This New Ocean, page 55
“It was very easy to maneuver with the gun. The only problem I have is I haven’t got enough fuel,” White reported. “This is the greatest experience; it’s just tremendous.… Right now, I’m standing on my head and I’m looking right down and looks like we’re coming up on the coast of California … as I go on a slow rotation to the right. There is absolutely no disorientation associated with it.” Edward H. White was flying upside down at about 17,500 miles an hour, a vast expanse of blue, green, and brown just on the other side of his visor, and feeling just great.
The space walk lasted twenty minutes—“the longest extravehicular activity on record,” as briefers would later tell the news media—and ended with White’s climbing back into his craft without experiencing the frightening ordeal that Leonov had endured. Besides the romp in space, eleven experiments were performed.
More prosaic, though necessary, operations were also accomplished. There was a bungee cord with a handle on one end and a foot strap on the other to be used for exercise in the cramped space and to tone up the astronauts’ hearts before re-entry.
Longer flights also meant that food had to be considered, as did its elimination. McDivitt and White had four meals a day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper—that were marked by day and meal and connected by a nylon cord in the order they were to be eaten. The food itself was freeze-dried, dehydrated in powder form, or compressed into bite-sized chunks. A specially designed water gun was used to reconstitute the freeze-dried and dehydrated morsels. A typical breakfast included apricot cereal bars, reconstituted coffee, ham and applesauce, and cinnamon toast. Chicken salad, beef sandwiches, peaches, and banana pudding were a typical dinner, while supper consisted of potato soup, chicken and gravy, toast, peanut cubes, and reconstituted tea. The nutritionists figured that the four low-residue meals combined averaged 2,500 calories.
And all of it had to come out. Eliminating waste had not been a problem on the short Mercury flights (with the notable exception of Shepard’s delay), but Gemini, Apollo, and other relatively long duration missions required an efficient and tidy waste elimination system, particularly since the astronauts had to function in an area the size of two phone booths. Urine was passed through a relatively simple hose and into a container from which it was flushed overboard. Getting rid of excrement, however, was a far different matter because of the cramped quarters and weightlessness. An astronaut who felt nature’s call had to pull off his space suit and attach a small bag with an adhesive surface to his buttocks. Since there was no gravity, he then had to squeeze his excrement to the bottom of the bag and then thoroughly knead it like dough so it would mix with a chemical that killed bacteria. It was not a process NASA’s public information people went out of their way to talk about.
There were eight more Gemini flights, the last one flown on November 11, 1966, by James A. Lovell Jr. and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., both of whom were destined to go to the Moon, though under vastly different circumstances. Combined, they increased U.S. experience in manned spaceflight by 540 orbits, 865 hours, and just over 24 million miles, or the equivalent of fifty-one round trips to the Moon. The astronauts performed fifty-four experiments, including in-flight sleep analysis, cardiovascular conditioning, measuring the effects of weightlessness and radiation on blood, communicating during re-entry, collecting micrometeorites, navigating by starlight, and measuring surface features. In addition, astronauts racked up eleven more hours floating in space, six of them working in the open hatchways of their spacecraft.
Largely unnoticed was the fact that an important transition had begun. The difference between Mercury and Gemini was the difference between taking short excursions to space and living there.
Yet Gemini, like Mercury, was menaced by a series of glitches—one of them nearly fatal—that underscored how fragile manned space operations really were. GT-4 was unable to rendezvous with the target spacecraft because it ran low on maneuvering fuel and then had to be landed by hand because its computer forgot the automatic re-entry sequence; GT-5 also missed its rendezvous, this time because its special fuel cell, designed to provide long duration electrical power, broke. Gemini 6’s launch was delayed because of a problem with the Titan 2, while Gemini 7 not only had problems with its fuel cell, but with two failed attitude thrusters. Despite that, however, they had a beautiful rendezvous that came within a foot of each other in identical orbits. Neil A. Armstrong and David R. Scott were nearly killed when Gemini 8 spun wildly out of control during the program’s first docking attempt.42 They regained control by using the re-entry control system, but that forced them to come down early. Gemini 9 was launched late because of a guidance system computer problem and, once up, Eugene A. Cernan was unable to test a new Air Force maneuvering unit during his own EVA because his visor fogged up.* Gemini 11’s launch was postponed twice because of problems with the Titan 2 (one of them a dangerous oxidizer leak), and its successor, the last Gemini that went to space, was afflicted by problems with its fuel cell and attitude thrusters.
Slaves in Space
While people were beginning their first, tenuous forays into low orbit, their proxies were multiplying there and far beyond. Like the supporting cast in a drama of majestic proportion, a class of robotic spacecraft served the humans who were being shot into space and readied for the Moon. Where no man had gone before (to borrow a phrase from a then-new television series called Star Trek), robots would go first.
By the mid-1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had developed two basic kinds of robotic spacecraft: the Earth huggers and far-ranging explorers. The explorers were sent to the Moon and to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, for the sake of both knowledge and politics. The trips to the Moon were reconnoitering expeditions in advance of the arrival of humans.
Having been upstaged by the Army’s Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, the Air Force decided to strike back by using an Atlas to launch a probe to the Moon that August. Fearing that the GIs would get wind of it, the airmen took the precaution of classifying it top secret. And since they needed first-rate tracking for the mission, they decided to go to Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank in England. The astronomer first heard about the Air Force plan when a colonel showed up in Manchester just before Easter. After making certain that the windows in his office were closed and the door was locked, the American visitor asked Lovell in a near whisper whether he would be willing to use his telescope to track an Atlas-launched Moon shot. Lovell agreed to do it and also to keep the secret. But the secrecy soon evaporated.
As it turned out, the Air Force tried to reach the Moon with a Thor IRBM and a specially designed upper stage called Able, both of which disappeared on August 17, along with a tiny hitchhiker named Pioneer, in a well-publicized explosion shortly after being launched from Cape Canaveral. A second try with a successor named Pioneer 1 failed on October 11, though the midget spacecraft went high enough to send back forty-three hours of data before it dropped into the Pacific like a scorched rock. Pioneer 2 also fell back down a little less than a month later. That was it for the Air Force. The old Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Army Ballistic Missile Agency team led by Pickering and von Braun, in effect shaking their collective head on the sideline, saw the Vanguard fiasco repeating itself and prepared to rescue the nation’s honor yet again.
The Russians, meanwhile, were also aiming beyond Earth orbit at a pace that reflected their own desperation. Knowing that the R-7 lacked the muscle to get even a tiny payload to the Moon, Korolyov invented an upper stage whose RO-5 engine added another five tons of thrust, and took his own shot from Tyuratam on September 23. The Semyorka, carrying a small probe named Luna, shook itself to pieces and blew up ninety-two seconds after ignition. On October 12, the day after Pioneer 1 was lost, a second R-7 disintegrated a hundred seconds after launch. A third try, on December 4, lasted a little more than four minutes before engine failure struck.
Two days later, just as that month’s launch window was closing, JPL and the ABMA launched the twenty-eight-pound Pioneer 3 on top of a souped-up Jupiter.46 There would be no gloating this time, however, because the booster’s engine cut off early, sending the little spacecraft into an arc that stretched more than 63,000 miles before plowing back into the air blanket and disintegrating in its own fire.
The Russians opened 1959 with a faultless launch on January 2 that sent a 796-pound probe named Luna 1 toward the Moon. “Lunik,” as it was called by its creators, was a fully pressurized and temperature-controlled aluminum sphere that drew its energy from a battery and that measured the Earth’s and Moon’s magnetic fields, collected data on solar radiation, and more. The probe missed the Moon by 3,700 miles and instead sailed into an orbit around the Sun. “Mankind’s age-old dream of flight to the Moon was coming true—which is why Luna 1 was renamed ‘Mechta’ (Dream) when it became the first manmade planet,” one sympathetic account would later explain. The Russians had indeed produced the first machine to fully escape Earth’s gravity and enter deep space. The American space community’s inner circle knew full well that it was the Moon the Soviets were aiming at, but that was only acknowledged years later.
On it went, well into 1959 and then into the new decade, with the rockets improving all the time and the contestants hammering at each other relentlessly.48 Pioneer 4, launched two months after Lunik, was also aimed at the Moon but came no closer than 37,000 miles before it became the second craft from Earth to swing into orbit around the Sun. JPL and the Huntsville rocketeers could take some consolation in knowing that they had at least accomplished what their Air Force rivals had not been able to do. But it was small satisfaction, since Korolyov scored yet another victory on September 14, 1959, when Luna 2 became the first man-made object to actually hit the Moon.
In keeping with their perchant for anniversaries, the Russians launched another Moon probe on October 4, 1959, or exactly two years after Sputnik 1 went up. On October 7, Luna 2’s achievement was topped by Luna 3’s sensational orbit of the Moon and the return of the first photographs—twenty-nine of them—showing 70 percent of its far side. To accomplish that stunning feat, the spacecraft had to fly between the Sun and the Moon, stop its rotation, point and shoot its two cameras for forty minutes while the attitude-control system kept it steady, and then head back toward Earth so the imagery could be scanned electronically and transmitted to ground stations by television as the spacecraft swung by from 25,000 miles out. In the view of Nicholas L. Johnson, an expert on the Soviet space program, the mission amounted to “one of the most astounding technological achievements of any nation, considering the state of the art at the time.” Pickering, von Braun, Schriever, Medaris, Killian, and others were soon treated to pictures of the Sea of Moscow, the Gulf of Cosmonauts, the Sovietsky Mountain Range, Tsiolkovsky Crater, and the Sea of Dreams.
But now the momentum moved back to the United States. Unlike its predecessors, Pioneer 5 was sent to explore interplanetary space, not the Moon. And also unlike the others, it did what it was told to do. Launched on March 11, 1960, and run by the Goddard Space Flight Center, the ninety-five-pound sphere carried four scientific instruments into orbit around the Sun and returned a great deal of data about what was happening out there: specifically, about radiation, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and solar activity. Pioneer 5 was the first spacecraft to track the magnetopause, which is the boundary where Earth’s magnetic field gives way to the solar wind. Whatever it did for the fledgling field of space science, it gave the United States a badly needed boost in both senses of the word.
Within three years of the start of the space age, exploring machines were being developed for missions both to the Moon and to other planets. Three kinds of missions, each in logical order and of increasing complexity and sophistication, would be worked out for the new explorers during the 1960s: flyby, orbit, and landing.
First and most basically, spacecraft would shoot past the planet or moon and collect preliminary data before either being pulled into an eternal orbit around the Sun or heading out of the solar system. The information, combined with what astronomers turned up with their telescopes, would define the next phase: orbiting. As the term implies, spacecraft following the ones that flew by would drop into orbit around the planet. The obvious advantage of circling for months or years rather than flying by was a phenomenal increase in data because they were collected continuously. And that wealth of new information would in turn tell mission planners where to put the landers down for the final, touch-and-feel phase of robotic exploration. Then, according to plan, people would follow.
Like most of his colleagues, Oran W. Nicks, an aeronautical engineer who ran NASA’s Lunar and Planetary programs during their formative years, liked to give the robot explorers the qualities of living creatures. A “far traveler,” as he lovingly called lunar and planetary spacecraft (more than thirty of which he helped send to the Moon, Venus, and Mars), had to have lifelike qualities and be able to get along on its own very far from home. First, and most obviously, Nicks explained, it had to have a rigid structure that held it together just as a skeleton defines the human shape. It also had to see with its cameras, speak with its radio, listen with its antennas, sniff with its other sensors, keep its balance with gyroscopes and optical sensors, and remember with its tape recorder. And it had to be able to eat and digest sunshine for energy. “Incoming solar energy had to be assimilated to sustain it,” Nicks explained. “Attitude orientation was required to obtain power, to maintain communications, for pointing sensors, and for thermal control. A method of knowing where it was headed was required; thrusters were needed to serve as ‘muscles’ for attitude and course corrections. It had to have some memory and a time sense, plus an ability to interpret and act on commands and to communicate its state of health and its findings.” In the same vein, Donna Shirley, who directed JPL’s Mars exploration program three decades later, would talk about the robots that were sent to crawl over the Red Planet using artificial intelligence as being as “smart” as bugs. And they were.
Lone Rangers
While Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo progressed, a series of three kinds of robots were developed to successively scout the Moon. The first were called Rangers and were designed and built by JPL. The plan called for sending the first two flying over the Moon in highly elliptical orbits so they could measure radiation, magnetic fields, and other properties at close range. Then three others were supposed to crash onto the lunar surface, taking detailed television pictures and collecting data on the electromagnetic field, particles, and other things before they were smashed to splinters. The pictures would be used to calculate where a series of follow-on spacecraft, named Lunar Orbiters and Surveyors, would circle and set down, respectively. The orbiters were supposed to send back high-resolution pictures of likely landing sites, spotting boulders, depressions, and other potential hazards. The lander would hopefully prove beyond doubt that a manned spaceship coming to rest on the lunar surface wouldn’t sink into cosmic quicksand. The best geologists in the country thought the lunar surface was indeed firm enough to support the Apollo landing. But given the catastrophic consequences of being wrong, educated guesses were not good enough. Like Ranger, Surveyor was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Lunar Orbiter was awarded to Langley.
Ranger itself was designed in close conjunction with an interplanetary explorer named Mariner (the family resemblance was unmistakable) and, unlike its far-ranging cousin, very nearly caused the demise of JPL.
Rangers 1 and 2, launched on August 22 and November 18, 1961, were done in by Agena upper stages that failed to restart, leaving both spacecraft stranded in the parking orbits they were supposed to use before heading toward the Moon. Ranger 3 went up on January 26, 1962. This time the Atlas booster went deaf. Unable to receive a command from Canaveral to shut down at the right instant, the big rocket’s engines fired for too long, sending its passenger hurling ahead of and below the Moon at an uncorrectable distance of 20,000 miles. That much was not JPL’s fault.
Ranger 4 actually made it to the Moon on April 26 but crashed on its far side without sending back so much as a single picture because its timing sequencer did not tell the antenna and solar panels to deploy. It therefore virtually ran out of energy and slammed into the lunar surface like a stone.
Webb nevertheless proclaimed the flight to be a resounding triumph. An “outstanding American achievement” is what he made of the embarrassing mishap because, he explained to newsmen with an absolutely straight face, it was the first American spacecraft to reach the Moon. As such, it contributed to what he called the “long strides forward in space” made by the United States. And, NASA’s administrator could not resist adding, Ranger 4 was far more sophisticated than Luna 2. What Webb neglected to mention was that small spheres made from metal pennants and embossed with hammers and sickles rested on the lunar surface as he spoke.54 They had been delivered there by Luna 2 despite its relative unsophistication (or, more likely, because of it).
“The Americans have tried several times to hit the Moon with their rockets,” Khrushchev retorted at his own impromptu news conference. “They have proclaimed for all the world to hear that they launched rockets to the Moon, but they missed every time.” The pennants, he added gleefully, were getting lonesome waiting for an American companion.
“Ranger 4 was tracked by the Goldstone receiver as it passed the leading edge of the Moon,” JPL’s infuriated director shot back before giving the coordinates of the crash site. And if the Russians wanted to confirm that fact, William Pickering added with unbridled anger, they could send one of their cosmonauts to the scene to see for themselves. But he was far from sanguine. The nature of the Ranger program itself was now being questioned by Apollo managers and engineers who needed reliable data on the Moon’s radiation environment and the characteristics of its terrain so they could pick landing sites for the astronauts.
