Eight Years to the Moon Read online

  EIGHT YEARS TO

  THE MOON

  THE HISTORY OF THE APOLLO MISSIONS

  NANCY ATKINSON

  AUTHOR OF INCREDIBLE STORIES FROM SPACE

  FOREWORD BY RUSSELL SCHWEICKART, APOLLO 9 ASTRONAUT

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  TO RICK

  The Apollo 9 Command Module in Earth orbit. Credit: NASA.

  APOLLO 5OTH ANNIVERSARY AND THE COSMIC PERSPECTIVE

  BY RUSSELL “RUSTY” SCHWEICKART

  I’m a big-picture kind of guy. Since I’ve had many opportunities recently to reflect on the Apollo program—now that 50 years have gone by—there is one big-picture aspect of those days in the 1960s and early 70s that clearly stands out for me; to wit, the existential meaning of Apollo. What Apollo really gave us was a different perspective on the human condition.

  The key moment for me was Apollo 8 in 1968. As the crew flew towards the Moon, they watched the Earth get smaller and smaller as it occasionally drifted through their windows. But their mission objective was to focus on the Moon. So when they went into lunar orbit, that’s what they did. For their first three orbits they looked down at the Moon, studying the gray, cratered and lifeless lunar surface. As Bill Anders once said, “You see a thousand craters and it starts to get boring; one crater starts to look like another.”

  On their fourth time coming around the Moon, Commander Frank Borman rolled the spacecraft around the vertical so that the windows faced towards the forward horizon. Suddenly, this beautiful blue and white ball rose up over the colorless Moon. The shock of what they saw, the beauty and wonder of this stunning blue and white planet, contrasting so starkly with the devastated surface of the Moon and the ultimate blackness of space made them realize the significance of life and of home.

  While this happened for the first time to three people named Borman, Anders and Lovell, in reality, it happened to all of us. For me, that is the significant thing about Apollo: For the first time, we had the ability to understand the preciousness and uniqueness of life; to realize that we are the only life in this little corner of the universe. And now, after 50 years, we’ve come to understand that we can be an extremely strong and powerful influence on where the evolution of human life goes from here. But with power comes responsibility.

  Less than three months later, during my own Apollo 9 mission, I had, by happenstance, a five-minute break while floating outside our Lunar Module. I proactively opted to step out of my astronaut role and fully take in where I was and what I was seeing. Uninvited, a flood of questions popped into my mind; How did I get here? What’s really going on here? Who am I? What does “I” mean? Am I “I” or am I “us”? These were not small questions and I wrestle with them still after 50 years.

  So for me, here on its 50th anniversary, it is these personal experiences, gifted to a few lucky astronauts directly but to all of us in reality, that shape the historic significance of Apollo. That said, the other essential reality of Apollo is that it took over 400,000 people to make it possible to get to the Moon. For those of us who lived it day to day, we worked directly with perhaps a few handfuls of people, and we ended up meeting maybe a thousand or so others as we traveled across the country, visiting the sites where people were doing essential things for Apollo. But there were thousands of others who comprised this incredible tree of 400,000. Each and every person on that tree experienced a life-shaping, life-changing story of the dedication it took to make Apollo possible.

  What Nancy Atkinson does with this book is pick up the behind-the-scenes details to bring home the fact that many real and ordinary people came together to do this amazing, extraordinary thing. Nancy shares their stories in a way that highlights how all these people were living and breathing the responsibility of contributing to humanity’s dream to reach the stars. She makes this history more intimate, and shows us how everyone who worked on Apollo was an essential part of “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” It’s a moment that will never be repeated and should never be forgotten.

  I’m delighted Nancy decided to tell the Apollo story in this way. While the stories in Eight Years to the Moon are just a sampling of the 400,000 stories that are out there, this sampling comes at a deeper level that has not generally been heard, and provides an intuitive view of those who worked on the myriad bits and pieces of Apollo. Apollo was a tremendous collective experience of discovery and creativity and accomplishment. And that’s a great story.

  I am personally indebted and thankful to every one of those 400,000 people who each contributed, in their own way, not only to meeting JFK’s goal “of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” but to having played a personal role in realizing this historic shift in humanity’s understanding of its place in space and time.

  PROLOGUE

  SLEEPING ON THE MOON

  NEIL ARMSTRONG AND BUZZ ALDRIN WOKE up on the Moon with two big problems.

  Woke up, however, is perhaps a bit of an overstatement.

  Neither astronaut was able to fall asleep after everything that had just happened. After all, it was a day of history-making and drama unlike any other: humankind’s first landing on the Moon, our first foray on another world. And getting down to the lunar surface wasn’t easy. The landing was fraught with communication problems, electrical glitches and navigation errors so great the Lunar Module (LM) overshot the intended landing site by more than four miles. Then Armstrong had to search for a new place to set down that wasn’t filled with treacherous, LM-tipping boulders, manually flying the lander until it nearly ran out of fuel. All the while, jarring alarm klaxons sounded as the overloaded navigation computer struggled to process excessive data.

  Finally, though, they landed—successfully. And all those in the Mission Control Operations Center (more commonly known simply as Mission Control) in Houston who had nearly turned blue from holding their breath started breathing again.

  “Be advised there’re lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world,” Capcom and fellow astronaut Charlie Duke radioed up to the crew on the Moon.

  “Well, there are two of them up here too,” Armstrong replied.

  “And don’t forget one in the command module!” chimed in crewmate Mike Collins, orbiting above the Moon in the Columbia Command Module. Collins had also been holding his breath while listening in on the communications loop—and holding a hopeful vigil in the crew’s ride back to Earth.

  The Apollo 11 astronauts’ view of Earthrise, from lunar orbit. Credit: NASA.

  The original mission plan called for a sleep period for the astronauts after the landing and before going out and doing the historic moonwalk, or the extravehicular activity (EVA) in NASA parlance. But who could sleep after what they’d just been through? Armstrong and Aldrin petitioned Mission Control—and the EVA was moved up, right into prime time on a Sunday night back in the US (or, depending on whom you talk to, this was the secret plan all along).

  Around the world, approxi
mately six hundred million people, or one-fifth of humanity at the time, huddled around small television sets in homes and bars and on street corners, watching in wonder at the fuzzy black-and-white transmissions from the Moon. They saw the ghostly visages of two terrestrials bounding about on an alien world. For two hours and thirty-two minutes, the astronaut duo put their bootprints on the Moon, collected rocks, planted a flag, set up several science instruments and even talked to the president.

  And then it was time to get some shut-eye. The two astronauts had been awake for more than twenty-two hours.

  Neil Armstrong inside the Lunar Module Eagle after the historic first moonwalk. Credit: NASA.

  While every system on the LM had been checked and rechecked, verified and signed off on, for some reason no one had spent much time considering where and how the first two humans on the Moon would sleep. Subsequent Apollo crews would have hammocks that could be strung up inside the cramped quarters, but Armstrong and Aldrin had to make do by trying to curl up in the limited flat areas. The floor space where the astronauts stood while landing their LM, the Eagle, was just 36 by 55 inches (1 by 1.4 m). The only other area suitable to use for sleeping was a ledge that covered the LM’s ascent engine—the engine that would blast them off the Moon—but that space wasn’t very wide or long. So, while Aldrin lay in a semi-fetal position on the floor, Armstrong tried to stretch out on the ascent engine cover, his legs in a makeshift sling fashioned from a tether to keep his feet level with his torso.

  Outside, the Moon was silent, but the LM wasn’t. The Eagle creaked from temperature changes on its metal exterior, with a nearly 500°F (260°C) difference between sun and shadow on the airless Moon. Inside, the tiny cabin was noisy with various systems—especially that all-important life-support system—running in the background.

  “There was this pump,” Armstrong would recall later. “My head was back to the rear of the cabin and there was a glycol pump or a water pump or something very close to where my head was.” If Armstrong started to doze, the pump would kick in at an inopportune time and wake him.

  In addition, between the bright panel display lights that couldn’t be dimmed and the sunlight streaming into the windows, it was virtually broad daylight inside the Eagle. The astronauts had pulled down the window shades, but that didn’t help. Armstrong described the shades as having the light-dimming qualities of photograph negatives.

  “The light came through those window shades like crazy, and they were glowing, illuminated by intense sunshine outside,” he said. “Then after I got into my sleep stage and all settled down, I realized there was something else.”

  The Eagle had an optical telescope sticking out like a periscope, which the crew used as a sextant in tracking the stars for navigation, just like the early ship navigators on the Earth’s seas. “Earth was shining right through the telescope into my eye. It was like a light bulb,” said Armstrong. He got up and hung an extra moonrock bag over the eyepiece.

  Armstrong was congested, probably a reaction to the lunar dust. He and Aldrin had tracked plenty of sootlike lunar regolith into the spacecraft, and it seemed to magically stick to their suits, gloves and everything else like static cling.

  Armstrong and Aldrin tried closing their helmets to shut out the noise and light. They also used their suits’ ventilation system for better air quality. But that didn’t work either. The suits’ cooling systems—necessary for regulating body temperature on the scorching lunar surface—was working a little too well inside the cold cabin. It was only about 62°F (17°C) inside the Eagle, and both astronauts were cold. They finally turned off their cooling and ventilation systems, opened their helmets and made a mental note to suggest blankets for future Apollo crews.

  The best Aldrin could manage was a “couple hours of mentally fitful drowsing.” Armstrong just stayed awake.

  Back in Mission Control in Houston, NASA flight surgeon Dr. Kenneth Beers was monitoring data from the astronauts’ biomedical sensors. He watched as Armstrong’s heart rate would start to go down into the sleep range only to go back up again, indicating he was stirring around considerably.

  “This was a never-ending battle to obtain just a minimum level of sleeping conditions, and we never did,” Armstrong said later during a mission debriefing. “Even if we would have, I’m not sure I would have gone to sleep.”

  Armstrong’s statement was understandable: Besides the lack of creature comforts keeping him awake, there was the simple fact that he and Aldrin were on the Moon.

  They were on the freakin’ Moon.

  Panoramic view of the Apollo 11 landing site. Credit: NASA.

  Throughout all of human history—up to 1969, anyway—a trip to the Moon was considered far-fetched if not downright impossible. Even once it became theoretically possible, few believed that it could successfully be accomplished. But now Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins had done it. They did it not for themselves, but for the hundreds of thousands of people who had worked their collective asses off for the past eight years, enduring a lot of personal sacrifice, to make it all possible. Eight years of working late nights and weekends, missing their toddler’s first steps, missing their kids’ ball games and first dances and maybe even growing apart from their spouse. “A lot of us who were married during that time ended up not married later,” said one Apollo engineer.

  But they did it. They did it amid the tumultuous times of the 1960s: civil rights, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the free-speech movement, the women’s movement, hippies and the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. And now, if only for a few days, everyone could put their differences aside and celebrate the success of this historic moment.

  And they did it in a way that made the event belong to all of humanity—as the plaque left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts reminds us, “We came in peace for all mankind.” Surely, if we can send humans to the Moon, it would seem we might be capable of just about anything.

  And so, as they tried to sleep on the Moon, all Armstrong and Aldrin could do was lie there, probably thinking about the magnitude of what they had just accomplished. But in all likelihood, what really kept them awake was what loomed ahead of them. It was the other side of the equation that President Kennedy had challenged NASA to do eight years earlier in 1961: to not only send men to the Moon but also to return them safely to Earth.

  And therein lay their two problems.

  A replica of the plaque the Apollo 11 astronauts left behind on the Moon in commemoration of the historic mission. Credit: NASA.

  The first issue was that no one—neither on Earth or on the Moon—knew where the Eagle had landed. Yes, they were on the Moon, but precisely where they were had ramifications for the upcoming lift-off and rendezvous with Columbia.

  The navigation computer’s errors and Armstrong’s fast-on-his-feet flying to find a safe landing spot meant that the Eagle wasn’t where everyone expected it to be. Issues with the radar and communications during landing made it difficult to get an exact fix on their location.

  Flight dynamics officer Dave Reed in Mission Control was monitoring the situation. He took his headset off so as not to be overheard, walked back to flight director Gene Kranz and said, “We have a problem: We do not know where the hell they are.”

  The view out the window of the Lunar Module of the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon. Credit: NASA.

  In spaceflight, timing is everything. Knowing the Eagle‘s exact location would establish the timing of lift-off from the Moon in order to meet with Columbia in lunar orbit. For the Apollo program, the time at which the LM took off from the surface of the Moon would set up a sequence of events—from rendezvous and docking with Columbia, to the time of leaving lunar orbit, all the way to coordinating where and when in the Pacific Ocean the aircraft carrier USS Hornet would have to be to pluck the crew from the Command Module after splashdown. Change the lift-off time, and the Hornet would have to steam across the ocean to a different spot.

  Armstrong and Aldr
in tried to give landmarks that might provide clues, but there wasn’t a lot to go on. Out the window, the astronauts could see a relatively level plain, with a large number of craters and ridges and a hill that might be a half mile away. Or was it farther? Judging distances without any frame of reference was extremely difficult. Plus, those features would describe just about any area of this lunar plain called the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong mentioned the football field–size crater strewn with boulders they had flown past.

  Collins, up above in Columbia, was enlisted to help. As he circled the Moon every hour and fifty-eight minutes, he scanned a grid of possible coordinates radioed up from Mission Control, his eye to the Command Module’s twenty-eight-power sextant. But whizzing along at 3,700 miles per hour (6,000 km/h) and just 69 miles (111 km) up, the landscape below zipped by and Collins had—at most—about two minutes to frantically search the grid. Sometimes he intently scanned the landscape with his eyes alone, trying to catch at least a glint off the LM or some other clue to visually pinpoint the Eagle‘s landing site.

  Every time Collins came around from the far side of the Moon, Mission Control would have a new set of coordinates for him to scan.

  “I need a very precise position, because I can only do a decent job of scanning maybe one of those grid squares at a time,” he radioed back to Earth, a sense of frustration in his voice. “The area that we’ve been sweeping covers tens and twenties and thirties of them.”

  Before Collins could bed down for the night, Columbia made one more pass over the area the flight controllers thought might be Eagle‘s landing site. Again, he squinted, scanning the horizon below.

  “No joy,” Collins finally said.

  While the crew tried to sleep, the flight controllers back on Earth would have to come up with another plan to try to pinpoint Eagle‘s position.