This new ocean, p.63
This New Ocean, page 63
Besides testing the structural integrity of the spacecraft and its launch vehicle and a thousand other things, including the ground support system, NASA intended to toss the command and service modules into a 115-mile-high parking orbit, then send them out to 11,185 miles on the end of the Saturn’s third stage, and finally slam the command module back into the atmosphere as if it were returning from the Moon. Apollo 4, blunt end forward, returned on the button at almost 25,000 miles an hour and then floated down only ten miles from the recovery ship. “No single event since the formation of the Marshall Center in 1960 equals today’s launch in significance,” von Braun chirped at a postlaunch news conference. “I regard this happy day as one of the three or four highlights of my professional life—to be surpassed only by the manned lunar landing.”
Indeed, Apollo 4 was virtually flawless. The reporters who came to Canaveral, mindful of what had happened in January, nevertheless chased the story with their old energy and enthusiasm. They knew that they were living through a profound moment there on the shimmering Florida coast, where fire and steel were being mated to carry members of their race to another world for the first time. The journalists, decked out in bush jackets, sunglasses, and the ubiquitous laminated press cards hanging from their necks on beaded chains or clipped to pockets, prowled beneath the huge gray gantries and inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the rockets came together, and searched for ways to describe the moment.
The size and power, the sheer immensity and brute force of the machines, lent themselves to the kind of simple comparisons and symbols that oil the public’s digestive process. The Saturn 5’s first stage was so wide—thirty-three feet—that three moving vans could drive through it side by side; the LOX tank held enough liquid oxygen to fill thirty-four railroad cars (or fifty-four, depending on the handout); the pumps in the first stage worked with the force of thirty diesel locomotives; the whole Saturn 5 was as high as a thirty-six-story building, towered well above the Statue of Liberty, and weighed a lot more than a Navy destroyer. The U.N. Secretariat building could roll through the VAB’s doorway. A writer for Fortune figured that von Braun’s behemoth could lift 1,500 Sputniks on a single launch, or 9,000 Explorer 1s, or 42 Geminis with astronauts inside.
But beyond the metaphors and analogies, beyond the hype and hokum, there was this plain fact, and it needed no embellishing: the United States of America was actually going to send men to the Moon. To the Moon! It was really going to happen! Apollo 4 was important because it brought all of the diverse pieces of the program together for the first time—not the least of them being managerial—and demonstrated that they could work together. The Great Pyramid now looked like what it was supposed to look like. And it was pointing at the Moon.
The first working lunar module, three months late because of changes that had resulted from the fire, went to space as part of Apollo 5 on January 22, 1968.74 In orbit, the LM’s attitude control engines pulled it away from the Saturn upper stage just the way they were supposed to do on the way to the Moon and both its descent and ascent engines were tested. That accomplished, the spider’s fiery carcass crashed into the waters southwest of Guam on February 12. With a few minor exceptions such as slight instability in its Bell engines, this flight, too, was an outstanding success.
The Death of Gagarin
Meanwhile, fate delivered another blow to the Russians, this one emotionally devastating. On the morning of March 27, Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seregin, an instructor, took off on a routine proficiency flight in a MiG-15 trainer and never returned. Their air traffic controller radioed that there was cloud cover at about 13,000 feet. In fact, the clouds began at 4,000 feet. Furthermore, the old fighter’s altimeter had probably been set too high. So as 625—Gagarin’s call sign—flew into the clouds northwest of Moscow, he apparently thought he was higher than he really was and that the clouds were higher, too. He therefore felt he could push the MiG’s stick forward. But that put it into a steep dive that sent it slamming into the earth before either he or the man behind him had time to eject. Both were so pulverized that there were no recognizable remains. Ironically, Gagarin had been Komarov’s backup, and now both were dead because of tragic accidents.
Yuri Gagarin was undoubtedly the most beloved individual in the country. Whether the average Russian cared about the space program or not—and a majority emphatically did not care—Yura or Yurka or Yurochka was a national emblem of transcendental magnitude: a soft-spoken, baby-faced, shy, virginal-appearing hero who, like the legendary Aleksandr Nevsky, had carried Russia’s fragile honor to the citadel of history with courage, dignity, and humility. “Yuri Gagarin is not with us,” one journalist who was not given to cultural or political bilge wrote as a eulogy two decades later.75 “He who was the first to realize the eternal dream of mankind, who stepped into the ocean of stars, flew over the planet, saw it from the side. A tragic, stupid, unfillable and still enigmatic loss. Our pain and grief. Forever!”
The nation truly grieved for the world’s premier spacefarer. His ashes were carried through Moscow by nine cosmonauts. Then, with his widow sobbing and his portrait and decorations laid out on display, he was buried in the Kremlin wall with Korolyov and Komarov. Gagarin’s likeness remains carved in marble, cast in bronze, and depicted on everything from posters to postage stamps throughout the country. On Leninsky Prospekt, a main thoroughfare leading to the heart of Moscow, a towering monument to the national idol showed a stainless-steel socialist superman clad in what amounted to light armor standing absolutely erect, his arms spread like an Olympic high diver, poised to plunge into space. A model of Earth, set at the foot of the hero’s pillar, memorialized the flight of April 12, 1961. Star Town’s official name was changed to the Y. A. Gagarin Memorial Cosmonaut Training Center. Gagarin was for years the most incongruous of all ghosts: a saint in a steadfastly secular society. Korolyov and Gagarin, the two guiding lights of the space program, were now dead, and their patron, Khrushchev, was banished to limbo. He would die three years later.
Apollo Moves into High Gear
Meanwhile, the pace of their rival’s Moon program accelerated as the pieces of Apollo continued to come together. Apollo 6, also unmanned, was launched just after dawn on April 4. This time, however, an old and troublesome phenomenon called the “pogo effect” reappeared. The thrust of the first stage’s F-1s began to fluctuate in a series of spasms or pressure surges known as low-frequency modulations, or pogoing, which caused the entire Saturn to bounce for thirty seconds right after liftoff. Then two of the second stage’s five J-2s conked out, forcing its controllers to increase the burn time of the other three, which caused them to run out of fuel before the huge rocket reached the required speed and altitude. So the third stage had to be fired for longer than planned in order to make up for the low velocity. This put Apollo 6, still attached to the now-dead third stage, into an elliptical orbit that was higher than the circular one in the flight plan.76 To make matters even worse, the third stage would not restart. This was anything but nominal.
While Apollo 6 was taking a series of spectacular color stereo pictures around the world, the controllers decided to salvage the mission by firing the service module’s own engine long enough to send the spacecraft out to 13,800 miles, where it mimicked the translunar injection maneuver that would get its successors headed to the Moon. Ten hours after it was launched, Apollo 6 splashed down in the Pacific and was brought home aboard the carrier Okinawa. A “pogo task force” heading some thousand engineers at Rocketdyne, Marshall, and elsewhere eventually solved the problem by using helium to absorb surges in pressure in the liquid-oxygen feed system.
Apollo 7 blasted off on October 11, 1968, carrying the crew that was supposed to follow Grissom’s: Schirra, Don F. Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham. During almost eleven days in orbit, the astronauts rehearsed virtually every operation that would get their successors to the Moon. They also took television pictures of themselves to show taxpayers at home, nonaligned Third Worlders, and other earthlings how they operated the spacecraft: the “magnificent flying machine,” as Cunningham called the capsule. The public relations people wanted the audience to see how the nation’s heroes lived and frolicked in their exotic new environment, and swimming topsy-turvy in a weightless world was a guaranteed grabber. “Hello from the Lovely Apollo Room High Atop Everything,” said one sign the clowning spacemen held for a camera.
What the television audience missed, however, was the first real space rebellion. Apollo 7’s crew went up knowing that they were on the first manned flight since the fire that had killed Grissom, Chaffee, and White, and that made them tense; they felt the future of the now-beleaguered program rested squarely on their performance. And their performance, they now saw, was being turned into a circus by the public affairs people.
“I had fun with Mercury. I had fun with Gemini,” Wally Schirra would explain later. But then, “I lose a buddy, my next-door neighbor, Gus, one of our seven; I lose two other guys I thought the world of. I began to realize this was no longer fun. I was assigned a mission where I had to put it back on track like Humpty-Dumpty.” The pressure to do that was intense enough. But Schirra thought that having millions of people looking over their shoulders while they did it just to get publicity was contemptible. “They decided on Saturday morning—we launched on Friday—to turn on television.… The NASA PR guys want to have some television today because you’ve got some quiet time. We can get national media,” he remembered Mission Control telling him. “We’ve got a new vehicle up here and the TV will be delayed without further discussion until after the rendezvous,” an angry Schirra snapped back. Glynn Lunney, the mission’s flight director, said later that the Apollo 7 crew was “openly difficult to deal with and hostile to some of the things we were trying to do.”77 That’s because, as Schirra growled over the open mike, he thought several unscheduled chores had been invented by an “idiot.” In his novel Space, which commemorated the Apollo program, James A. Michener likened such performances to “dancing bears” at the circus.79 Schirra would have agreed.
To make matters worse, Schirra probably took the first head cold to space and spread it to his companions in the command module’s cramped quarters. Since there was no gravity, their mucus accumulated in their nasal passages, forcing them to blow extra hard to clear them. That built painful pressure in their ears. When it came time to come down, Schirra told Houston that he wanted the crew to take off their helmets so they could squeeze their nostrils with their mouths shut while blowing as hard as they could. The technique, known as the Valsalva maneuver, reduces pressure in the middle ear. But the men in Houston thought that taking a helmet off during re-entry was more dangerous than playing football without one, and they therefore refused the request. Schirra lost his temper again. He told Mission Control that he was Apollo 7’s commander—that the lore of air and space gave the commander the last word—and that he would therefore use his own judgment. Chris Kraft reacted by calling Schirra “paranoid.”
And the reality of spaceflight brought another problem. Although crumbled food floating around the cabin looked like fun in a place where gravity held eggs on plates and soup in bowls, it quickly became annoying to those who had to catch it and try to get it down. Schirra and the others came to hate flying food. The combination of afflictions made Wally Schirra really testy. Deke Slayton, who would deliver a tongue-lashing to Schirra after he was safely back on Earth, called it “the first space war.” It would not be the last. After logging more than 260 hours in space, Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham hit the Atlantic off Bermuda a little more than a mile from where they were supposed to land. It was time to go to the Moon.
The final decision to send astronauts around the Moon—to go for it—was made in August 1968, three months before Apollo 7 flew. It came after intelligence reported that the Soviets were getting ready to put five tankers into Earth orbit and then use a manned Soyuz to herd them to the Moon like a dog herding sheep. And all that to land just one cosmonaut. The fact that Soyuz was being pushed so hard that it had killed Komarov the year before indicated what seemed to be an all-out drive to get a man on the Moon first. And if there was any lingering doubt about a manned Soviet Moon shot, Zond 5’s becoming the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon and return to Earth in mid-September 1968 dispelled it.81 Whether the U.S.S.R. got a man onto the surface or not, the CIA warned NASA, Zond showed that it was straining to at least circle it with a man before Americans did. And Zond 5, really a lighter version of Soyuz without an orbital module that was designed to be launched by a Proton, carried passengers: plants, turtles, flies, and worms to test radiation effects.
The decision to send men around the Moon was an agonizing one because it was potentially perilous. No one had to be reminded during the summer of 1968 that the Saturn carrying Apollo 6 had pogoed and lost three engines. Nor did anybody forget that no one had actually flown an Apollo mission. “Remember now,” Deke Slayton would later recall, “we had not yet flown Apollo 7, had not flown a manned command module, and the last time we had flown the Saturn 5 it had almost come unglued because of the vibration problem.82 Shit, we didn’t even have the software to fly Apollo in Earth orbit, much less to the Moon.” Webb was a doubter who soon came around. But then he was replaced by former General Electric research manager and Deputy Administrator Thomas O. Paine because Richard Nixon won the election. Paine came around, too, on the first manned Moon shot after von Braun, Slayton, Gilruth, Kraft, Low, and others ganged up on him. Slayton was particularly persuasive: “It is the only chance to get to the Moon before 1969,” he told NASA’s new administrator.
Santa Circles the Moon
Apollo 8 roared off Pad 39A just before eight o’clock on the morning of December 21, 1968, carrying Borman, James Lovell, and rookie William Anders on what Shepard and Slayton would one day call “the single greatest gamble in space flight then, and since.”84
Even as the spaceship neared the Moon on Christmas Eve, no firm decision had been made as to whether it would actually orbit or simply swing around and head back home. If everything looked good—was “in the green”—then Borman would be given permission to circle. But Apollo 8 was riding the sharp edge between triumph and catastrophe. In order to swing into lunar orbit, the trajectory guys calculated, the command and service module’s engine would have to burn for precisely 247 seconds. A miscalculation or an engine problem could send it back to Earth too soon, or into an elliptical orbit around the Moon, or, with too long a burn, it would dig a new crater on the Moon.
Finally, the historic command went out. With all the indicators weighed and Apollo 8 about to slip behind the Moon for twenty minutes during which it would be out of radio contact, Houston gave the historic order: “You are go all the way.”
“We’ll see you on the other side,” Lovell answered as his spacecraft disappeared, locked in lunar orbit a little more than sixty-nine hours after it left home. Twenty minutes later, with Mission Control repeating “Apollo 8 … Apollo 8 … Apollo 8” in a monotone that gave no hint of the tension in the room, the silence from space was finally broken. “Go ahead, Houston,” Lovell answered with equal reserve. Those three words created pandemonium in the Manned Spacecraft Center, with wild cheering, shouting, and applause.
“The Moon is essentially gray, no color,” Lovell, now the first lunar guide, reported. “It looks like plaster of Paris, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.” But the first men to see the Moon up close were transfixed, absolutely captivated, by the starkness over which they flew, as well as by the splendor of the distant blue, green, and white globe that was their precious home. “It makes us realize what you have back on Earth,” Lovell said. Indeed, some of the most important photographs in history, including an earthrise and others showing Earth against the dark void—pictures destined to become the icons of the environmental movement—were taken by the Apollo 8 crew. But there was more practical work to do. Five potential landing sites that were under final consideration, including the Sea of Tranquility, were also photographed up close. One of the Earth pictures, showing the New World and its deep blue oceans beneath swirling clouds—a disc surging with life and framed in absolute blackness—would make the cover of a special issue of Life the following January that celebrated “The Incredible Year ’68.”
It being Christmas Eve, Anders and the others came up with an appropriate greeting. “For all the people on Earth,” he said, “the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.” He then stunned those who listened by reading from Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” Lovell and Borman read from it, too, in a blatant back of the hand to the godless Commies who had not made it. If, as Khrushchev had said, some American planetary probes failed because they were made by capitalists, then it was fair to share the glory of the moment with the God he also disdained. Borman gave his and the others’ own greeting: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
Apollo 8’s engine kicked in for the required 304 seconds during the last of its ten orbits on Christmas Day, easing the spacecraft out of its circular flight path and pointing it home. A relieved Lovell took the occasion to radio Houston: “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.89 The burn was good.” They hit the water late on the morning of the twenty-seventh after traveling farther than anyone else in history, 580,000 miles, and were given a tumultuous welcome home.
A Bear Falters
There was not cheering everywhere. The day Apollo 8 left for the Moon, Lev Kamanin, the son of the cosmonauts’ own leader and himself a Kremlin space expert, penned this melancholy thought in his diary: “For us this [day] is darkened with the realization of lost opportunities and with sadness that today the men flying to the moon are named Borman, Lovell, and Anders, and not Bykovsky, Popovich, or Leonov.”
