Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure (10 page)

On 20 April, Kennedy sent a memo to Vice-President Johnson asking whether '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 land on the moon ... ?' Johnson replied that a manned Moon landing was far enough in the future to allow the United States the possibility of achieving it first. It was an argument supported by Gilruth, who saw the project as being so technically difficult the US and Russia would each have an equal chance of success regardless of their current position. For the moment, however, Gilruth remained preoccupied with the more modest objectives of the current missions. For him great relief came with the first successful Mercury flight on 5 May. Millions of TV viewers were enthralled by the first US manned rocket launch, but behind the scenes America's ambitions were already being propelled towards bigger ideas.

In deciding to back a manned landing, Kennedy gave NASA the relevant parts of a forthcoming speech proposing a flight to the lunar surface in 1967. Since they still did not know how such a mission could practically be accomplished, NASA's managers urged him to put back the date. On 25 May, Kennedy told a joint session of Congress, 'I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project ... will be more impressive to mankind or more important ... and none will be so difficult or expensive.' The question of how far Kennedy was prepared to stomach the costs involved remains a subject of debate, but publicly he needed to send the right signal. The president recognised that such an effort in such a short timeframe would require a monumental commitment on a wartime scale. 'It will not be one man going to the Moon,' he added, 'it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.'
¹⁴
Gilruth doubted it could be done in the time available.

Given a shot in the arm by the commitment from Kennedy, NASA managers commissioned studies on the various landing options. Once it was realised that a huge rocket such as Nova could never be developed within the president's deadline, and the whole idea of direct ascent was left to sink into a fug of equations. With Nova stranded on the drawing board, interest veered towards von Braun's work on EOR. Although his rockets were smaller and more feasible than the Nova, his vision of two spacecraft successfully finding each other for a safe rendezvous in space remained a daunting prospect. At least if the rendezvous failed, the astronauts could be quickly brought home.

This was a comforting thought compared to the nightmare inherent in a proposal put forward by NASA's Langley Research Center. Supported by John Houbolt, a tenacious engineer with a passion for his work, the Langley plan also involved a rendezvous in space but suggested this take place not above the Earth but three days away, above the Moon – an idea that 'horrified' Low.
¹⁵
Direct, to the point of being blunt, Houbolt refused to let the idea drop. He suggested that lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) required only a very small capsule to be sent to the surface of the Moon. Unencumbered by the resources necessary for a six-day round trip to and from Earth, the capsule would only have to fly from lunar orbit down to the surface and back again. It would then rendezvous with a bigger vehicle for the journey home. Small and lightweight, it would be far easier to land than the large spaceship envisaged in EOR, never mind the mammoth Nova. In fact, Houbolt argued, LOR was 50 per cent lighter than direct ascent. Nevertheless, the plan meant that men returning from the lunar surface would have no way of getting home if they failed to find the vehicle waiting for them. The Moon was more than 2,000 miles wide. Yet if it were difficult to find a moving target as big as this, how was anyone going to be expected to find a small orbiting spacecraft? If things went wrong, there would be no hope of rescue. Forced to contemplate the prospect of dead astronauts perpetually trapped in orbit around the Moon, in June staff at headquarters rejected the idea.
¹⁶

Difficult as they were for some to accept, Houbolt's proposals were inspired by a logic that could not be dismissed. Nova was too impractical and EOR raised too many technical questions. Houbolt knew there wasn't time to pursue anything other than LOR, but for months he found there was 'virtually universal opposition – no one would accept it – they would not even study it'.
¹⁷
'The critics in the early debate murdered Houbolt,'
¹⁸
von Braun later remembered. Bypassing several layers of management, six days before Kennedy's announcement Houbolt had put his arguments in a letter to the second most powerful man in NASA, Robert Seamans. Kennedy's deadline only served to harden Houbolt's opinions, and in November – still facing opposition to his ideas – he wrote to Seamans again. 'Do we want to go to the moon or not?' he demanded, asking, 'why is a ... scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive?'
¹⁹

Over time, senior figures slowly came round to Houbolt's point of view including, in January 1962, Gilruth. He had been instructed to take his Space Task Group from Virginia down to Houston and there set up a site under the new name of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Once in Houston, Gilruth's group began to look seriously at LOR, while von Braun's team at the Marshall Space Flight Center continued to study EOR. Each side sought the commitment of headquarters, and with tensions running high an argument on the subject broke out within earshot of the press while Kennedy was visiting Marshall.
²⁰
Without a decision, it was impossible to move forward. Aware of the difficulties of EOR – and of the president's deadline – in June von Braun came to accept that the only viable option was lunar rendezvous. It was the final move in the game: on 11 July 1962, NASA decided in favour of LOR. 'It is my opinion to this day,' Low wrote twenty years later, 'that had the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mode not been chosen, Apollo would not have succeeded.'
²¹

With Apollo free to move forward, Gilruth was now able to devote his attention to the fledgling Gemini programme, believing this would provide the experience in space-flight needed to fly to the Moon. Beyond spacesuits and extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), a pressing priority was to begin work on rendezvous techniques. Any lunar landing relying on a rendezvous in space would be impossible if Gemini failed to prove it could be done. On 3 June 1965, shortly before Ed White began the first US space walk, the commander of Gemini 4, Jim McDivitt, tried to fly alongside the abandoned upper section of their two-stage rocket. Although such a manoeuvre had never been performed before, McDivitt assumed it would be relatively straightforward. But each time he attempted to approach the rocket stage he found that it mysteriously moved further away, and amid concerns over using up fuel he was ordered to abandon the experiment. By the time Gemini 5 reached orbit two months later, new training techniques had been developed and the spacecraft was fitted with a radar system. The crew successfully flew from one point in space to another, demonstrating for the first time an ability to reach a pre-determined position in orbit.

Only through practical experience of orbital mechanics was NASA able to get to grips with the difficulties of rendezvous. McDivitt had expected to catch up with his target by firing his engine, with the intention of going faster. Actually the burn simply pushed him into a higher orbit, which left him travelling more slowly relative to anything at a lower altitude – like a spent rocket stage. With the target in sight, McDivitt ought to have slowed down. In doing so he would have become more vulnerable to the pull of the Earth's gravity, which would have taken him down to a lower – and faster – orbit. When he was in the right position he could have fired his thrusters and climbed back up to meet his target. Such logic wasn't for the faint-hearted. Once digested it was supplemented with side orders of apogee adjusts, phase adjusts, plane changes and coelliptic manoeuvres, spiced up by the differences between near-circular and elliptical orbits. In short, a successful rendezvous requires an understanding of the relationship between a spacecraft's speed and its height above the Earth (or the Moon).

While Gemini 5 proved the theory, it did not approach any target but simply completed a rendezvous with an empty point in space, following a plan designed by Buzz Aldrin. It was left to the next two missions to show that NASA could indeed perform a rendezvous as required by LOR. Relying on his basic flying skills and supported by a computer, on 15 December 1965 Mercury veteran Wally Schirra flew Gemini 6 to within one foot of Gemini 7. The two spacecraft orbited the Earth three times while flying in formation, at one point maintaining their positions so accurately that neither crew had to fire their thrusters for 20 minutes. The Russians had not yet managed to do the same thing with a similar degree of accuracy, and for the first time in the space race NASA was edging ahead.

The next stage was docking. Rendezvous involved two spacecraft finding and approaching each other, but only by demonstrating an ability to dock could NASA show that LOR was feasible. The first test was given to Gemini 8, to be commanded by Armstrong. Neil had been part of the backup crew on Gemini 5 before becoming one of the few astronauts to be given a command position on his first flight. Approaching from behind and below, Armstrong rendezvoused with an Agena target vehicle (a converted rocket stage). After gently approaching it at three inches per second, on 16 March 1966 he completed the first successful docking. 'Outside in airless space,' Armstrong later recalled, 'there was only silence, but in the cockpit we heard a slight thud. We relaxed for the first time.'
²²
The final moments took place during darkness; Armstrong remembered that 'you saw stars up above, and down below you might see lights from a city or lightning embedded in thunderstorms'.
²³

Neil, and his pilot Dave Scott, had been warned that the Agena may have been experiencing guidance problems, and soon after docking they found they were being rolled over. They stopped the problem by using the Gemini spacecraft's own thrusters, but only when they turned the Agena off did they feel that they had the problem under control. Then it started again. Armstrong noticed that the fuel used by their thrusters had dropped to 30 per cent and it dawned on him and Scott that the problem was not with the Agena but with the Gemini. The roll reached the point where Armstrong felt that the 'stresses might be getting dangerously high', and the two spacecraft might break apart.
²⁴
He wanted to pull away from the Agena, but with dangerous levels of 'rotation in all directions' he knew he risked a collision. Eventually he was able to pull away, but the problem returned, and with the spacecraft now revolving faster than one revolution per second it was quickly becoming one of the most dangerous moments in space-flight history.

'The sun flashed through the window about once a second,' Armstrong noted. Out of radio contact with the ground, the vehicle was spinning round and round so fast that the crew, now suffering from tunnel vision, were close to losing consciousness.
²⁵
'I could tell,' Armstrong later said, 'when I looked up above me to the controls for the rocket engine that things were getting blurry.'
²⁶
He had no choice but to shut down the thrusters. Investigating the problem in the analytical style he developed as a test pilot, Neil successively fired each of the small boosters and found that one had become stuck in the 'open' position. By activating the re-entry control system he was able to fly the spacecraft safely, but according to the mission rules this action obliged him to return to Earth as soon as possible. Less than eight hours after launch, a decision was made to end the flight early. Armstrong felt frustrated and depressed at being unable to complete the mission, but his cool handling of the emergency won him much praise within NASA's higher echelons.
²⁷

Next to fly were Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan aboard the ill-fated Gemini 9 flight. They had hoped to dock with a second Agena, but when it dived into the Atlantic shortly after launch it had to be hurriedly replaced with another target device which itself malfunctioned once in orbit. After its protective shroud failed to detach properly, Robert Gilruth called a meeting in Houston to discuss the problem. Buzz Aldrin, serving as Cernan's backup, suggested that Gene try to remove the shroud during an EVA – an idea that appalled Gilruth. 'What in hell did you say?' Deke asked Buzz a few days later. 'He's all pissed off at you. Said he had had great confidence in you and now he wants you taken off Gemini 12.' After Buzz explained what had happened, Deke ordered him to wait in his office. While Aldrin paced up and down, Slayton chased after Gilruth, returning three hours later. 'Everything's cool, you're on,' grunted Deke, adding, '... but listen Buzz, why don't you use me as your translator from now on?'
²⁸
Although Slayton had rescued his career, Buzz had inadvertently made things more difficult for himself. He now needed his mission to be a success more than ever – and relying on the success of a Gemini mission was a risky strategy.