles of space. Either way, their communications could fail, or stagger, or crackle into caterwauling of static—some irritated zone of universe always between. When one abstracted one’s knowledge of radio the knowledge ended in one final abstraction: All solids, liquids and gases could be reduced to structured and structureless arrangements of molecules, and radio seemed to be the communication from one kind of activated structure—sometimes no more than a crystal which was scratched—to another structure, and the message, or the resonance, or the wave went out in all directions through any medium of fluids or gases or near-voids of structureless molecules. It suggested that it was in the nature of structures to address each other. It was not as if a transmitter shot a direct communication on a line to a unique spot, or on direct lines to millions of receivers, it was rather that a particular message went out to be added to all the other messages resonating in the atmosphere and—however it happened—in the vacuums of space as well, and so every structure on earth, and in space, was forever being passed through myriads of invisible messages which pervaded atmosphere and space, any one of them to be picked up if the equipment of the structure were appropriate to the task.