APOLLO 11 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MOON L ANDING
Taylor Devices Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo Mission to the Moon Taylor Devices is the world leader in shock and vibration control since 1955. Our products form the cutting edge of technology in our market-place and are backed by our 60+ years of successful experience in the shock and vibration control industry. Our products off offer a turn-key solution to shock and vibration problems, with Taylor Devices providing full analysis, development, manufacturing and testing capabilities to satisfy the most exacting customer requirements. Taylor Devices is now in its 7th decade as a supplier of critical damping and shock isolation components for major military and space programs including space vehicles, aircra landing gear, launch pads, satellites, weaponry, navigation systems, and new modern st structures throughout the world. Taylor Devices is proud to have been involved with getting humankind to the moon and looks forward to getting them back once again and beyond.
Taylor Devices was founded in 1955 and has since become a world leader in the field of shock and vibration control. Taylor Devices adheres to the strictest national and international standards and provides the same level of quality standards regardless of industry or application.
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To the Moon and Back: Apollo Technology Saves Lives On Earth Taylor Devices close relationship with NASA continued to grow throughout the 70s and when the Space Shuttle Program was announced in 1972 the much-improved system was proposed for the program. To this day this technology is still in use and protects the equipment on the International Space Station as well as the launch pad systems of several space O ne of the challenges associated with this vehicles. historic mission involved the swing arms that housed the umbilicals which supplied the rocket In the 1990s, Taylor Devices sought and was with fuel and electrical signals. During launch awarded permission from the Department of sequences these swing arms needed to be Defense to commercialize the technology used disengaged from the spacecra and retracted during the Apollo missions to the moon. This back into their cradle near the gantry. NASA commercial application was developed to wa in search for a device that could control the protect buildings, bridges from the destructive was These energy generated during launch and avoid vibrations induced by earthquakes. damage from overextension as well as prevent seismic dampers proved far more effective than the best stress-relieving technologies used at a collision with the vehicle. the time. Today, this technology protects over Taylor Devices was awarded the contract to 700 bridges, buildings, and other structures develop the system that would safely disengage around the world. the swing arm, umbilical hoses and mechanical gear jettisoned off the launch vehicles. These Taylor Devices was a 2015 Space Technology first motion dampening systems were hydraulic Hall of Fame inductee for innovations developed dampers controlled by electronic valves and for space that now improve life on Earth. “It is while this approach safely contained the motion quite satisfying to tell our clients and of the gear, the system itself was complex and prospective customers that the same level of quality and ingenuity that protects equipment prone to reliability issues. on launch pads and in space is used to protect hu lives here on Earth.” says company Honeywell and Taylor Devices had a brief human partnership on a project to develop a President, Alan Klembczyk. high-speed analog computer using oil-based hydraulics which ended quickly with the advent Taylor Devices is now in its 7th decade as a of transistors. However, it was this research supplier of critical damping and shock isolation that ultimately led to the discovery of components for major military and space fluidics-based control systems. This innovative programs including space vehicles, aircra co concept was then used to create a new landing gear, launch pads, satellites, weaponry, launch-platform dampening system using a and navigation systems. compressible fluid capable of operating at transonic and supersonic velocities. In the early 1960’s, the United States embarked on what would become one of the most ambitious projects in human history; sending a man to the moon. This giant leap for mankind was the culmination of the work over 375,000 employees of NASA, private industry, research institutions, and universities.
An artist’s illustration of the swing arms and umbilicals
THE CRADLE OF ASTRONAUTS Purdue University is called the “cradle of astronauts” for good reason. Nearly a third of all U.S. spaceflights have included a Purdue grad, and 10 missions have included multiple Purdue grads. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, both graduated from Purdue University. We congratulate our esteemed Purdue University Astronauts: Neil A. Armstrong John E. Blaha Roy D. Bridges Jr. Mark N. Brown John H. Casper Eugene A. Cernan Roger B. Chaffee Richard O. Covey
Andrew J. Feustel Guy S. Gardner Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom Gregory J. Harbaugh Michael J. McCulley Beth Moses Loral O’Hara Gary E. Payton Mark L. Polansky
Jerry L. Ross Loren J. Shriver Scott D. Tingle Janice E. Voss Charles D. Walker Mary Ellen Weber Donald E. Williams David A. Wolf
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APOLLO 11 I 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MOON LANDING Published by Faircount Media Group 4915 W. Cypress St. Tampa, FL 33607 Tel: 813.639.1900 www.defensemedianetwork.com www.faircount.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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PROJECT MERCURY America’s First Astronauts By Craig Collins
EDITORIAL Editor in Chief: Chuck Oldham Managing Editor: Ana E. Lopez Editor: Rhonda Carpenter Contributing Writers: Craig Collins, Craig Covault Edward S. Goldstein Clarence A. Robinson, Jr. DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Art Director/Project Designer: Robin K. McDowall
ADVERTISING Ad Traffic Manager: Art Dubuc III Associate Publisher: Geoffrey Weiss Account Executives: John Caianiello Art Dubuc III, Matthew Nussbaum OPERATIONS and ADMINISTRATION Chief Operating Officer: Lawrence Roberts VP, Business Development: Robin Jobson Business Development: Damion Harte Business Analytics Manager: Colin Davidson Interns: Julia Debs, Emily Falcone Patrick Freer, Julia McCabe, Nicholas Meye, Matthew Nussbaum, Alison Salama, Stephanie Zamudio FAIRCOUNT MEDIA GROUP Publisher: Ross Jobson
PROJECT GEMINI The Bridge to Apollo By Craig Collins
26 THE ODYSSEY OF APOLLO 11 36 APOLLO’S AMAZING SPACECRAFT 44 PROJECT APOLLO By Clarence A. Robinson, Jr.
By Craig Collins
The Apollo program’s rockets and spacecraft have earned a lasting place in human history. By Craig Covault
54 NASA’S RETURN TO THE MOON 66 MEMORIES OF APOLLO By Edward S. Goldstein
By Edward S. Goldstein
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PROJECT MERCURY America’s First Astronauts BY CRAIG COLLINS Photos courtesy of NASA
M
any years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.” Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the Moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
– John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962
Many Americans forget, given the eloquence of John F. Kennedy in describing the nation’s aims in space, that he wasn’t the president under whom NASA’s Project Mercury was devised on Oct. 7, 1958 – a year after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who never really saw the point of a lunar landing, had a more sober aim for space exploration, and a simpler answer to the question of why the United States wanted to send men into space: because the Russians were there. Of course Kennedy, his successor, understood the delicate power balance between the world’s two superpowers, and the strategic importance of gaining a technological edge on the Soviets – he simply preferred to frame the space effort as a noble quest that would bring out the very best in humankind. As the competition known as the “space race” played out as a kind of geopolitical soap opera, the public statements of U.S. and Soviet leaders revealed fascinating differences in how each nation conceived of and pursued its aims in space – and a reminder that our headlong rush into space was driven by equal parts pragmatism and grandeur. In the United States, the first effort at manned spaceflight – Project Mercury – was a carefully designed set of unmanned and manned flights that achieved a logical sequence of practical goals. But it was also an emblem of the idealism of America’s president and of its citizens. ABOVE: The launch of Friendship 7, the first American-manned orbital spaceflight. Astronaut John Glenn aboard, the MercuryAtlas rocket is launched from Pad 14. OPPOSITE PAGE: Astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., suiting up for the first manned suborbital flight on MR-3 (Mercury-Redstone) Freedom 7, on May 5, 1961.
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MERCURY-REDSTONE 3 May 5, 1961 Spacecraft: Freedom 7 Astronaut: Alan B. Shepard, Jr. A suborbital, ballistic-trajectory flight that lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds, Mercury-Redstone 3 successfully put the first American into space.
MERCURY-REDSTONE 4 July 21, 1961 Spacecraft: Liberty Bell 7 Astronaut: Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom A duplicate of Shepard’s mission that lasted 15 minutes, 37 seconds. The flight was successful, but the spacecraft sank shortly after splashdown.
MERCURY-ATLAS 6 Feb. 10, 1962 Spacecraft: Friendship 7 Astronaut: John H. Glenn, Jr. The first American to orbit Earth, Glenn orbited three times and was in space for 4 hours, 55 minutes, 23 seconds.
MERCURY-ATLAS 7 May 24, 1962
MERCURY-ATLAS 8 Oct. 3, 1962
MERCURY-ATLAS 9 May 15-16, 1963
Spacecraft: Aurora 7 Astronaut: M. Scott Carpenter The flight confirmed the success of Glenn’s mission by duplicating the flight, but left orbit a few seconds late, resulting in a splashdown 250 miles from the targeted site.
Spacecraft: Sigma 7 Astronaut: Walter M. Schirra, Jr. The first longer-duration Mercury mission, Schirra’s engineering test flight lasted 9 hours, 13 minutes, 11 seconds, and orbited the Earth six times. The first NASA mission to splash down in the Pacific.
Spacecraft: Faith 7 Astronaut: L. Gordon Cooper The last Mercury mission lasted 34 hours, 19 minutes, 49 seconds, and logged 22 orbits to evaluate the effects of a full day in space.
Astronaut Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, one of the original Mercury Seven, was prevented from flying in space until the Apollo-Soyuz mission, due to a heart murmur.
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RIGHT: Four Mercury missions carried chimpanzees into space before Alan Shepard’s flight. “Ham,” is shown here in the biopack couch for the MR-2 flight. BELOW: The original Mercury Seven astronauts with a U.S. Air Force F-106B jet aircraft. From left to right: M. Scott Carpenter, Leroy Gordon Cooper, John H. Glenn, Jr., Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Jr., Walter M. “Wally” Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton.
CHOOSING THE MERCURY SEVEN The objectives of Project Mercury were simple, and there were only three: to place a manned spacecraft in orbital flight around Earth; to investigate the ability of a human to perform tasks and function in the environment of space; and to recover the man and the spacecraft safely. While advances in rocketry had made the idea of flight far into the vacuum of space a realistic expectation by the mid-1950s, there was still very little known about whether a living organism could survive in space. Many scientists were hesitant to predict how a person would behave under the conditions encountered in spaceflight, while others offered dire predictions: In zero gravity, humans would not be able to swallow; their cardiovascular systems would fail; their bodies would be either crushed or torn apart by the force of the launch. By 1958, hundreds of studies had been done in the new field of space medicine, and the Space Task Group at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was steeped in research in the potential medical issues of spaceflight – a field of inquiry spearheaded by the U.S. military – and was confident that a human could safely enter the realm of space. The military, Eisenhower insisted, would supply the pilots who would help to navigate these spacecraft – men who would be called “astronauts,” a word coined from the Greek words astro for “star” and naut for “sailor.” Chosen from a pool of more than
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The seven men in Arab-looking gear were NASA Mercury astronauts participating in the U.S. Air Force survival school at Stead Air Force Base in Nevada. Portions of their clothing were fashioned from parachute material.
a hundred applicants, subjected to a rigorous, often baffling, and now legendary battery of physiological and psychological examinations, the seven astronauts who would form Astronaut Group 1, or the “Mercury Seven,” were college-educated engineers in excellent health, talented specialists who had made careers of flying the most powerful and advanced military aircraft. They were also relatively small in stature; the Mercury capsule, designed by NASA’s chief engineer, Maxime Faget, and built by McDonnell, was too compact to accommodate anyone taller than 5 feet 11 inches. On April 9, 1959, when these men – M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper, John H. Glenn, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton – were introduced before live television cameras, it was another moment that would capture the striking differences between the American and Soviet space programs. As famous as the Mercury Seven are today – and they are as familiar to American history as nearly any politician, soldier, or entertainer – they were bigger than Elvis in 1959. The over-the-top celebrity worship of America’s first astronauts was fueled by enormous public curiosity, along with overwhelming political pressure to win the space race. As Project Mercury (named for the speed it would take to launch a man into orbit) was gradually revealed to the American public, in fact, it showed several remarkably American traits. The Soviet
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program relied on automated systems, and the human occupant of the spacecraft was essentially a passenger on a ground-controlled projectile – its first cosmonauts were parachutists whose most important skill would be the ability to reach the ground safely after ejecting from a returning vehicle. Project Mercury, on the other hand, placed great emphasis on the skills of its individual pilots; the Mercury Seven became working members of NASA’s Space Task Group (later the Manned Spacecraft Center), and were assigned responsibilities not only for the flights themselves, but also for the design of the spacecraft, simulators, life-support systems, and other hardware and systems. One of the basic guidelines set forth by the Space Task Group was that existing technology and off-the-shelf equipment would be used wherever practical – not just as a cost-saving measure, but, in the heated race against the Soviets, to save time as well. Because much of the equipment was adapted from military applications, this guideline lent distinct Cold War undertones to the space program: The Redstone rocket that launched Shepard and Grissom into space was originally designed and used to deliver warheads for some of the first live nuclear tests by the United States. The astronauts’ silver spacesuits, coated with aluminum for better thermal protection, were individually tailored adaptations of the Navy’s Mark IV high-altitude pressure suit.
THE MISSIONS Between August 1959 and November 1961, there were 20 unmanned missions in the Mercury program – four of which carried chimpanzees Sam, Miss Sam, Ham, and Enos into space
and safely returned them to Earth. Each of the unmanned missions was designed to test functions of hardware such as spacecraft, boosters, escape systems, or tracking networks. It was the manned missions, however, that captured the public’s attention. When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin entered Earth orbit on April 12, 1961, and became the first person in space, it was, in the United States, another disappointing reminder that America was in second place. While Shepard, astronaut of the first Mercury mission, later contended that it was an abundance of caution on NASA’s part that kept him from beating Gagarin into space, his argument neglected a larger point: Gagarin had not just entered space. He had orbited Earth. The Redstone rocket used for the first two Mercury missions was not powerful enough to lift a spacecraft to orbit, and the newer Atlas, the nation’s first successfully tested intercontinental ballistic missile, while more powerful, was still considered too unstable to risk as a launch vehicle.
• Freedom 7 Gagarin’s achievement, however, did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the Mercury astronauts. In less than a month, on May 5, Shepard was launched on the mission known as MercuryRedstone 3 in a capsule he had named Freedom 7. The flight took him on a ballistic trajectory that reached an altitude of 116 miles. Unlike Gagarin, whose spaceflight was fully automatic, Shepard took some control over the flight, adjusting the capsule’s attitude (angular orientation) before re-entry. Also in contrast to Gagarin’s mission, which was conducted in secret, the launch, return from space, and subsequent collection of Shepard by a Navy helicopter
Shepard is hoisted aboard a U.S. Marine helicopter after splashdown of his Freedom 7 Mercury space capsule seen below his right arm.
were seen on live television by millions of viewers. Shepard found himself celebrated as a national hero, honored with parades in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, and a private meeting with Kennedy at the White House. Kennedy, who had recently suffered some serious foreign policy setbacks – including the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the overthrow of South Korea’s U.S.-supported government – was thrilled by the success of Freedom 7, and on May 25, he issued his famous challenge to Congress to commit to the long-term goal of landing on the Moon by the end of the decade. Within a matter of months, the Gemini project was conceived, designed to build on Mercury’s successes and pave the way to the Moon.
• Liberty Bell 7, Friendship 7, and Aurora 7: The Human Factor NASA had decided to allow the Mercury astronauts to name each of their capsules, and after Shepard’s choice of Freedom 7 was reported to the world, journalists praised his gesture of solidarity and fellowship with the other six astronauts. Carpenter, however, claimed in a 1999 interview: “The fact of that matter is that he named it ‘7’ because it was capsule No. 7 off the line ... But since everybody wanted to match Al’s largesse, Gus had Liberty Bell 7 and John had Friendship 7, so I had to do something with ’7,’ and it was Aurora 7.” The next three Mercury flights would introduce challenges and consequences that would underscore the question of whether
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HIDDEN HISTORY
American Volunteer Group (AVG) pilots, better known as the Flying Tigers, run for their P-40B Tomahawks in a posed photo. The vastly outnumbered AVG had only 79 qualified pilots and 62 operable aircraft on Dec. 2, 1941, but they and their shark-mouthed P-40s became legendary for their achievements against the Japanese over China and Burma.
National Archives photo
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COURTESY NASA
The Apollo 1 ground accident demonstrated that safety is not an option, and paved the way for design process improvements leading to the successful Moon landing. The International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), the leading non-profit space safety association worldwide, is there to help shape and advance an international culture of space safety in the New-Space age.
Support IAASS, to make SPACE happen. Visit iaass.space-safety.org
Astronaut John Glenn during his first orbit in Friendship 7.
something as sophisticated as spaceflight should be controlled by fully automated systems or involve the active presence of a pilot. Because of the speed of the capsule during takeoff and re-entry, it wasn’t really possible to “pilot” it in the conventional sense, but the astronaut did have a considerable role in positioning the craft for re-entry. On July 21, 1961, in Liberty Bell 7, Grissom successfully duplicated Shepard’s flight, and expertly piloted the re-entry procedure, but shortly after splashdown, his capsule sank to the bottom of the ocean after the hatch unexpectedly blew. Grissom – who died six years later in the Apollo I training fire – maintained until his death that the hatch had malfunctioned, while the capsule’s designer, Max Faget, insisted it was impossible for the hatch to be released by itself. Fellow Mercury astronaut Walter “Wally” Schirra, in his book Schirra’s Space, wrote that he had conclusively proved on his own flight that Grissom hadn’t blown the hatch. A question had persisted on the blowing of his hatch, and there were those who had maintained that Gus had inadvertently hit the plunger that exploded the bolts. When I was recovered, I remained in my spacecraft until being hoisted aboard the recovery ship. I then blew the hatch on purpose, and the recoil of the plunger injured my hand – it actually caused a cut through a glove that was reinforced by metal. Gus was one of those who flew out to the ship, and I showed him my hand. “How did you cut it,” he asked. “I blew the hatch,” I replied. Gus smiled, vindicated. It proved he hadn’t blown the hatch with a hand, foot, knee or whatever, for he hadn’t suffered even a minor bruise. Glenn’s Friendship 7 had also been planned as a suborbital flight, but that summer, less than a month after Grissom’s flight, Communist East Germany began constructing the Berlin Wall, and
the Soviets staged several atmospheric tests of massive nuclear weapons. NASA, mindful of the government’s growing alarm at the Soviet Union’s influence and ambitions, searched for a breakthrough in the space program, and embraced the Atlas as a launch vehicle that would take Glenn into orbit. After two successful unmanned tests, Glenn and Friendship 7 launched Feb. 20, 1962. After his first orbit, Glenn began to experience problems. The automatic attitude control system, for some reason, was forced to constantly correct the capsule’s position as it consistently drifted about 20 degrees to the right – consuming fuel Glenn would later need to drop out of orbit and re-enter the atmosphere. Glenn switched off the automatic system and took control of the capsule himself. In the meantime, Mercury Control was receiving a signal that a landing bag was loose. Because the landing bags were mounted behind the heat shield, this suggested that the heat shield – which kept the capsule and astronaut from burning up on re-entry – was also loose. It was decided that the “retro package” strapped over the heat shield – the suite of rockets used to slow the capsule for re-entry, and ordinarily ejected immediately afterward – would remain in place, which might help hold the shield in place during re-entry. As he prepared for re-entry, Glenn experienced another problem. The capsule’s gyroscopes were not giving him accurate attitude readings. Glenn flew the capsule literally by hand, like a pilot, keeping the constellation Orion centered in the cockpit window. He was the first astronaut, American or Soviet, to take so much control of a spacecraft. As he re-entered the atmosphere, flaming chunks of the retro package streamed past his window. Like Shepard, who had been the first American in space, Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, received a hero’s welcome, including a ticker-tape parade and a White House visit, after his
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successful return. Like Grissom, who merely duplicated Shepard’s achievement, Carpenter would not receive such adoration. In Aurora 7, launched May 24, 1962, Carpenter duplicated much of Glenn’s flight – down to manually compensating for a failure in the capsule’s automatic control system. Carpenter’s maneuvers, however, consumed fuel at a higher-than-anticipated rate, and he was a few seconds late in firing the retro-rockets that brought the capsule out of orbit. As a result, he missed his splashdown target in the Atlantic by about 250 miles. Overall, both man and machine had proven fallible by the completion of Aurora 7 – but problems with Glenn’s flight,
experimenter in space without unpleasant reactions or degraded bodily functions for more than 34 hours of weightless flight. It was an unprecedented scientific effort, calling upon the skills and experience of more than 2 million people from government agencies and the aerospace industry. Project Mercury also brought several less-tangible results. In placing Cooper in space for 34 hours, American astronauts had proven there was nothing a cosmonaut could do that they couldn’t. For ordinary Americans, the beginning of the U.S. space program would mark a turning point in the national consciousness – which would, in the years to come, never again take its eyes off the stars.
THE PROJECT DEMONSTRATED THAT A HUMAN COULD FUNCTION WELL AS A PILOT, ENGINEER, AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTER IN SPACE WITHOUT UNPLEASANT REACTIONS OR DEGRADED BODILY FUNCTIONS FOR MORE THAN 34 HOURS OF WEIGHTLESS FLIGHT. IT WAS AN UNPRECEDENTED SCIENTIFIC EFFORT, CALLING UPON THE SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE OF MORE THAN 2 MILLION PEOPLE FROM GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY. especially, had proven the wisdom of placing a trained pilot inside even the most highly automated craft.
• Sigma 7 and Faith 7: The Long-duration Flights On Oct. 3, 1962 – a month after NASA had selected a second group of astronauts to help carry out the objective of the Gemini program, and a mere 11 days before U.S. reconnaissance planes spotted missile bases under construction in Cuba – Astronaut Wally Schirra conducted a nearly flawless six-orbit engineering test flight in a capsule he’d named Sigma 7. Mindful of the problems encountered by Glenn and Carpenter, he conserved fuel carefully, and splashed down almost exactly on target. Schirra’s mission was so nearly perfect that many NASA officials believed the agency, having pushed the Mercury hardware far enough, should make it the last of the program’s missions and move on to the Gemini program. Officials at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, however, thought it would be useful to test a man in space for a full day – as all the Soviet spaceflights since Gagarin’s had done. Gordon Cooper piloted the last Mercury flight in the capsule Faith 7 from May 14 to 15, 1963, orbiting the Earth 22 times and staying in space for more than 34 hours. The only problems to surface during the mission occurred at the end, when a series of faults in the electrical system forced Cooper to take control of nearly every aspect of the capsule’s re-entry and landing, which he did expertly; his landing was the most accurate of the six manned Mercury missions. Cooper had demonstrated, once again, the need for experienced test pilots to fly in the early days of the American space program.
And for the new – and growing – corps of U.S. astronauts, it would vindicate the quintessentially American approach to spaceflight, which valued the individual expert slightly more than it did the fully automated machine. “We proved,” recalled Schirra years later, “man could do a lot more than a machine could do.” Today, images of the Mercury Seven standing next to their spacecraft are already beginning to look a bit dated; it seems scarcely believable that these men in silver suits, evocative of a 1950s science fiction B-movie, orbited Earth in shuttlecock-shaped cans. Future generations will likely look upon the Mercury capsule the way we now view medieval woodcuts of the first diving bells – why would anyone enter such a vessel, let alone use it to submerge themselves in an environment that would promptly kill them if it failed? Regardless of the mortal, global struggle that happened to place them in outer space, the answer, for the Mercury Seven, will always be: because it was there.
THE MERCURY LEGACY NASA canceled the final three Mercury missions in order to clear the way for pursuing the more ambitious goals of Project Gemini. But in four years and nine months, the United States’ first manned spaceflight project had successfully met, and even surpassed, the original three program objectives. The project demonstrated that a human could function well as a pilot, engineer, and scientific
Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., has a smile for the recovery crew of the USS Kearsarge after being brought on board from a successful 22-orbit mission in his Mercury spacecraft Faith 7. Cooper is still sitting in his capsule, with his helmet off.
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PROJECT GEMINI The Bridge to Apollo BY CRAIG COLLINS Photos courtesy of NASA
B
ABOVE: Gemini VII photographed from Gemini VI during the first rendezvous between two manned spacecraft in Earth orbit. The spacecraft practiced rendezvous and station-keeping maneuvers for one day in orbit. Gemini VI, with Walter M. Schirra, Jr. and Thomas P. Stafford aboard, launched December 15, 1965. Gemini VII, with Frank Borman and James A. Lovell aboard, launched December 4, 1965. OPPOSITE PAGE: Edward H. White II, pilot of the Gemini IV spacecraft, floats in the zero gravity of space with an Earth limb backdrop. The extravehicular activity (EVA) represented the first time an American had stepped outside the confines of his spacecraft. White was attached to the spacecraft by a 25-foot umbilical line and a 23-foot tether line, both wrapped in gold tape to form one cord. In his right hand, White carries a Hand-Held Self-Maneuvering Unit (HHSMU). The visor of his helmet is gold plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.
GEMINI III March 23, 1965 Command Pilot: Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom Pilot: John W. Young 4 hours, 52 minutes, 31 seconds
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y the time Gordon Cooper’s final Mercury mission splashed down on March 15, 1963, the U.S. space program was well aware of the gaps in its knowledge about space travel. Mercury had achieved its goals well, but those goals, while extraordinarily ambitious, had been limited. In 1963, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) knew that humans could function normally in the weightless environment of space for a little more than a day; they knew that they could launch a spacecraft into high Earth orbit; and they knew that both astronaut and spacecraft could be safely recovered after spaceflight. But the object of both the American and Soviet space programs was the Moon, and to NASA, it was not yet clear that the trip could be achieved. A lunar voyage would necessarily demand more than one astronaut, and it would require a command module and a lunar lander to separate, carry out separate tasks, and later rendezvous and dock together. To travel to the Moon and back – a distance, in total, of nearly a half-million miles – would require astronauts to remain in space for at least two weeks. The spacecraft itself would need to be powered for a much longer period than was possible with the kinds of batteries used in a Mercury capsule, and it would have to be controlled by the astronaut to a much greater degree. If there were a problem with the docking mechanism, astronauts would have to exit one spacecraft and make their way to another while in orbit – an extravehicular activity (EVA) or “spacewalk.” It wasn’t as if NASA had been caught flat-footed by these issues. Even as the hardware for Apollo was being designed, NASA had been developing a separate “Mercury Mark II” program that would test the hardware, systems, and techniques needed to reach the Moon. The program was announced in December 1961, and became officially known as “Gemini,” named for the stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini (Latin for “twins”), which symbolized both the program’s two-man crew and its rendezvous mission.
GEMINI IV June 3-7, 1965 Command Pilot: James A. McDivitt Pilot: Edward H. White II 4 days, 1 hour, 56 minutes, 12 seconds. This marked the first extravehicular activity (EVA) by an American, a 22-minute spacewalk by White.
GEMINI V Aug. 21-29, 1965 Command Pilot: Gordon Cooper Pilot: Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr. 7 days, 22 hours, 55 minutes, 14 seconds. Gemini V made the first weeklong flight and the first use of fuel cells for electrical power. It also completed 120 orbits.
GEMINI VII Dec. 4-18, 1965 Command Pilot: Frank Borman, Jr. Pilot: James A. Lovell, Jr. 13 days, 18 hours, 35 minutes, 1 second. Primary objective was to see whether humans could live in space for 14 days. Gemini VII was also used as a rendezvous target for Gemini VI-A.
GEMINI VI-A Dec. 15-16, 1965
GEMINI VIII March 16-17, 1966
Command Pilot: Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Pilot: Thomas P. Stafford 1 day, 1 hour, 51 minutes, 24 seconds. Achieved the first space rendezvous with Gemini VII, maintaining an assigned orbit (station-keeping) for more than 5 hours at distances from 1 to 300 feet apart.
Command Pilot: Neil A. Armstrong Pilot: David Scott 10 hours, 41 minutes, 26 seconds. Accomplished first hard docking in space. Armstrong overcame a thruster malfunction that caused a near-fatal tumbling. He also made the first emergency landing of a manned U.S. space mission.
GEMINI IX-A June 3-6, 1966 Command Pilot: Thomas P. Stafford Pilot: Eugene A. Cernan 3 days, 21 minutes, 50 seconds. Three different types of rendezvous, 2 hours of EVA, and 44 completed orbits. Docking attempt aborted when the shroud on the target vehicle did not completely separate.
GEMINI X July 18-21, 1966 Command Pilot: John W. Young Pilot: Michael Collins 2 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, 39 seconds. First use of the Agena target vehicle’s propulsion systems. Collins had 49 minutes of stand-up EVA and 39 minutes of EVA to retrieve an experiment from the Agena stage.
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The major goals of Project Gemini were, like Project Mercury’s, stated simply enough to understate their technical complexity: • to subject astronauts and equipment to spaceflight lasting up to two weeks; • to rendezvous and dock with orbiting vehicles, and to maneuver the docked combination by using the target vehicle’s propulsion system; • to perfect controlled methods of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and landing at a preselected site; • to perform extravehicular activities while in orbit, and to develop the capabilities and techniques for working in space.
Preparations
Technicians from the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which built the Gemini spacecraft, make final inspections to Gemini III. Unlike manned rockets both before and after, Gemini didn’t have a rocket-powered launch escape system connected to the spacecraft. Instead, the astronauts sat in ejection seats. The photo was taken from the white room atop the Titan launch vehicle at Pad 19 at the Kennedy Space Center. Gus Grissom and John Young would ride the spacecraft into orbit for the first Gemini mission, a five-hour trip into space on March 23, 1965.
GEMINI XI Sept. 15-16, 1966 Command Pilot: Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr. Pilot: Richard F. Gordon 2 days, 23 hours, 17 minutes, 8 seconds. Gemini record altitude reached using the Agena’s propulsion after rendezvous and docking.
GEMINI XII Nov. 11-15, 1966 Command Pilot: James A. Lovell, Jr. Pilot: Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Docked manually with the target Agena. Aldrin set an EVA record of 5 hours, 30 minutes, with one spacewalk and two standup exercises, demonstrating improvements on previous EVA problems.
To help the seven U.S. astronauts successfully conduct 10 two-man missions into space, NASA selected a second group, informally known as the “New Nine,” to complement the Mercury Seven. On Sept. 17, 1962, Neil A. Armstrong, Frank Borman, Jr., Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., James A. Lovell, Jr., James A. McDivitt, Elliot M. See, Jr., Thomas P. Stafford, Edward H. White II, and John W. Young were introduced to the public. Gemini missions would also include five astronauts from Group 3, the “Next Nine,” who were introduced a year later: Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Eugene A. Cernan, Michael Collins, Richard F. Gordon, and David R. Scott. As in Project Mercury, each member of the New Nine was immediately immersed in a specialty area in the development of Gemini, such as simulators, cockpit layout, or boosters. Given its mission requirements, the Gemini spacecraft would differ significantly from the Mercury capsule. It would need to be bigger, in order to accommodate two astronauts. It needed more powerful on-board computers, to handle the complicated changes in its orbital path. It would, for its longer-duration missions, be powered by fuel cells in addition to batteries, and it would be equipped with two hatches that could be opened from the inside by both astronauts, to allow them to exit the craft and work in space. Astronaut Walter M. “Wally” Schirra, who flew in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, often said afterward that the Gemini craft was the most fun to fly. “[With] Mercury, the flight path was predestined,” he said. “You were aboard a ballistic flight around the world. So if you just went fast enough, you kept going around the world, until you slowed down and you came down,” he said in a 1998 NASA interview with NBC News science correspondent Roy Neal. The pilot of a Gemini capsule could move it forward, backward, and sideways in space, a truly piloted craft. Cooper, also a Mercury and Gemini astronaut, explained to Neal another significant difference between the Mercury and Gemini capsules. “The noise level in Mercury was really quite high,” he said, “because of the inverters and the motors and all the things running right in the same shell you were in. So in Gemini, we moved all of these systems out into an adapter section. We needed more room, too, for putting in fuel cells and batteries and a propulsion system, to be able to do a little bit of orbital maneuvering for rendezvous.” Because it was bigger, the Gemini capsule was also heavier, weighing around 8,400 pounds – too heavy to be lifted into orbit by the Atlas rocket that launched Mercury’s orbital flights. For its Gemini launch vehicle, NASA turned to the more powerful Titan II ballistic missile, which the Department of Defense had placed into service in 1963.
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The Missions By the end of the Mercury program, the United States had pulled even with the Soviets in the space race, and in the first half of the 1960s, the Russian space program, to demonstrate to the world that it still owned the lead, pulled off a series of flashy stunts. In June 1963, they sent the first woman into space: Valentina Tereshkova, an amateur parachutist plucked from her job as a cotton mill loom operator to join the cosmonaut program. In October 1964, the spacecraft Voskhod I was launched into space, an occasion which, the Soviets pointed out, marked several firsts. It was the first spaceflight to carry more than one person (it carried three people, crammed into a capsule designed for one, which required each to go without a pressure suit), and it was the highest spaceflight then recorded. Meanwhile, Project Gemini forged ahead, slightly behind schedule but still on target. The first two Gemini missions were unmanned. Gemini I was launched April 8, 1964, and demonstrated the structural integrity of the launch vehicle and its ability to place the spacecraft in orbit. After a pair of launch pad failures involving the guidance system and the fuel cells, Gemini II, an unmanned suborbital flight, was launched on Jan. 19, 1965, and successfully demonstrated the module’s heat shield protection, the spacecraft’s structural integrity, and the performance of the spacecraft’s on-board systems. On March 18, 1965, the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov stepped out of the airlock of his spacecraft, the Voskhod 2, and floated free in space for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. The world’s first EVA was an amazing achievement that thrilled the world, and it proved that the United States still had some catching up to do, but NASA’s leaders remained unflappable. To them, the Moon was the finish line, and they remained relatively unconcerned – however impressive the Soviet’s achievements might be – with the lead changes that took place in the interim.
The First American Spacewalk Before NASA would attempt to match Leonov’s achievement, it launched a brief test flight of the manned Gemini systems, Gemini III, commanded by Mercury veteran Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom and co-piloted by John W. Young, on March 23, 1965. The following month, Ed White opened his hatch and stepped out of the Gemini IV capsule, tumbling out into the open vacuum of space – America’s first EVA. To compensate for being second overall, NASA made sure its images of White’s 22-minute free fall were far superior to the blurry black-and-whites returned from Voskhod 2. The images snapped by Gemini IV’s commander, James McDivitt, were breathtaking: They captured White, tethered to the spacecraft by a golden umbilical, floating high above snowy-looking clouds and brilliant blue oceans. Among all the images NASA has collected since, these remain some of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring. Almost immediately after they were developed, one was made into a U.S. postage stamp. The experience was certainly moving for White, who, when ordered back into the capsule, expressed reluctance, and when once again seated next to McDivitt, said, “It’s the saddest moment of my life.” The next two missions encountered several glitches. Gemini V, an eight-day, 120-orbit flight by Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad, revealed balky performances by the craft’s new fuel cells, and Gemini VI, the first mission calling for rendezvous with a target vehicle – an unmanned Agena rocket stage – was scrubbed when the Agena rocket exploded shortly after launch.
Gemini VI and VII: A Hard-won Rendezvous Rather than abandon the mission altogether, however, NASA flight controllers devised a bold alternative: Gemini VII, a 14-day flight commanded by Frank Borman and co-piloted by Jim Lovell, would be taking off in December 1965. Why couldn’t the Gemini VI capsule hunt down and rendezvous with them? The vehicles weren’t yet prepared for docking, but they could still demonstrate rendezvous maneuvers – and place four Americans in space at one time. Gemini VII launched into orbit on Dec. 4; on Dec. 12, the renamed Gemini VI-A encountered more trouble – this time, a much more frightening situation. During launch,
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Astronauts Edward H. White II (left) and James A. McDivitt inside the Gemini IV spacecraft wait for liftoff. The objective of the Gemini IV mission was to evaluate and test the effects of four days in space on the crew, equipment and control systems. White successfully accomplished the first U.S. spacewalk during the mission.
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ABOVE: The Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ATDA) as seen from the Gemini IX spacecraft during one of three rendezvous in space. The ATDA and Gemini IX spacecraft are 66.5 feet apart. Failure of the docking adapter protective cover to fully separate on the ATDA prevented the docking of the two spacecraft. The ATDA was described by the Gemini IX crew members as an “angry alligator.” RIGHT: The Gemini X spacecraft docked with the Agena Target Vehicle. The Agena display panel is clearly visible, as is the glow from Agena’s primary propulsion system as it pushed the docked spacecraft into a higher orbit of 475 miles above the Earth, which set a new altitude record for manned spaceflight.
the engines of the Titan launch vehicle inexplicably shut down. The on-board computer indicated that the rocket had briefly left the launch pad, which meant the crew – Commander Wally Schirra and co-pilot Tom Stafford – would have to forcibly eject themselves from the capsule. Schirra was faced with an agonizing split-second decision. If the rocket had, in fact, lifted off the ground, even as much as a foot, it would likely settle back down and collapse in a fiery explosion. If Schirra and Stafford activated their explosive ejection seats, they would ruin the capsule for another mission; more important, ejection at such a low altitude could kill them. Schirra, his hand on the ejection ring, waited for the imminent explosion, but heard nothing. Launch controllers quickly figured out the automated system had detected a problem and shut down the engines before liftoff. Schirra’s experience had paid off, and he and Stafford were back in the capsule a few days later. They caught up with Lovell and Borman on Gemini VII’s last day in space, and proved the precise maneuverability of the Gemini spacecraft; at one point, the two capsules were a mere foot apart as they hurtled over the Earth at about 25 times the speed of sound. Borman and Lovell’s 14-day flight was essentially flawless, and the two astronauts splashed down in good health after two weeks in space.
Armstrong Averts Disaster Now that Gemini VI and VII had demonstrated the fine maneuvering of the capsule, it was time to attempt a “hard dock” with a target vehicle. Gemini VIII, commanded by Neil Armstrong and co-piloted by David Scott, performed the first successful hard dock in space on March 16, 1966, but shortly thereafter, things went horribly wrong. What followed were some of the most terrifying moments in the history of the U.S. space program. A thruster on the Gemini VIII capsule was held open by
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Gemini VIII astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott with Navy divers after their splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on March 17, 1966.
a short circuit in the electrical system, and sent the capsule and target vehicle spinning end-over-end. Fortunately, Gemini VIII had a quick-thinking commander. Armstrong had been a test pilot for the X-15 rocket plane, which had also been controlled by maneuvering thrusters – and which had flown at speeds that literally raked the paint from its fuselage. Armstrong, struggling to stabilize the capsule, jettisoned the target vehicle, but Gemini VIII’s tumbling worsened, spinning now at about one rotation per second, a rate that could, in time, cause both Armstrong and Stafford to lose consciousness. Armstrong made the emergency decision to use re-entry fuel to counter the thrust. His skillful counterfires stabilized the capsule enough that the rate of spin was slowed until the stuck thruster ran out of fuel. Because they had consumed re-entry fuel, however, their mission was cut short, canceling Scott’s planned spacewalk, and Gemini VIII was brought down for an emergency splashdown in the Pacific after a mission that, once again, validated the wisdom of placing a skilled pilot in the cabin of a NASA spacecraft.
Solving the Spacewalk One of the remaining unsolved questions for NASA, after Ed White’s fanciful tumble through space, was whether an astronaut could work purposefully in space. The first attempt to do so was made by Eugene Cernan in June 1966, on Gemini IX-A – a mission that had also been delayed by the failed launch of an Agena target vehicle. Though a second attempt was successful, the shroud that was supposed to peel back over the target vehicle’s docking mechanism became stuck, and Cernan and Commander Tom Stafford turned their attention to rendezvous maneuvers and Cernan’s spacewalk, during which he was scheduled to test a new backpack Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (AMU). Cernan found the going rough in space. With nothing to hold onto or push against, he flailed about ineffectually, his considerable strength of no help at all in the weightless environment. His advisers on the ground became concerned when his heart rate rose to near his maximum, the exertion so great that his visor fogged, obscuring his vision. His EVA was cut short after an exhausting 2 hours – he was later found to have lost 10 pounds during that time – and Cernan never made it to the AMU. Even with careful direction from Stafford, he barely made it back inside the spacecraft. The next two EVAs – by Michael Collins in Gemini X and Richard Gordon in Gemini XI – revealed similar difficulties. Collins, on July 19, 1966, performed a “stand-up” spacewalk, bracing himself in the frame of the hatch rather than venturing outside, but a second spacewalk was riddled with problems: After a struggle, he retrieved a micrometeorite collector from the side of the spacecraft, but the collector later floated out of the cabin and was lost. He traveled over the Agena to retrieve another collector, but could not find anything to hold on to, and had trouble making it back to the capsule. The gas gun Collins used for maneuvering in space stopped working, and it took the two men eight minutes to close the hatch as they struggled to tame the 15 feet of Collins’ umbilical cord. Gordon’s first EVA, during which he straddled the target vehicle and attached a tether that would make for an easier rendezvous, was cut short at 33 minutes after he became overtired. The next day, he performed a 2-hour, stand-up EVA.
In advance of their last manned Gemini mission, NASA astronauts had arguably not demonstrated an efficient working EVA. Its crew for Gemini XII, its last shot, would prove well chosen: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, a Ph.D. who had written his thesis on orbital mechanics, studied the problems reported by White, Cernan, Collins, and Gordon, and developed underwater simulations to study the mechanics of moving in low gravity. Based on his experiments and the input of the other spacewalkers, NASA engineers tried to improve the odds of a successful EVA by adding handholds and railings to the capsule and target vehicle, as well as shoe restraints in the area where Aldrin would be working. Gemini XII, commanded by Jim Lovell, launched on Nov. 11, 1966, and performed its rendezvous, docking, and orbital adjustments relatively smoothly – even demonstrating, after the failure of a radar guidance unit, that the docking procedure could be conducted manually. After a 2-hour stand-up EVA on Nov. 12, Aldrin ventured out of the hatch on Nov. 13 to photograph star fields, retrieve a micrometeorite collector, and tether Gemini XII and the Agena target vehicle together. Each of his movements was planned in advance, and Aldrin didn’t break a sweat during the two-and-a-half hours he spent in space. His approach to planning and simulating an EVA became a standard for NASA. With Gemini XII, NASA had at last achieved what had, perhaps unexpectedly, become the trickiest of its mission objectives – the purposeful spacewalk. After Aldrin’s pioneering studies and successful demonstration, NASA had the EVA down. Surveyor I, NASA’s first unmanned lunar lander, had, just a few months earlier, sent back close-up images of the surface of the Moon – a milestone, but still behind the Russians, whose Luna 9 probe had performed the first soft Moon landing in February 1966. By the end of the Gemini program, however, as the Apollo launch complex was being constructed at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, the achievements of American astronauts had surpassed those of Soviet cosmonauts. The Moon had never been closer.
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PROJECT APOLLO BY CLARENCE A. ROBINSON, JR. Photos courtesy of NASA
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ABOVE: A briefing is given by Maj. Rocco Petrone to President John F. Kennedy during a tour of Blockhouse 34 at the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex. OPPOSITE PAGE: Astronaut John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, jumps up from the lunar surface as he salutes the U.S. flag at the Descartes landing site during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity (EVA-1). Astronaut Charles M. Duke, Jr., lunar module pilot, took this picture. The lunar module (LM) Orion is on the left. The Lunar Roving Vehicle is parked beside the LM. The object behind Young, in the shade of the LM, is the far ultraviolet camera/spectrograph. Stone Mountain dominates the background in this lunar scene.
APOLLO 1 Jan. 27, 1967
APOLLO 7 Oct. 11-12, 1968
Launch vehicle: Saturn IB Crew: Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, Roger B. Chaffee. All three astronauts died in a command module fire on the launch pad during a launch simulation at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA suspended Saturn IB launches for almost a year to redesign the Apollo command module.
Launch vehicle: Saturn IB Crew: Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, R. Walter Cunningham. 10 days, 20 hours, 163 Earth orbits. First manned command and service module (CSM) operations in the lunar landing program. First live TV transmission from manned spacecraft.
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n 1961, the United States was in a position of weakness in spaceflight by comparison to the Soviet Union. However, President John F. Kennedy had no intention of allowing the nation to remain mired in the existing situation. After months of careful study and quietly working with the best technical minds in the country, the president was about to reveal his decision. The last part of the president’s “Urgent National Needs” speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, called for an all-out American effort to alter current circumstances. He called for a firm promise for a new course of action over an extended period of time. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. … This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, material, and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where we are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization, and discipline, which have not always characterized our research and development efforts.” In summing up this initiative, Kennedy requested “every scientist, engineer, serviceman, technician, contractor, and civil servant to personally pledge that the nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in this exciting adventure of space.” He knew the risks involved; nevertheless, Kennedy was willing to commit the nation’s resources to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the civil space program. Thus, Project Apollo was born. Even before taking office, Kennedy called upon Jerome B. Wiesner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to head an ad hoc committee. This group concluded that the issue of national prestige was too great to relinquish it to Soviet leadership in space, and that the United States would have to enter the field in a significant way. But it was a dicey enterprise. What if the Soviets were to beat us to the punch? They already had twice twisted our tail in space, starting with Sputnik and the dawn of the Space Age.
APOLLO 8 Dec. 21-27, 1968 Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., William A. Anders. 6 days, 3 hours. In lunar orbit 20 hours, 10 orbits. First manned lunar orbital mission. Support facilities tested. Photographs taken of Earth and Moon. Live TV broadcasts.
APOLLO 9 March 3-13, 1969 Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: James A. McDivitt, David R. Scott, Russell L. Schweickart. 10 days, 1 hour, 152 orbits. First manned flight of all lunar hardware in Earth orbit. Human reactions to space and weightlessness tested. First manned flight of lunar module (LM)
APOLLO 10 May 18-26, 1969 Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: Eugene A. Cernan, John W. Young, Thomas P. Stafford. 8 days, 3 min. In lunar orbit 61.6 hours, 31 orbits. First manned command and service module/lunar module operations in cislunar and lunar environment. Simulation of first lunar landing profile.
APOLLO 11 July 16-24, 1969
APOLLO 12 Nov. 14-24, 1969
Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. 8 days, 3 hours, 18 min. In lunar orbit 59.5 hours, 30 orbits. First manned lunar landing mission and lunar surface EVA. Flag and instruments deployed. Gathered 44 pounds of material.
Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., Richard F. Gordon, Jr., Alan L. Bean. 10 days, 4 hours, 36 min. In lunar orbit 89 hours, 45 orbits. Retrieved parts of the unmanned Surveyor 3, which had landed on the Moon in April 1967. Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) deployed.
APOLLO 13 April 11-17, 1970 Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: James A. Lovell, Jr., John L. Swigert, Jr., Fred W. Haise, Jr. 5 days, 22.9 hours. Mission aborted after rupture of service module oxygen tank. Classed as “successful failure” because of experience in rescuing crew. Spent upper stage successfully struck the Moon.
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The 363-foot-tall Apollo 11 space vehicle is launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, at 9:37 a.m., July 16, 1969. Apollo 11 was the United States’ first lunar landing mission.
The president, in close consultations with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), had his finger on the pulse of Congress. Johnson also chaired the National Aeronautics and Space Council. Kennedy sought from the council a recommended course of action and strategy to overtake the Soviets in space. In a memorandum, the president asked LBJ to consider a lunar landing program. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man?” Kennedy inquired. “Is there any other space program that promises dramatic results in which we could win?” In 1961, a lunar landing was believed far beyond the scientific and technological capabilities of either nation. Thus, the early Soviet lead in space could not predetermine this outcome, giving the United States a reasonable way to recover a measure of lost status, a NASA analysis reasoned. Meanwhile, Hugh L. Dryden, NASA’s deputy administrator, responded to a request for information from the space council about a lunar program by writing that there was “a chance for the United States to be the first to land a man on the Moon and return him to Earth, if a determined national effort is made,” according to NASA historians. He added that the earliest this feat could be accomplished was 1967, but that it would cost about $33 billion, a figure $10 billion higher than the whole projected NASA budget for the next 10 years. Almost simultaneously, Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and head of the “big booster” program so necessary for a lunar effort, responded in a memorandum to a similar request from the vice president. “We have a sporting chance of sending a three-man crew around the Moon ahead of the Soviets” and “an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the Moon, including return capability, of course.” With an all-out crash program, the United States could achieve a landing by 1967 or 1968, von Braun wrote. Johnson had already worked with Congress, lining up leadership approval in committing the nation to an accelerated space endeavor. To quash any remaining doubts, congressional leaders called on NASA Administrator James E. Webb to provide a straight answer. Webb’s enthusiastic endorsement of landing a man on the Moon and bringing him home safely generated considerable congressional endorsement for Project Apollo. Johnson also met with aerospace and industry officials to gain their support. Kennedy had made up his mind. He clearly grasped the enormity of his decision and the sacrifices required to enable an American to successfully set foot on the lunar surface. The entire world would be watching at every turn, assessing the probability of success. Only a month before Kennedy’s speech, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
APOLLO 14 Jan. 31 - Feb. 9, 1971
APOLLO 15 July 26 - Aug. 7, 1971
APOLLO 16 April 16-27, 1972
APOLLO 17 Dec. 7-19, 1972
Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Stuart A. Roosa, Edgar D. Mitchell. 9 days. In lunar orbit 67 hours, 34 orbits. ALSEP and other instruments deployed. Two EVAs (extravehicular activities). Third stage struck the Moon. Gathered 94 pounds of lunar material using handcart for the first time to transport rocks.
Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: David R. Scott, James B. Irwin, Alfred M. Worden. 12 days, 17 hours, 12 min. In lunar orbit 145 hours, 74 orbits. First to carry orbital sensors in service module of CSM. Improved spacesuits gave increased mobility and stay-time. Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) used for the first time.
Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: John W. Young, Thomas K. Mattingly II, Charles M. Duke, Jr. 11 days, 1 hour, 51 min. In lunar orbit 126 hours, 64 orbits. First study of highlands area. Selected surface experiments deployed, far ultraviolet camera/ spectrograph used for the first time on the Moon.
Launch vehicle: Saturn V Crew: Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, Harrison H. Schmitt. 12 days, 13 hours, 52 min. In lunar orbit 17 hours. Last lunar landing mission. First scientist-astronaut to land on the Moon – Schmitt. Sixth automated research station set up.
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flew a single orbit around Earth aboard his Vostok 1 spacecraft, becoming an international hero. American astronaut Alan Shepard, aboard Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961, became the first American in space during a 15-minute suborbital flight. NASA historians pointed out that Gagarin’s spacecraft weighed 10,428 pounds while Shepard’s weighed 2,100 pounds. Gagarin was weightless for 89 minutes; Shepard for only 5 minutes. Clearly, the United States had not demonstrated spaceflight equality with the USSR. After Gagarin’s mission, Kennedy and his administration knew that they had to find a way to reestablish the United States’ reputation as a leader in the eyes of the world. Just two days before the Gagarin flight, Kennedy discussed once again the possibility of a lunar landing program with Webb. Historians today compare the scope of Project Apollo to building the Panama Canal or to building the atomic bomb during the wartime Manhattan Project. Landing on the Moon’s surface would require billions of dollars, the best scientific and engineering minds in the country, mobilizing civilian and military efforts, and a great deal of risk. However, there would likely be an immense return on investment from Project Apollo’s scientific and technical advances, with thousands of applications across all of U.S. industry. This technology leapfrog effect could pay huge industrial dividends for decades to come. NASA scientists and engineers obtained their wish with Kennedy’s announcement – a national space effort integrating both scientific and commercial components. “A unique confluence of political necessity, personal commitment and activism, scientific and technological ability, economic prosperity and public mood made possible that 1961 decision to move forward with the lunar landing program,” NASA officials said. But gearing up would not be an easy task. In meeting the strict Project Apollo time constraints mandated by Kennedy, personnel had to be mobilized. Only 10,000 civil service employees worked for NASA in 1960, but that number swelled to 36,000 by 1966. An early NASA decision was critical to Apollo’s success.
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FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Dr. Werhner von Braun explains the Saturn launch system to President John F. Kennedy while Kennedy was on tour at the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex, Florida, November 1963. •The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) under construction with the Launch Control Center (LCC) and Service Towers as seen from across the Turning Basin. • Artists used paintbrushes and airbrushes to re-create the lunar surface on each of the four models comprising the LOLA simulator. Project LOLA, or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach, was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related to landing on the lunar surface. It was a complex project that cost nearly $2 million.
NASA would have to rely on outside researchers and technicians to complete Apollo, and contractor employees increased by a factor of 10, from 36,500 in 1960 to 376,700 in 1965. Therefore, the majority of personnel working on Apollo came from private industry, research institutions, and universities. During the 1960s, some 80 to 90 percent of NASA’s overall budget went to contracts for purchasing goods and services. Moreover, the space agency had to move quickly to expand its physical capacity to accomplish the Apollo mission. The agency consisted of a small Washington, D.C., headquarters and three research centers – the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA added three new facilities to meet lunar landing program demands. The Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973) near Houston, Texas, was one. This center was to design the Apollo spacecraft and launch platform for the lunar lander. It also became home to NASA’s astronauts and the site of Mission Control. The space agency greatly expanded the launch operations center near Cape Canaveral on Florida’s eastern seacoast, renaming it the John F. Kennedy Space Center in 1963. This installation’s massive Launch Complex 34 became the site for all Apollo booster firings. A huge and expensive 36-story (550-foot-tall) structure at the Cape became known as the Saturn/Apollo rocket assembly facility. NASA also created the Mississippi Test Facility on a Deep South bayou. It later became the John C. Stennis Space Center in 1988. The NASA expansion cost more than $2.2 billion. Most of the money was spent before 1966, agency historians said.
Meeting Kennedy’s goal also required NASA to meld disparate institutional cultures into an inclusive organization moving along a single unified path. “Each NASA installation, university, contractor, and research facility had different perspectives on how to go about the task of accomplishing Apollo,” NASA officials said. Expanding the program management concept, NASA brought in military managers to oversee Apollo. A central figure in 1962 was Air Force Maj. Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, the architect for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile program. Phillips answered directly to the Office of Manned Space Flight at NASA Headquarters, which, in turn, reported to the NASA administrator. Phillips created an all-powerful program office with centralized authority over design, engineering, procurement, testing, construction, manufacturing, spare parts, logistics, and operations. A fundamental tenet of the program’s management was that three critical factors – cost, schedule, and reliability – were interrelated and would be managed as a group. This management approach would become a critical component in Apollo’s success. In terms of complexity, rate of growth, and technological sophistication, Apollo was certainly unique in American history. Managing complex organizations and structures for completion of widely varying tasks was an important consequence of the Apollo program. This management concept, under Phillips, orchestrated more than 500 contractors working on both large and small aspects of the Moon landing program, NASA officials stated. For example, the prime contracts awarded to industry for the principal components of just the Saturn V booster included Boeing for the first stage; North American Aviation for the second stage; Douglas Aircraft Corporation for the third stage; Rocketdyne Division of
North American Aviation for the J-2 and F-1 engines; and IBM for Saturn electronics. The prime contractors, with more than 250 subcontractors, provided millions of parts and components in the Saturn launch vehicle. Each part had to meet exacting specifications for performance and reliability. So enormous was the overall Apollo endeavor that NASA’s procurement actions rose from roughly 44,000 in 1960 to almost 300,000 by 1965. As planning for Apollo began, more than 10,000 separate tasks had to be accomplished to put man on the Moon. Each task had particular objectives, manpower needs, scheduling, and a complex interrelationship with many other tasks. But first, vital questions had to be answered in building the network of tasks leading to a lunar landing. Which tasks had to be done first? Which could be completed concurrently? What were the critical sequences? The network of tasks had to be divided into manageable portions, the key ones being determination of the environment in cislunar space and on the lunar surface and design and development of the spacecraft and launch vehicles. Other key tasks involved conducting tests and flight missions to verify the components and procedures, as well as selection and training of flight crews and ground support to carry out the missions. Today’s generations often take for granted routine U.S. spaceflight. But Apollo’s takeoff from the surface of Earth headed for the Moon was not without inherent physical difficulty. Earth travels at 1,000 miles an hour as it rotates, and going into orbit requires reaching an exit velocity of 18,000 miles an hour, then speeding up to 25,000 miles an hour at the proper time and traveling 240,000 miles to another body in space. The Moon itself travels at 2,000 miles an hour relative to Earth. Then, the spacecraft must orbit around that
AS PLANNING FOR APOLLO BEGAN, MORE THAN 10,000 SEPARATE TASKS HAD TO BE ACCOMPLISHED TO PUT MAN ON THE MOON. EACH TASK HAD PARTICULAR OBJECTIVES, MANPOWER NEEDS, SCHEDULING, AND A COMPLEX INTERRELATIONSHIP WITH MANY OTHER TASKS. APOLLO 11 I 50 YEARS
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LEFT: Officially designated Apollo/Saturn 204, but more commonly known as Apollo 1, this close-up view of the interior of the command module shows the effects of the intense heat of the flash fire that killed the prime crew during a routine training exercise. While strapped into their seats inside the command module atop the giant Saturn V Moon rocket, a faulty electrical switch created a spark that ignited the pure oxygen environment. The speed and intensity of the fire quickly exhausted the oxygen supply inside the crew cabin. Unable to open the hatch due to its cumbersome design, and with a lack of breathable oxygen, the crew lost consciousness and perished. They were astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee. RIGHT: A heavy beard covers the face of astronaut Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Jr., Apollo 7 commander, as he looks out the rendezvous window in front of the commander’s station on the ninth day of the Apollo 7 mission.
body to drop a specialized landing vehicle onto its surface. Only then can lunar work begin – making measurements and observations, collecting samples, leaving instruments to send back data. Returning to Earth requires repeating the outward-bound process to return home, NASA officials emphasized. In the early planning stages for Apollo, three different approaches to the Moon were considered: direct ascent, rendezvous in Earth orbit, and rendezvous in lunar orbit. Each had advantages and drawbacks, NASA officials said. The choice of mission mode was an important milestone in Apollo development. Lunar orbit rendezvous meant considerable payload savings, which, in turn, reduced propulsion requirements on the order of 50 percent. However, reducing brute force also meant more skill and finesse would be needed. “A module designed especially for landing on and lifting from the lunar surface had to mate with a module orbiting the Moon. Rendezvous and docking, clearly, were of critical importance. The Gemini program was created to provide greater experience than Mercury would in manned operations in space, especially in perfecting procedures on rendezvous and docking,” said Robert C. Seamans, Jr., a former deputy NASA administrator. The unmanned Ranger, Surveyor, and Orbiter flight series contributed necessary cartographic, geologic, and geophysical data about the moon. All of these missions were in preparation for the flights with the powerful Saturn V launch vehicle first flown unmanned in late 1967,” Seamans said. In preparation for Apollo, NASA launched five Orbiter satellites between August 1966 and August 1967, achieving all of their objectives. After the third mission, NASA officials announced they had sufficient data on the Moon to press on with an astronaut landing. Work on the Apollo spacecraft stretched from November
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1961 to October 1968, when the last test flight took place. The tests encompassed ground, suborbital, and orbital modes. However, it was the all-important Saturn V that was so necessary for the Moon mission. A calculated risk followed in November 1967, with the entire Apollo/Saturn combination. Another test took place in April 1968, and even though there were some anomalies, NASA declared the test program completed. The next launch would have astronauts aboard. In 17 tests and 15 piloted launches, NASA officials asserted, the Saturn booster family scored a 100-percent launch reliability rate. NASA leaders declared the Apollo command module ready for human occupancy. While these development activities took place, tragedy struck the Apollo program. On Jan. 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger B. Chaffee were aboard the Apollo/ Saturn capsule scheduled to be used in the first manned spaceflight. The men were running a mock launch sequence, and several hours into it, a fire flashed in the pure oxygen atmosphere, engulfing the capsule and killing the astronauts. The nation and NASA were stunned. NASA launched an investigation to determine
OUTBOUND, APOLLO 8’S CREW FOCUSED A CAMERA ON EARTH. FOR THE FIRST TIME, HUMANITY SAW ITS HOME FROM AFAR – A TINY, LOVELY, FRAGILE “BLUE MARBLE” HANGING IN THE BLACKNESS OF SPACE, AS NASA OFFICIALS DESCRIBED IT.
LEFT: This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn. It became one of the most famous photographs in history. RIGHT: View of the Apollo 9 lunar module Spider in a lunar landing configuration. The landing gear on Spider has been deployed, and lunar surface probes (sensors) extend out from the landing gear foot pads. Inside the Spider were astronauts James A. McDivitt, Apollo 9 commander; and Russell L. Schweickart, lunar module pilot.
what happened and why. The space agency learned that a short circuit in the electrical system ignited combustible materials, fed by the oxygen-rich atmosphere. NASA discovered the fire could have been prevented and called for more than a thousand wiring changes and other modifications to the spacecraft, including a less oxygen-rich environment. Capsule changes quickly emerged, and within a little more than a year it was ready for flight. However, with the public and congressional backlash, it would be 20 months before another launch. Resuming flight, Apollo 7 was an Earth-orbiting mission that lasted 10 days and 20 hours, from Oct. 11-22, with Schirra, Donn F. Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham aboard for 163 orbits of Earth. On Dec. 2, 1968, Apollo 8 took off atop a Saturn V. Three astronauts were on board – Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders – headed for an orbit around the Moon. Originally, Apollo 8 had been planned to test the lunar module in Earth orbit, but the module was not yet ready for flight. Officials at the highest levels were also worried that the Soviet Union might yet get a manned spacecraft to the Moon, and they decided to send Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon and return to Earth. After oneand-a-half Earth orbits, the third-stage burn put Apollo 8 on a lunar trajectory. In lunar orbit for 20 hours during 10 orbits, this first manned lunar mission lasted 6 days and 3 hours. This “around-themoon-and-back” mission was designed to demonstrate translunar injection, command support module navigation, communications, and midcourse corrections. Another element of this mission was to return high-resolution photographs of proposed Apollo landing sites and locations of likely scientific interest. Outbound, Apollo 8’s crew focused a camera on Earth. For the first time, humanity saw its home from afar – a tiny, lovely, fragile “blue marble” hanging in the blackness of space, as NASA officials described it.
Only two more missions remained before the lunar landing main event – Apollo 9 and 10. In acquiring critical rendezvous and docking experience, Apollo 9 flight-tested the whole system – the booster, the command and service module, and the lunar module – in Earth orbit. This flight with all the lunar hardware involved a crew headed by James A. McDivitt, the commander; David R. Scott, the command module pilot; and Russell L. Schweickart, the lunar module pilot. The mission lasted 10 days and 1 hour, and it was the first manned lunar hardware flight in Earth orbit. Schweickart performed 37 minutes of extravehicular activity (EVA). Human reactions to space and weightlessness could be studied in the 152 orbits. Approximately 70 hours into the 10-day mission in Earth’s orbit, the astronauts separated, rendezvoused, and docked the lunar module with the command module. As a result of unfavorable weather in the planned landing area, Apollo 9 completed an additional orbit before returning to Earth. The second Apollo mission to orbit the Moon, Apollo 10, was also the first to travel to the Moon with a full Apollo spacecraft, consisting of the command and service module, called Charlie Brown, and the lunar module, named Snoopy. The primary objective of the mission was to demonstrate crew, space vehicle, and mission support facilities during a human lunar mission and to evaluate lunar module performance. This mission was a full dry run for the Apollo 11 mission, and operations except an actual lunar landing were performed. On May 22, 1969, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan entered the lunar module and fired the service module reaction control thrusters to separate the lunar and command modules. The lunar module was put into an orbit to allow low-altitude passes over the Moon’s surface, the closest approach bringing it to within 8.9 kilometers (5.5 miles) of the Moon. All systems on the lunar module were tested during the separation, including communications, propulsion, attitude, control, and radar. Then the lunar module and command module
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made rendezvous and redocked. This took place 8 hours after the separation, on May 23. Thirty-one lunar orbits were achieved. In addition to extensive photography of the lunar surface from both the lunar module and the command module, television imagery was transmitted to Earth. John Young, the third member of the Apollo 10 crew, captained the Apollo 10 command module. He continued to orbit the Moon while the other two astronauts went down toward the lunar surface. This all-important mission set the stage for what was to come with Apollo 11. On July 16, 1969, the big event took place when Apollo 11 lifted off. After confirming the hardware was working well, the spacecraft began a three-day trip to the Moon. At 4:18 a.m. EST on July 20, 1969, the lunar module of astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, radioing the cryptic message “the Eagle has landed.” Meanwhile, Michael Collins orbited overhead in the Apollo command module. After checkout, Armstrong set foot on the surface, telling millions who saw and heard him on Earth that it was “one small step for a man – one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin soon followed him out, and the two plodded around the Sea of Tranquility landing site in one-sixth lunar gravity. The astronauts planted an American flag but omitted claiming the land for the United States, as had routinely been done during European exploration of the Americas. They collected soil and rock samples and set up scientific experiments. Armstrong and Aldrin left behind on the surface of the Moon a plaque mounted on the lunar module descent stage with an inscription reading, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” The next day, the two astronauts launched back to the command service module orbiting overhead and began the return trip to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific on July 24. Apollo 11, in particular, met with ecstatic reaction around the globe, as everyone shared the success of the mission. Ticker-tape parades, speaking engagements, public relations events, and a world tour by the astronauts helped to create goodwill both in the United States and abroad.
The bootprint marks one of the first steps human beings took on the Moon in July 1969. It was made by American astronaut Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 mission.
Five more landing missions followed at approximately six-month intervals through December 1972, each of them increasing the time spent on the Moon. The last three Apollo missions used a lunar rover vehicle to travel in the vicinity of the various landing sites. The scientific experiments placed on the Moon and the lunar soil samples returned through Project Apollo have been a boon for scientific investigations of the solar system ever since. While the technology return has been significant, the Apollo program did not answer conclusively the age-old question of lunar origin and evolution. Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon due to a malfunction, but the survival and safe return of the astronauts was considered by many to be NASA’s “finest hour.” Three planned Apollo missions – 18, 19, and 20 – were canceled. NASA officials pointed out that when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, mission control in Houston flashed the words of Kennedy announcing the Apollo commitment on its big screen. Both phrases were followed with these words: “Task accomplished, July 1969.” No greater statement could probably have been made. Any assessment of Apollo that does not recognize the accomplishment of landing an American on the Moon and safely returning before the end of the 1960s is not complete, for that was the primary goal of Project Apollo. Apollo was not only a triumph of man’s desire to explore his universe but also of management in meeting enormously difficult systems engineering, technological, organizational, and integration requirements. Humankind’s first steps onto an extraterrestrial body with Project Apollo became a high point in U.S. space efforts. Perhaps more importantly, Project Apollo enabled the people of Earth to view their planet in a new way. This was critical to fundamental change as it treated the world to the first pictures of Earth from afar.
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APOLLO 11 BY CRAIG COLLINS Photos courtesy of NASA
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y the summer of 1969, almost every element of the Apollo program had been tested and proven. The massive Saturn V rocket – the most powerful machine ever built and the first launch vehicle developed strictly for space applications – had shown it could reliably lift the Apollo modules and astronauts together beyond the Earth’s orbit. The command and service module (CSM) and lunar module (LM) could launch together, dock, and separate, and the LM could fly on its own. Russian and U.S. unmanned probes had performed soft landings on the Moon, dispelling fears that spacecraft would simply sink into the powdery lunar surface. In December 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, the power bottled in the Saturn V’s three stages sent U.S. astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders into orbit around the Moon and back, a total distance of a little under a half-million miles. There was, really, only one question left to answer, and it was embedded in Apollo 11’s pithy prime mission objective: “Perform a manned lunar landing and return.” Could a man land on the Moon? Even in the Information Age, it’s difficult to grasp the technological burst – still unequaled today – that approached its historic climax in the summer of 1969. A little more than eight years earlier, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and astronaut Alan Shepard had become the first men in space; now astronauts were preparing to set foot on another world. Many experts continued to fear that the LM – much heavier than its unmanned predecessors – would sink into the lunar surface, fatally stranding the astronauts.
BY CRAIG COLLINS
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MAIN PHOTO: Astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot, is photographed during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity (EVA) on the lunar surface. In the right background is the lunar module (LM) Eagle. On Aldrin's right is the Solar Wind Composition (SWC) experiment already deployed. INSET: Aldrin descends the steps of the LM ladder as he prepares to walk on the Moon. The photos on this spread were taken by astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander, with a 70mm lunar surface camera during the Apollo 11 EVA.
Judging from the icy cool of his decision-making in the Gemini 8 mission – and later in Apollo 11 – astronaut Neil Armstrong probably wasn’t fanciful enough to imagine he’d be mired in a lunar bog. But he did, reportedly – along with many NASA officials – fix the chances of a successful lunar landing attempt at about 50/50. There were simply too many unknowns. To offset these unknowns, the Apollo 11 astronauts – Armstrong, the commander; Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot; and Michael Collins, the command module pilot – trained 14 hours a day, six days a week, from January to July 1969. About a third of Armstrong and Aldrin’s training time was spent inside the lunar module simulator, and they began consistently demonstrating successful landings some time in late June, about two or three weeks before launch. To be fair, these simulations were led by ground crews who threw every imaginable problem at the two, who by July, had probably begun to wonder when the bells, sirens, and warning lights of the simulator were going to burn themselves out. By July, NASA and its astronauts were as ready as they were ever going to be.
OUTWARD BOUND
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he American public, on the other hand, had some catching up to do. Since the onset of the space race, the visionary idealist who had launched it, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated. The nation had become increasingly entangled in an unpopular war in Vietnam and in rancorous, sometimes violent, political debates at home about civil rights, poverty, and the competence of its leaders. Many Americans, by the end of the decade, seemed to have lost interest in the space program, or to believe it was a waste of the nation’s resources. Most accounts of the time just prior to the Apollo 11 launch, however, portray a reawakening of the American spirit – and in the spirits of millions of people around the world – during the spring and summer of 1969. Launched as a competition to prove the superiority of one political system over another, the goal of reaching the Moon had taken on much more significance in the intervening years, and as the launch date neared there was, it seemed, a mounting public appreciation of the almost metaphysical importance of the approaching moment. On the morning of July 16, as the Apollo 11 astronauts – who had awakened early that morning, even by astronaut standards – sat atop the 363-foot Saturn V at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, a million eyewitnesses packed themselves into the surrounding sandy flats and shorelines, waiting along with a worldwide television audience. Three-and-a-half miles away, seated in grandstands, were half the members of Congress and more than 3,000 journalists from 56 different nations. At 9:32 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST), the rocket blasted the Apollo 11 crew into the sky. Threading the sky at more than 6,300 miles per hour, Apollo 11 jettisoned its first two rocket stages and entered a 103-milehigh Earth orbit, during which flight and ground crews checked the spacecraft’s functions. At 12:22 p.m., Apollo 11 fired its third-stage engine to launch it out of Earth orbit and into a lunar trajectory. A little more than 20 minutes later, the lunar module Eagle was unpacked from its compartment atop the launch rockets, and the CSM, Columbia, turned around and docked head-to-head with the LM. The crew passed the next three days traveling at a speed of nearly 13,000 feet per second, taking time from their daily routines to send two extended telecasts back to Earth.
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CONGRATULATIONS TO NASA ON APOLLO’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY.
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LEFT: The Apollo 11 prime crew poses for a photograph during a walk-through egress test. The hands-on test was in preparation for the first manned lunar landing mission scheduled for liftoff in July 1969. RIGHT: The Apollo 11 Saturn V space vehicle lifts off with astronauts Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin at 9:32 a.m. EST July 16, 1969, from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A.
The crew approached the Moon on the morning of July 19, a sight Collins later recalled in his memoir, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey, “The Moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen.” At about half-past 1:00 p.m. EST, the astronauts fired Columbia’s main rocket to slow the vehicle for entry into lunar orbit. It had been another epic Apollo journey, only the third spaceflight to the Moon – but until now, everything done by Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins had been done before.
LANDING THE EAGLE
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n the fourth day of Apollo 11 – July 20, 1969 – its crew began to prepare for the mission’s unproven tasks. Aldrin crawled through the hatchway linking Columbia and Eagle and powered up the lunar module, to be joined about an hour later by Armstrong. Together, they rechecked the systems and deployed the LM’s spidery legs. On the far side of the Moon, at about 1:46 p.m. EST, Collins pressed the switch that separated Columbia from the lander. “See you later,” he said. Armstrong and Aldrin were on their own now, rocketing over the lunar surface face down, feet forward. Armstrong fired the LM’s main engine in counterthrust, to slow the craft’s horizontal velocity, while Collins watched from his orbit. As well-prepared as they considered themselves and the astronauts to be, NASA officials viewed the first lunar landing with concern. Gene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director, recalled in a 1999 interview conducted for the NOVA television special, To the Moon, “Going through my mind was a very simple equation: Today we are either going to land, we are going to abort, or we are going to crash.” As if on cue, Eagle’s descent to the lunar surface promptly confronted Apollo 11 with its two most serious tests – either of which had the potential to kill the mission. At an altitude of just over 7,000 feet, about 5 miles from the landing site, the LM pitched over to assume its vertical landing posture, the ghostly lunar surface
visible through the downward-angled windows. It descended about another 1,000 feet and then the guidance computer sounded an alarm. The light that came on in the LM was coded 1202, an “executive overflow” alarm, which meant the computer was having trouble completing its work in the cycling time available. Almost nobody knew what a 1202 was and in the first row of consoles at the Mission Control Center – “the Trench” – it fell to 26-year-old Guidance Officer (GUIDO) Steve Bales to make the split-second decision – Go or No Go. “GUIDO?” Kranz shouted, seeking an answer. Eagle was rapidly burning up its descent fuel. Luckily, Bales was aided by 24-year-old Jack Garman, an expert in the guidance computer software, who knew immediately that the computer would complete its work as long as the alarm didn’t sound too frequently – a signal that it was overwhelmed. “It’s OK,” he assured Bales, who shouted “Go!” to the capsule communicator (CapCom), astronaut Charlie Duke. “We are Go on that alarm, Eagle,” Duke said. A few months earlier, Garman had suggested to the simulation supervisor, Dick Koos, that flight controllers should be tested on their reactions to computer error codes. Koos did, throwing a 1202 alarm at Kranz and his flight controllers on the last day of simulations, two weeks before the launch date. Bales, incorrectly, had called an abort – and, Kranz wrote later, “I was ready to kill Koos.” At Kranz’s insistence, Bales and the other controllers then wrote down every possible computer error code and the correct response to each – a list Garman had beneath his console glass during Apollo 11. Meanwhile, as Armstrong eased the LM down toward the Moon, he and Aldrin could see that the chosen landing area, the vast Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) – which had been selected because of its relative smoothness – wasn’t as smooth as advertised. Worse, the Eagle had come in slightly faster than anticipated, overshooting the target site and sailing over a crater strewn with boulders that would wreck the LM. Armstrong swiftly overrode the computer and assumed manual control. There was no time to discuss the decision with mission control in Houston;
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LEFT: Astronaut Michael Collins, the command module pilot, orbited the Moon alone while Armstrong and Aldrin made their trip down to the lunar surface. RIGHT: This interior view of the Apollo 11 LM shows Aldrin during the lunar landing mission. This picture was taken by Armstrong, prior to the Moon landing.
there was precious little reserve fuel for the descent stage and Armstrong would need every available second of it. The Eagle diverged from the programmed path, coasting over the boulder field, searching for a clear landing spot as the fuel level dropped nearer to zero. In Houston, Duke called out the remaining fuel: “Sixty seconds.” Mission control watched in silence, stunned at the telemetry data that told them the LM had not landed yet, but was throttling rapidly over the surface. Armstrong, who had crashed the LM many times during simulation, was, despite his outward calm, feeling the stress of the moment; his heart rate had climbed from a normal rate of 77 to 156. “Thirty seconds,” Duke radioed. Finally, Armstrong saw what he needed – a clear spot just beyond a small crater. He brought Eagle down slowly, kicking up sheets of gray dust that enveloped the LM. The lander’s downward-pointing feelers touched the surface of the Moon, tripping the circuit that illuminated the blue indicator light in the cockpit. “Contact light,” Aldrin called. Armstrong cut the engine, and the four footpads came down on the lunar soil. “We copy you down, Eagle,” said Duke. His heart rate beginning to slow a bit, Armstrong’s voice was calm and clear: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
THE MOON WALK
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fter the tense moments spent waiting for the Eagle to land, Kranz recalled, many in mission control simply burst into tears after the LM was safely down, and he himself admitted to having some trouble getting out the words that would begin the next sequence for the astronauts and mission control: the Stay or No Stay decision. Armstrong and Aldrin, once down, immediately prepared the ship for the contingency of an emergency launch.
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There was one last remaining unknown for Armstrong and Aldrin: whether they could actually walk on the surface of the Moon. It was beginning to seem more likely, but the Moon environment – which fluctuated about 500 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature, between the fatal extremes of about 243 degrees Fahrenheit at lunar “noon” to 279 degrees Fahrenheit below zero at “night” – was more forbidding than an Earth-orbit EVA (extravehicular activity). Apollo 11 had been planned to land during lunar morning, which would make the outside temperature a more hospitable 40 or 50 degrees. The Moon spacesuit, also, had been reinforced with several aluminized layers to guard against not only the temperature extremes, but also the possibility of a tear – which would promptly prove fatal, causing an explosive decompression that would vent the astronaut’s oxygen into space. Six hours after landing, Aldrin and Armstrong had bled Eagle’s cabin of air and were sealed in their suits, their enormous backpacks supplying them with cooled oxygen. At about 10:56 p.m. EST, Armstrong stepped outside, the lunar sky around him darker than the blackest night on Earth, and descended the Eagle’s 10-foot ladder, on his way down, activating a television camera that had been installed specifically to capture the moment. His approach demonstrated the extreme caution with which the moment had been planned: First, he paused at the bottom rung to observe the lunar surface. “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches,” he said. “The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder.” He dropped first onto one of Eagle’s footpads, surveying the surface. And then, finally, it was time for the first person in history to set foot on something that did not exist on Earth. “I’m going to step off the LM now,” Armstrong said. He planted his foot on the surface – which was firm beneath the thin layer of
The Apollo 11 command and service modules (CSM) comprising Columbia are photographed from the lunar module Eagle (LM) in lunar orbit during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.
moondust. With more than a billion people listening in, he said: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” He was joined about 19 minutes later by Aldrin, who described the lunar landscape as “magnificent desolation.” The two astronauts took several exploratory strides, bouncing over the surface of the Moon, whose gravitational pull, one-sixth that of the Earth, transformed the combined 360 pounds of astronaut, suit, and backpack to a mere 60 pounds. “Isn’t this fun?” said Armstrong at one point. “I was struck,” Aldrin recalled later, “by the contrast between the starkness of the shadows and the desert-like barrenness of the rest of the surface. It ranged from dusty gray to light tan and was unchanging except for one startling sight: our LM sitting there with its black, silver, and bright yellow-orange thermal coating shining brightly in the otherwise colorless landscape.” About two-and-a-half hours were allocated for the astronauts’ inaugural Moon excursion, and there were many tasks to accomplish, including the planting of an American flag, photographing, collecting lunar soil and rock samples, and setting up three experiments: a seismic experiments package to measure Moonquakes and meteor impacts; a laser ranging retro-reflector that would allow scientists to precisely measure Earth-Moon
distances; and a solar wind experiment – basically, a sheet of foil for collecting solar wind particles, which could not be collected on Earth due to the deflection from its magnetic field. Armstrong and Aldrin also answered a congratulatory phone call from President Richard M. Nixon. As they worked, Collins continued his silent vigil, spending 48 minutes of each orbit behind the dark side of the Moon, out of radio contact – a time during which, he recalled in his memoir, he felt “not fear … or loneliness, but … awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exaltation.” After resting in the LM that night, Armstrong and Aldrin, using the Eagle’s descent stage as a launch pad, blasted off from the lunar surface at 1:54 p.m. They took with them soil samples, solar wind particles, film, and some mementos to be returned to Earth. At 5:35 p.m., while circling the back side of the Moon, Eagle and Columbia redocked, and Aldrin and Armstrong joined Collins for the ride home. On the Moon, Apollo 11 had left behind a number of items, including the flag and equipment they didn’t need any more. They also left medals and shoulder patches in honor of the five astronauts who lost their lives in the race to the Moon: Gagarin, Vladimir Komarov, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Edward
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LEFT: The Apollo 11 lunar module (LM), in a lunar landing configuration, is photographed in lunar orbit from the command and service modules (CSM). Inside the LM were astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, commander, and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot. Astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained with the CSM in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the LM to explore the lunar surface. RIGHT: Armstrong inside the LM while the LM rested on the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin had already completed their historic EVA when this picture was made.
White. Gagarin and Komarov’s medals had been given to Borman, the Apollo 8 commander, by the Soviet astronauts’ widows during a previous visit to Moscow. The largest object left behind, of course, was the lower half of the Eagle, which, affixed to one of its legs, bore a plaque inscribed with both hemispheres of the Earth, the signatures of the three astronauts and Nixon, and the inscription: HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969, A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
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Armstrong’s boot and footprint on the surface of the Moon.
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he next three days were, for the astronauts, anticlimactic, even boring. About halfway home, they transmitted the final color television transmission from the cabin of Columbia, during which each of the crewmen reflected on their experiences. Each of them took the opportunity to point out that the Moon mission was an achievement for which thousands, even millions, deserved credit. Said Armstrong: The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort; next with the American people, who have, through their will, indicated their desire; next with four administrations and their Congresses, for implementing that will; and then, with the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft, the Saturn, the Columbia, the Eagle, and the little EMU, the spacesuit and backpack that was our small spacecraft out on the lunar surface. We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the
LEFT: A rare image of astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin together, erecting the American flag on the lunar surface. Armstrong, stands on the left at the flag’s staff. Aldrin is at right. The picture was taken from film exposed by the 16mm Data Acquisition Camera (DAC) which was mounted in the lunar module (LM). RIGHT: Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the lunar module (LM) Eagle during the Apollo 11 exravehicular activity (EVA). Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera.
spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11. The trip back to Earth was so uneventful that only one of four planned course corrections was required. Columbia entered the atmosphere of Earth at 12:35 p.m. EST on July 25, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. After arriving on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins were rushed into a quarantine chamber designed to protect the rest of the world from the remote possibility of contamination from
“Moon germs” or lunar microorganisms. Of all the otherworldly images of the Apollo 11 mission, one of the strangest is the photograph of the three astronauts, sealed inside their quarantine chamber, being greeted by Nixon, who was aboard the Hornet for the occasion. It is no exaggeration to say that, upon the return of the Apollo 11 astronauts, the entire world rejoiced. Even the Soviet Union, mirroring the astronaut’s goodwill gesture of enshrining Gagarin and Komarov on the Moon, offered its heartfelt congratulations. In fact, political leaders the world over viewed Apollo 11 as possibly the most historic success ever achieved by humankind, and it became a touchstone for optimists the world over: What couldn’t we do, if we could do this? Golda Meir, Israel’s new prime minister, publicly expressed the wish that Apollo 11’s achievement of the impossible could pave the way to the universal peace predicted by the prophets of Israel. Today many people, jaded by the intervening years of conflict and bloodshed around the world, would probably regard such a sentiment as naïve. But many thought the same thing of Kennedy on May 25, 1961, when he challenged Americans to find a way to the Moon. It is often pointed out – and it seems worth remembering – that Apollo 11, inspired in the 1950s by mortal fear of the Cold War enemy, resulted in perhaps the most powerful expression of hope ever shared by the people of the world.
New York City welcomes Apollo 11 crewmen in a showering of ticker tape down Broadway and Park avenues in a parade described as the largest in the city’s history. Pictured in the lead car, from the right, are astronauts Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin. The three astronauts teamed for the first manned lunar landing on July 20, 1969.
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APOLLO’S AMAZING SPACECRAFT The Apollo program’s rockets and spacecraft have earned a lasting place in human history. BY CRAIG COVAULT Photos courtesy of NASA
WELL BEFORE PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY CALLED FOR A MANNED LUNAR LANDING, KEY APOLLO HARDWARE ELEMENTS, ESPECIALLY THE ENGINES FOR THE SATURN V MOON ROCKET, HAD ALREADY BEEN PUT IN DEVELOPMENT BY THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION. This work was fueled by the leadership of German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. Concepts for the Apollo command and lunar modules were also being laid out at companies like Grumman and North American Aviation years before the Kennedy speech. These largely unheralded conceptual efforts were closeted in many companies that would later bid on the nearly $25 billion of Apollo contracts during the 1960s. Von Braun’s heavy rocket design work during the Eisenhower administration was centered at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. By 1959, it was shifted to NASA and renamed the Marshall Space Flight Center, with von Braun as director. But it was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, not NASA, that funded initial Saturn rocket work pioneered there. These efforts laid the technological foundation for the first machines that would carry humans from Earth to another body in space. “We go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” said Kennedy in his May 1961 speech at Rice University in Houston. But perhaps not as hard as he wanted the Soviet Union to believe. According to space historian Asif A. Siddiqi, the Soviets did not engage in a Moon race with the United States until two years after the Kennedy speech. They did not believe that Kennedy was serious – or if he was, that the United States could do it given the slow pace of the U.S. program up until that time. Soviet rocket pioneer Sergei Korolev had started to develop the massive N-1 rocket, equal to a Saturn V, but he envisioned it as a manned Mars vehicle that would possibly do only circumlunar missions that would not even land on the Moon. The Soviet government did not change N-1 plans to put the USSR into a race to land on the Moon until 1964. All four unmanned flight tests of the N-1 between 1969-1972 failed, indicating the Soviets never really had a chance to win the Moon race. Kennedy was not acting out of hubris, but rather homework when he made his challenge. He knew that key hardware elements, like
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the 1.5-million-pound-thrust F-1 engine – a power plant that could propel the United States to the Moon – was, by 1960, already being built and tested. NASA had been formed in 1958 as a civilian agency, and needed a mission to go somewhere using something larger than converted ballistic missiles. The early development of the F-1 engine, powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, was seen as one of the steps necessary to get ready for whatever was to come in the civilian space program. The Moon was high on the list, but so also was a large Earthorbiting space station. To carry three men to the Moon and back, the United States would need to develop a launcher that could place about 260,000 pounds in Earth orbit. This would be an assemblage of propellant and hardware for a 500,000-mile, seven-day round trip with as many as three days on the lunar surface. A decision on how to fly a mission to the Moon would be critical to how the Apollo spacecraft, the machines of Apollo, would be built. NASA had to choose among: • Direct ascent. In this concept, pictured in many science fiction depictions, the vehicle would launch directly to the Moon. It would not stop in Earth or lunar orbit to reconfigure what had been launched from Earth. It would take off and fly to the surface of the Moon and back as mostly a single entity. • Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR). An Apollo mission using this concept would require two launches: the first to Earth orbit carrying a lunar module for the Moon and propellant for the round trip, and a second launch to fly up the crew that would then climb into the large vehicle that would fire off to the Moon. Von Braun favored this concept because it would also involve a small space station as a refueling point and docking location for both rockets. But EOR was too complex to succeed by 1969. • Lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR). In this mode, all of the elements would be launched at once, but be
The ascent stage of the lunar module Eagle approaches the command service module Columbia in lunar orbit after departing the Moon. The lunar module consisted of two stages; the descent stage was used for the lunar landing phase of the mission, and then served as the “launch pad� for the upper, or ascent, stage of the LM, which would launch back into lunar orbit to dock with the command service module.
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LEFT: The Saturn I (SA-4) flight lifts off from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 34 on March 28, 1963. This was the fourth launch of Saturn launch vehicles developed at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) under the direction of Dr. Wernher von Braun. CENTER: The Apollo 7/Saturn IB space vehicle is launched from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 34 at 11:03 a.m. on Oct. 11, 1968. RIGHT: A close-up view of the 363-foot-tall Apollo 11 space vehicle as it is launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, at 9:37 a.m. on July 16, 1969.
reconfigured en route and again on the lunar surface as part of the sequence of events to return to Earth. Originally considered a “dark horse” concept, the LOR plan had been proposed in 1923 by German rocket visionary Herman Oberth. NASA Langley Research Center engineers in Hampton, Virginia, began re-looking at the concept in 1959 under the leadership of John C. Houbolt, and it was adopted by the Apollo program in 1962. The selection of the LOR mode affected the function, shape, cost, and engineering appearance of every component of the Apollo program. It was the single most sweeping engineering decision of the entire project. The Apollo command and service module (CSM) with the threeman crew would be launched atop a Saturn V. The Saturn V would also carry a two-stage lunar module (LM) tucked under the CSM in a fairing atop the rocket. All of that would be put into Earth orbit for a short checkout, then fired to the Moon using the upper stage of the Saturn V. Shortly after the upper stage firing, the CSM would undock from the nose of the stage and perform a 180-degree turn to face the LM still nested in the upper stage of the Saturn. The CSM pilot on the crew would then pilot the module to dock with the top of the LM. Then, using its thrusters, the CSM would back away, pulling the LM out of the upper stage of the Saturn V. All of this would take place with the upper stage of the Saturn and CSM flying in formation at approximately 25,000 mph with the Earth as a gigantic blue backdrop.
But it was an ever-shrinking backdrop, as the CSM, with the LM now on its nose, headed to the Moon. Some of the Saturn V upper stages were fired again to forever orbit the sun, but others were allowed to hit the Moon to see how the lunar interior would react as sensed by seismometers left on the Moon by Apollo 11 and subsequent missions. After a three-day transit, the CSM’s large rocket engine would be fired to place it and the LM in lunar orbit. The following day, the commander and lunar module pilot would undock the LM and descend to the Moon, leaving the CSM pilot in lunar orbit. Once surface operations were completed, the descent stage would form the launch pad for the LM’s ascent stage. The LM, with its two pilots standing up (since it had no seats to save weight), would fire itself off the Moon to dock with the command ship in orbit, then return to Earth. It sounded the most complicated of all the concepts. But, in fact, it broke the lunar mission down into bite-size elements that could be distributed to different contractors for development, assembly, and checkout, and then operated with specific individual mission roles. Another benefit was that with LOR, in the event of any lifethreatening emergency the process could be interrupted at virtually any point, except the liftoff from the Moon, for a mission abort to return a crew safely home to Earth. In addition, LOR allowed the complex management principles needed by Apollo, especially multiple tests and redundant design, to be divided up into more efficient tasks.
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The first engine selected for clustering was the Rocketdyne H-1, a 200,000-pound-thrust engine that had been used in the much smaller ThorDelta rocket. By clustering eight of them together, the rocket could generate 1.2 million pounds of lift-off thrust and put heavy payloads into low-Earth orbit. It also created the first rocket ever developed specifically as a space booster, not as a weapons launcher. Ten Saturn Is were launched from Cape Canaveral between 1961-65. The age of big rockets had arrived. Another key part of the Apollo family was developed from scratch. This was the Rocketdyne J-2 oxygen/hydrogen engine with 200,000 pounds of thrust. It would form the basis of upper stages used on both the future Saturn IB and then the Saturn V. The introduction of liquid hydrogen was a key development because of its highenergy capability. But it was also a serious challenge. The cryogenic hydrogen was high risk and had to be kept at nearly -400 A cutaway illustration of the Saturn V launch vehicle with callouts of the major components. degrees Fahrenheit while the cryogenic The Saturn V was the largest and most powerful launch vehicle developed in the United oxygen was also dangerous, at nearly -300 States. It was designed to perform Earth orbital missions through the use of the first two stages, while all three stages were used for lunar expeditions. degrees Fahrenheit. Out of this engine design came the second stage of the Saturn V, the North American Aviation S-II, equipped with five J-2s, and the McDonnell Douglas S-IVB upper stage, with just one All of the decisions that led to this flight hardware and operational J-2 engine. concept were still undetermined in the late 1950s when the rocket When added to a Saturn I, the new oxygen/hydrogen S-IVB hardware was being sized. stage converted it into a more powerful launcher called the Saturn In fact, the Saturn rocket designs predated by two to three years IB. There were nine successful launches of IBs, proving the cluster how the spacecraft would actually look and operate. But the von concept. Braun team knew they could resize the Saturn to suit the other Together Saturn I and IB launched the first unmanned flight tests mission hardware, and that is what they did. of the LM and CSM into Earth orbit, and then in October 1968, the The Saturn Vs that went to the Moon all had five first stage F-1s. first manned test of the CSM. Three other IBs launched crews to Had EOR been selected, smaller Saturn versions with just two to the Skylab space station in 1973-74 and the final Apollo mission – three first stage F-1s would have been developed instead. Von the joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission in 1975. Braun had already done major design work on the smaller vehicle – The three stages of the Saturn V, with the Apollo spacecraft on top, as well as an even bigger “Nova” launcher with 10 F-1s. formed a 363-foot-tall vehicle. The first of only two unmanned flight Engine “clustering” was also a key engineering detail. The von tests was in 1967. Braun team knew well before Kennedy’s mandate that to propel the Unlike the Saturn Is and IBs, the Saturn Vs were not launched U.S. space program, it needed experience on how to develop large from Cape Canaveral, but rather the new Kennedy Space Center clustered engine boosters powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene. (KSC) built on Merritt Island, Florida, several miles north of the Cape. Until then, most launchers were simply intercontinental KSC’s 550-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) was designed ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that required only one to three small as a gigantic processing facility to hoist Moon rocket stages onto a first-stage engines. platform for transport to Launch Complex 39 three miles away. The Further, the program needed to flight-test a high-energy upper Boeing-built S-1C first stage alone would be loaded with about 4.4 stage powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, because million pounds of liquid oxygen and kerosene. ICBMs did not need such powerful second and third stages to Fueled on the launch pad, a Saturn V and its payload weighed launch nuclear warheads or the small satellites of the day. about 7 million pounds, while the five F-1s in the first stage had 7.5 By clustering engines, tons of weight were saved while gaining million pounds of thrust. tons of lift-off thrust. This was done by using common propellant That was only 500,000 pounds of “up.” But it was enough to tankage and lines. Some wags noted that if the concept were slowly get the monster rolling to more than 6,000 mph, where unsuccessful, it would be forever known as “cluster’s last stand.”
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ABOVE: The LM Spider, still attached to the Saturn V third (S-IVB) stage, is photographed from the CSM Gumdrop on the first day of the Apollo 9 Earth orbital mission. This picture was taken following CSM/LM-S-IVB separation and prior to LM extraction from the S-IVB. The Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA) panels have already been jettisoned. Inside the command module were astronauts James A. McDivitt, commander; David R. Scott, command module pilot; and Russell L. Schweickart, lunar module pilot. RIGHT: Designed and developed by Rocketdye under the direction of the Marshall Space Flight Center, the F-1 engine measured 19 feet tall by 12.5 feet at the nozzle exit, and each engine produced a 1,500,000-pound thrust using liquid oxygen and kerosene as the propellant. A cluster of five F-1 engines was mounted on the Saturn V S-IC (first) stage and burned 15 tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene each second to produce 7,500,000 pounds of thrust.
the first stage would burn out. The second and third stages, pushing a much lighter vehicle, would accelerate the rocket to 17,500 mph to achieve Earth orbit. Just above the third stage was the IBM electronics unit – a ring of humble boxes dwarfed in capability by today’s laptop computers. The ring contained the basic guidance system components: a gyro platform, accelerometers, a digital computer, and control electronics. The instrument unit’s stable gyroscopic system was based on the one used in the German V-2 rocket developed by von Braun in World War II. The Bendix Corporation produced the Saturn V gyro platform, while IBM designed and built the unit’s digital computer. The Saturn V’s 72-pound IBM computer consumed 137 watts of power and had four memory modules, giving a total capacity of 16,384 words. By today’s standards, the processor was slow, with a 2.048 MHz clock cycle versus a fraction of a nanosecond on a current computer. The Saturn V’s computer memory was only 32,768 28bit words. But it was good enough 50 years ago to get your 3,500ton rocket into Earth orbit, then on to the Moon. The CSM and LM space vehicles carried by the Saturn Vs were the “Chariots of Apollo,” as NASA’s history of the program calls them. Between 1969-72, they carried 27 crewmen to the Moon – and 12 of them all the way to the lunar surface and back. No Saturn rocket or lunar module ever suffered a complete failure. They often had significant malfunctions – but never a missionending failure. Unfortunately this was not the case for the CSM.
But the CSM also had a very tough role to fulfill. It was mankind’s first spaceship capable of carrying three humans on a round trip to orbit another body in space. That achievement alone – its first manned trip to the Moon as Apollo 8 in December 1968 – is viewed by many astronauts, historians, and program officials as even more awesome, if not historic, than Apollo 11, the first lunar landing.
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Tragically, astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White would die in a 1967 launch pad fire in the first CSM to make Apollo 8 and then the launch of six safe lunar landing missions possible. According to space historian Mark Wade, in his Apollo research in Encyclopedia Astronautica (Astronautix.com) the CSM, much like the Saturn V, was under contract (to North American) before the Apollo LOR decision had been made. Originally, two Apollo CSM design blocks were to be produced: one a Block 1 series of spacecraft for solo Earth-orbit missions, and Block II configured with all the added components for a lunar mission. Only Block IIs were ever flown. The design called for two major components: the cone-shaped manned “command module” with an Earth re-entry heat shield, sitting atop an unmanned cylindrical “service module.” The service module was unpressurized and carried all of the electrical, propellant, rocket engine, and other systems, including attitude control thrusters. In total, the CSM measured 36 feet tall and 12.7 feet wide, with a launch mass of 66,863 pounds. Of this, 41,000 pounds was propellant for the spacecraft’s Aerojet engine, which would fire to insert the vehicle into lunar orbit, then fire again to send it back to Earth. The command module was a truncated cone measuring 10 feet, 7 inches tall and having a diameter of 12 feet, 10 inches across the base. As on the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, the honeycomb ablative heat shield was designed to carry off heat by gradually ablating – wearing away – during re-entry. But a major difference was that spacecraft re-entering from Earth orbit were “only” traveling 17,500 mph, compared with 25,000 mph returning from the Moon. The Apollo heat shield was not a perfect concave shape; it was instead lenticular. This was done so that by changing spacecraft roll during re-entry, different lift vectors could be achieved for a safer, more precise descent. The spacecraft was first dipped into the atmosphere to bleed off initial speed and heating, then eased out slightly to cool off before diving back in to complete each descent. Astronaut Tom Stafford, who commanded Apollo 10 to the Moon, said approaching Earth at 25,000 mph “was like having giant vivid blue pie thrown toward you.” But after the launch pad fire, the CSM had to be redesigned before ever flying. To save weight, it had been designed to operate using only pure oxygen and with a hatch that opened inward. Its interior also had significant flammable materials. All of these deficiencies and its electrical system had to be redesigned. The Apollo crew that was lost had been dissatisfied with the ground tests of the spacecraft. No one could bring this first Apollo crew back, but the spacecraft redesign saved the program. One of the marvels of the CSM was the ability of its flight computer to navigate the spacecraft to the Moon and back using updates from ground control punched in by the astronauts. The Apollo Guidance Computer was designed by MIT and built by Raytheon. It was the first aerospace computer to use integrated circuits – with more than 4,000 in the unit. But it had only 2,000 words of random access memory and 36,000 words of core memory. The Apollo lunar modules used to descend to the Moon carried the exact same computer as that in the CSM, plus two others for landing abort and redundancy purposes. The LM today remains a marvel of aerospace engineering. It was developed by Grumman in Bethpage, Long Island, New York – the home to a long line of Navy fighters so robust that Grumman was nicknamed “the Iron Works.”
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The Apollo 17 CSM America, piloted by astronaut Ron Evans, orbits 70 miles above the Moon, where it was imaged by astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt as they returned from the lunar surface in December 1972. This was the ninth and last CSM to reach the Moon, but through 1975 four more were launched into Earth orbit for the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission. The Scientific Instrument Module (SIM) has been revealed at the top of the service module.
At the time, Grumman seemed a long shot to be involved in a unique space program vehicle development. But superb engineering talent and its position on the team that lost the CSM competition to North American worked in Grumman’s favor to win the LM contract. Grumman was one of a few companies that had actually been studying manned Moon landing concepts since the late 1950s. When Apollo happened, Grumman and key managers there, especially Joe Gavin and Tom Kelly, were ready to lead the company in a whole new direction. Among the major factors that impressed NASA was that Grumman – on its own – had arrived at a conclusion that the LOR technique should be used involving a two-stage LM. The descent stage would use the first throttleable rocket engine ever flown, giving the commander helicopter-like control to balance thrust to hover over a landing position. And the ascent stage would use a simple rocket engine to shoot the vehicle off the surface with high reliability. Grumman built 14 LMs for ground test and spaceflight, of which nine flew in space, and of those nine, six landed on the Moon. One of the nine, LM-7, saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew when an oxygen tank exploded in their CSM. The Apollo 13 LM oxygen sustained the crew while its computers made calculations, and the
Astronaut James B. Irwin, Apollo 15 lunar module pilot, salutes the flag during an EVA at the Hadley-Apennine landing site. The lunar module (LM) Falcon is in the center. On the right is the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). While the LM and LRV are rightly celebrated, the astronauts’ spacesuits were themselves spacecraft of a sort, with life support and protection from heat and cold a part of their design.
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THE LM WAS A BIG SPACECRAFT, STANDING 23 FEET TALL AND SPANNING 31 FEET ACROSS ITS FOUR LANDING LEGS. WEIGHT WAS AT SUCH A PREMIUM THAT GRUMMAN INITIALLY PROPOSED ASTRONAUT CREWS USE A ROPE TO DESCEND FROM THE COCKPIT TO THE SURFACE INSTEAD OF ADDING THE WEIGHT OF A LADDER – SOMETHING THE ASTRONAUTS VETOED IMMEDIATELY. descent engine was used for rocket firings to keep the vehicle on course for an Earth return. “Simplicity was the byword for LM designers,” wrote Kelly in his book Moon Lander. In a scholarly assessment of the LM by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), its science writers found major examples of that simplicity: “The lunar module descent engine was arguably the most technologically advanced piece of equipment on the Apollo-Saturn vehicle.” Grumman sub-contracted Rocketdyne to develop the descent engine. Rocketdyne proposed a helium injection throttle mechanism where the inert gas was introduced into the propellant lines. This had the advantage of keeping propellant flow constant. “A constant propellant flow simplified the design of the injector,” a critical high-risk area on other rocket engines, according to the ABC. The notion of a manned spacecraft with a wide throttle range – 10 to 100 percent – was so novel that NASA directed Grumman to run a parallel descent engine development program and choose which engine was better. It was thought at the time that one design would outperform the other. Space Technology Laboratories (STL) was selected to develop an alternative descent engine. STL proposed a pressurefed system that used mechanically linked flow control valves and a variable geometry injector. Both Rocketdyne and STL had considerable success developing the LM descent engine. Finally, Grumman awarded the contract to Rocketdyne, only to have NASA reverse the decision. This meant that STL’s engines would power all the Apollo landings. Simplicity was especially true of the super-critical ascent engine. The Bell Aerosystems engine was all pressure-fed by helium gas to avoid the use of complex pumps and plumbing. Its nozzle was simply ablatively cooled. “Minimizing the amount of plumbing, components, and joints was also a virtue because it reduced the chance of leakage, which, due to the small margins on the amount of propellant required to achieve lunar orbit from the Moon’s surface, could be disastrous,” wrote Kelly in Moon Lander. Aerodynamics was not a part of the LM challenge, since the LM would only function in the vacuum of space. The placement of propellant tanks for center-of-gravity purposes with no aerodynamic coverings gave the LM its odd angular shape. It was built so lightweight that the shock and ascent engine blowback of liftoff from the lunar surface harmlessly tore all the LMs’ outer skin panels. At times in its development, the LM program was months behind schedule and thousands of pounds overweight. The first test LM delivered to KSC had many defects, including pressurization leaks. But Grumman assessed all the problems and ended up with total mission success across the program. The LM was a big spacecraft, standing 23 feet tall and spanning 31 feet across its four landing legs. Weight was at such a premium that Grumman initially proposed astronaut crews
use a rope to descend from the cockpit to the surface instead of adding the weight of a ladder – something the astronauts vetoed immediately. To save weight, Grumman also proposed that seats be removed so the pilots would fly standing up, looking straight down through special triangular windows at the approaching surface. The astronauts liked that idea. By the last three flights in the program – Apollo 15, 16, and 17 – the Saturn V lift capability had increased to the point of allowing the LM weight to grow about a ton heavier, to 36,000 pounds. This especially allowed J-Mission LMs to carry the Boeing lunar rover electric car that allowed crews to travel 3 to 4 miles from their LMs. The lunar module descent profile designed by the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, along with Grumman and other contractors, was as complex as anything in the Apollo program. It involved precision targeting and precision flying – where time was the enemy. Initially, the LMs were to fly with enough propellant for 120 seconds of hover time for the pilots to look for a safe smooth spot before touchdown, but to save weight, the hover time was reduced to 60 seconds. That nearly resulted in an Apollo 11 landing abort. Auto-guidance was taking the lunar module Eagle into a boulder field when Neil Armstrong took manual control and, with Buzz Aldrin calling out critical parameters, maneuvered until he dodged the boulders, as well as a large crater. Armstrong eventually landed with only about 25 seconds of fuel left before an abort would have been necessary. The LM powered descent profile began at only about 50,000 feet of altitude, with the lunar module flying backward in order to fire its descent engine thrust forward to negate lunar orbit velocity. At this phase, the pilots were on their stomachs relative to the lunar surface, which they could see passing below. At 35,000 feet, however, the LM was rolled onto its back, putting the astronauts on their backs looking out at space, but aiming the LM’s landing radar so it could begin to “see” the surface for final computer calculations. The data was needed for when the LM computer was to command and carry out the LM pitch over at 10,000 feet or lower. At this point, the LM pitched forward – in effect taking the astronauts from a position on their backs relative to the surface to standing upright in the LM cockpit. It was at this point that the descent engine began to counter the Moon’s one-sixth gravity pulling the LM down. The mission commander, standing at the left window, then took manual control to find a safe spot to continue the descent, throttling the engine to change the descent rate. After landing, the crews “camped” on the Moon in the LM, where they could take off their spacesuits and sleep on the floor or in hammocks. On departure day, the ascent engine was fired at the same moment explosive wire joints separated the ascent stage from the descent stage. The LM would then fly into lunar orbit for rendezvous and docking with the CSM, and then return to Earth.
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MEMORIES OF APOLLO BY EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN Photos courtesy of NASA
For those people involved in the lunar voyages of the Apollo era, memories of those epic events still remain vivid, wistful, and poignant. Here are firsthand accounts, gathered over the years, of some of Apollo’s most memorable missions.
APOLLO 1 “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” - Apollo 1 astronaut Roger Chaffee
It was a Friday night at 6:31 p.m. And all of a sudden you hear, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” And of course we jumped to attention without any question to see what was going on. And that was the horrible thing that happened. Now [Director Flight Crew Operations] Deke Slayton was in the blockhouse and Rocco Petrone was our launch director, and the first thing Rocco did was turn off all the phones. I told Rocco I had to have a phone, because I had to let our people know in Washington, and for our planning as far as handling the press was concerned. So he gave me back the phone. And we had to wait for an hour or so, before anybody was able to go up to open the hatch in the spacecraft. The reason for that was you had a 155,000-pound thrust escape rocket sitting on top of the Apollo spacecraft. Now of course what happened was you had that spark and pure oxygen in the spacecraft, pure oxygen at [over 14] psi [pounds per square inch]. Once that spark happened, the fire and explosion occurred. The spacecraft actually ruptured. Ed White made a move to try to open the hatch, but there was no way he could the way it was constructed at that time. That was changed later. We had to wait about an hour or so before anybody could go up there. Deke and I talked, and I made a deal with Deke that I wouldn’t say anything about the astronauts having perished,
which we assumed that they had at that point … I made a deal that I wouldn’t make any announcement until the three wives, now three widows, were informed. … I was criticized at that time because a number of the news guys said that the astronauts’ death was like a presidential assassination or a presidential death, so you had no reason not to announce that immediately. I have no regrets about that whatsoever. Betty Grissom as it turns out was my next-door neighbor, across the fence on the next street in Houston. … I could not live if I was the one, and my voice was the one that Betty Grissom heard that Gus had perished. So I stand by that without any question. Jack King, Public Information Officer It was something that shocked us all because we didn’t think of that as dangerous. We knew flying spaceships was dangerous, but we didn’t think the testing was. Which showed we didn’t know everything, and we were shortsighted. People just said, “We’re going to have to solve this problem and get on with the program.” This is not going to deter us, but it does let us know this is a dangerous business and we’ve got to try to correct this and try to foresee any others. And of course we did, and Apollo 13 – that could have been a huge tragedy, but it wasn’t. We were able to solve it. Humans are just humans. We do the best we can but we just aren’t perfect. … When we were taking crews, we took three extra crews – that’s nine astronauts. We built three extra command modules, three extra rockets, and all that other stuff, because we knew this wasn’t going to be easy and we were probably going to lose some people along the way. And of course we lost them in a different place than what we thought. But you know that’s life. And that’s exploration. Remember what happened to Magellan. So exploration is dangerous, and for us to lose a shuttle once every 57 flights, although it’s sad and you don’t want to be on that flight, that’s what it’s going to take. And when people go back to the Moon, you are going to lose people there, too. No doubt about it. Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot
APOLLO 7 “Keep those cards and letters coming in folks.” Handwritten sign shown by Apollo 7 Commander Wally Schirra during the first live television broadcast from space
Astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee pose in front of Launch Complex 34, which is housing their Saturn I launch vehicle. The astronauts later died in a fire on the pad.
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We had no illness in flight during the Mercury program and the Gemini program. Then the very first Apollo flight we were able to fly with Wally Schirra and his crew with the new
spacecraft after the fire … Wally came down with a cold and the other two crewmen got it. And it was a very interesting experience in the weightless environment because mucus doesn’t drain and there was a lot of plugging, and that whole mission ended up with a medical mutiny. In fact, it was a mutiny. Wally said they were going to come back in with helmets and gloves off so they could hold their nose and pop their ears. He was ordered by [Director of Flight Crew Operations] Deke Slayton, by [Director of Flight Operations] Chris Kraft and by [Manned Spacecraft Center Director] Bob Gilruth finally … with direct orders. And he disobeyed those orders. They did come in with helmets and gloves off and they did never fly again. That started the illness in flight business. It actually was a situation influenced by the fact that when Wally was in Navy flight training, he had a rapid descent in an aircraft, and he had plugged his sinuses and his ears, and he had blood in his oxygen mask. On Apollo 7, one of the crewmen started blowing blood. … So that really colored what Wally thought about this and brought all this on. The amazing thing about it was we got them to use the medication that we had in there to try to decongest them. It included Actifed, which Wally later did an advertisement for. He bought a sailboat by doing Actifed ads. Dr. Charles Berry, Chief Physician to the Astronauts
APOLLO 8 “In the beginning … ” - Lunar Module Pilot Bill Anders beginning to read from the Book of Genesis during the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit
People often ask what our most exciting mission was. Most of us will say Apollo 8. How can you say Apollo 8? You didn’t land, you didn’t do anything. You just went around the Moon. I say, “You know how much guts it took to do Apollo 8?” … When the command and service module came around the Moon right on time to show they were actually in lunar orbit, I just stood up and yelled into the air, “The Russians suck!” Sy Liebergot, Apollo Electrical, Environmental and Communications Flight Control We couldn’t see the firing of the engine into lunar orbit because they were on the back side of the Moon. Here we are going into orbit 60 miles above the Moon, and by the way, [Associate Administrator, Office of Manned Spaceflight] George Mueller didn’t want to do that. Mueller wanted to do that at a higher altitude, because he said, “We don’t know how accurate we are going to be,” and I argued him out of it. I told him, “Hell, we are going to do this at the same altitude and the same inclination as a lunar landing mission because we want that data.” Anyway, we talked him into that. When it went behind the Moon I guess I was about as nervous as a cat on a tin roof. No question about that. Not half as nervous as I was when we fired the engine to come out of lunar orbit around the Moon on the back side. I guess those were the longest 20-some minutes of my life, both
This is how the Earth looked as photographed from a point near the Moon by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The Earth fills less than 1 percent of the frame exposed through an 80mm lens. North is approximately vertical.
times. We were waiting for them to come back around the other side of the Moon and wondering where the hell they were going to be. We had it figured out from A to Z what we would have to do … if the engine had cut off early or the engine had burned too long or not at all. [Mission planner] Bill Tindall had that all worked out. But on both occasions they certainly came out perfectly, and we could predict within a second’s time what that time would be when we would reacquire the communications signal and we did it. When we lost them and when we gained them was within one second every time. Christopher “Chris” Kraft, Jr., Director of Flight Operations The first time I [looked up at the Moon] with any thought in mind was when I was walking to the control center at 7 o’clock one night about three weeks before we were going to launch Apollo 8. I looked up at the Moon and said to myself, “God damn, by the time that thing is going to get back to the phase it is in now, we will have been there and back.” That shook me up and let me know we were about to do that mission. It was quite impressive. I don’t ever look at the Moon that I don’t see six spots up there where we set down. I don’t ever look at the Moon without thinking about some aspect of the flights, some aspect of how we worked our tails off to get there, some aspect of the people like Bill Tindall and John Mayer. Chris Kraft, Jr. [On naming features on the backside of the Moon] I picked a bunch of craters along our track, and was politically correct in naming them after Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and [Manned Spacecraft Center Director] Bob Gilruth and the various big wigs. I picked out three for the deceased [Apollo 1] astronauts, and I picked out three for the Apollo 8 crew. The Apollo 8 crew ones I picked were just over the lunar horizon, and were just not visible from Earth. But from the spacecraft at 60 miles, I could see them and talk about them back to Earth. The people at Mission Control had maps with these names on them. … There probably were 20 or 30 craters that were named. I sent that map to the
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U.S. Geological Survey, and they totally ignored it [due to the role of the International Astronomical Union in naming celestial bodies]. Not only that, in naming craters for our crew later, they [the International Astronomical Union] picked craters which were in this tiny dark sliver on the back of the Moon [which was] the one place we couldn’t see. In my view they were either incredibly stupid or incredibly vindictive in that the explorers’ prerogative wasn’t exercised. And I never got my map back from them. William “Bill” Anders, Apollo 8 Lunar Module Pilot The movie [2001: A Space Odyssey] had a very jagged, rough-edged Moon, and the Moon [was] sandblasted. So yes, it [the Moon] was quite different than the Arthur Clarke [Stanley Kubrick movie] version. At a reception shortly after we came back, Arthur Clarke was there and I said, “Arthur, I need to talk to you privately.” So we kind of got behind a cocktail table, and Arthur said, “What is it, Bill?” And I said, “Arthur, I haven’t told anybody, but there was an obelisk on the back of the Moon.” And for about 30 seconds he believed me [laughter]. Bill Anders Actually, it wasn’t so much that photograph [the Earthrise], but others which would show the Earth about the size of your fist at arm’s length … without the Moon in sight, without the lunar surface in sight [that struck me]. And it struck me that the photograph made the Earth look not only very delicate, like a fragile Christmas tree ornament, but that it looked very small. I think one of the things that has not really emerged from that flight, but one day will, is that our Earth is quite small, almost physically insignificant, yet it is our only home. … I’ve thought and said it’s too bad we couldn’t put all the members of the U.N. in orbit around the Moon to look back at the Earth so that they could see how delicate our planet is, and we ought to quit fighting over it. Bill Anders
APOLLO 11 “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” - Commander Neil Armstrong’s first words from the lunar surface
The secret of the thing was we were young and we were fearless, and after all, nobody had ever told us young guys that you couldn’t successfully land humans on another planet. Nowadays it would be a little bit different, I think. There’s a phrase that has crept into our lexicon called “risk aversion.” There are whole careers built on risk analysis and all that stuff. I get asked could we do it again in today’s atmosphere and I say, “No, I don’t believe we could.” We’d talk it to death. There would always be a lot of “Yes, buts.” We were ready to go. We were the ground astronauts, us flight controllers, which the astronauts didn’t like to hear. We were the guys looking out for their mission success and their safety. Sy Liebergot I had a ritual when I drove out to the launch control center,
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An atmospheric photo of the Apollo 11 launch vehicle sitting on Launch Complex 39A.
and that was after I crossed part of the causeway and went over the Banana River bridge, which is heading toward the Kennedy Space Center. I pulled out to the side of the road and there was the Saturn V, this majestic rocket just standing there gleaming in the floodlights and I just paused and stood there for a minute or two and it was just the Saturn V and me. It was a thing that I particularly enjoyed. Jack King I had stayed up all night long, slept on a cot, and got in a position to broadcast it. Just when we got to the final countdown, we were on the air live, Russ Ward and me, anchoring the NBC Radio network coverage … and we were ready to go. I had a little tap on my shoulder and I looked up and I heard this voice that was really familiar, and he said, “Awww, awww, awww, is it OK if we watch from here?” And it was Jimmy Stewart and his wife, Gloria. And, of course, as excited as we were about Neil, Buzz, and Mike lifting off to the Moon, I jumped straight
worrying about that they were trying to get everything right and second guessing everything they did, so they put that in the flight plan that they were taking a sleep-rest period. Of course the plan was, once they had landed on the Moon, [they] would make sure all the systems were working properly. As soon as they were working properly, then they were going to open the hatch, they were going to go on the Moon, and the first thing that Neil Armstrong did after he stepped on the Moon and said his famous words was he reached out and grabbed a handful of lunar dust and put it in the pocket of his suit, just in case he had to hurry and scurry to get back on the lunar module if something had gone wrong and they had to get off the surface of the Moon. He wanted to make sure at least he had a sample. Jay Barbree
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong going through flight training in the lunar module simulator at the flight crew training building at KSC.
out of my chair and said, “Well, Mr. Stewart, of course you can stand here and look over my shoulder.” Jay Barbree, NBC News Correspondent On Nov. 24, 2008, NBC gave me a dinner down here [commemorating his 50th year with NBC], and Neil Armstrong came down and so did John Glenn. Later that night, Neil started telling us what happened actually when they landed on the Moon up there. It was all set up that they were supposed to take about a 6-hour sleep period so they could get well rested when they went out on the Moon. We bought that, but what was going on was that they felt like when they landed on the Moon, because of all the fluids involved in the lunar module Eagle, it would take them under this different gravity several hours to get everything settled down until it was working the way it should be where they would be comfortable enough that they could go out on the Moon. But they didn’t want us [reporters] sitting there
I was in the radio studio and Reid Collins was doing the play-by-play. He had on a big desk in this news studio the NASA map of the Moon with the approach of the landing on it. He was doing the play-by-play listening to NASA Select. We also had a television monitor in the radio studio, and the animation that CBS News was showing had the lunar lander touching the Moon, and something came up on the screen that said “Moon landing” or “Man on the Moon” and in one ear I heard Cronkite say, “Hot dog!” As far as the CBS television audience was concerned, the landing had taken place. Reid, with his finger on the trajectory listening to what was going on at NASA, said, “Apollo 11 is not down where it should be.” And I think he used the term, “It’s drifting, and it may be lost.” He didn’t mean that there had been a crash. He was just following it with his finger. But there was this concern that if it had drifted too much, it would crash land in some of the hillier mountainous areas of the Moon at the time it went down. So we on radio had it down at the time when it really landed, and TV beat us to it by at least a few seconds. … I don’t know if Walter really told what happened, but there were two landings that day: one on television, one on radio. Right after the landing, Reid and I talked for a while. He didn’t quite say, “How do you feel?” but he took a good breath, and I said, “I clearly felt as if I were … ” and he said, “Mugged?” And I said, “Yes.” It just took my breath away. It was such a profound happening. Morton Dean, CBS News Correspondent My guys who were responsible for interfacing with the training were telling me that the way things were going that Buzz Aldrin would be the first guy to go out of the spacecraft because he was the lunar module pilot and the training was going that way. … [Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager] George Low and I requested a meeting with Bob Gilruth to discuss that subject and asked [Director of Flight Crew Operations] Deke Slayton to attend. We discussed whether we thought it ought to be Buzz Aldrin [who was] the first guy to step on the Moon, or Neil Armstrong. We discussed that the guy who does this is going to be the next Lindbergh in this country … and who did we want that to be? The consensus after we voiced our
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A reproduction of the television image that was transmitted to the world on July 20, 1969, as Armstrong egressed the ladder to the lunar surface.
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opinions was that we want it to be Armstrong. We just thought that Armstrong would be the best representative in the crew to be the first guy on the Moon. ‌ I know damn well we made the right decision. ‌. I knew Armstrong from even before he was an X-15 test pilot. I worked at the NACA when he did. He was always a very good test pilot. A guy that was easy to get along with. He did great work as far as his testing was concerned at Edwards Air Force Base. He came to us from the X-15. And he had the kind of personality that you knew he would not be
There was a controversy regarding placing an American flag on the Moon. And that was one of the reasons why this little committee was formed at headquarters to make sure that nobody would think that we were taking it on behalf of the United States. The compromise was, OK, if you want to put a flag there, don’t say you are conquering it in favor of the United States, but make the astronauts say something that indicates we are not doing this. Because the treaty [United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space] had already spoken to this matter, and it said there would be no appropriation of any land or anything else on the Moon. Paul Dembling, General Counsel
Neil Armstrong playing the ukulele while in quarantine, post lunar mission. (Photo courtesy of Don Blair)
overbearing about the subject and he would be a damn good representative to the rest of the world for the United States. Chris Kraft, Jr. We had had all those discussions [about conditions that would require an abort to the lunar landing attempt] with Armstrong, and I could tell from his attitude he was thinking, “I hear you, Chris, but when I get there I’m going to do what I think is the right thing to do.” And frankly, I was kind of glad that he thought that way. The guy on the scene is the guy that’s got to make the decision. It’s his life that he’s going to get rid of or keep. I knew damn well that regardless what happened there, he might try to do it [land]. Chris Kraft, Jr. I am a great supporter of the flight director and his team in Mission Control and would not take lightly any recommendation they made. Nevertheless, an abort at low altitude over the lunar surface is a very risky business, requiring the blowing of explosive bolts, the physical separation of the ascent stage from the descent stage, and the ignition of another rocket engine, all before intersecting the lunar surface. So long as the lunar module was flying reasonably well and the risk of continuing was not substantially greater than the risk of aborting, I believe I would have continued toward landing. Neil Armstrong
There was a lot of resistance to putting a camera on [the Apollo command module and lunar module]. Not only [was there a] fear of astronauts that Big Brother was watching, but also the fact that every ounce that went on was another ounce that couldn’t be on for survival or anything else. They were actually taking things off of the lunar module to make room for an 8-pound camera. That didn’t sit well with the astronauts either. … Once we got to the Moon safely and landed and we then approached the time for them to come out of the spacecraft, no longer was TV thought of [as], “If we get it, fine, and if we don’t then it doesn’t matter.” It was then, “We better see TV or else,” because we had 600 million people worldwide waiting for that moment. So they could call it a non-requirement, but boy, that was probably the biggest requirement we had once they landed. Richard Nafzger The quarantine [of the astronauts] was a huge, huge problem. I did not agree with the National Academy of Sciences. Our official NASA position was we didn’t agree with that. We felt that there was no evidence that an organism could live on the Moon from any of the probes that had been there. The temperatures and the dryness, so forth, we felt that there would be no organism there. Any of the probes that had been sent there had been sterilized, so no organisms had been carried there. We argued this vociferously, and finally we ended up before President Johnson, and the Academy of Sciences said, “Well, you may be right when you’re saying you don’t think any organism could survive there, but you haven’t proved it.” Well, of course we hadn’t proved it, because we hadn’t got anything back from there. President Johnson then finally said, … he didn’t feel that he could be responsible for bringing lunar plague back to the Earth. I could’ve killed [author] Michael Crichton. He was a medical student at Harvard. And that damn book The Andromeda Strain came out. That added fuel to the fire for the quarantine, definitely. Dr. Charles Berry That night [of the Apollo 11 splashdown], after having been on our feet for 16-18 hours, I should have had enough sense to hit the bunk. I had done my job. They were safe in the
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trailer. What else can we do? But I had two cameras around my neck and … I went down and walked down the length of the hangar bay. … As I approached the trailer looking into the window at the back end, I noticed there was a person in that little living room, and of course it turned out to be Neil Armstrong. I had black and white Kodak Tri-X film in the camera, and I said to myself, “Here goes, for better or for worse, here is this man who just made world history, walking on the Moon, standing in the room playing his ukulele.” I popped off three shots, one of which turned out to be a little bit sharper or clearer than the others. … The fact that I didn’t use flash and only used the high speed of the black and white film, the neon-like lighting in the ceiling of the trailer was diffused, almost halo like, which I thought was very appropriate considering where they had just been. Pretty close to the heavens. … I turned around and walked away and I wasn’t more than 100 feet from the trailer and I turned around again and looked and he was gone. … It was pure, one-of-a-kind, good luck, good timing photography. I sent him [Armstrong] a copy at the University of Cincinnati. In 2004 at a reunion of the USS Hornet [Apollo 11 recovery ship], he wrote his regrets, and he said, “Tell Mr. Blair, I was not playing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ on my ukulele.” He said, “I am not much of a musician. I was plinking. It was relaxation time.” Don Blair, Mutual Radio Network Correspondent
APOLLO 12 “Let’s take the LM down and land on the back side. Wouldn’t that shake ‘em up.” - Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad’s whimsical suggestion to Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean
You’ve already made up your mind that, first of all, you could very easily get stuck there. But you decided long before you went that the gain was worth the risk, and so you’re not as worried about that as you are about being careful, and watching where you are landing, and not getting too near the edge of deep craters that you couldn’t get out of if the side gave way, if the edge gave way. I’m sure if you got close enough to the edge of any crater, since they are all 3 billion years or older, then suddenly the sides could slump away and you could slide down to the bottom. If you did, you’d be there now. So you’re careful. Alan Bean Every once in a while [on the lunar surface], I would look up and see the Earth up there, and I would say to myself, “That’s the Earth. This is the Moon!” I could hardly believe it myself, that we were running around on the Moon, and the Earth was way up there 239,000 miles away. That was kind of my connection with being on the Moon. It never dawned on me, I never said, “Gee, I’m the fourth man on the Moon.” I didn’t come down the ladder and think about how … you know, none of those thoughts
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The Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) in the Mission Control Center (MCC) at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) during the fourth television transmission from the Apollo 13 mission in space. Eugene F. Kranz (foreground, back to camera), one of four Apollo 13 flight directors, views the large screen at the front of MOCR. Astronaut Fred W. Haise, Jr., is seen on the screen.
were on my mind at all because it wasn’t my job. My job was different. Alan Bean I entered art training at night school when I was a test pilot, even before I became an astronaut. … Claude Monet was my favorite artist, so I painted the kind of things he did and other artists did that I admired. Then my astronaut friends said, “Look, Bean, you need to quit painting the Earth things, you’re the first artist in history – of all the artists who have ever been on this Earth, millions and millions and millions – you’re the first one who has ever gone anywhere else besides the Earth. You need to paint there.” … And I thought, “You know, they are right, because I know about spacesuits, and I know all about lunar modules. I spent 18 years doing this stuff and liked it. That’s why I became an astronaut.” … So when I began to paint [space scenes] it began to be obvious to me that I was the first artist in all history to go anywhere else. These paintings I do are the first paintings of another world by someone who actually went there. Period. They will always be the first paintings of another world. I never thought of that initially. But now I realize that these paintings that I’m doing, whether I am a good artist or not – I am a good artist –
APOLLO 13 “Thank you. We’re on our way back home.” Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert upon hearing from Houston that Apollo 13 was under the Earth’s gravitational influence and heading home
An interior view of the Apollo 13 lunar module (LM) during the troubleplagued journey back to Earth. This photograph shows some of the temporary hose connections and apparatus that were necessary when the three Apollo astronauts moved from the command module (CM) to use the LM as a “lifeboat.” Astronaut John L. Swigert Jr., command module pilot, is on the right. An unidentified astronaut on the left holds in his right hand the feed water bag from the Portable Life Support System (PLSS). It is connected to a hose (center) from the Lunar Topographic (Hycon) Camera. In the background is the “mail box,” a jury-rigged arrangement that the crew men built to use the CM lithium hydroxide canisters to scrub CO2 from the spacecraft’s atmosphere. Since there was a limited amount of lithium hydroxide in the LM, this arrangement was rigged up to utilize the canisters from the CM. The “mail box” was designed and tested on the ground at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) before it was suggested to the Apollo 13 astronauts. An explosion of an oxygen tank in the service module (SM) caused the cancellation of the scheduled Moon landing, and made the return home a hazardous journey for astronauts Swigert, James A. Lovell Jr., commander, and Fred W. Haise Jr., lunar module pilot.
they are the first paintings of another world. Now as the centuries unfold, there will be many, there will be other artists that go to the Moon, artists that go to Mars, to the Moons of Jupiter, to the surface of asteroids and all those things as the centuries unfold, but the very first paintings of another world besides this Earth are the ones I’m doing right now. Alan Bean The [television] camera got pointed at the sun and it caused a burn. Before they realized what had happened, they tried to trouble shoot, and unfortunately Pete [Conrad] used a hammer. One time he hit it and it seemed to loosen something up that they thought was a problem that needed jostling. That was a misconception. When he hit it again, it crumbled the coating on the pickup lens. That was unfortunate, but that’s what happened due to error. We couldn’t have probably saved it anyway because of the sun burn already, but there was further damage done because of the hammering. We were all very depressed because we were still in the mode that every mission and downlink was our lifeline to what we do for a living. It was kind of crushing. Because if I don’t get TV down, everything I did was for naught. Richard Nafzger
[Upon being pulled out of a shower to get a phone call from Gene Kranz about the Apollo 13 explosion] I was scared to death. He told me they’d had an explosion of some kind. He didn’t explain any further than that. He just said, “We’ve got a hell of a problem here, we’ve just had some kind of explosion with the spacecraft, you’ve got to get here quickly.” I said, “I’ll be there in 15 minutes,” and I was. I’m glad there were no cops on the road that night. When I arrived, I [had] one hell of a lot of confidence in the flight control guys, and I knew that whatever happened, if it could be done, they could do it. When I arrived in the Mission Control room … I just watched. Kranz gave me a 30-second briefing on what happened, and they were still in the middle of figuring out what happened. The damn telemetry was all screwed up from a standpoint of so much had failed you couldn’t tell whether it was instrument failure, or true instruments, or nothing, or static. The guys who were responsible for the systems were really struggling to figure out what happened. And Kranz made one of the greatest decisions he ever made in his life, in that there were three small oxygen bottles which were always being filled or kept full to be used for reentry for when you got back to the Earth. That line was therefore open if you didn’t do something about it. And had he not made the command by way of the astronauts to seal off those three bottles so that amount of oxygen would be preserved for re-entry if we got it back, that was a very, very extremely important decision, because if he had not done that, all of that oxygen would have gone overboard, over the next hour, would have just gone away. … I have to say, within about 2 ½ to 3 hours I felt reasonably confident that we would get them back. It was a hell of an evening, I can tell you that. … I felt very good about the mission. And I was one among others, I suppose, that talked them into using the lunar module engine. … It was a very important decision to get back 24 hours early to make sure we had enough power, and you have to give credit to [Electrical Systems Flight Controller] John Aaron. He was the guy who figured out the use of electrical power every minute of the time. Chris Kraft, Jr. My producer Mark Kramer and I met the famous oil well fire fighter Red Adair at a restaurant after Apollo 13. … He told about fighting one fire in Libya and he said, “There I was, seven seconds from death.” And I said, “How did you know you were seven seconds away from death?”
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He said that he knew he had a pretty good feel for what his lung capacity was and he could feel the gases building up and he knew he was seven seconds from death. And I said, “What did you do?” And he said, “I turned myself off and I thought about it.” I sort of knew what he meant, you know, how you slow yourself down at times, and every millisecond is stop action. He then said, “As a matter of fact, when the boys came back from Apollo 13, the commander [Jim Lovell] is a good friend of mine, and I saw him about a week or so after and I told him I thought he had done a hell of a job. And he said, ‘Well Red, you know what I did when we were in trouble on the back side of the Moon spinning almost out of control. I turned myself off and thought about it.’” Red had told Jim the story about being seven seconds away from death some time before. I always thought it was interesting in that time of stress, Lovell had thought about it and tried to make use of what Red Adair had offered him. Morton Dean, CBS News Correspondent The LM lifeboat is something that had shown up previously in one of our lunar orbit simulations. I think it was on Apollo 10. I don’t remember what failure they instigated, but it required depressurizing the CM and cabin. So the idea was to put the people in the lunar module, seal it off, depressurize the CM, and then repressurize it. The second part of it was we had found some failure mode – this may have been on Apollo 8 – where they simulated getting trash into one of the air circulation fans, and they pulled a circuit breaker on a simulated loss of a power converter on another command, so you were left with no cabin air … and somebody said, “Well, we’ve got a vacuum cleaner. It’s just a fan. Why don’t we use it to blow air through the lithium canister?” The fascinating thing about this is almost everything except the [command module] power up sequence; we had at some time in the mission simulation history done something very close to what we were facing. That to me is magic. Thomas “T.K.” Mattingly, Grounded Apollo 13 Command Module Pilot
we’ve never, ever done before and take the backup Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert, and put him on the crew to replace Mattingly.” Well [Commander] Jim Lovell was mightily against this… but as a matter of fact, he [Jack Swigert] was very well trained on the command module. … And so we had to make that decision, and from that meeting the decision was made. I said, “My vote is I think we are going to have to make that switch.” It became a unanimous condition we had to say we are going to do it, and we did. So we launched a tired crew because they ended up doing a lot more trainer time with Jack to make sure that Fred and Jim were comfortable with it. Dr. Charles Berry When you are in that position you’re not thinking logically. I look back at it and I was profoundly devastated. I thought it was crazy. I’d been sick before and you don’t stop working because you are sick. I just couldn’t come to grips with the idea that it was not the right thing to do. Looking back, I can’t imagine making any other decision. Nor can I imagine why it took them so long to come to the conclusion. Thomas “T.K.” Mattingly Keep in mind the cryogenic tanks, oxygen, and hydrogen tanks we had on board Apollo 11 were identical tanks to the ones we had on Apollo 13. It was just an incredible set of circumstances that [it] took … years for Apollo 13 to occur. They were the same tanks. They had the same design flaws. Sy Liebergot We didn’t know Fred Haise had the urinary infection in flight until after the flight, as a matter of fact. The reason we didn’t was everything was so oriented to how could we make sure all these systems in the LM were going to bring them back and to save power and everything, one of the things I did right early was say, “OK, we will stop the medical monitoring and save that portion of power,” which we did. Dr. Charles Berry
APOLLO 14 [On T.K. Mattingly’s exposure to German measles] We ended up about two days before the flight where we were going to have to make a decision. I had a meeting in my office down at the Cape … and I had all this stuff on the chalkboard about the incubation period and where we were, and what we found out was that Charlie Duke and his family had visited some friends in San Antonio on the weekend before the 21-day isolation period started. And two of the children they visited had rubella and that’s where he was exposed. We weren’t told about this. This came out as we tried to piece this thing together. So the situation was if Ken was going to come down, it would happen when he’s alone in the command module and the other two guys are down on the lunar surface. … I talked to people in and out of the country, everybody who was an expert, and I said, “So, OK, we have to make a decision. We can either hold the mission and wait until T.K. has passed the incubation period and make sure he isn’t going to come down with it, or we can go ahead and launch, which I think is somewhat of a risk, or we can do what
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“Miles and miles and miles.” - Commander Alan Shepard describing his golf shot
[Alan Shepard’s golf shot] wasn’t a real great surprise to me. Although we hadn’t talked about it, I knew about it. Then I used the staff from the solar wind experiment, and used it as a javelin to throw after his golf shot. We’ve got a photograph showing what we call the first lunar Olympics — one golf shot, one javelin throw, and my javelin outdistanced his golf shot by about four inches. We’ve got a picture to prove it. After the flight when he kept claiming that it went miles and miles, and the more distance we got from the mission, the more miles and miles was the distance of the golf shot. And every once in a while I had to pull out this photograph and tell him, “Alan, miles and miles is really enough. It was more about 50 feet [laughter].” Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot
APOLLO 16 APOLLO 15 “Man must explore. And this is exploration at its greatest.” - Commander David R. Scott
At one point, we decided [to] just leave the camera and the dish powered up [on the lunar rover] and point it and start moving and see if we can keep [the signal] locked. And we kept locked about 30 seconds where the camera is like a headlight in front of the rover looking at the terrain. And although they were going about 5 miles per hour, it looked like they were going 80 miles per hour across the Moon. It was the most amazing picture I think I’ve seen other than the first step on the Moon, but it wasn’t for public release at the time. They were just scooting across the lunar surface and it looked like a dune buggy that was out of control. Richard Nafzger
“There you are, our mysterious and unknown Descartes highland plains. Apollo 16 is gonna change your image.” Commander John Young’s first words on the lunar surface
There’s one part of the picture of flying in space that is particularly attractive to me that I don’t hear talked about very much. You’re in this environment which is generally very quiet. There are no vibrations. You’re able to float. You can look out the window to see remarkable sights. Now, what do you need to close the picture? For me, it was music. Starting with Apollo, we were able to take these little tape cassettes, maybe five per person. And you’d put your music on them. John [Young] and Charlie [Duke] liked country and western and I liked classical music. When they left, I had a chance to play my music. I’ll tell you, you cannot imagine what that does to complete the picture. It is really spectacular. One of my selections was [a song by Maurice Jarre] from the movie Grand Prix. … It was a story about Formula One
An image from Apollo 15, taken by Commander David Scott at the end of EVA-1, shows Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin with the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which made its debut during the mission. Mount Hadley is in the background. The TV camera is pointed down, in the stowed position.
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This full disc of the Moon was photographed by the Apollo 17 crewmen during their transearth coast homeward following a successful lunar landing mission in December 1972.
racers, and there are some scenes where the hero is running around with [the song] playing in the background. And it is punctuated by the sound of Formula One cars coming from behind and roaring by. I had been involved with engines and machinery since I was a little kid. So I have a special affection for the sound of high-performance vehicles. So here we have this melodic tune of these race cars roaring by, and I used it when we were tracking their landing sight with a sextant prior to their landing. … So, when I was tracking for the first time, you get a sense of motion because when you are down at eight miles you can actually tell there’s a fairly large velocity, that you are moving in a hurry. You hear this sound of race cars, and this music in the background, and you are tracking this target that’s trying to run away from you. And it’s surreal. Thomas “T.K.” Mattingly
APOLLO 17 “History will record that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow.” – Commander Eugene “Gene” Cernan speaking before entering the lunar module and closing out the first era of lunar exploration
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I was doing it live [Apollo 17 launch]. I remember we all used the same line practically, night turned to day, and it really was that bright. It was like daylight again. But one of the things that I think I remembered more and I could tell it as I was reporting was the squawking of the birds and the seagulls and all the noise that they made when it lifted off. It was partly because of the noise and partly because of the light that got them off of their roosts. I remember that mixed in with the noise, the tremendous roar. Jay Barbree
RETURNING TO THE MOON
It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to really be able to accomplish. I think if I had to look at my life, I think probably that was the peak. I think the fact that we were able to show what the human could do in the space environment is a really great thing. We sort of put the ladder there that’s going to allow whatever we continue to do happen. And I think we’ve got to do it. I think we need to continue to do it. Dr. Charles Berry I look at [the Moon] differently than I ever did before. I look at it and I say, “Well, I know those places up there.” As a matter of fact, there is some of our equipment up there now. And I think about that every time I look at it. I was just talking to
The last two men on the Moon. During the first EVA of Apollo 17, Eugene Cernan photographed Harrison Schmitt with the American flag and the Earth in the background. Cernan is visible in the reflection in Schmitt’s helmet visor in the awkward position he assumed to obtain this image.
a school bunch in Dallas a week ago, and there was a teacher who came up to me and said he does not really believe that we went to the Moon. And I said, “You have got to be kidding. You are a teacher at this school, and you do not believe that we went to the Moon.” And he said, “Well, I don’t know that all those pictures and things haven’t been faked.” And I said, “Let me tell you. I can tell you that the people who went there, I was intimately familiar with them. I know that they were well taken care of and put into a spacecraft. I monitored them from the ground when they were going to the Moon, when they were on the Moon, and on the way back, and after they came back.” And I said, “I can guarantee you.” Dr. Charles Berry We certainly need to get back there for several reasons. The first is if we are ever going to be real space explorers, we’ve got to develop some capability. And the capability we had was really short-lived and it was [50] years ago. If we are to going to go on to Mars, we’re going to need to build a capability at exploring alien planets, alien objects, before we start taking a year to get out to Mars and doing that. I think the Moon is an
appropriate training ground for doing further space activity and the possibility there might be some resources there that we can utilize on Earth. I don’t know if the Helium 3 that we have there is usable, but [Apollo 17 lunar module pilot ] Jack Schmitt seems to think so, and we need to investigate that. But I think we do have a destiny here in due course to explore the rest of the solar system with manned flight and eventually get outside of the solar system with manned flight. And it is just a matter of time, provided we don’t blow ourselves up with our stupidities and our nuclear weapons in the process. Edgar Mitchell I believe that, sometime in the future, humankind will be required to expand their activities beyond Earth. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to begin to develop those options from which future generations will select. Scientific knowledge from unmanned probes will be most important in providing information helpful in learning what the possibilities might be, but it will take human involvement and human spaceflight to expand humanity’s boundaries. Neil Armstrong
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NASA’s Return to the Moon BY EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN Images courtesy of NASA
T
he last time we sent men to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth – back then, our astronaut corps’ makeup dictated only men would undertake these journeys – we left much unfinished exploration business undone. During the Apollo era, NASA contracted for 15 flight-worthy massive Saturn V launch vehicles. Apollo 11 achieved the first landing with the sixth Saturn V, leaving nine for follow-on landings, three beyond the six missions that were attempted. Had budget cuts not crimped NASA’s plans, we would have mounted the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions with the likely landing sites Schroter’s Valley, the Hyginus rille region and Copernicus crater, all in the Moon’s equatorial region, as were the six landings. Now, NASA intends through its Artemis program to land the first woman and the next man near the Moon’s south pole by
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2024, initially aiming for a brief visit to the lunar surface leading up to six-and-a-halfday missions, roughly twice the length of the longest Apollo sortie, and subsequently establishing a sustained human presence by 2028. Going back to the Moon has seriously been proposed twice before, by President George H.W. Bush (1989 “Space Exploration Initiative”) and President George W. Bush (2004 “Vision for Space Exploration”) administrations, but failed due to a lack of capability and long-term national commitment. Why might this time be different? Dr. John Logsdon, the George Washington University space historian whose books have chronicled the space policies of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, has a notion why. “I think the fact that we in Apollo used up the easiest exploration destination very early on
in the development of the program has led us over the past 50 years to try to re-create the rationales that led us to go to the Moon in the first place: power, prestige, very little science, and now economics,” he said. “They haven’t worked over this half-century since the end of Apollo. We in the U.S. have been aiming in my mind to go back to the Moon since 2004, pretty much consistently. We’ve been building hardware with the SLS [Space Launch System] and Orion [Orion Multi-purpose Crew Exploration Vehicle] ever so slowly, but there is a trajectory to get back to the Moon due to a combination of factors. One, I think, is the very simple reason that it is time to go back. If we are going to have a human spaceflight program, it should go somewhere, not just go around in circles. And the hope is we can finish the exploration of the Moon and find that there are economically valuable
OPPOSITE PAGE: An artist’s conception of the next generation of astronauts on the lunar surface. A new, larger manned lunar lander stands in the background. RIGHT: An artist’s conception of the Orion command and service modules in lunar orbit.
resources there, either valuable in terms of future space exploration, and maybe even [back] on Earth. We are not racing anybody; the race has been won. It is an attempt to re-create some of the factors that made Apollo sustainable, not only possible, but sustainable in a very different situation.”
Following the Water Logsdon’s point about lunar resources may be the key to the current drive toward the Moon. We left there in 1972, largely believing that the Moon lacked the abundant, available, and extractable resources needed to sustain lengthy human exploration activity. What changed our perception were subsequent unmanned satellite missions that investigated previously unexplored lunar regions. And in a new refrain upon the famous mid-19th century rallying cry, the belief these days is, “There is water in them thar craters.” In 1994, the joint NASA-Strategic Defense Initiative Organization Clementine mission used an eliptical polar orbit of the lunar surface to document for the first time the enormous south pole-Aitken impact basin, a hole in the Moon 1,616 miles across and more than 8 miles deep. Clementine’s sensors provided a tantalizing hint that permanently dark areas near the Moon’s south pole may contain frozen water deposited over millions of years by impacting comets. NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission, conducted 1998-1999, ended when the mission’s orbiter was deliberately crashed into a permanently shadowed area of the Shoemaker crater near the lunar south pole, after the presence of water ice was detected. NASA’s followon Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, which involved directly observing a plume of material created by the impact in the Moon’s southern hemisphere Cabeus crater by the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) and a companion rocket stage, helped identify sites close to potential resources with high scientific value, favorable terrain, and
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NASA has selected three commercial Moon landing service providers that will deliver science and technology payloads under Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) as part of the Artemis program. Each commercial lander will carry NASA-provided payloads that will conduct science investigations and demonstrate advanced technologies on the lunar surface, paving the way for NASA astronauts to land on the lunar surface by 2024.
the environment necessary for safe future robotic and human lunar missions. As a result of the LRO/LCROSS missions, “NASA has convincingly confirmed the presence of water ice and characterized its patchy distribution in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon,” said Michael Wargo, then NASA’s chief lunar scientist. Added LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator Anthony Colaprete, “Seeing mostly pure water ice grains in the plume means water ice was somehow delivered to the Moon in the past, or chemical processes have been causing ice to accumulate in large quantities. Also, the diversity and abundance of certain materials called volatiles in the plume suggest a variety of sources, like comets and asteroids, and an active water cycle within the lunar shadows.” If there are sufficient quantities of easily recoverable water ice near the Moon’s surface – and it should be noted the details of this proposition remain a big if, with great uncertainty about how much water there is beyond a foot deep below the Moon’s surface – that could be a massive driver for
lunar and beyond lunar exploration in the remainder of the 21st century. “If we can get water at the poles of the Moon, you can split water into oxygen and hydrogen and make rocket fuel,” said John Thornton, the CEO of Astrobotics, one of the many commercial space companies seeking to be players in renewed lunar exploration, and which was selected by NASA in May to deliver precursor science and technology payloads to Lacus Mortis crater as part of the Artemis program. “So conceivably the Moon could become a refueling station for spacecraft to go out and refuel and go farther out into the solar system, or maybe just to explore the Moon more thoroughly.” He added, “We know water is there and there are various estimates as to how much water is actually there. In order to determine how much, we need a ground proofing experiment on the Moon’s surface.”
The Commercial Driver And that’s not all in terms of lunar resources. We know the Moon contains potentially harvestable quantities of gold, silver, titanium and Helium-3, which could
be used for nuclear fusion power plants. An important incentive for commercial space companies to take heed of these mining possibilities is the provision Congress passed in the 2015 Space Act, which allows U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space. This was a driver for Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company’s design of the Blue Moon lander, first designed three years ago as a commercial cargo lander and recently unveiled as a potential humancarrying spacecraft. Blue Origin is one of 11 companies NASA has selected to conduct studies and produce prototypes of human landers for the Artemis program. The other companies are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Dynetics, Lockheed Martin, Masten Space Systems, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, OrbitBeyond, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, and SSL, now part of Maxar. As Logsdon points out, the interest of the commercial space companies is vital to NASA’s current ambitions. “I don’t think there is enough political will to pay to go back to the Moon as a unilateral effort of the U.S. government,” he said. “By default, you are going to have to find partners if the U.S. government wants to do this. I hope
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An artist’s conception of a manned ascent vehicle separating from a descent vehicle and departing the lunar surface. NASA will seek proposals from industry in support of rapid development of an integrated human lunar landing system, including elements such as a descent element, ascent element, and transfer vehicle.
it is not an illusion, but the impression [is] that the private sector for its own reasons is interested in going to the Moon, not as a government contractor, but by investing some of their own resources. I think that’s still to be demonstrated, whether the billionaires – the Jeff Bezoses and the Elon Musks – will put significant amounts of their own money into a Moon program. Clearly, other countries are interested in exploring the solar system starting with the Moon, realizing there is no way they can afford it on their own, so the only way to do it is by partnering with a major country, and I think the partner of choice despite all our foibles is the United States.” Another factor to consider is that the costs of access to space are going down. “I think the big difference between now and a while ago is the technology has advanced considerably and the cost has come down considerably,” noted Thornton. “Now it is possible to buy many of the components we need for a lunar lander off the shelf. They are accessible and ready and the advent of very affordable commercial launch has made the Moon and space more accessible.” And then there is the challenge of using human ingenuity to do something new. “If we are to become true explorers as we once were when we crossed the oceans, and not rely on the resources of Earth, our ability to
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use the resources on the land is when we can become untethered from Earth and go really, really deep,” said Thornton. Some of the key components are creating fuel, finding sources of water, methane, or other volatiles that you can turn into fuel. Another key one is making parts off the world – such as with 3D printing to build habitats and solar panels generating vast quantities of power – and learning how to deal with the radiation environment.” Indeed, the commercial potential of space is a big driver for the Trump administration, whose Dec. 11, 2017 Space Policy Directive 1 switched course from the president’s reported desire to have NASA achieve the goal of landing humans on Mars by the end of his potential second term, to the charge that NASA “Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.” Following the directive’s issuance, NASA planned for a 2028 Moon landing that
would be abetted by a waystation in a stable eliptical lunar orbit called the “Lunar Gateway.” The Gateway is expected to contain a small habitation module that the Orion crew module could dock with after launching from Earth on the SLS or other commercial launcher, and a power and propulsion element. From the Gateway, a lunar lander will descend to a lower orbit and then touch down and ascend from the Moon’s surface. In May, NASA selected Maxar Technologies to receive a $375 million contract to build Gateway’s power and propulsion element with a launch date of 2022 and flight demonstration lasting as long as one year. Since Space Directive 1 was issued, the administration’s impatience with NASA’s initial 2028 schedule led Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as chairman of the National Space Council, to push in March for the new landing goal of 2024, raising eyebrows with his critique of the SLS’s slow pace of development, hinting at a possible turn to commercial launch providers. But when the administration announced the Artemis program in May, the $1.6 billion funding boost it asked lawmakers to provide NASA in fiscal year 2020 still contained additional funds for SLS development, along with $1 billion targeted for the lunar landers. Because NASA will not have enough core SLS systems, commercial launch vehicles will be required to get the landers to the Lunar Gateway.
Planning for Renewed Surface Operations NASA is now gearing up for the accelerated schedule with an increased sense of urgency. “We are going to return humans near the Moon on Orion with a mission to go around the Moon coming up shortly in early 2020,” noted Dr. Greg Chavers, the Marshall Space Flight Center formulation lead for the Human Landing System. Chavers added, “Our sequence is first orbiting the Moon, getting humans to the Lunar Gateway and they will get in the lander at the Gateway and go from there to the surface. After the first landing mission we plan for missions in 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028, one each year, building capability
ABOVE: Like the International Space Station (ISS) the Lunar Gateway will be an international cooperative program. BELOW: An artist’s concepton of the Lunar Gateway. The Lunar Gateway is envisioned as a waystation in orbit around the Moon, from which astronauts will travel down to the lunar surface and return. It will also be a jumping-off point for missions heading farther out in the solar system, such as to Mars.
through the whole decade up to some kind of habitation or pressurized mobility system sometime in the late 2020s.” Chavers said the details haven’t yet been worked out as to whether the Gateway itself will be a refueling depot or the landers will be fueled near the Gateway, “but the end goal is to have the lander to be refueled and parked at the Gateway waiting for the crews to come back each year as they use the system to go to the surface.” Potential landing sites are in the vicinity of Shackleton crater, an impact crater whose peaks along its rim are exposed
to almost continual sunlight, while the interior has not seen sunlight for more than 3 billion years. “The goal is to get to a site that has a lot of light, so we can follow up with missions for those stations, where you have lunar resources, where you would have access to solar power, even before the astronauts get there and after they leave, and you come back for the next mission,” said Chavers. He noted that after the first mission conducted totally in sunlight, follow up missions will require the development of technology “to allow humans to stay through the [10-plus
hours] eclipse of the local terrain to make it more survivable at night. That will require systems on the surface to provide power for the crew.” Chavers said the second major consideration in a landing site “is to set up near a location where there are lots of volatiles, potential water ice that may be in a permanently shadowed region. We don’t want to put the crew in a permanently shadowed region,” where the ambient termperature is 25 degrees Kelvin, 80 degrees colder than on Pluto. “We want the surface station to be set up near there.” Among the new capabilities NASA hopes to have on the Moon to assist the astronauts, said Chavers, are “unpressurized rovers that will allow astronauts to get several kilometers away from the landing site.” He adds the agency is looking into pressurized rovers as well, which “can be autonomous, allowing the crew to get out of the lander and into the pressurized rover and have more volume, living space, and roving capability. When the crew is not there, the pressurized rover can rove on the lunar surface and perform science experiments between crewed missions. It’s not something we will have for the initial sortie, but for some of the longer range missions.”
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An artist’s conception of the Orion spacecraft configured for deep space missions, such as to Mars, as shown in this image.
Another consideration is the spacesuits the astronauts will use. Chavers noted suits already in development need to be tweaked with reduced mass and more flexibility in the lower torso. “On Apollo, the astronauts hopped, but we don’t want to go back and hop.” He added, “We are driving toward suits that can be reused and be long duration as well.” The lunar suits will first be tested on the International Space Station.
The Science Imperative Science was not the primary rationale for the first voyages to the Moon, nor will it be for our return to the Moon. But to space veterans like Dr. James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, we may be vastly underestimating the Moon’s scientific value. “The idea that the Moon is ‘been there, done that’ is as crazy as saying six one-tothree-day field trips to Africa is going to tell you the history of the planet Earth,” said Garvin. “It’s that dumb. If you are optimizing only one target, the Moon would be a fantastic place to go. We’re not done.” Garvin added, “The Moon is Mother Nature’s best naturally controlled experiment that’s both accessible and meaningful to all of us here on Earth, and of course, inextricably linked to Earth’s history, the motion of the oceans, and even to some, the history of life. The Moon offers us the only really accessible laboratory to look at all the processes that affect solid planets, the rocky planets particularly, but also the rocky icy outer planetary satellites, all in one place.”
72 APOLLO 11 I 50 YEARS
What makes the Moon unique, stated Garvin, is what it is not. “If you could design a world that is a laboratory for studying phenomena, the Moon is great because it is not complicated by mass gushings of water and oceans, complications by all kinds of life processes, and massive tectonics in the outer crust the way our Earth works. All of that stuff on the Moon is simplified. And it is a planetoid where there is a water cycle, a very different one from Earth; it’s the kind you’d expect on a small body, main-belt asteroids or otherwise. You can study what’s out there by going to the Moon.” Whatever we learn about water on the Moon, said Garvin, could be profound. “It could be 2-to 3-billion-year-old water ice particles. Those are little time capsules of part of the solar system’s history that we aren’t going to be able to find anywhere else. If we find it in places that is more prevalent than not, and we protect it and store it and study it before we bring it home, that could be huge for science. We don’t have the old ice here on Earth. It’s all been recycled. And on Mars, there may be some insulated, deep [water], but most of it is in the modern cycle. So the Moon may be a way of getting some of the oldest water in our solar system, which would be incredibly valuable scientifically to understand how everything works.” There are also implications for the science of astrobiology. “On the Moon, you can ask questions about the astrobiology of deep space without having to worry about mucking up what might be an extant biological system, as we could have on
Mars or in the oceans of Europa,” said Garvin. “Going to the Moon, we can bring testbed biology experiments with us and watch them react to deep space, evaluate how they react, test them in the Lunar Gateway or Space Station, wherever. And of course, the far side of the Moon can be an exquisite location for radio astronomy undisturbed by all the ‘noise’ our modern civilization generates.”
Onward to Mars Of course, looming in the background of any discussion about returning to the Moon is what that will mean for the holy grail of human space exploration: Mars. “The Moon means everything when it comes to exploring Mars,” asserted Garvin. “While we all want to leap to Mars more than anything, that’s a big leap. Great leaps are super. People are good at them. But to have confidence in the engineering solutions that let us send women and men to places that are not close by, that are in a non human-friendly environment, we need practice. I really believe that. So the trick is going to be to open the lunar frontier. Use it. Learn from it and then do Mars.” For those of us who were among the estimated 600 million people on Earth who watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take humankind’s first steps on the Moon, it can seem excruciatingly frustrating that we may not live to see the first explorers set foot on Mars. But if the planners of the next lunar adventure are on the mark, the sequel to the Moon, episode 1, may be rewarding in its own right.
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