Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (23 page)

It would take further study, but Von Braun and Sam Phillips thought it was great, the best idea they heard yet. And so, the marketing of a beautiful idea started, to the rest of NASA Headquarters, to the industry leadership, and the rest of Washington external to NASA. NASA did an amazing job keeping this plan close to the vest, until all the reviews were made, all the necessary approvals were reached and Apollo VII was successful. It is easy for me to imagine the excitement that was growing and then leaping across this Apollo team. This is what we came for. And in early November, the news went public with six weeks to launch.

1968 had been a year of turmoil for the American public. It started with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a U.S. military victory turned into an advertised defeat by the media, the hippie movement, the drug scene, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, civil rights marches, President Johnson’s refusal to run for another term, and ended with the Democratic convention in Chicago with protest and mayhem in the streets. America had to be ready for some good news.

Cliff was the lead Flight Director joined by Milt Windler and me on the other shifts. This was a mission made for the trench team. It was all about navigation, guidance, and new lunar propulsion requirements for going into and leaving from lunar orbit. Jay Greene, Chuck Dieterich and Gran Paules were on the launch shift with Cliff. The other shifts would be manned by Ed Pavelka, first time as Apollo prime, Phil Shaffer, and George Guthrie at FIDO, Jerry Bostick, John Llewellyn at Retro, Charlie Parker, Ken Russell and Raymond Teague at Guidance. This was a very strong team and we still had an equally strong trench team supporting Gene’s preparations for Apollo IX. That mission was planning a work out with the command service module and LM manned vehicles in earth orbit. We would also add additional guidance operators to cover both of the ships.

The Marshall (MFSC) team did a superb job in quickly understanding and fixing the problems of Apollo VI. The entire Saturn stack was in countdown on the morning of December 19, 1968. After liftoff, the crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were in orbit in about twelve minutes and on an escape trajectory in a few short hours, aimed at orbit around the moon. Once on the coast phase, my team came on duty and we became involved in resolving an anomaly during the first SPS burn. There was an excess of helium in the propulsion system from the loading process at the launch site. The engine passed this non-combustible gas during the burn. The MCC operator’s analysis was confirmed by Harry Galenas of North American Aviation. He was able to match the anomaly to the helium loading process and restored full confidence in the SPS. At the time I was dealing with this anomaly, all of the MSC and HQ management were off listening to an onboard recorder that had just been dumped to the ground. (This meant that the contents did not go out over the normal air to ground loop.) On the tape, the crew reported the first motion type sickness in one of our astronauts, Frank Borman. This event made for much conversation with management and the flight surgeons, but in the end the crew had a three-day coast period out to the moon with light housekeeping duties. Before arrival at the moon, the symptoms had sufficiently abated.

Another peculiarity of the trajectory and the lighting was that the crew never did see the moon as they approached. My team was on for the lunar orbit insertion (LOI) burn. There was universal awareness that, once in lunar orbit, the SPS propulsion system was the only system that had enough energy to boost the CSM out of lunar orbit and on the way back to earth. NASA had become famous for redundancy, but here there was no backup to the SPS. Our mission rules said we had to have an essentially perfect system to proceed with LOI. We did and the capcom relayed the “Go for LOI.” Soon the spacecraft would go behind the moon and lose all communication with earth. The LOI burn would occur in the middle of the pass on the back side of the moon. In MCC, we would have an early indicator that the burn had started and then that it was close to nominal. One clock was set up to count down to the acquisition of signal of the communications system assuming there was no burn at all. This condition meant that the spacecraft would still be flying at much higher speeds and would arrive back in view of the earth about two minutes earlier than the nominal time line would be. We had a clock also counting down to the nominal arrival of the spacecraft within our communication coverage.

Waiting was something we had become used to, but this wait had a distinct edge to it. Most of the flight controllers sat quietly, eyes on the two clocks listening and probably offering a prayer. In due course, the first clock reached zero and there was no communication from the ship. The second clock continued to count, reached zero and almost at the same time, the crew reported that the spacecraft was in lunar orbit. It was lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968, and playing to an American audience, which was overdue for a reason to celebrate and it choked all of us. Misty eyes, nods all around, and touches on shoulders and backs were the shared signs of a decade of work together by the MCC team.

The crew had a good time picking out craters and landmarks and matching their visuals to their lunar maps. They were the first humans ever to look at the moon this close up, and to contrast it with their view of earth, a beautiful blue planet in the blackness of space. What a time, what a Christmas Eve. And then on the next to last orbit, the crew conducted a TV tour looking inside and outside the windows. It seemed to me to have an undercurrent of reverence for what we were seeing, and then Bill Anders started and they each contributed to the reading of the passages from Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” And the familiar voices of our friends softly recounted the biblical story of creation. And as one, all of us in MCC felt the power and awe of the moment. We could only look at each other.

In another revolution, the spacecraft was on the way home – a nominal return, and a perfect splashdown in the blue Pacific. Apollo VIII was recovered by the Navy crew of the USS Yorktown, who gave up their Christmas holiday time to retrieve the spacecraft and three American astronauts.

Many citizens today may remember mostly the lunar landing mission as the symbol of Apollo. For us, Apollo VIII was the opening of the gates to the lunar landing mission. It was the breakthrough that made our path to the landing much less uphill, maybe even downhill. We even got a telegram from a citizen, who thanked NASA for “saving 1968.”

1968 and the second half of the sixties were a traumatic time in our country. Many people, even today, are defined by what they were experiencing and even participating in during those times. Certainly, we were. But ours was a markedly different experience, very strongly felt and limited to a small fraction of the population. For us, although we were aware of all the divisions and changes tearing at our country, it was as if we lived on an offshore island. The mainland was suffering through these turmoils and upsets. We felt the pain of our countrymen but we had a mission to perform. Our life was on the island and we were completely focused on the challenge of the space race. This was our Camelot, our special place where our work was our life. We lived, and were marked by, a far different view of the sixties than the vast majority of our people who were on the mainland.

Earth Rise

By virtue of the preparations for Apollo VIII, we had captured the mission mechanization in our people, the RTCC computers, our procedures, and the mission rules. The following phases were now added to our portfolio of building blocks for Apollo:

• Launch windows to meet Lunar target conditions
  

• The translunar injection (TLI) from earth orbit by the S IVB
  

• The Coast Phase with mid-courses, passive thermal control and abort plans
  

• Lunar orbit insertion (LOI)
  

• Lunar orbit operations
  

• Transearth injection for return to earth
  

• Coast phase home with mid-courses to meet entry conditions.
  

Short of the actual landing and EVA, we were now planning to demonstrate the lunar landing sequence of propulsion maneuvers of both LM stages and the CSM. These would be performed first in earth orbit on Apollo IX and then in lunar orbit on Apollo X. This was a simple, logical plan to capture all of the requisite experience short of landing and EVA.

The crew of Apollo IX was Jim McDivitt, Rusty Schwiekart, and Dave Scott. Jim and Dave were Gemini veterans and this was the first flight for Rusty. Gene Kranz was the lead Flight Director for Apollo IX. The LM team, trench operators and systems flight controllers were ready while another set prepared Apollo X. Dave Reed was the experienced hand at the Lunar Module, and the leader of the Trench team at FIDO. Greene, Boone, Kennedy and Pavelka rounded out the FIDO team. Fenner, Renick, Paules, Paules and Wells were at Guidance with Jim I’Anson, prime at Retro, and Spencer, Deiterich, Elliot and Llewellyn on the other shifts. The crew and the MCC team put the vehicles through their scheduled paces and all of the new equipment worked just fine.

This was a tribute to another of the major Apollo contractors, Grumman and their sub-contractor team. The only threat to the timeline was not hardware but a human one. Rusty came down with the same kind of motion sickness which affected Frank Borman on Apollo VIII. The Apollo spacecraft was different from Mercury and Gemini because it was a bigger cabin and enabled the crew to move around, much more so than the strapped in the seat configuration of Mercury and Gemini. This resulted in a scrub of an EVA backpack test and a space walk by Rusty from the LM to the CSM. All in all, IX was a great test of the LM and the team was beginning to feel the lunar landing within reach. Next up was Apollo X on May 18, 1969.

Tom Stafford was the commander of Apollo X with a crew of Gene Cernan and John Young and a combined total of five Gemini flights in experience. Tom and Gene had flown Gemini IX together and with John Young, they were very well versed in the rendezvous sequences as was the MCC team. This Apollo X crew was the only one which carried three crewmembers, all of whom served as Commanders of Apollo flights. I was the lead Flight Director with Gerry Griffin, Pete Frank, and Milt Windler. Bill Stoval was the prime FIDO after less than two years with us, with Shaffer, Greene, Kennedy and Guthrie each on-console for some of the critical phases. Russell was the prime for a Guidance team of Paules, Renick, Bales and Teague. Tom Weichel was the prime Retro with Deiterich, I’Anson and Elliot. We had considerable depth in the Trench by this time, with a cast of solid operators at all positions.

The mission was planned to provide as much Apollo XI specific information as possible. Once in lunar orbit at sixty miles altitude, the timeline called for the descent orbit initiation maneuver that put the low point of the orbit about fifty thousand feet or eight miles above the moon surface where the powered descent to the moon would take place for the landing mission. This was the first time at this low altitude and it had to feel like the LM was clipping the mountains. Gene Cernan relayed that sentiment to the world with “We is Go – we is down amongst them.” And later, “That one looked like it was coming inside.” Tom was known for some salty language of his own. Picking out a crater, he remarked “there’s old Censorinus, bigger than shit.” Gene affectionately called Tom “mumbles” because it was hard to understand him sometimes. Tom’s annunciation always seemed to clear up just when he was compelled to observe something with a salty remark. No harm done, just men working. Gene Cernan added a “sob” later when the spacecraft control system put in a rapid attitude change when Gene was not expecting it. A big descent stage maneuver and later separation of the ascent stage with the crew cabin set up the rendezvous chase by the LM ascent stage just as it would be two months later. Rendezvous was completed, docked with the command ship and after almost sixty-two hours in Lunar orbit the crew was on its way home. One minor problem with fuel cell 1 caused it to be taken off line while in Lunar Orbit. The fuel cell was put back on line for TEI and then kept in reserve off line during the flight back home.