Rocket Men Read online

  Then he threw down a gauntlet.

  “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

  The room stood silent. The United States hadn’t even put a man into orbit around Earth; now the president was committing the country to landing astronauts on the Moon, and on an eight-and-a-half year deadline, no less. Even if NASA knew how to fly a man to the Moon—and it did not—it lacked the infrastructure, industry, manpower, and technology required to do it. And yet the president stood there insisting it would be done. And soon.

  The stakes could hardly have been higher. If America fell short, its failure could not be denied or buried. It would be proof that the nation couldn’t do what its leader said was most important, that its greatest minds had failed, that it might not be the world’s best hope for the future. It would weaken morale at NASA. And it would embolden the Soviet Union, a nation that wouldn’t hesitate to exploit an American embarrassment for propaganda, or press a military advantage.

  And yet…

  If NASA could meet Kennedy’s deadline, it would be a statement—to the American people, the Soviets, and the world—that there was nothing the United States could not do if pushed hard enough, that even after losing round after round in the Space Race, falling behind in missiles and bombs, and suffering a humiliation like the Bay of Pigs, the United States could rise in a way no other nation could rise and pull off a miracle. And that’s what Congress seemed to hear as Kennedy kept talking and their applause began to build: that landing a man on the Moon and bringing him back safely might be the single greatest scientific and technological challenge mankind had ever faced, but doing it by the end of the decade was impossible, and it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was.

  * * *

  —

  While Americans buzzed about Kennedy’s plan, the Soviet Union yawned. It remained far ahead in the Space Race, and had even sent a probe 42.5 million miles away, which had passed by Venus a few days before Kennedy’s speech. In June, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy during a two-day summit in Vienna at which the men discussed Communism and democracy and the relationship between the two superpowers. “Worst thing in my life. He savaged me,” Kennedy told a New York Times writer. “I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.”

  Four months later, on October 30, 1961, the Soviets exploded a device known as Tsar Bomba over northern Russia. Packing a force of nearly four thousand Hiroshima bombs, it was by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated or even built; for the briefest moment, it equaled 1.4 percent of the power output of the Sun. The device’s blast wave orbited the globe three times and its mushroom cloud rose to more than seven times the height of Mount Everest. The ground around the blast site melted and turned to glass, while people fifty miles away were knocked flat.

  A year after Tsar Bomba, Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy demanded they be removed. Khrushchev refused, but in October 1962, he was facing a different kind of president. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island. For thirteen days, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war. But Kennedy refused to call off the blockade. Just as it seemed both sides had no choice but to use their nuclear weapons, Khrushchev backed down and removed the missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been among the most tense and dangerous events in American history, but when it ended, the world had a different opinion about the will of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  * * *

  —

  In mid-November 1963, Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral, where he was briefed on America’s developing colossus, the Saturn V, the 36-story-tall three-stage booster being built to take Americans to the Moon. Standing outside with rocket designer Wernher von Braun, Kennedy shook his head in wonder at it all. These men in shirtsleeves and ties were building machines to take human beings to new worlds.

  Six days later, the president was dead from an assassin’s bullet.

  In the wake of Kennedy’s killing, some wondered whether the nation’s will to land a man on the Moon might have died with him. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, supported the space program and pushed to keep Kennedy’s deadline, but problems with logistics, spacecraft, rockets, and engineering bogged down the American effort. Some NASA analysts put the chances of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade at just one in ten. In 1964, the Soviet Union only widened its lead in the race to the Moon.

  But NASA wouldn’t give up. Over the next three years, the Americans and Soviets volleyed for supremacy in space. Project Gemini, designed to perfect techniques the Apollo flights would use to land men on the Moon, opened a floodgate of progress. In the Soviet Union, the skies darkened. Its space program had managed a few interesting missions, but nothing close to the game changers that had put them so far ahead for so long. By the end of 1966, the Soviets were panicked. For the first time since the Space Race began, they were losing.

  The American advantage never looked stronger than on January 27, 1967, when three astronauts rode an elevator to the top of a Saturn IB booster at Cape Kennedy in Florida and strapped themselves into their capsule for a simulated countdown. In three weeks they would do it for real, taking Apollo 1—the kickoff of NASA’s new Apollo program—into orbit around Earth.

  At 6:31 P.M., one of the astronauts screamed into his microphone a word that sounded like “Fire!” Two seconds later, another cried out. His first word was unclear—either “I” or “We” —but the rest was unmistakable: “got a fire in the cockpit!” That was followed by garbled, desperate words and an agonized scream. Some thought they heard an astronaut saying “We’re burning up!”

  After that, there was nothing but silence.

  Flames spread through the capsule. None of the astronauts could overcome the cabin’s highly pressurized atmosphere and move the inward-opening hatch. Seconds later, the capsule ruptured. Technicians rushed to the scene but were beaten back by heat and fire; almost six minutes passed before they could get inside. Rescue personnel found the crew, already expired from asphyxiation, their space suits fused to the melted interior of the spacecraft. Seven hours passed before the bodies could be removed.

  Until now, the American space program had owned an excellent safety record; even a chimpanzee named Ham, who’d flown on a suborbital mission in 1961, had come through it safely. Suddenly, three American heroes had died without ever leaving the launchpad, and in a way that seemed entirely preventable. Hundreds of grown men at NASA were reduced to tears by the accident.

  Media reports blamed an electrical spark for igniting the pure oxygen environment of the spacecraft’s cabin. But to many, there seemed a more basic explanation. “There’s reason to believe that establishing a deadline of 1970 for the Moon flight contributed to their deaths,” said NBC News anchor Frank McGee. Like many, he thought that by rushing, NASA was risking safety.

  After surviving the congressional investigation into the fire, and enduring months of delay while instituting new safety measures, NASA was ready to resume flight operations. On November 9, 1967, controllers counted down the final seconds to the launch of Apollo 4 (Apollo 2 and 3 had been canceled in a reorganization after the fire). This would be the first test of the massive Saturn V booster, a rocket that was orders of magnitude more powerful than any NASA had ever launched, and the only one capable of taking a man to the Moon. The agency dared not put a man on board.

  At 7 A.M., the rocket’s five enormous engines ignited, sending shock waves of sound and light and energy in every direction as 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifted the six-million-pound behemoth up and away from the launchpad. T
hree miles away, plaster dust fell from the ceiling in the Launch Control Center, while sand shifted on beaches even more distant than that. Describing the event for a live television audience, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite grabbed the plate glass window of his booth to keep it from collapsing.

  “Our building is shaking here!” Cronkite said with uncharacteristic exuberance. “Oh, it’s terrific! The building’s shaking! This big blast window is shaking and we’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at three thousand feet! The roar is terrific! Look at it going!”

  The flight worked, every part of it, almost perfectly. It was clear now that America stood a fighting chance, not just of putting a man on the Moon, but of doing it by a long-dead president’s impossible deadline.

  * * *

  —

  NASA kicked off 1968 by flying Apollo 5 in January, an unmanned test of the lunar module, the landing craft that would shuttle astronauts between the orbiting spacecraft and the lunar surface. The mission used a smaller rocket, and despite a few problems it was classified a success.

  And then came Apollo 6.

  It would be just the second test of the Saturn V, a necessary step before NASA would certify the booster for manned flight. Lift-off was proceeding normally on the morning of April 4, 1968, but just a few minutes into the flight, things started to go wrong. The rocket’s first stage began to “pogo”—to shake violently up and down. Pieces of the spacecraft flew off. Later in the flight, two of the five engines on the second stage shut down prematurely. Still, the third stage struggled into orbit, but its engine—the one required to send Apollo to the Moon—failed to reignite. A backup plan was put into effect, but the reentry of the command module into Earth’s atmosphere was too slow to fully test the heat shield.

  To many at NASA, the ten-hour flight had been a disaster. By the time the Apollo command module splashed down into the ocean, any chance for a lunar landing by the end of 1969 looked to have burned away.

  “What was illustrated,” wrote The New York Times, “…was the extraordinary difficulty of assuring that every one of the literally millions of components in such an extremely complicated system as the Saturn 5 works perfectly….This fact argues for a slow but sure approach to future Apollo tests, rather than an adventuresome policy aimed primarily at completing the job by the end of 1969.”

  * * *

  —

  On the same day that Apollo 6 went haywire, United States intelligence agencies delivered a report on the Soviet space program. It was marked TOP SECRET and went only to high-ranking government policymakers and top NASA officials. It read:

  The Soviets will probably attempt a manned circumlunar flight both as a preliminary to a manned lunar landing and as an attempt to lessen the psychological impact of the Apollo program.

  That much wasn’t news. But the estimate on when it would happen jumped off the page. The report said that 1969 was more likely for this manned circumlunar flight. But the second half of 1968 was entirely possible.

  NASA had no plans to send men to the Moon in 1968. The soonest they’d be ready to try was mid-1969, when Apollo 10 would orbit the Moon—a test run before Apollo 11 attempted a landing.

  By that time, a cosmonaut might already have reached the Moon. And that would be more than just the greatest technological achievement in history. It would be a definitive victory for the Soviets in the Space Race. The landing would still matter, of course. But no one ever again would ask, “Can we get there?” By that time, someone else would have answered, “We did.”

  NASA had little choice but to keep working. But as spring turned to summer, there was more bad news for the agency. Plagued by design and production problems, the lunar module had fallen behind schedule. Engineers reported that a fix could take six months or more. That threatened to delay several planned Apollo flights—including those to the Moon.

  By early August 1968, things looked dire for the American space program. The Saturn V rocket was in no shape to fly with a crew aboard. The Soviets looked ready to send men around the Moon by year’s end. And now, because of issues with the lunar module, Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline for a lunar landing was slipping away.

  NASA always proceeded deliberately and carefully. They didn’t skip ahead; the risks of manned spaceflight were simply too great. But their hand had been forced. So Deke Slayton had to ask Frank Borman an unthinkable question: Will you and your crew go suddenly—in just four months’ time—to the Moon?

  Now Slayton needed an answer.

  BORMAN HAD NO IDEA WHAT SLAYTON’S proposed mission entailed. He did know, however, that NASA couldn’t be ready to go to the Moon in just four months. He knew the agency had yet to build essential systems, calculate proper trajectories, solve problems with its Moon rocket, determine fundamental navigation, develop software, even make a basic flight plan. And he knew how badly the lunar module had fallen behind schedule.

  Borman hadn’t joined NASA for the usual reasons. He had little interest in exploration, adventure, or pioneering. He didn’t thrive on speed or adrenaline. Even the glamorous perks of the job—the availability of beautiful women, discounts on Corvettes, the public’s adoration—meant nothing to him. He’d joined NASA for a single purpose: to fight the Soviet Union on the world’s new battlefield, outer space.

  Before Slayton’s question could settle, Borman gave his answer.

  “Yes, Deke. Let’s go to the Moon.”

  Slayton didn’t need any more than that. He thanked Borman and warned him to keep the information on a need-to-know basis. A few minutes later, Borman was in his airplane and headed back to his crewmates in California.

  Flying always focused Borman’s mind, and now, cruising at 600 miles per hour, he began to see what a dangerous business he’d signed up for. He believed his crew to be the best at NASA, but four months might not be enough for even this crew to prepare for a journey to the Moon. He had no idea how the space agency would do its part to be ready by December. He could only trust that NASA had carefully crafted the mission, whatever it was, and had taken their time to work out the science.

  In fact, much of the plan to send Apollo 8 to the Moon had been contemplated by George Low on the beach just five days earlier. As for the science—that would require some faith.

  * * *

  —

  To fly to the Moon and land a man on its surface, the Apollo spacecraft required three components:

  Command Module—the cone-shaped spacecraft where the three astronauts lived, worked, and conducted most of their mission

  Service Module—the storehouse for the craft’s life support systems, its electrical power, and a large rocket engine with sufficient propellant

  Lunar Module—the small landing craft that shuttled two astronauts between the orbiting spacecraft and the lunar surface

  NASA needed to test all three modules—both in Earth orbit and around the Moon—before it could attempt a lunar landing. For months, this is how the test schedule stood:

  FLIGHT OBJECTIVE LOCATION ESTIMATED DATE

  Apollo 7

  Test Command and Service Modules

  Low Earth orbit

  September/October 1968

  Apollo 8

  Test Command, Service, and Lunar Modules

  Low Earth orbit

  December 1968

  Apollo 9

  Test Command, Service, and Lunar Modules

  High Earth orbit

  February 196
9

  Apollo 10

  Test Command, Service, and Lunar Modules

  Lunar orbit

  Mid-1969

  Apollo 11

  Lunar landing

  Lunar surface

  Late 1969

  Apollo 1 had ended in a fatal fire in early 1967. Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 had been canceled after the fire. Apollo 4, Apollo 5, and Apollo 6 had already flown, each unmanned and in Earth orbit.

  * * *

  —

  Everything changed the morning that Low returned from vacation. Even before getting his coffee, he called his secretary, Judy Wyatt, to his office at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.

  “I want you to keep a log of people I talk to,” he said. “And I want it kept under a secret cover sheet.”

  Low made a list of key NASA managers and engineers and asked Wyatt to call them in. She’d worked for her boss for two years and knew him to be a precise and serious man. His subjects and verbs always agreed, even while he gave dictation, and he would sunbathe on the weekends with his briefcase beside him, never missing a chance to think or plan. More than anything, Low was efficient; he did not ask for things or take a person’s time more than was necessary. On this day, he was requesting the time of several important men, and right away.

  He began by seeing two experts—one on NASA safety rules, the other on trajectories, the flight path a rocket would take to its destination.