Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (44 page)

In the Bethpage Mission Support Center we were exhilarated at the success of the trajectory corrections and heartened by our ability to participate in solving a problem that was far outside our normal scope of activity. Reentry was not a lunar module concern—the fragile LM, with no protective heat shield, must be jettisoned before reentry to burn up like a meteoroid flashing across the night sky. In this time of crisis, the whole space program team across America meshed seamlessly together to do the seemingly impossible. It was a proud moment for all of us.

The time for the crew to leave and jettison Aquarius approached, and there were many procedures to be developed and recommended to NASA for closing out the LM and positioning her at a safe distance from Odyssey for reentry. NASA-Houston was preoccupied with developing and simulating the complex checklist for reactivating the CM, so anything we could do on the LM side to simplify things for them was welcome. NASA noted that Odyssey would be lighter than normal for reentry because she was not carrying the two hundred pounds of Moon rocks and containers that had been expected. What could be taken out of Aquarius to increase reentry weight? We suggested that the crew could cut free some of the fire-resistant Nomex cloth netting and webbing used in the LM cabin for equipment stowage and crew restraint.

As the workload for us in Bethpage tapered off, we became more fully immersed in the impending reentry drama. Of concern to us all was the condition of Odyssey. She had been shut down, cold and dark, for more than three days. Upon reactivation, condensation from the crew’s breathing could be expected on all cold surfaces. All wires and electrical connectors would be dripping wet—would they short out? Odyssey’s heat shield was another major unknown. It had been directly facing and attached to the service module in which the oxygen tank exploded—had it been damaged by debris? If there were a hole or crack in the heat shield, Odyssey would be torched inside with five-thousand-degree flame, its occupants cremated. There was no way of knowing if the heat shield was still intact.

About five hours before reentry the crew jettisoned the crippled service module. As it drifted away from Odyssey they turned the windows toward it and for the first time saw the full extent of the damage. Lovell reported with astonishment: “There’s one whole side of that spacecraft missing.”

An entire bay was no longer there, and shreds of debris were dangling from the shattered side, giving eyewitness verification of what those numbers on the screens had been telling us.

The crew transferred into Odyssey and powered her up. No pop or sizzle of electrical shorts, a good sign, and her systems appeared to be normal. After
stripping all removable items from Aquarius, the crew closed and locked the hatches and jettisoned their faithful lifeboat. Jack Swigert announced, “Houston, LM jettison complete.”

“OK, copy that,” said CapCom Joe Kerwin. Then he expressed the proud feelings of all Grummanites for their creation when he added for the world to hear, “Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you.”

Even after being on an emotional roller coaster for so long, I was unprepared for the visceral drama of reentry. Upon reentry the spacecraft is surrounded by a white-hot sheath of ionized gases (plasma) as the atmosphere rapidly absorbs energy from it. During this period of high deceleration, radio signals cannot penetrate the plasma, resulting in a communications blackout. For Odyssey the blackout period lasted four minutes, during which the integrity of her heat shield would undergo its crucial test. When the mission clock showed that the blackout period had ended, we held our breaths waiting for a familiar voice to crackle over the net that all was well. Seconds ticked by, and still no hail from Odyssey. Looking at the TV picture live from the South Pacific, we strained with the sailors aboard the carrier
Iwo Jima
to see, among the scattered clouds, a conical spacecraft dangling beneath a cluster of three large orange-and-white parachutes. After more agonizing seconds, we saw the sailors cheer, and the camera zoomed in on a cloud bank. There they were!

At last Jack Swigert’s voice came over the net: “OK, Joe.”

Thank God, they made it! The Bethpage Mission Support Center became pandemonium, as all the pent-up emotions of the past three and a half days flooded out in cheers, shouts, and backslapping. On the screens we could see the deliriously happy flight controllers in the MCC breaking out the traditional American flags and cigars. Although we were not similarly supplied, our celebration lacked nothing in intensity and ardor. There were smiles and loud laughter, but not a dry eye in the Bethpage Mission Support Center. The United States manned space program was still number one, and the people who worked for a small aerospace company on Long land, New York, were a vital part of it. After about an hour of mutual congratulations in the room and over the phone, I suddenly felt overpoweringly tired. Threading my way through the still-excited crowd, I sought out the quiet of the nurse’s office cot, and gratefully stretched out. I had had no more than five or six hours sleep in the last three and a half days.

A few weeks later the Apollo 13 astronauts visited Grumman to personally thank the people who built Aquarius and give them keepsakes they made from the materials removed from the spacecraft. Fred Haise had spent much time at Grumman talking to people in every part of the program; as we toured Plant 5 he knew at least as many people as I did. We all were moved by the astronauts’ visit and their open expressions of gratitude.

18

The Undaunted Warrior Triumphs

Apollo 14

Alan Shepard was America’s first man in space, an honor he had earned by demonstrating leadership in fierce competition with the other hand-picked overachievers who made up Project Mercury’s original seven. A virtuoso test pilot, he was intelligent, decisive, and resourceful. And he coveted the chance to be strapped atop a Redstone booster at a time when most large American rockets were exploding shortly after ignition. Such raw courage depended upon a powerful ego and positive self-image, characteristics that also made him somewhat testy. Some associates described him in work situations as arrogant, impatient, and remote, prone to turn unexpectedly on a colleague.

After his pioneering, fifteen-minute suborbital spaceflight on 5 May 1961, Shepard became the first celebrity astronaut. He was honored in the White House Rose Garden by President John F. Kennedy and rode triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue to wild cheering by thousands. Even Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who accompanied him in the open car, was amazed at the size and enthusiasm of the crowd.

“You’re a famous man, Shepard,” the vice president told him.

Shepard’s successful flight, and the American public’s immense reaction to it, took place as President Kennedy was weighing the decision whether to attempt a Moon program. It appeared to push him over the edge. Less than three weeks after the Rose Garden ceremony, Kennedy announced his decision to make the Apollo lunar landing program a top national priority in his address to a joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961.
¹

I personally saw only brief glimpses of Shepard’s complex character. At the M-1 mockup in September 1963, he seemed condescending and amused by the rookie Grumman team and our crude wooden mockup. A year later at the M-5 mockup review, I chanced to share a lunch table with Shepard, Grumman’s chief test pilot Corwin H. “Corky” Meyer, and veteran Grumman test
pilot Ralph “Dixie” Donnell. The three pilots were in high spirits, witty and charming as they vied with one another in telling about their flying experiences. Shepard told an exciting story about a carrier landing on a stormy night with a rough engine and failing electrical system, when he resisted the impulse to eject and stuck with it to a safe landing. Not to be outdone, Meyer and Donnell told this tale: Corky had been performing gun-firing tests and target practice with the new swept-wing F9F-6 Cougar. The flight test engineers were puzzled by a pressure buildup inside the airplane’s nose that they noted during the high-speed gun-firing runs. They were not sure whether it resulted from a leak of external aerodynamic pressure into the nose, or from inadequate ventilation of the gun gas that the four 50-caliber machine guns expelled inside. When he learned that the gun gas was probably flammable, Corky proposed a “quick and dirty” test: installing a few spark plugs inside the nose. If the source were gun gas, it should ignite and produce a pressure spike that would show up on the instrumentation.

The Cougar was outfitted overnight with spark plugs and an ignition system, and Corky took her up to perform the flight test, with Dixie flying a production F9F-5 Panther as chase airplane. When they reached the test altitude in the designated firing range over the Atlantic Ocean, Corky turned on the instrumentation recorders and the spark ignition system and pushed the throttle forward for the high-speed run. As he neared maximum velocity, he fired a long burst from the machine guns. He heard an explosion, smoke filled the cockpit, and the airplane bucked like a bronco. When the smoke cleared, he could see that the aerodynamic nose fairing was gone, leaving the beams and struts of its supporting structure exposed. In the chase plane, Dixie was incredulous, then burst out laughing over the radio, “That was a great test you cooked up, Corky—you just blew the nose clear off the dang airplane!”

Corky hung onto the stick and chopped back the throttle. Despite buffeting and erratic pitch-up tendencies, he was able to land at Grumman’s Calverton flight test center. Corky said the test was “a tad inelegant” but certainly answered the question of where the elevated nose internal pressure came from.

Shepard hooted with laughter. “You were absolutely right on that, Corky.” Then, grinning broadly and throwing a good-natured wink in my direction, he added, “If you’d left it to the engineers, they’d probably still be trying to work out instrumentation to do the job.”

At the top of the growing astronaut corps, Shepard was selected to command the first Gemini mission, with Tom Stafford as his copilot. Then, in the summer of 1963, Shepard was stricken by recurring attacks of dizziness and nausea, which became so severe that he reluctantly reported them to the NASA doctors. They diagnosed his illness as Ménière’s syndrome, an inner-ear disorder characterized by excess fluid buildup in the semicircular canals. There was no known cure, although the symptoms disappeared spontaneously
in about 25 percent of the cases. Shepard came off flight status while NASA waited to see if he would be one of the lucky 25 percent.

Grounded, Shepard became chief of the Astronaut Office, reporting to Deke Slayton, the other grounded member of the original seven, who headed the Flight Crew Operations Directorate and had his hands full with newly selected astronauts, accelerating Gemini flight schedules, and increasing Apollo activities.
²
Shepard ruled the fractious, competitive pilots with a firm hand, earning their respect if not their affection. He never considered resigning, always hoping that his problem would spontaneously disappear. Finding that he could fulfil his desk-bound duties and still have free time, Shepard became increasingly involved in business, using the many contacts his Mercury celebrity had gained for him.

For six years his situation continued, as the Gemini program was completed and Apollo entered early flight testing. Shepard’s business ventures gained him a small empire in shopping centers, hotels, and other enterprises and made him a millionaire. (There was some criticism that he traded profitably on his government-funded Mercury celebrity.) But this was just something to do until he could fly again in space. By the spring of 1968 his condition had worsened, and time was running out to secure an Apollo flight berth. When he learned of a newly developed, risky, and delicate operation that implanted a small silicon tube in the ear to drain excess fluid away to the spinal column, he decided to take the chance. It was his last resort, and it worked.

In spring 1969, with manned Apollo flights occurring every two months, NASA cleared Al Shepard to fly airplanes and spacecraft. Slayton promptly chose him to command Apollo 13, provoking protests from other astronauts that Shepard was being allowed to jump over Slayton’s carefully established system of flight crew assignment rotation.
³
Slayton replied that Shepard had always been at the top of the rotation but was on hold while he was grounded.

Shepard’s luck had changed more than he knew at the time: his selection for Apollo 13 was overridden at NASA Headquarters by George Mueller, associate administrator for Manned Spaceflight, who thought he needed more training time. Slayton swapped Shepard’s mission with Jim Lovell’s Apollo 14 crew. Ironically, Shepard’s prolonged grounding may have saved his life. Otherwise he probably would have been selected to command the first Apollo flight and would have been inside Apollo 1 on Launch Pad 39.

At this stage of the Apollo program, much more than piloting skills were required of the astronauts. They also had to be competent field geologists, capable of representing the Earth-bound scientists by conducting efficient, perceptive surface traverses in limited time in a hostile environment. Although temperamentally the opposite of the patient, painstaking lunar scientists, Shepard resolved to attain the knowledge and skills needed to be a discerning
field geologist. Leading his crew by example, he plunged into field training in the mountains of California and Arizona under Lee Silver, who together with geologist-astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was giving the Apollo astronauts a crash course in field geology. They learned to identify minerals and to describe what they saw in precise geological terms. They also studied the different theories on the origins of the Moon and how the specific objectives and possible findings of their mission might confirm or refute them. As in all else he did, Al Shepard was resolved to excel in this new dimension of an astronaut’s job.
⁴