Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (6 page)

On the return flight we were buzzing with excitement. Hope was reborn! Gavin asked me to prepare a study plan and budget request for the next year, aimed at positioning us to bid as prime contractor on the LM. I bounded off the plane in Bethpage refreshed with the prospect of a marvelous new challenge.

The twelfth of December was a miserable morning, with a raw, gusty wind driving a steady rain. I felt chilled just walking from the parking lot into the front lobby of Plant 5, and I climbed up the stairs shivering. I had decided to attend the weekly meeting of the Propulsion Section on the main Engineering floor. It was a way to keep in touch with my other Grumman “home,” a good idea with my prospects in space looking so shaky.

I was early, alone in the Propulsion area, just a few people streaming across the main bullpen. As I sat debating whether to go downstairs and pick up some coffee, a telephone at a nearby desk rang insistently.

A barely audible woman’s voice said, “Hello, is this … is this Grumman?”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

“I just wanted you to know … to know that Tom Sanial was killed … in an auto accident this morning.”

“What? What? Who is this?”

She was sobbing. “A neighbor. Just a neighbor. I’m so sorry. So very sorry. I must call others now. Goodbye.”

I stared unseeing at the telephone in my hands. A few minutes later I walked to Joe Gavin’s office, blurted out the gist of the call, and burst into tears myself.

Sanial’s loss deprived us of his extensive Apollo knowledge and background at a critical time in Grumman’s efforts. Others in our study team rose to provide the systems design integration talent for which we had relied on Sanial. The cruel but practical lesson was that in a big company, no one is indispensable.

On every raw, rainy December day, I think of the immense promise and goodness that was snuffed out so senselessly, and wonder at the implacable role that fate and chance plays in our lives. And I miss that sweet, gentle man who surely would have shared with me one of mankind’s greatest adventures.

Getting into Position

The company authorized fifty people to study LOR and the LM for a year. Joe Gavin headed the project, and I led the technical study. We received major assistance from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which provided a sizable engineering team to support our studies at their own expense. RCA was responsible for most of the electronics and for some of the systems engineering. Their team was headed by Frank Gardiner, a darkly handsome, smooth-talking senior electronics engineer. About thirty RCA engineers moved into the PD mezzanine with us.

Gardiner was able to tap experts from different RCA divisions to bring the talent we needed to the team, including communications engineers from Camden, radar specialists from Burlington and Moorestown, and guidance and control experts from Burlington. They bolstered our effort with in-depth technical expertise and marketing savvy.

In January 1962 we competed for a NASA-funded study of LOR and the LM. Although we thought our proposal was a good one, Convair won the award: fifty thousand dollars for a four-month study. We proceeded with our company-funded study anyway, and in June we submitted our study report to NASA. Shortly thereafter we were invited to brief our findings to Joseph F. Shea at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Shea had recently been recruited to NASA by Brainerd Holmes, NASA’s associate administrator for Manned Space Flight, and had been assigned to settle the “mission mode” issue. An experienced systems engineer from the Titan ballistic missile guidance program, Shea projected intelligence, engineering talent, self-confidence, and leadership. He was the right man to make a momentous decision.

In my first meeting with him in Washington, Shea continually interrupted my briefing with difficult but logical questions and meaningful comments: What makes you so sure the rendezvous can be accomplished? It’s a long way from home, and there won’t be much help from the ground. Have you calculated the allowable guidance errors for each rocket firing during rendezvous? How good are your LM weight estimates? If LM is overweight, it gets multiplied all the way down the launch stack.

Our study results on the relative advantages of LOR were by then quite mature, and I was on solid ground with our data, able to parry Shea’s thrusts. Our LM design studies had also progressed to the point where they seemed credible, and each major design feature was supported by technically satisfying
arguments. John Houboult joined enthusiastically in the interrogation; it was like defending a doctoral dissertation.

After two hours of grilling, Shea smiled and said that we had done a useful study on our own initiative and promised to consider our input in reaching his decision. He complimented me on my presentation and in-depth knowledge. I left the room elated that I had survived a baptism by fire.

Two weeks later NASA announced that they had selected LOR as the Apollo mission mode and would proceed with an industry competition for the design, development, and construction of the lunar module. The LM request for proposal was issued in late July, with responses due in early September. We were ready. After more than three years of preparation, Grumman was in the right place at the right time. And I was hungry for a win.

3

The LM Proposal

From the praise and comments of our Grumman supervisors, we knew that we were an elite within the company, chosen from among the brightest in a demanding profession in which brainpower ruled, counted upon to create the systems that would become the mainstays of the company’s business. We had been assigned to Preliminary Design, the nest from which new airplanes were hatched to fly “higher, faster, and farther.” Now this quest had reached its ultimate conclusion: escape from Earth itself and flight to our nearest celestial neighbor. At thirty-two years of age, I was leading Grumman’s technical proposal to NASA to design and build a spacecraft to carry men to the Moon and back.

To the uninformed observer, however, we looked like outcasts confined to a hidden backwater where we could do no harm to the company’s ongoing business. We worked in a segregated area suspended from the ceiling over a portion of the Experimental Shop, reached by a nondescript flight of dark blue painted metal stairs leading up from the polished wood blocks of the shop floor or by a flight of metal stairs and a catwalk down from an unlabeled door on the second floor Engineering Department office. Both stairways led to a blue metal door in a whitewashed cinder-block wall to which a doorbell and buzzer provided access. Inside, the low-ceilinged compound bathed in fluorescent light and humming with air conditioning seemed like a time tunnel, remote from worldly existence.

Our office area was cinder-block painted a faded light yellow and crammed with as many wooden desks and chairs as would fit. A single small office at the front of the room, framed by a large window partition, belonged to Al Murder, one of the few permanent members of Preliminary Design. Al was an experienced aircraft designer who had helped fashion Grumman’s Wildcats and Hellcats during World War II and a firm proponent of advancing the company into the space age.

The group secretary’s voice crackled over the intercom, summoning me to a meeting in Joe Gavin’s office. I put aside the study report I was reviewing and bounded up the stairs to the second floor. It was a welcome change to be on the Engineering floor. The interior vistas were broader and the ceilings higher and neatly finished with white acoustic tiles and frosted glass panes concealing fluorescent light bulbs. Joe Gavin’s office was spacious by Grumman standards. The walls were tastefully covered in rich dark paneling, and it was furnished with dark mahogany furniture with brass hardware and trim.

Joe and Al Munier were already seated at the conference table, and I joined them there, followed by my deputy Erick Stern. “The LM RFP has been released,” said Joe in his crisp voice with a hint of New England twang. “Saul Ferdman just picked it up in Houston and we’ll have it here in the morning. The proposal is limited to one hundred pages and it’s due in sixty days. Al and I thought we should get together and make sure you have everything you’ll need.”

Joe Gavin, in his early forties, was a rising star at Grumman. Joining the company in 1946, with an aeronautical engineering degree from MIT and wartime service in the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, he soon established a reputation as a talented aircraft designer with leadership capability. As project engineer on the swept-wing F9F-6 Cougar, he directed the design of an improved stabilizer control actuator driven by a high-speed, irreversible, ballbearing screw jack. This novel design allowed the Cougar to safely fly through the Mach 1.0 speed-of-sound barrier in a dive. The Cougar and its straight-wing predecessor, the F9F-5 Panther, both served in the Korean War. Joe became project engineer on the F11F Tiger, the first Grumman-produced fighter that was supersonic in level flight. The Tiger reached limited production and contained many technological innovations.

Joe Gavin grew up in eastern Massachusetts near Boston. His father was a tinkerer and tool collector, and young Joe developed a keen curiosity about how things work. A visit as an eight year old to a local dirt airstrip where he saw the transatlantic hero Charles Lindbergh impressed him early with the romance of aviation, and his studies at MIT informed him of its technical elegance. By nature reserved and understated, he thought problems through and stuck with his conclusions. Tall, muscular, and with craggy good looks, he was an accomplished oarsman at MIT and an expert skier from his youth. He was a natural leader who, in the face of crises and confusion, remained calm and steadfast of purpose, inspiring others to rally around him.

Gavin was chief Missiles and Space engineer, in charge of the LM project, and my boss. Al Munier provided the proposal team with support and guidance from the resident Preliminary Design Group. We went over a list of additional engineers we would need and added office space and equipment. High on our equipment list were IBM Selectric typewriters—the new design with the removable type ball—which were in short supply at Grumman.
Most of the engineers we needed had worked on our proposal for the Apollo spacecraft in 1961 and on LM studies since then.

Al, Erick, and I assembled the dozen or so LM proposal engineers in our work area and passed the word. Al promised to find space and desks for another two dozen people in Preliminary Design; the remainder would have to work at their “home” desks and visit us as required. A large conference room in the mezzanine would be available for our daily proposal meetings, which would begin as soon as we had the request for proposal.

The next morning Joe, Al, Erick, and I joined a standing-room-only crowd in the plainly furnished conference area within Preliminary Design. Saul Ferdman, Grumman’s space marketing director, passed out copies of the RFP and summarized what it contained, having read it on the plane from Houston. It was a drastic departure from NASA’s usual RFP, which normally provided a detailed set of mission plans, spacecraft specifications, and technical requirements and requested that contractors respond with their preliminary design of spacecraft and systems to meet the requirements, their plans for building and supporting the spacecraft to a NASA-specified schedule, and their bid price.

For the lunar module NASA considered both the mission planning and the technical requirements too uncertain to buy a proposed design. Instead they decided to base contractor selection on an evaluation of which company’s design team was most knowledgeable about the LM’s mission and requirements and had plausible approaches to its design. The company’s manufacturing capability, financial stability, and record of quality would also be considered, and the estimated cost for the program was requested as a means of determining the contractor’s understanding of the program’s scope.

The RFP was more like a graduate examination in an aerospace engineering design course than a typical government procurement specification. It posed fourteen technical questions and required discussion of five management areas, to be answered in one hundred pages of carefully specified format, even to the type size and line spacing. The technical questions “probed the most exacting technical requirements in the LM mission,” as we told NASA in our response.
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Summarizing some of them:

1. Discuss the flight mechanics and other considerations of near-Moon trajectories and of lunar launch and rendezvous.

2. Describe your approach to the design of the following LM systems: onboard checkout, propulsion, reaction control, flight control.

3. To what extent do you consider backup methods of control and guidance necessary? Describe your approach to this issue.

4. How do visibility requirements affect LM operations and design?

5. How would you accommodate micrometeoroid and radiation hazards in the LM design?

The RFP encouraged contractors to submit a conceptual design of a lunar module with their proposals, as a means of focusing their answers to the questions and demonstrating their competence in manned spacecraft design. However, NASA was not buying the contractor’s design; after the winner of the competition was selected, NASA and the contractor’s engineers together would develop the preliminary design of the LM.

We already had three conceptual designs prepared against our own estimates of the mission requirements and the space environment. Our major tasks were to compare NASA’s official requirements with our estimates, to determine the impact of differences on our designs, to select a leading candidate design, and to refine and improve that design until time ran out for the proposal. In parallel we drafted answers to NASA’s questions and analyzed them for possible effects on our conceptual design. Within a couple of days we were deeply immersed in this process.

We ultimately submitted a design for a two-part spacecraft, with a lower landing, or descent, stage and an upper liftoff, or ascent, stage. The descent stage contained mainly the tanks, rocket engine, and plumbing of the descent propulsion system, which was used to drop the LM out of lunar orbit and land it gently on the Moon’s surface; other consumables, such as oxygen, water, and batteries, which could be left behind on the Moon; scientific equipment to be deployed by the astronauts during exploration; and the landing gear.