Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (30 page)

Returning to my role as chief of the Flight Directors office, Gerry had been the lead for Apollo XII, Milt for Apollo XIII. It was now Pete Frank’s turn for lead for Apollo XIV. My role was to help as needed or asked and I planned to ride shotgun with Pete or other Flight Directors on their shifts.

By the time the flight approached, the return of Alan Shepard to flight status and a flight assignment had played out through the ranks. After his Redstone flight in May of 1961, he was in the rotation for one of the first Gemini flights. It probably would have been the first, but a condition of the inner ear called Meniere disease changed all that. He was grounded and unhappy, but he served the astronaut office and the program well through the Mercury, Gemini and early Apollo years. He chose to have a new and risky surgery to fix the problem. Once the success returned him to flight status and after a run at the Apollo XIII assignment, Al settled into the preps and training for Apollo XIV. There were many advances by this time compared to the early Mercury spacecraft. These changes were especially in the digital computer systems now available on both the Apollo ships. Alan seemed to march right in and master it all in short order. His crew included Ed Mitchell of the U.S. Navy, and Stu Rousa, originally a smoke jumper and now Air Force, both on their first space flight. On January 31, 1971, the crew of Apollo XIV was on its way to the moon and ready to dock with the LM and remove it from the S4B stage. Not for the first time in the program, nor the last, the capture latches did not operate properly and the CSM/LM capture was still pending. After two hours of six unsuccessful attempts, it was decided to use the thrusters to force the structural docking rings of both spacecraft together and fire the docking latches manually. It worked.

Once in lunar orbit, the gremlins continued their work. It was assumed that some contamination in the crew abort switch moved in zero gravity to a place where it lodged on some electrical contacts and delivered an abort message to the computer. If the LM was on descent, the computer would recognize the signal and shift to the abort mode from powered descent to abort maneuvers to start the re-rendezvous sequence with the CSM. After trying the usual tapping on the panel with no joy or clearing of the abort signal, Gerry waved off this attempt. Dick Thorson and his LM team plus Jack Garman and his MIT team pulled out their software patch tool and invented a list of procedural commands to the LM computer. They loaded the software patch and we all hoped that they had thought it through sufficiently. The engine was started for descent at low power – ten percent – and the displacement caused by the engine firing was enough to clear the abort bit. Ed Mitchell hustled through the procedural commands and the LM was on its way to landing. Our combination of competence and trust worked again.

Gerry still had one more obstacle to clear. As they were a few miles altitude above the surface, the landing radar data did not transfer in to the computer. We had long debated the prospect of landing without the radar data. The final mission rules always said that the radar landing data was mandatory for attempting a landing. Some of the crews felt that they would be able to land without the landing radar by using less accurate navigation data, their VFR ability to discern altitude and using the dust coming up as a final cue. Again we tried what was a long-standing procedure and the crew was asked to cycle the circuit breaker for the radar. As often happened when it was tried, the data cleared up, came into the computer and Apollo XIV was able to land with all capabilities intact.

Al Shepard captured the fancy and affection of all golfers with his golf club head attached to a lunar soil scoop. His first was a practice shot that was allowed by USGA rules covering the case of wearing a bulky pressure suit on the moon. The legal shot was a solid drive of “miles and miles.”

Apollo XIV came home and landed with two hundred pounds of lunar samples.

The “J” missions were another giant leap in the scientific emphasis and how that emphasis drove the spacecraft provisions and the operations. We were a far cry from the criticism I heard after Apollo XI from the science community. They were just unhappy that Apollo XI did not try to do more science on the first landing flight. I have to remind myself that they also waited many years to get to this point and they were chafing at the bit to get on with their science studies. Still, in retrospect, focusing Apollo XI on the challenge of landing and a simple grab-some-samples-EVA seemed the correct priority. After that, it did not take long for the planning and operations team at MSC and the lunar science team to coalesce with the goal of achieving the maximum science return for each mission. This became our common purpose and started in earnest on Apollo XII.

In the process leading up to the science issues, there was a need to significantly improve the lift capability that would deliver the CSM and the lunar module (LM) to lunar orbit. The MSFC team came forward with that improvement. The Saturn V was now able to propel more payload through the translunar injection and that paved the way for the additions needed for the J missions. The Grumman LM team along with MSC had been scrubbing the weight of their craft for years. Progress was measured in a few pounds here and there and the gains were always painfully earned. It was a great relief to get a big enough improvement in the lift capability of the Saturn V to accommodate essentially all the extra provisions that were needed.

The program had already achieved a pinpoint landing which allowed very detailed planning for specific lunar traverses even in difficult terrain. Apollo XII landed a short walk away from the surveyor, an unmanned robot/spacecraft that landed on the moon thirty-one months earlier. The follow-on flights to Apollo XII were all well within a very small range of dispersions, essentially pinpoint landings at selected locations. The extra Saturn V lift capability enabled:

1. The mobility of adding the LRV (lunar rover vehicle) increased to a seventeen-mile radius from the LM, versus the maximum of two to three miles walking
   

2. The extra provisions of O2, electrical power, food, and H2O allowed longer lunar stays (three days versus two days and three EVAs versus two EVAs)
   

3. More improved scientific and communications equipment
   

Apollo XII also saw the first deployment of an Apollo lunar surface experiments package (ALSEP). Various versions of this package were subsequently deployed on each of the landing missions. These packages had their own nuclear power and performed data observation over years and even tens of years. The instrument packages measured ion-pressure as caused by the solar wind, ultraviolet radiation and other measures of the energy spectra of the solar wind. The network of ALSEP sites grew with each flight, and data was relayed back to earth over the subsequent years. Retro laser reflectors were added and allowed stations on earth to track changes of the moon location to earth (one of the many obstacles for the “Apollo-was-made-in-a-movie-studio” crowd). The third instrument measured seismic activity and another package measured the fluctuations in the magnetic field. The crew of Apollo XIV deployed a second ALSEP in this network and did some traveling with a transporter cart to carry equipment on the lunar surface.

It was clear that the CSM was a superb platform for a scientific survey from orbit. We took one outer panel off one of the service module bays and installed a scientific instrument module, which permitted the mapping and characterizing of the lunar surface during most of the time when the CSM was in orbit around the moon. Film retrieval was later done on the trans-earth leg by an EVA from the CSM.

Further, the flight team, including Flight Directors and other operation members, went on some of the geology trips for the training of the astronauts. This brought us more understanding of the subject and improved our abilities to support the crew and the scientists. I believe Gerry Griffin was the MCC record holder for geology field trips as we became one Apollo exploration team.

Lunnar Rover Vehicle

On the lunar surface, the operation of the Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV) was first achieved on Apollo XV. It was fun to watch the crews trying out their newly found freedom – back to being sixteen again. The lunar rover deployment from its launch fixture on the LM was like an erector set exercise. Even the wheels had to rotate from a towed in position to a lock in the drive position. It was equipped with a TV camera and a high gain antenna to get the signal back to Earth. And again, we learned, just as we did when TV was first added on Apollo VII, that the availability of TV coverage added immeasurably to the team’s ability to help with the exploration process.

And it was all of this new capability that opened up the possibility of major increases in the return of scientific knowledge for the last three Apollo missions. Apollo XV was targeted to land and explore the Hadley Rille, a mile wide canyon snaking around the foothills of the Apennine Mountains. The astronauts were Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden, an all Air Force crew. Dave had Gemini and Apollo flight experience. Gerry Griffin was the lead Flight Director and Kranz, Windler and I rounded out the shift coverage.

Hadley Rille

Soon after TLI on Apollo XV, there were indications from a main engine thrust light that there was the start of arming of the service propulsion engine to fire. So we had to develop a new procedure to be sure we did not get any unplanned firings but that the start and shut down of firings we wanted would be safe. This new procedure was developed, verified and ready well before we had to fire the engine to go into lunar orbit (LOI).

The lunar landing phase went as nominally as a steep landing on a narrow strip of moon between mountains and a mile wide canyon can be. Once done, attention focused on the work ahead. About two hours after landing, Dave Scott stood on the case housing the top of the ascent engine in the cabin. He opened the hatch on top of the LM and did the first ever reconnoiter of the landing site from that vantage point. The TV coverage got better on each succeeding flight and the added TV on the LRV was like icing on the cake. The whole surface operation went well with only one core drilling problem encountered by Dave. But the apparent ease and competence of the crew disguised how difficult some of the conditions really were. They encountered an unexpected problem with working with the gloved fingers. Especially with Dave’s fingers, they became sore, raw and the nails turned black from the workout they endured. There was a full timeline of work and the crew set themselves to it. By the third EVA, this must have felt like a real grind to Dave and yet he never made a point of it.

Windler came on duty for the lunar ascent and rendezvous and it went by the book. I came on to wrap up the day with the major activity being the LM jettison. Suit integrity checks had failed the first time and Scott fixed the problem with a plug for one of the connectors in the Liquid Cooled Garment loop. But in the process leading up to the jettison, one of the most critical steps is to check the cabin integrity for the CM before separating the LM and exposing the pressurized tunnel hatch to vacuum. In doing the test, a reading from the pressure gauge in the tunnel was indicating what could be a leak from the CM to the now reduced pressure in the tunnel between the CM and LM. That is a potentially fatal threat to the crew and we needed to find a solution.

As a result, the crew opened the hatch, inspected both seals, and verified they were clean and undamaged. Because of the slight inaccuracy of the pressure readout available to the crew, the test should run for tens of minutes, longer is better. For reasons unknown to us, the crew terminated the test early. We then went through a very deliberate step-by-step repeat with callouts of the pressure as we proceeded. This finally settled the matter and the CM cabin integrity was judged good. It was disturbing because I expected that the circumstances would have provoked a much stronger engagement from the crew. However, it reminded me of an experience on my shift on Apollo XII when the crew became incommunicado after returning to the CM from the surface. They were so occupied with cleaning up that they had headsets off and took an extended time to be ready to answer the calls from the ground. And as I found out in a few minutes, they had another problem bearing on their exhausted state. Now with the cabin pressure resolved, LM jettison was performed. This is always followed by a separation burn. In this case, we had delayed the jettison by about an hour, which changed the attitude of the spacecraft at which the burn was to be done. The attitude didn’t look right to the crew, correctly so, and Bill Stovall at the FIDO position recommended the crew get in front of the LM and thrust away from it for several seconds. This established the proper separation.