Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (31 page)

Now, however, they did not have time to play. There was static in their ear, and systems and subsystems to monitor, align, check out, adjust, a Puritan ethic in the whisper of the empty spaces—keep busy in the empyrean was the whisper of those empty spaces.
So they kept busy for those two and a half hours before they took off for the moon. Names and duties came their way. Alignments, static, stations.

Ground stations ready to receive their communications and relay them to Houston came into range as they moved around the earth, acquired signal, then lost signal when they moved further on. The tracking ship
Vanguard
in the Caribbean lost contact, the Canary Island Station acquired it, Tananarive in the Indian Ocean was next, then Carnarvon in Australia, Honeysuckle in Australia, Goldstone in California. Somewhat later, starting from an altitude of ten thousand miles, on all the way to the moon, there would be but three stations for radio communication, each one hundred and twenty degrees apart on the circumference of the earth, stations with enormous eighty-five foot dish-shaped antennae located in Madrid; in Goldstone; and Canberra, Australia; but for now the stations were more modest, the antennae were no larger than thirty feet, the communication was close, and the data received was fed by relay into computers at Mission Control at Houston, there to go up on the wall to show in display the position of the ship.

They passed the other tracking stations in their orbit, passed them at Hawaii, at Guaymas in Mexico, Corpus Christi, in the Bermudas, the Bahamas, the tracking ship
Redstone
, in all there were seventeen ground stations, plus six units from ARIA (Apollo Range Instrumented Aircraft, what an acronym was ARIA!), six jets which could be used for voice relay in emergency or on unusual azimuths if Apollo passed over in unconventional orbit. But nothing was out of the ordinary today. The orbit and a half before Trans-Lunar Injection was a time of testing out communications and making their checks. The rocket thrusters which would give their spaceship its attitude, put its nose up or down, left or right, or leave it to roll, were fired in brief maneuvers, and studied by instruments in Mission Control in Houston to pass on the results. The temperature of one rocket thruster was soon discovered to be lower than the others. Queries came up from the ground.

The time-line lengthened. They were in second orbit. At a point somewhere near the Gilbert Islands, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, they would ignite the engine on the third and remaining stage of the launch vehicle, and proceed into Trans-Lunar Injection, which is to say they would quit their earth orbit and fire up to the moon.

This is the transcript on that mighty event:

Conceive of a sinner who is a Catholic and devout. What complexity in his feeling for the Church, what pieties of observance live between his sins. He has to make such intricate shows of concealment to his damned habits. Yet how simple is the Church’s relation to him. Extreme Unction will deliver his soul from a journey through hell.

So it is with physics and engineering. Physics is the church, and engineering the most devout sinner. Physics is the domain of beauty, law, order, awe, and mystery of the purest sort; engineering is partial observance of the laws, and puttering with machines which never work quite as they should work: engineering, like acts of sin, is the process of proceeding boldly into complex and often forbidden matters about which one does not know enough—the laws remain to be elucidated—but the experience of the past and hunger for the taste of the new experience attract one forward. So bridges were built long before men could perform the mathematics of the bending moment.

Now, Apollo 11 has had a trip up from earth with bumps and blasts, clockwork and sharp explosions, communications and fires hot as five thousand degrees Fahrenheit in the furnace of the engines and it has been a trip which on the one hand amounted to no more than a passage through the simplest laws of acceleration in classical physics, but represented on the other a fair climax to the best and most complex engineering techniques of the century, yes, Apollo 11 after this voyage from earth to earth orbit, and from orbit (via its last burn) into Trans-Lunar Injection, yes, Apollo 11, much in debt to engineering, and still trailing the ghosts of the earth’s atmosphere, now pushed its nose toward the moon (or
toward a rendezvous with the circling moon three days out) and the final burn of its third stage completed, passed over at a speed of 25,000 miles an hour from the sweat-yards, crooked contracts, closet Mafia and mud-lanes of engineering to the rare temples of physics where one law at a time was enshrined, and one could observe the pure effects of that law. Now, the spaceship, all motors off, coasted up to the moon, lifting on its own momentum against all the loosening bonds of earth’s powers of desire to pull all flying bodies back to it, Apollo 11, shining templar of alloy, ascended in all delight as pure exhibit of Newton’s Laws of Motion. How beautiful they were. The First Law interned the mystery of the ages for it stated that “every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, except when it is compelled by external force to change that state.” That was a way of saying bodies at rest and bodies in uniform motion were in the same state. Indeed they were, once one could recognize that bodies everywhere were in motion, all bodies, the earth, the sun and the stars. Rest did not exist, rest was relative, a special condition of uniform motion—no easier place to grasp that phenomenon than in the fastest travels of man, for the more rapid the vehicle, the less was the sensation of speed. One passed from a sense of rest sitting in a chair on the ground to a cognition that it was only the sense of rest one knows in balance with the movement of larger parts of the universe. Further and further away from the earth coasted Apollo 11 at an initial translunar velocity fifty times greater than the fastest auto ever to scream past five hundred miles an hour on the salt flats at Bonneville; and in the Command Module, freed of the sensation of weight, objects traveled as freely as the men, flash-lights switched on, then given a twist, spun like illumined beacons on a tower, free-floating as they revolved, crumbs from the bread of a sandwich hovered for hours like motes of dust the size of flies.

It is a picture of great happiness, of harmony, of souls at rest, and evil matter released from the bondage of its weight, but the laws of motion like the laws of morality invoke every notion of
balance. Newton’s Second Law was harsh and just, as severe as the Third, which has been already encountered and taught us—if we did not know—that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So the Second Law stated that the rate of change in a motion must be proportional to the force applied. One could not cheat life. One did not accelerate for nothing, nor slow one’s speed without braking force and heat. As a body moved away from the earth, so, too, did its speed diminish, for the force of gravity weakening, it was still a force to be applied against the effort to escape. Therefore Apollo 11 moved at a half, a quarter, finally a tenth of its greatest speed as it ascended to escape the gravity of the earth and enter the new field of the gravity of the moon. It was like a ball being rolled up a hill—if it reached the crest it would go over and roll down the other side no matter how slowly it was traveling over the crest. In fact, it was easy to think of the earth as being at the center of a bowl, and objects seeking to escape the earth’s gravity would have to be fired out at an initial speed sufficient to travel up the wall of the bowl and roll over the lip—that initial speed was almost seven miles a second for all objects which would escape the earth, and at almost seven miles a second (and a little more) was Apollo 11 fired up—the rest of the trip was given over to the hours and the days of the long coast in space as the speed of the spacecraft diminished from thirty-five thousand feet a second to three thousand feet a second, yes, the ship of space was still moving at the respectable speed of half a mile a second when it passed finally out of the last lingering lulling attraction of the earth and moved over the lip into the bowl of the moon’s gravity somewhere at an unmarked point about one hundred and eighty seven thousand nautical miles from the earth. And the computers moved over in the calculations with it. Now the force of the moon’s gravity would draw the spacecraft with its three men nearer and nearer to it, now the descent to the moon had begun.

Long before, almost two and a half days before, not a half hour after the third stage had completed its five and a half minute burn and pushed Apollo 11 up to its highest speed, the final separation took place between this last of the launch vehicle and the as-yet unfired spacecraft.

The Command and Service Module, two objects which when isolated together looked like nothing so much as a tin can with a cone on its nose and a motor at its rear, these two objects in combination about thirty-five feet long and thirteen feet wide, now separated themselves from the SLA or Service Lunar-Module Adapter. The SLA was attached to the S-IVB or third stage and in turn these last two objects, S-IVB and SLA, also might have looked like a tin can with a tin funnel attached, for the S-IVB was a cylinder with a motor at its rear, and the SLA was composed of four closed curved aluminum panels, much like the petals of a bud, designed to be sprung free a fraction of a second after an explosive wire blew the joining between the CSM and the SLA just as the small rocket thrusters of the Service Module gave a small push away. On the instant, the four aluminum petals, each twenty-one feet long, and each wide enough to encircle a quarter of the Lem, blew off in four separate directions to go scaling through space and reveal what the SLA had contained—the folded legs, the head, thorax, and sac of a complex mechanical craft or creature which had the look of a particularly nasty insect. It was the astronauts’ first glimpse in space of the Lunar Module or Lem. And the Command and Service Module containing them promptly backed away from this sight of the leg-folded Lunar Module mounted on the end of the spent third stage, and at a rate of less than a foot per second, such slow speed offered it by a judicious use of its thrusters, the CSM withdrew about seventy feet, and then did at the end a complete back somersault to point in the opposite direction. The turnaround had taken about two seconds. The nose or probe of the Command Module had now reversed to point toward a small cavern in the Lem called the drogue, named doubtless for its resemblance
in shape to one of those conical canvas sea anchors which are set out on lines during storms at sea. Now the CSM chugged forward slowly on its thrusters, moving relative to the Lem (still attached to the S-IVB) about as fast as a tugboat at maneuvering speed, although absolutely through space at a velocity somewhere over twenty-seven thousand feet a second. As the CSM moved, it proceeded by the use of other thrusters to go through a sixty-degree roll in order to align certain catches on its probe with the drogue. Then, at about one foot per second it closed the gap between probe and drogue. At the edge of rendezvous the speed was reduced to some fractions of an inch per second. With not much more impact than the lips of thoughtful lovers coming together, the probe of the Command Module entered the drogue, passed through a hole where a set of metal tongues called captive latches might lock, and the rendezvous was completed. The CSM and the Lem were docked.

The terminology of rocket engineers was no stranger to the act of coupling—the stages of a rocket when brought together were
mated
—the astronauts, aware of the risibilities of passive and active collaboration between probe and drogue, would play with the humor. During a television transmission two days later, when Armstrong and Aldrin had to remove probe and drogue in order to enter the Lem, this following dialogue took place.