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Full download The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America’s First Moon Missions Brandon R. Brown file pdf all chapter on 2024
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The Apollo Chronicles
The Apollo Chronicles
Engineering America’s First Moon
Missions
Brandon R. Brown
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For my father and my mother.
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. 1945—Origins 1
5. The Moon 60
8. 1965—Saturn Breathes 99
Notes 241
Bibliography 255
Index 259
vii
Preface
On a winter’s night three years ago, I looked up at the full Moon, with its dark
and light patches, and realized all at once that I knew very little about my father’s
early career. Almost nothing. I’d met many of his fellow engineers, heard stories of
their quirks and their humor, but I had no idea what living and working the Moon
missions was like in the 1960s. As of this writing, my father has just turned eighty-
five. He has some very sharp memories of certain segments and certain projects,
while other parts are understandably hazy now. After I started peppering him with
questions, he brought out a box of keepsakes and memorabilia from his career days,
talking through a review of each piece. He also shared a few phone numbers with
me, of surviving colleagues. And when I showed him a list of names from NASA’s
archive of oral histories, he gamely circled those he knew would have interesting and
important stories to tell.
I started reading everything I could find about Apollo—America’s program to land
people on the Moon and return them alive to our planet’s welcoming surface—and
the steps that came before it. Many wonderful narratives focus on the astronauts and
the blow-by-blow missions in space. But I mostly wanted to understand the project’s
earthly trenches, with engineers sweating details, deadlines, and decisions of a sort
no person had faced before. In the eleven years spanning the formation of NASA in
1958 to the first Moon landing in 1969, the engineers cleared or circumvented every
hurdle. If they did not solve every problem, they solved most and cleverly soothed the
rest. Another set of books, fewer in number, detail the engineering work, including
the piles of acronyms, the shifting, expanding organizational charts, the precise titles
and versions of the various systems of each rocket, spacecraft, testing platform, and
so on. The combination of NASA’s strange internal parlance and Apollo’s monu-
mental technical complexity raises a significant hurdle for many readers who might
otherwise want to understand the work, the process, and the experience. What was it
really like, day to day and month by hectic month?
The Apollo engineer Peter Armitage once told an interviewer, “The real story is in
the people and why they behaved the way they behaved. Nobody’s ever written a book
like that yet—t he real people, the mistakes they made.” With humility, I have tried
to write a book that could leave the remaining engineers nodding in approval. But
ix
x Preface
I also have written this book for anyone my age or younger. I was born in early 1969,
months before the first Moon landing, and by the time my generation became aware
of the world, Apollo was old news.
This book is not a memoir. As the least interesting element involved, your au-
thor will now recede. Neither is it my father’s story, though a few of his anecdotes
will improve the pages that follow. And while I now appreciate just how brave our
astronauts were, to sit on towers of explosive fuel and venture into a deadly realm,
this book is more concerned with the astronauts’ protectors. In it, I focus on the
Earth-bound: the welders of space-worthy seams, the designers of heat shields, the
stitchers of spacesuits, and those who computed razor-thin trajectories through
space, with disaster awaiting any deviation or missed step. As you read, you’ll sit
with the mystified engineers who, barely out of college, watched warning lights blink
on at the worst possible times. You’ll hunker with the rocket engineers in the shaking
walls of a block house during tests of the world’s most powerful rocket engines. You’ll
crawl with draftsmen over sprawling, improvised tables, drawing around the clock to
complete hundreds of schematics. And you’ll sit with young, farm-raised Americans
learning rocketry from imported German experts.
The stories, even the ones we haven’t yet lost, are nearly endless. Any attempt
to comprehensively honor the four hundred thousand minds that pioneered the
missions would be as impossible to assemble and write as it would then be to read. You
will meet a number of the engineers but avoid long parades of names. This book will
explore the Apollo years using a handful of main characters like blood cells moving
through the various limbs of NASA. I want to urge the reader against the impression
that these individuals were super-human. Two were most definitely visionaries, but
I’ve selected others because they were involved in key milestones, worked in multiple
parts of NASA, and, crucially, have retained detailed memories of the Apollo era.
The first act of a dramatic arc to the Moon began in October of 1957. When the
Soviet Union put a metallic “artificial moon” in orbit around the Earth, Americans
quite nearly lost their minds. What did it mean that our enemies, at unprecedented
speeds and heights, could methodically paint these bands—t hese orbits—again and
again over our skies? Could the Sputnik see us? Was it a hostile device? Could it
drop an atomic bomb? As the political historian Walter McDougall wrote, “For the
first time since [the War of 1812] the American homeland lay under direct foreign
threat. . . .” Newspapers compared flat-footed America to “some fat Roman lolling in
the baths” before a barbarian invasion.1
Never mind catching up, the nation thought. How could we get into space at all?
What did the country have in its engineering cupboard? If nameless Soviet scientists
were plotting even larger and more menacing missions, who would lead the way for
the humiliated United States?
xi Preface
Before experiencing 1957, you will meet some of our cast in earlier times. In most
cases, they had little inkling that history would sweep them up and push them onto
a brightly lit technical stage. The world would soon watch them working in a theater
of bewildering scale and scope. When the curtain rushed open, they would stand
without script or rehearsal, looking to one another for whatever relevant experience
they could muster. And to a surprising extent, humanity’s peaceful path to the Moon
relied on ideas born in war.
July 2018
Acknowledgments
I first want to thank the engineers and scientists I have interviewed. In sharing their
recollections and expertise, the following people breathed great life info this pro-
ject: Bob Austin, Hal Beck, Eugene Benton, Aldo Bordano, Robert Brown, Marlowe
Cassetti, Nesbitt Cumings, Caleb Fassett, Gerry Griffin, Mack Henderson, Frank
Hughes, John Kastanakis, Ed Kowalchuk, Arnolia McDowell, Elric McHenry, Jack
Miller, Thomas Moser, Debra Needham, Lee Norbraten, Catherine Osgood, Thomas
Parnell, Henry Pohl, Wesley Ratcliff, William Sneed, Ken Young, Renee Weber,
Cynthia Wells, Don Woodruff, and Len Worlund.
I want to acknowledge Hal Beck, Lee Norbraten, Thomas Parnell, and Henry Pohl
for sharing some of their unpublished writings about their careers.
For providing further background and for their interview time, I thank Ann
Faget, Carol Faget, Guy Faget, Chip Lord, and Karl Pohl.
For historical and archival assistance, I gratefully acknowledge Brian Odom,
Historian at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Pat Ammons
and Carolyn Lawson of the United States Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville,
Alabama; and Steve Garber and Bill Barry of the NASA History Office in
Washington, D.C.
In terms of source material, I acknowledge all those who have compiled and
documented so very much already, and I apologize to those I have yet to discover.
I leaned heavily on NASA’s Oral Histories project, incorporating dozens of voices
from those digital archives. The book Apollo: The Behind-the-Scenes History of the
Most Triumphant Years of America’s Space Program, by Charles Murray and Catherine
Bly Cox, was a wonderful companion on my learning curve. Finally, a lesser known
tome, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun by the late Bob Ward, provided an
intimate portrait of the rocket pioneer and his center in Huntsville, Alabama.
I want to gratefully acknowledge the patient and eagle-eyed readers of various
drafts: Dana Smith, Sue Brown, Arden Hendrie, and Dean Rader, as well as, from
the Apollo era, Robert Brown, Gerry Griffin, and Frank Hughes. All of these people
improved the book, and any remaining errors are mine alone.
I appreciate Jeremy Lewis, my editor at Oxford University Press, very much for
his trust, support, and astute suggestions. I also want to acknowledge the expert and
xiii
xiv Acknowledgments
After surrendering to American forces in May of 1945, the lead scientist of Nazi
Germany’s rocketry program prepared to embark for the United States. Wernher
von Braun cooperated with his captors. He alternately charmed and shocked them
with his cheerful good will and confident self-importance. (In truth, he watched his
plan coming together. As he’d confided to a few fellow Germans late in the war, he
had hoped to end up in the United States.) He asked if he could bring hundreds of
his engineers and workers with him to America. He amazed his interrogators as he
rattled off the strengths, skills, and weaknesses of each man. Washington eventually
approved 118, who came to America in two waves.
In September, von Braun and a handful of his closest German colleagues deplaned
at the Newcastle Army Base in Wilmington, Delaware. At age thirty-t hree, his first
American steps were painful ones. After surviving a near-fatal car wreck in Germany,
the rocket pioneer suffered from a poorly set broken arm and a nasty case of hepatitis.
His new military keepers let von Braun recover his strength for a couple of weeks
but then covertly booked him a civilian train ticket. When his accent attracted the
questions of a fellow traveler, von Braun said he was Swiss and concocted business
interests in the states.
From his window, von Braun saw the vast expanse of a nation rumble past for
days. Completely unlike the craters and ash piles of Europe, this land was free of
war’s scars. The trees thinned as the train clacked onward and eventually, in the
middle of Texas, the grass gave up as well. He arrived in El Paso, a town perched be-
tween two stands of dry mountains. Fort Bliss became the new home for von Braun
and his German colleagues. The enlisted locals deduced the basics about their new
prisoners-turned-g uests: These were the infamous enemy scientists, plucked from
Nazi Germany and set in the cage of a rocket laboratory. They jokingly called von
Braun “the Dutchman.”
The initially secret Project Overcast hauled ten thousand tons of military and
industrial equipment, about seventy-five rockets (many of them in piles of parts),
and six hundred former enemies from Germany to the United States, largely
1
2 The Apollo Chronicles
whitewashing their political affiliations and wartime work. In von Braun’s case, the
cleansing covered, for many years to come, his advanced rank within the Nazi war
machine. He later claimed a tin ear for politics, calling himself “downright naïve” in
his early political views, blind to the meaning of the changes around him. He said he
was simply “too wrapped up in rockets.” When the Nazis took control of Germany,
he was barely twenty-one. He joined the Nazi party and eventually became an of-
ficer in the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”). Heinrich Himmler’s brutal
wing ran the concentration camps and, for von Braun, they eventually supplied slave
labor—t housands of prisoners of war and other enemies of the state toiling to build
von Braun’s massive rocket weapons.1
According to the story he relayed in America, his Nazi masters had tilted his ca-
reer away from his visions of space travel in favor of earthly and more nefarious
trajectories. He said he always would have preferred to perch spaceships, rather
than bombs, atop his rockets. He had even lapsed late in World War II, dangerously
wishing aloud for the war to end so he could return to his real passions. He pos-
sessed an almost deadly naïveté, scribbling sarcastic comments like “Final victory?
Well, well!” in his notes, mocking the late war slogans of Josef Goebbels. The Gestapo
arrested von Braun in early 1944 and charged him with scheming to subvert the Nazi
weapons program. If not for his skills, plus some friends carefully extracting him
from the Gestapo’s bureaucracy, the von Braun story could have ended there. Under
increased scrutiny, he followed orders and survived the war, with rocket schematics
tucked under his arm.2
Once Project Overcast became public in America, it took on the more be-
nign name “Project Paperclip,” and newspapers even printed quiet notice of von
Braun’s arrival. He was just one of the “certain outstanding German scientists and
technicians . . . deemed vital to our national security” who would have a “temporary
stay.” For von Braun that would span the rest of his life.
At Fort Bliss, von Braun and his German colleagues expected tension with
American soldiers, or perhaps retribution for years of war. But he found the op-
posite. The soldiers invited him to join their card games. “In America,” he later
wrote, “you don’t seem to carry grudges, as do many Europeans who have been
enemies.” He encouraged his fellow Germans to learn English as quickly and thor-
oughly as possible. They watched whatever movies they could and listened to the
radio. Not long after they arrived, some Germans took to wearing cowboy hats
and boots. 3
But before he could build new rockets, the Americans wanted to see his most fa-
mous work up close: He and his fellow Germans trudged into New Mexico’s nearby
white sands, with loads of their rocket parts. He was to revive his chief accomplish-
ment for Adolf Hitler, a weapon of incredible size and speed.
3 1945—Origins
From von Braun’s perspective, he could help the United States develop long-range
missiles, yes, but with the victors’ resources he might return to his visions of space
travel. With enough time and money, he was certain he could build a rocket powerful
enough to refuse Earth’s gravity and glide calmly through the cosmos. So he made a
new home willingly and joined his second army within one year. “It all made sense,”
he said later. “The V-2 was something we had and you didn’t have.”4 (See Figure 1.1.)
The Vergeltungswaffe-2 was the second of Nazi Germany’s “vengeance weapons.” The
desperate Reich had hoped the V-2 would reverse the late course of the war.
When preparing for launch, it stood forty-five feet tall, tethered like some sort
of laboratory monster. Oozing vapors, it was part science fiction and part Gothic
horror. If the rocket would launch with flame, why did tendrils of super-cold mists
hang from its fuel lines?
As with most combustible materials, the liquid fuel in the V-2 required oxygen
to light and burn, but the air around us only offers so much. And at the heights von
Braun craved, oxygen was incredibly scarce. Von Braun had his rockets carry their
figure 1.1 German and American workers prepare a V-2 rocket for a test at the White Sands
Proving Grounds in New Mexico, circa 1946. (Photograph courtesy the U.S. Space and Rocket
Center.)
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to effect a renewal of their old friendship with France, which
proposal, however, the Americans treated with contempt.
On the 30th of September, 1800, their ambassadors concluded an
agreement at Bonaparte’s country seat of Morfontaine, which
referred especially to the resistance which all the neutral powers
under the protectorate of the emperor of Russia were desirous of
making to the pretensions and claims of England. The Americans
first of all declared that neutral flags should make a neutral cargo,
except in cases where the ship was actually laden with goods
contraband of war. It was afterwards precisely defined what were to
be considered goods contraband of war. By the fourth article it was
determined that neutral ships must submit to be detained, but that
the ships of war so detaining a merchantman with a view to search
should remain at least at the distance of a cannon-shot, and only be
allowed to send a boat with three men to examine the ship’s papers
and cargo; and that in all cases in which a merchantman should be
under convoy of a ship of war, no right of search should exist,
because the presence of the convoy should be regarded as a
sufficient guarantee against contraband. Inasmuch as England and
Denmark were at open issue concerning this last point, the
Americans would have been inevitably involved in the dispute had
they immediately ratified the treaty of Morfontaine: they were,
however, far too cunning to fall into this difficulty; and they did not
therefore ratify the treaty till the Russian confederation had been
dissolved.
Sweden and Denmark had come to issue with England concerning
the right of search in 1798 and 1799, when four frigates, two
Swedish and two Danish, were captured and brought into English
ports. True, they were afterwards given up, but without any
satisfaction, for the English still insisted upon the right of search. The
dispute became most vehement in the case of the Danish frigate
Freya, which, together with the merchantmen under her convoy,
were brought into an English port, after a sharp engagement on the
25th of July, 1800; and the English, aware of the hostile negotiations
which were going on in the north, at once despatched an expedition
against Denmark.
Sixteen English ships of war suddenly appeared before
Copenhagen, and most unexpectedly threatened the harbour and
city with a destructive bombardment, if Denmark did not at once
acknowledge England’s right of search at sea. Had this
acknowledgment been made, Bonaparte’s and the emperor’s plan
would have been frustrated in its very origin; but Denmark had the
good fortune to possess, in its minister Bernstorff, the greatest
diplomatist of the whole revolutionary era, who contrived for that time
to save Copenhagen without the surrender of any rights. It was quite
impossible to resist by force, but he refused to enter upon the
question of right or wrong; and in the agreement which he signed
with Lord Whitworth on the 25th of August, 1800, he consented that
in the meantime all occasion for dispute should be avoided, and thus
the difficulty be postponed or removed. Denmark bound herself no
longer to send her merchantmen under convoy—whereupon the
Freya, and the vessels by which she was accompanied, were set at
liberty. On this occasion the emperor Paul offered himself as
arbitrator; and when Lord Whitworth rejected his interference or
arbitration, he immediately laid an embargo on all the English ships
in Russian ports.
The news of the agreement entered into at Copenhagen, however,
no sooner reached St. Petersburg, than this first embargo was
removed, and the dispute carried on merely in a diplomatic manner.
At last the emperor Paul put an end to this paper war, when Vaubois,
who had defended Malta since July, 1798, against the English,
Russians, Neapolitans, and sometimes also the Portuguese, at
length capitulated, on the 5th of September, 1800. The island was
taken military possession of by the English without any reference
whatever to the order, to Naples, to the promise which they had
made to the emperor, or to Bailli de la Ferrette, whom Paul had
named as the representative of the order. As soon as this news
reached St. Petersburg, Paul’s rage and indignation knew no
bounds. On the 7th of November, he not only laid an embargo upon
three hundred English ships then in his ports, but sent the whole of
their crews into the interior of Russia, and allowed them only a few
kopecks a day for their support.
Lord Carysfort, the English ambassador in Berlin, was unable for
six weeks to obtain any answer from the Prussian government with
respect to its connection with the northern confederation, although
he insisted strongly upon it; and yet Stedingk, the Swedish minister,
and Rosenkranz, the Danish minister, had signed the agreement for
an armed neutrality in the form of that of 1780 as early as the 17th of
December, 1800, in St. Petersburg, and the Prussian minister, Von
Luft, in the name of his king, had signified his acceptance of the
alliance on the 18th. When Lord Carysfort at length obtained an
answer on the 12th of February to his demands, so long and
repeatedly urged in vain, Haugwitz had drawn it up equivocally both
in form and contents. The emperor of Russia was so indignant at the
ambiguity that he not only expressed his feelings on the subject
warmly, but also took some hostile measures against Prussia.
On the other hand, the emperor invited Gustavus IV to St.
Petersburg where he was received with the greatest splendour. He
arrived at St. Petersburg at Christmas, 1800, and immediately, as if
to insult the English, a grand meeting of the order of Malta was held;
the king himself was loaded with marks of honour of every possible
description, and at the end of December he signed a new
agreement, by which the objects of that of the 16th of the same
month were greatly enlarged. In the former alliance defensive
operations alone were contemplated; but now offensive measures
were also agreed upon, with the reservation, indeed, if they should
become necessary. Paul took measures to refit his fleet, and an
army was equipped which was to be placed under the commands of
Soltikov, Pahlen, and Kutusov; the Danish fleet was in good
condition; the Russian minister in Paris appeared to regard the
circumstances as very favourable for gaining Hanover to his master
without danger or risk; and Pitt himself considered the state of affairs
so unfavourable, that he seriously contemplated the propriety of
retiring and making way for a new ministry, in order to render a
peace possible. This close confederacy against England was,
however, dissolved at the very moment in which the first consul
appeared to be disposed to favour Naples and Sardinia, in order to
gratify the wishes of the emperor of Russia.
ASSASSINATION OF PAUL (1801 A.D.)