Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (42 page)

With the end of the television broadcast, the mood altered abruptly. In a few minutes less than twenty-four hours ahead, their attempt to land on the moon would be successful, or aborted, or a disaster—they would be alive and heroes, or alive and failures, or dead. Just as if the clock of some inner schedule had rung a change, as if the act of finishing their television show was the end of some last view of a parlor and the sounds of summer on the lawn, so they stepped back into their worries again. Not everything was proceeding automatically. They had had trouble earlier with the nitrogen-driven ball valve in Bank B of the Service Propulsion System. It had developed a small leak and was a few hundred pounds under normal pressure. Since it remained at 1,960 pounds per square inch and the red-line was at 400 pounds, Bank B would have more than enough room to develop its leak further without being out of commission. And, of course, the system was redundant. Bank A in the absence of a working Bank B would open and close all the ball valves for the hypergolic fuel. Still, it was a malfunction, and not accounted for. It had to produce the same species of mild anxiety as a strange noise in one’s car engine.

Besides, something more mysterious was going on. It had begun before the television broadcast when Collins reported: “The Lem wants to wander up and down. I can get it completely stabilized in data and let it alone and in another couple of minutes it will have developed its own rate … several minutes ago I was exactly steady on data and since then I have been moving forward, the Lem pointed straight down toward the radius vector and that’s been despite a number of down minimum pitch impulses.”

Ten minutes later Collins was reporting again, “The tendency seems to be to pull the Lem down toward the center of the moon … it may have something to do with mascons or it may be
just the peculiarity of the DSKY display.” In another fifteen minutes, he remarked, “Interesting data on thruster firing versus pitch angle. It looks like that Lem just wants to head down toward the surface is all.”

“I have a comment here,” replied the Capcom, “that says that’s what the Lem was built for, I believe.”

Collins was grinding through the anxiety that the Lem was behaving most peculiarly, not unlike a dog on a leash who keeps leaning in the direction of a new and fascinating scent. There were unsatisfying explanations for the inexplicable. The moon had mascons, mass concentrations of dense material buried irregularly in its sphere. It was a little as if it had not one core but several. So its gravitational effects were a hint displaced. It would pull on the orbits of the spacecraft in irregular fashion, even distorting the orbit over a period of time. So the mascons might pull on the spaceship itself. But why pull on the Lem in preference to the Command and Service Module? Of course, these movements were minuscule. They appeared only on the computer rather than in the senses of the astronauts. So perhaps the malfunction was in the computer. How disagreeable either way—a mysterious fluctuation in the computer, or a mascon which attracted one of two connected spacecraft and ignored the other. Well, “that’s what the Lem was built for,” the Capcom had said. It was a joke, but the psychology of machines was in the wit. What if the moon would yet prove a womb to the chromosome of psychology in the bowels of each machine? Why did the Lem tip toward the moon? The answer did not come back from the Capcom and it lived as one more anxiety to take through the afternoon and into the evening and sleep.

The second burn for Lunar Orbit Insertion was fired on the far side, and the valves worked exclusively on Bank A. When they came out, their orbit had an apolune of 65.5 nautical miles, a perilune of 53.7. That orbit had been calculated to respect the eccentricities of the mascons so that the Command Module, two days and twenty-four revolutions later, would be traveling in something
close to a perfect circle at the hour the Lem would ascend from the moon and seek to rendezvous.

Work continued. There was more than a little work to do. The burn report on the second Lunar Orbit Insertion was relayed downlink, and the Lunar Module was pressurized. The radio was switched to high gain after a temporary loss of voice communication. Then a Program 22 for Lunar Surface Navigation was sent from the ground. The probe and drogue were removed from the Lem, and a small puddle of water was reported on the floor of the Command Module for the first time. The EECOM at MOCR was consulted on the best way to dispose of it, and Capcom told them to stand by for advice. The spacecraft went over the hill again and Loss of Signal occurred for the third time as they went into their third revolution. When they came around the corner again, the air-to-ground communications were noisy. An awkward spacecraft attitude had been required in order for them to be able to sight out the window on the landmark tracking in Program 22. So the omni-antenna was being used once more instead of the high gain. Conceivably, the psychology of machines gave a wink, for DAP, the Digital Auto Pilot, the pilot in the Lem computer, now showed signs of independence. “… thing that was a little odd is that there was some DAP thruster activity … roll and yaw got excited and the DAP went into a flurry of thruster firing … We’ve noticed the same thing in the Command Module System and just written it off as a CSM peculiarity.” There was undeniably something eerie about a rocket thruster system which would fire from time to time out of unforeseen reactions from the computer.

But they were in the Lem, and proceeding to check it out. The various systems in the Lem were being turned on, and data was being sent by telemetry. Now from two spacecraft, still connected, the LM and the CSM, were messages being sent independently to the ground.

Beautiful data was clear and thorough data. An engineer’s idea of beauty was system perfection. Beauty was obviously the absence of magic.

The data flowed, the check-outs continued. There were as many instruments, controls, switches, handles, circuit breakers, dials, panels, and displays on the Lem as on the Command Module, indeed by actual count there were more, for the Lem, being more delicate than the Command Module, had more redundancy built into it. Besides the Lem was two ships in one—even as the Command Module and Service Module were attached to each other before ever being connected to the Lem, so the Lem in turn had a descent stage and an ascent stage. Both ascent and descent stage would go down together to the moon—only the ascent stage would rise up off the moon and into rendezvous.

Now the data being sent down-link by Columbia was lost for a time and communication proceeded between Eagle and ground to restore it. Further communication checks went on between Eagle and ground via S-band OMNI. “You’re beautiful in this mode, Buzz. We’re reading you 5 by.” “You’re gorgeous also,” answered Aldrin.

The cameras were checking out and the eighty-five-foot dish antenna on earth and the two-hundred-and-ten-foot. The voice on S-band was found to be “truly beautiful.” What a quiver in the fundaments that a voice would vibrate loud and clear over a quarter of a million miles. (But then light could travel for millions of years at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second.)

The rapid tempo of work continued. They had much to do before dinner and sleep. The Eagle was powered down to twenty-seven volts, and Trans-Earth 11 was sent uplink to Columbia. Each time they went around the moon a new set of Trans-Earth Injection data was delivered to the computer. If an emergency occurred, they could press a button and the rocket would be fired into a trajectory which would bring them back from the far side of the moon with velocity sufficient to return to earth. Next was a request sent up to do the waste-water dump in thirty minutes. Instructions
were also sent for the water spilled on the floor. It could be sopped up with sponges and deposited in the waste stowage area. “If it’s too much, then we recommend using the procedure in the checklist on page F10-14.” A new S-band configuration was suggested for Columbia in order that reacquisition of signal would be automatic when they came next around the moon. Then ground sent instructions to Eagle to give the Oxygen Pressure System reading. Loss of Signal soon followed. The fourth revolution was begun. A discussion of Lem systems and warning lights followed, then fuel cell purges and time for battery charges, a balancing of the cryo tanks once more. The degree of deadband or limits on minor deviation in PTC were established and the radiation report on the astronauts’ dosimeters was given. High-gain lock was lost and reacquired manually. Tests were made for automatic reacquiring. Optics were zeroed for the night, and the crew had dinner and prepared for sleep. Music was heard in the background. The crew played taped music while eating dinner. Last chores were worked upon. Signal was lost for the fifth time on the trip around the far side, then acquired again. During that interval the fuel-cell purges were finished, and the problem of automatic reacquisition of signal was finally solved to the satisfaction of Mission Control. The bunks and zip-in hammocks were set up. Around midnight the crew went to sleep. They would be up in six hours. It was their last night before the moon landing. They were obliged to wonder whether two of them would sleep tomorrow on the moon or sleep forever. Yet calmly they went to sleep. So recorded the monitors on the ground. There are souls whose health is to sleep upon the edge of profound uncertainty, men whose greatest calm resides in the edge of danger. Who indeed can understand the psychology of astronauts? Let us try to comprehend how men can be so bold yet inhabit such insulations of cliché. As they sleep, we are forced to think again about the mysteries of makeup in these men who are technicians and heroes, robots and saints, adventurers and cogs of the machine. Let us try to think of astronauts.

Aquarius, turning over scientific ideas he had not considered in years, was startled by the sudden disclosure that “any piece of iron you pick up on earth is likely to be older than four and a half billion years because it’s made of the interior of some star.” (The remark was dropped in passing by Dr. Edward Anders at the Lunar Science Press Conference in Houston in January 1970.) Sieving the transcript for lunar gold, Aquarius was struck and struck again. If iron was the interior of the stars, iron was also—its molecules aligned in one direction—nothing less than the seat of magnetism. That suggested some intimate relation between the stars of the farthest galaxies and the turn of a magnet in one’s hand. But, then there was always in the force of the smallest magnet as intimate a sense of some stirring in far-off dominions as there is a capture of the sea in the roaring of a snail shell held next to the ear.

Yet if every magnet had an invisible field of force surrounding it like a mood, that exact field we experience in our fingertips as we keep another piece of iron from touching the magnet, so a metal wire cutting across that field (any metal—it can be one of the ways
to define a metal!) will have a sudden electric current passing through it. No physicist has ever explained the phenomenon satisfactorily, yet on that phenomenon is built the generator: all the electric power of the world can be seen as the translation from physics to electrical engineering of the controlled interruption of a magnetic field. So if magnetism derives ultimately from some communion in the interior of the stars, electricity may be nothing less than the interruption of that communion. Yet run a current through a wire wrapped around a bar of iron, and the iron bar will become a magnet. Electricity, passed through a coil, becomes the agent by which such magnetism is restored. It leaves one to think of iron as a spine on which electricity breaks and restores the resonance of the stars.

Now we speak of the iron of astronauts. What is one to do with the metaphor? Iron in its finished state, ground and polished, is a material of much strength, near to impenetrable surface, shining appearance, limited flexibility, and must be kept insulated from the corrosion of the atmosphere, usually by a thin layer of oil: astronauts are men of much personal strength, moral and physical, ground and polished to a turn by years of training, the depths of their character are kept hidden by the impenetrable qualities of their personal surface, and they shine in appearance. (Indeed, eleven of the sixteen astronauts who had been up in space and were still active had blue eyes. To better the item, fifteen of the sixteen had blue, gray, green, or hazel-colored eyes. Only Collins had dark-brown eyes.) That their flexibility is limited can be demonstrated by their powers of description before superlative sights and well-functioning equipment. That they were insulated from the caustic atmosphere of America could be taken for granted. A fine layer of public relations put oil over all unnatural exposure.

But the measure was not to be found in formal properties. It was rather that the astronauts were the core of some magnetic human force called Americanism, patriotism, or Waspitude, and if they were finally the men of all the men on earth to take the first step on the way to the stars, who was to say it was not the first step
back to the stars, first step back to joining that mysterious interior material of the stars, that iron of communion with cosmic origins? Indeed, who could be absolutely certain that the astronauts were not men finally forged out of some powerful equivalent in their blood of the stars’ iron—but in fact there is iron in the compounds of the blood—men created out of some impulse so deep that the metaphor of iron is re-engaged; we may yet have to lean on the notion that the astronauts, strange, plasticized, half-communicating Americans, might still be the spine on which electricity breaks and restores the resonance of the stars. It was at the least a thought that the mysteries of America, the urgencies of the national itch to dominate the world, the contrasts and harsh comedies of race and war and pollution, the schizophrenia of the land growing more Faustian and more Oriental each season with ABM and million-footed folk-rock festivals at the poles, yes, all the incomprehensible contradictions of America might yet come to focus on the possibility that races were at war in America like forces from the cosmos, and it was no accident we were on our way first to the moon, no, that had begun to shape itself in the cauldrons of the stars, and so the astronauts could even be men with a sense of mission so deep it was incommunicable even to themselves, as if they had signed on as the core, no, rather as the most finished product of a human ore whose purpose—despite all thoughts it had found that purpose—was yet undiscovered. Which is to say that one could also hold the thought that the real function of the Wasp had not been to create Protestantism, capitalism, the corporation, or a bastion against Communism, but that the Wasp had emerged from human history in order to take us to the stars. How else to account for that strong, severe, Christian, missionary, hell-raising, hypocritical, ideologically simple, patriotic, stingy, greedy, God-fearing, nature-despoiling, sense-destroying, logic-making, technology-deploying, brave human machine of a Wasp? It was a thought with which to begin to look at astronauts.