Apollo: The Race to the Moon (49 page)

Wyatt usually enjoyed taking dictation from Low—he was the only man she had ever worked for whose subjects always agreed with his verbs—but this day she was fretting over the mess that Borman had made of the Saturday-morning schedule. It wasn’t until Low was finished that she realized what she had been writing down. The memo was to Chris Kraft. Recent progress at Downey had been faster than they had hoped, Low was saying. Borman thought that the command module was about ready to go to the moon. Would Chris Kraft please get together a small group of people and find out very discreetly where they stood on this possibility from a flight operations standpoint—lunar trajectories, mission techniques, and so forth? Low told Wyatt not to make a copy even for his own files, and to tell Betsy Bednarcyk, Kraft’s secretary, that this was an “007.” Low was a James Bond fan, and “007” meant that after Kraft read the memo, his secretary was to destroy it.

Owen Maynard had devised the flight schedule for Apollo through the first landing, assigning a letter to each type of mission. “A” designated the unmanned Saturn V test flights (Apollo 4 and 6 were both “A” missions) and “B” was the unmanned test of the LEM, Apollo 5. “C,” scheduled for the autumn of 1968, was the first manned mission, a repeat of the one Gus Grissom was to have flown. “D” was the first manned mission using both the command module and the lunar module, in low earth orbit. “E” was another mission using the command module and LEM in combined operations, but in a high earth orbit that would take the spacecraft as far as 4,000 miles away from earth. “F” was the first mission in which a spacecraft would go to the moon; it would enter lunar orbit and exercise the LEM but not land. “G” was the first lunar landing. Each mission had its own reason for existence. None could safely be skipped.

In the spring of 1968 when Low sent his 007 memo to Kraft, he had been thinking of making E Mission into a lunar-orbit flight instead of a high earth-orbit flight, something that he and Kraft had been discussing off the record for some time. By May 24, Low felt ready to tell Gilruth in his daily “Apollo Notes” that “Chris Kraft and I agreed… that we would pursue an E Prime Mission which would be a lunar orbiting mission.” But as early as June, another more radical possibility had occurred to Low, which he still kept to himself. At the end of July, he left for a vacation in the Caribbean. On Monday, August 5, he returned to the office.

“He came back on Monday morning, and things just started popping,” Judy Wyatt recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t tell you what it is right now, but I want you to keep a log of people I talk to. And I want it kept under a secret cover sheet.’” Over the next few days, as she kept the log, she began to see a pattern. One morning she was in the washroom, brushing her hair, idly thinking over the people her boss had been seeing, when it hit her. Wyatt dashed back into the suite. “Marilyn, we’re going to the moon!” she said. Bockting, one of a handful that Low had let in on the secret, laughed and said nothing.

To George Low, the reasoning was simple. Wally Schirra’s crew was going to fly the first manned mission, C, known publicly as Apollo 7, in late September or early October. Low assumed it would be a success, that the C.S.M. would come out of Apollo 7 certified flight-worthy for a lunar mission. To get to the moon during 1969 and meet the Kennedy deadline, the D mission certifying the flight-worthiness of the LEM had to fly before the end of 1968. But to fly D, they had to have an operational lunar module, and the LEM was running behind schedule; D couldn’t possibly fly before the end of the year. None of the subsequent missions could be skipped. Therefore, why not switch the order of the D and E missions?

They wouldn’t have a LEM by December, but they would have a good C.S.M. and a Saturn V to lift it. They didn’t need the lunar module for that first deep-space mission. They needed to obtain deep-space experience in translunar navigation, lunar orbit, communications, and thermal conditions, and all of that could be gained with a crew in the command module. So: They could fly the E Mission without the LEM in 1968, let the D Mission slip until early 1969 when the LEM would be ready, and then proceed directly to the F Mission. That was the logical half of Low’s plan. The audacious half was that George Low was proposing to fly to the moon on only the second manned Apollo spacecraft, the first manned Saturn V, and the first Saturn V to fly after the failure-ridden Apollo 6.

During the first half of the week after he got back from the Caribbean, Low called Scott Simpkinson, now promoted to ASPO’s assistant program manager for flight safety. Could Apollo 8 go to the moon without compromising Simpkinson’s safety rules? Looking at the hardware, Simpkinson couldn’t see any reason why not. It looked to him as if the real problem was navigation, which wasn’t his specialty. Low called Bill Tindall, whose specialty it was.

Tindall thought the idea was gangbusters. As for navigation, they were in great shape. His Mission Techniques meetings had already worked through the procedures for launch, earth orbit, translunar injection, and entry. All they had left were the techniques for midcourse corrections on the way to the moon, lunar-orbit insertion, and trans-earth injection to come home again, and Tindall told Low those would be a piece of cake.

Low talked it over with Chris Kraft. Kraft, who had always been Low’s ally in trying to shift E Mission from high earth orbit to a lunar mission, was receptive, but what Low was asking now—for Kraft to get his flight controllers ready for a lunar mission in only four months—presented a new magnitude of difficulty. Pledging them to secrecy, Kraft met with Jim Stokes and Lyn Dunseith, his two leading experts on the status of the computer software for a lunar mission. If the software couldn’t be ready by December, there was no point in proceeding. Stokes and Dunseith went off to conduct a private inquiry.

On Thursday, August 8, Low flew to Kennedy Space Center for a meeting on work schedules, still saying nothing about his idea. He let Rocco Petrone do his work for him.

Rocco Petrone was getting frustrated. At Mueller’s last program review in Houston, it had sounded to Petrone as if Mueller still wanted Petrone to push for a December launch of a spacecraft with a LEM, and Petrone knew it couldn’t be done—the LEM just wasn’t going to be ready. But so far he hadn’t gotten the message across. Mueller’s Apollo Program manager, Sam Phillips, was giving him the meeting at the Cape to convince him—and through him, Mueller—that December was impossible. Petrone called together his staff and told them to prepare a straight-out briefing. “I don’t want any emotion in this thing,” Petrone told them, “and I don’t want you picking on anybody, because then they always feel you’re trying to shove a hot poker up their ass. Just lay it all out for them.” So they did, and Phillips listened. “Sam,” Petrone concluded, “there’s no way that thing is going to launch before the first of February; I don’t care if you give it to God.” Now senior NASA staff knew that a gap in the schedule existing schedule was inevitable. Low flew back to Houston confirmed in his determination to send a LEM-less Apollo 8 to the moon.

Early Friday morning, Kraft gave Low another green light. Dunseith and Stokes had determined that the schedule for the Control Center software was tight, but it could be met. At 8:45 that morning, August 9, Low walked from his office up the two flights of stairs to Gilruth’s office on the ninth floor and for the first time revealed his plan to the Center Director. Kraft and Slayton came in and added their endorsements. By temperament a cautious man, Gilruth nonetheless thought this was a great idea—“It took me ten seconds to respond,” he said.

Low called Phillips, who was still at the Cape, while Gilruth called von Braun. Phillips was intrigued, but he reserved judgment. He suggested that they convene a meeting of the program’s key people to discuss it. In a remarkable demonstration of how rapidly NASA could react in those days, a meeting was arranged for 2:30 that same afternoon in Huntsville. Only five hours after anyone outside Houston had heard of the idea, most of NASA’s senior officials were gathered in von Braun’s office—Sam Phillips and George Hage from O.M.S.F.; Kurt Debus and Rocco Petrone from K.S.C.; Eberhard Rees, Lee James, Ludie Richard, and von Braun from Marshall. Representing Houston were Gilruth, Low, Kraft, and Deke Slayton.

Low’s plan was an easy sell—the initial reaction, Phillips recalled, was “guardedly positive.” Von Braun promised that the Saturn could be retargeted (“It doesn’t matter to the launch vehicle how far we go”). Debus promised that the Cape could be ready for a lunar launch by December 20. The mission would be technically designated C’, spoken as “C-prime.” For the time being, the code phrase for it would be “Sam’s budget exercise.”

The only two NASA officials who didn’t express their enthusiasm were Jim Webb and George Mueller, and they were 4,000 miles away attending a conference in Vienna, Austria, on the peaceful uses of outer space. In fact, nobody told them what was happening. The enthusiastic cabal in von Braun’s office decided that there wasn’t any point in bothering Webb and Mueller with this new idea quite yet, not until they had all had a chance to take a closer look at it.

Chapter 23. “It was darn scary”

By August of 1968, Jerry Bostick was holding Glynn Lunney’s old job as head of the Flight Dynamics Branch, making him the leader of the Trench. If Kraft sent a spacecraft to the moon in four months, it would be the Trench that would be responsible for seeing that all the burns happened at the right times, for the right durations, with the spacecraft in the right attitudes. It would be the Trench that would have to oversee navigation to and from the moon and prepare the dozens of abort contingency plans. So Bostick was among a very small number of people who were let in on the secret. Cliff Charlesworth, in whom Kraft had already confided, called Bostick on Friday evening after the Huntsville meeting and told him to go to Kraft’s office the next morning. “It’s about the C Mission,” was all that Charlesworth would say. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”

It was a small meeting that Saturday—Kraft, Charlesworth, Kranz, Arnie Aldrich (chief of the C.S.M. Systems Branch for the Flight Control Division), and Bostick. Kraft told them that George Low wanted the next flight to go circumlunar. Aldrich thought it sounded like a clever strategy. Bostick was shocked. “How do you think we’re gonna do that?” Bostick protested. “We’re not ready to do that!”

“No, don’t take that attitude,” Kraft replied. He, too, had thought it was crazy when Low first suggested it. He just wanted Bostick to think about it until Monday morning.

“I left there still thinking that, geez, I’ve heard of some stupid things, but that’s crazy,” said Bostick. He spent Sunday with a few people in MPAD (the Mission Planning and Analysis Division) who had been alerted. They decided they wouldn’t have time to get everything into the Mission Control Center computers by December, but that was okay. MPAD could run the calculations off line, in their own computers, and then feed the data into the back rooms. It wouldn’t be perfect, the Trench wouldn’t have all the displays in front of them that they might like, but the MPAD people could walk the hard copy from the office wing of Building 30 over to the MOCR, and they could read it off the printouts. “By about noon Monday,” said Bostick, “I had concluded that, yeah, we can do that.”

Slowly, still limited to a few key people, the word spread, and the effect was electrifying. Years later, Aaron Cohen remembered as the highlight of his illustrious career the day when Low called him and said he wanted to “pull off a coup” on Apollo 8. Cohen, then working as Owen Maynard’s top engineer for the C.S.M.’s systems, was directed by Low to see whether the C.S.M. was ready to take on a lunar mission. Rod Loe, running the Communications and Life Support Systems Section in Flight Operations, was getting too far up the hierarchy to act as a flight controller any more. His boss, Arnie Aldrich, kept threatening to move him out of the MOCR and into the Spacecraft Analysis Room (SPAN), a more senior position but less fun. Loe had been resisting. After a meeting in Kraft’s office where Loe first heard that they might be going circumlunar on the December mission, Loe and Aldrich walked back to their offices in Building 30. On the way, Loe made up his mind. Just let me be your lead EECOM on this flight, he said to Aldrich, and he would never argue with him again about going into the SPAN. Loe would go there for the rest of his career, he said, if only he could be in the MOCR for this one.

Sam Phillips had gone back to Washington after the Huntsville meeting to tell Tom Paine, the acting administrator in Webb’s absence, about the idea. “Sam,” Paine said, “we’ve been arguing whether we could put a man on the Saturn V. The last time, it had pogo troubles, the SLA came apart, and three engines shut down… . Now you want to up the ante. Do you really want to do this, Sam?” “Yes, sir!” Phillips said. Paine instinctively liked the idea, but it seemed too good to be true. Yet Phillips’s judgment was always solid, and if he was this enthusiastic then C-prime must be feasible. “We’ll have a hell of a time selling it to Mueller and Webb,” Paine said.

When Sam Phillips finally got hold of him by phone on the Tuesday, August 13, George Mueller was “skeptical and cool.” The risks were obvious. The technological gains of a lunar flight over an earth-orbit flight were not immediately apparent. Mueller would think about it.

It wasn’t until Thursday, August 15, that they reached Webb on a conference call to the U.S. embassy in Vienna. Mueller had not yet mentioned C-prime to him. “Sam and I sat down in two offices and managed to put over the idea to Jim,” Paine recalled. “He was horrified.” “He was pretty crisp and clear in his disbelief,” Phillips agreed. “If a person’s shock could be transmitted over the telephone, I’d probably have been shot in the head.”

For Jim Webb, Low’s brainchild was more than he wanted to face. By the summer of 1968, Webb had been administrator of NASA for more than seven years, negotiating a path for NASA in the midst of Johnson’s growing preoccupation with Vietnam and increasing congressional hostility toward Apollo. Webb had borne months of criticism after the fire. Now, he was being asked to approve a mission that jumped the schedule everyone had agreed to and that, if it were to fail, could fail in a particularly ghastly way, with astronauts marooned in lunar orbit at Christmastime. Furthermore, Webb knew he was going to be out of his job on January 20, 1969—neither Humphrey nor Nixon would let him stay on through the first moon landing.