1967–68
Nobody fully appreciated what a bright, hopeful charm the moon had been until it was suddenly moved back out of reach. The steady climb to a lunar landing had been bracing, with the spaceships flying and the calendar cooperating, and for a while it seemed almost certain that NASA would meet the challenge President Kennedy had thrown down. Now there was nothing; the deadline was less than three years away, and the ships, for the moment at least, were grounded. Worse, what remained was a national mess that stretched well beyond NASA.
If 1967 had been birthed in a fast, hot fire at the Cape, other, larger fires soon seemed to be breaking out everywhere else. Lyndon Johnson could point proudly to his Voting Rights Act and his Civil Rights Act, but laws counted for little if the people they were meant to benefit were still suffering in rural poverty in the South and in broken, stultifying ghettos in the North. That summer, as the nation endured a record-setting heat wave, more than 150 U.S. cities erupted in race riots, and many of them were put to the torch. New York burned in late July, when cars were overturned and set ablaze in the largely segregated neighborhood of Harlem. Newark’s fires raged for six terrible days; riots killed 26 people and injured a thousand. Detroit followed, with 43 deaths, 1,189 injuries, and some 7,200 arrests. Firefighters abandoned a hundred square blocks of the city, which quickly burned to the ground, the flames hurried along by winds of twenty-five miles per hour that struck at just the wrong time.
In October, fires of a different sort were lit, as more than one hundred thousand antiwar protesters, fed up with the endless combat in Southeast Asia, marched on Washington, rallying first at the Lincoln Memorial and then across the Potomac River at the Pentagon. Their loathing for Johnson and his Vietnam adventure was palpable, and the signs they carried were savage. Some read, LBJ—HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY? and, much worse, WHERE’S OSWALD WHEN YOU NEED HIM? Kennedy’s assassin, like Kennedy himself, might be long dead, but the blood in which Johnson’s presidency had begun seemed to be rising back up and threatening to drown him entirely.
Within NASA, the mood was equally bleak. Everyone understood that 1967 was going to be a washout, at least in terms of getting American astronauts off the launchpad. In an agency known for its bravado, doubt crept in. How could it not? The moon project depended on a spacecraft that had proven itself a literal deathtrap, a Saturn V rocket that had never carried men into orbit, and a lunar excursion module that hadn’t even been completely built.
Against the background of these delays, many at NASA were nevertheless impatient to see the Apollo program start flying again, no one more so than the astronauts themselves, Frank Borman among them.
It had been Borman’s own choice to cash out of the Gemini program early, but he had done so in order to get a head start on Apollo. Yet as 1968 began, he was entering his third year without a mission after his sole trip into space aboard Gemini 7. Jim Lovell, John Young, Pete Conrad, and Tom Stafford had two notches on their guns, all of them flying once in the right-hand seat and then going back up, this time in the left. The Gemini program had ended with Lovell, Borman’s former junior, commanding Gemini 12, and that voyage had proved to be an all but flawless finale for the two-man spacecraft. Within the exceedingly ambitious corps of astronauts, the two-time fliers were increasingly starting to look like the real stars of the incoming Apollo class. Borman and the other one-timers somehow seemed second-tier.
Worse for Borman, word had started going around NASA that Bob Gilruth—one of the space agency’s founding wise men and the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston—wanted to take him out of the cockpit altogether. Not long after the fire, it had become clear that Joe Shea, chief of the Apollo program almost from its inception, had to go. It wasn’t entirely Shea’s fault that the early development of the Apollo spacecraft had been such a sloppy business. Still, most people agreed that if the day-to-day operation of the program had been the responsibility of someone like Chris Kraft or Gene Kranz, heads would have been knocked together earlier and the shoddy work exposed a lot sooner. Maybe that wouldn’t have saved Grissom, White, and Chaffee, but the men would at least have had a better chance of surviving.
In April, Shea was moved to a desk job at NASA headquarters in Washington. In July—recognizing the posting as the banishment it was—he resigned from the agency altogether. He was replaced on an interim basis by Gilruth’s deputy, George Low, but a permanent replacement was needed fast. Gilruth, known as a good judge of talent and a master at getting men to take the jobs he needed them to do, couldn’t say exactly what he was looking for in a new Apollo program chief, though he would know it when he saw it—and during the recovery from the fire, he saw it in Borman.
Gilruth had a high opinion of the work Borman had done on the factory floor at Downey, and soon it became an open secret inside NASA that he hoped the astronaut would abandon his dream of traveling to the moon and instead take over the program that would send other men into space instead. But Borman had other ideas: he had been grounded once before, because of a bad eardrum, and he was not about to let the same thing happen again, this time because of a job well done. As soon as his work at Downey allowed, he returned to the training regimen for Apollo and immersed himself in the curriculum, as much to catch up with what he had missed as to make clear to anyone who was watching that he had come to NASA to fly a spacecraft, not a desk.
Finally Gilruth called Borman in for a meeting. He did not waste time before getting to his point: “You know, Frank, I’d very much like to have you run the Apollo program.”
Borman looked back at Gilruth respectfully but said nothing, hoping his silence would say everything.
Perhaps it did. Gilruth immediately seemed to sense where the conversation was going; as he always did in situations like this one, he set about making sure that all parties came away feeling that the right decision had been made. So after a pause he said, “But I also know you want to keep flying, and you don’t have the administrative experience we need right now.”
Borman nodded solemnly in response, trying his best to convey sincere disappointment at this very bad news.
Moving on quickly, Gilruth told him that he had thought a lot about the position and decided that Low might be up to taking it on permanently. “But if you’re really interested,” he said, “I’ll reconsider.”
“No,” Borman replied, perhaps a little too quickly, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”
The two men shook hands on the decision, and with that, Borman was officially back in the flight rotation.
* * *
In early 1968, a full year after the fire, the preliminary mission assignments for the first several Apollo flights were finally released. The space agency’s astronauts had waited for this moment with the nervous excitement of junior high school students anticipating their homeroom assignments, but when Borman saw the slot he’d been given, he was crestfallen. Despite his high standing, despite his yeoman work on the factory floor at Downey, despite the fact that the head of the Manned Spacecraft Center had wanted to put the entire Apollo program under his command, he had once again been handed a stinker.
The first mission was still going to be Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham’s maiden flight of the Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit. Nobody knew what the exact numeral of any Apollo flight would be yet—a lot depended on how many unmanned tests of the Saturn V rocket spacecraft were run—but it was looking like Schirra’s crew would be known as Apollo 7.
After that would come Gemini veterans Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott and rookie Rusty Schweickart—part of the third astronaut class—aboard Apollo 8, test-driving both the Apollo spacecraft and the lunar excursion module (LEM), once again in Earth orbit. Even for men who were eager to peel off from the home planet and fly to the moon, Apollo 8 was a sweet assignment, primarily because getting a first crack at the LEM would be part of the deal.
The lunar module, by even the most charitable definition, was a madman’s machine, different from every aircraft or manned spacecraft ever built before it. Even vehicles designed to blast off from Earth and soar into space still had to fly through the atmosphere before they got there. That meant they needed a certain aesthetic elegance, with the smooth-skinned, tapered-nose backswept shape that was necessary to provide lift and keep air resistance to a minimum. But the LEM didn’t care about any of that. Tucked inside the uppermost stage of the Saturn V booster, it would be carried to space and wouldn’t see starlight until it was out of Earth orbit and on its way to the moon, when it would be extracted from the rocket by the Apollo spacecraft. That meant it could be designed strictly for the job it had to do, which was flying through the vacuum of space, landing on the moon, and then getting off again.
The result was the opposite of elegant: the LEM was a twenty-three-foot-tall, four-legged insectlike beast. Its triangular windows looked like nothing so much as a pair of angry eyes, and its trapezoidal mouth served as the door through which the astronauts would crawl to reach the ladder that would take them down to the lunar surface. The ship was covered in crinkly, reflective insulation, a material that also served as the walls of the crew’s cabin—walls that were no thicker than about three layers of aluminum foil.
For the LEM, weight was everything, since even the Saturn V could lift only so much. From the beginning, the designers at the Grumman Aircraft plant in Bethpage, Long Island, fought to give the machine as much capability as possible, while shaving off every available ounce.
Part of that job was easy, because the LEM was actually a two-part ship. Its first task would be to land on the moon with its four legs and a powerful descent engine. When it was time to take off, the bottom half of the ship would serve as a launch platform, with explosive bolts and a guillotine system cutting the cables and other links to the top half, allowing an ascent engine to carry the remains of the spacecraft—which was essentially the crew cabin—up to lunar orbit.
That cabin would be as spartan as possible. Seats would weigh too much, so they would simply be dispensed with. Besides, the LEM would be doing its work only in the weightlessness of space or in the moon’s one-sixth gravity, so the crew could stand. That also made it possible to eliminate the wraparound windows the initial designers had envisioned; though they would have maximized the astronauts’ field of vision, they’d be very heavy. If the men were standing, they could press their noses—or the faceplates of their helmets—right up against the little triangular portholes and get the same effect.
The wires used in the ship were the narrowest gauge possible, so that they made their own small contribution to weight reduction. But they were also exceedingly fragile and broke like spider’s silk if the builders didn’t handle them just so. To reduce the LEM’s weight even further, the engineers gave all of the metal surfaces a round of what they called chem milling—chemically burning away half a millimeter of thickness here and a quarter millimeter there. This painstaking work made almost no difference in the weight of any one spot, but over the total body of the spacecraft, the reductions added up.
The Apollo 8 crew would have the job of taking this mass of foil origami on its first flight. McDivitt and Schweickart would climb inside, separate from the Apollo spacecraft, and kite around for a few orbits, while Scott piloted the command module alone. If, for some reason, the LEM could not rejoin the Apollo, Scott might be the only one coming home. Unlike the command module, which was equipped with a sturdy heat shield, a LEM would go up like a piece of flash paper if it tried to reenter the atmosphere. People outside of NASA might dismiss the entire flight exercise as just another jaunt around the Earth, but the astronauts knew the complex piloting it involved, and Scott took to describing Apollo 8 as “the connoisseur’s mission.”
Next up would be Borman’s shot. Once again he would get the commander’s left-hand seat, which pleased him. The affable Mike Collins would be in the center seat, and off to the right would be Bill Anders, an eager rookie from the third astronaut class. Borman didn’t know Anders terribly well, but the newcomer already had a reputation as a lunar module wunderkind, someone who had made it his business to understand the strange machine better even than the men who had designed it. If McDivitt’s crew did their job well, Borman’s mission ought to be able to fly to the moon. But to Borman’s great frustration, what the mission planners had in mind for Apollo 9 was little more than a repeat of Apollo 8.
It would be the same basic drill for more or less the same number of orbits, with the one exception that Apollo 9 would end its mission by climbing to an altitude of 4,600 statute miles and practicing the high-dive reentry that astronauts would have to execute when they returned from the moon. That wasn’t just beanbag. A Gemini spacecraft orbited the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour and then eased back into the atmosphere by tapping its brakes until it was no longer moving fast enough to stay aloft. But an Apollo spacecraft returning from the moon would slam into the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 miles per hour, aiming for a narrow keyhole in the sky just a couple of degrees wide. Too steep an approach would cause the ship to burn up on reentry; too shallow and it would skip off the atmosphere like a rock off a pond and then go careering into space forever.
Borman didn’t see why McDivitt’s crew couldn’t just tack the high-altitude reentry onto the end of their flight. Wouldn’t the three Apollo 8 “connoisseurs” want that little finale to their time in space? The first flight of the LEM was historic; the second would be understudy stuff. In the wake of the fire, however, the cautious fellows in the flight planning office weren’t about to take chances again. The journey to the moon would be a slow, incremental process. Not until Apollo 10, 11, 12, or later would anyone go anywhere near the lunar neighborhood.
For Lovell, meanwhile, the Apollo prospects looked brighter. He would have a small role on Borman’s Apollo 9, serving as backup to Collins in case the prime crewman had to be scratched from the lineup. But the odds of that happening were slim: Collins kept exceedingly fit and did not do a lot of the hard drinking and fast driving some of the other astronauts did. If he was assigned to fly a mission, there was very little chance he wouldn’t go.
That meant that Lovell would get a starting spot on a later, distinctly better, flight: the center seat on Apollo 11, between Neil Armstrong on the left and Buzz Aldrin on the right. Apollo 11 might or might not be a lunar landing, and even if it was, Lovell would have to wait overhead in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin flew down in the LEM and got their boots covered with moon dirt. Still, 11 could easily be a bona fide moon shot, an adventure that looked a lot better than the Earth-orbit dog-paddling Borman had been assigned. Perhaps hanging around Gemini a little longer had been the smart play after all.
* * *
The men at Grumman might do brilliant work when designing and building the lunar module, but no one was going anywhere if the Saturn V rocket, which was being built by multiple other contractors, didn’t get off the ground—and that was going to take some doing.
Traveling from the launchpad in Florida to the plains of the moon was, at bottom, a business of using a very big rocket to get a very large payload moving very, very fast—faster than human beings had ever traveled before. That called for a rocket unlike any that had ever been built, and NASA never tired of wowing the world with the size of the monster they had invented. The Saturn V stood 363 feet tall—the height of a thirty-six-story building, or sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, or longer than a football field, including the end zones.
The monster’s weight was just as impressive. Fully fueled, a Saturn V tipped the scales at 6.5 million pounds, or a third again as heavy as a Navy destroyer. A Navy destroyer, however, moved on its belly, sliding across the surface of the ocean, a prisoner of gravity. The Saturn V flew.
Each of the giant rocket’s five first-stage engines gulped three tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel per second, burning through more than five hundred tons in the 168 seconds of life given to that stage before it was done with its job. At 41 miles of altitude, the first stage was jettisoned, allowing the second to take over. That stage carried five smaller engines that burned through 340,000 gallons of fuel in just 384 seconds. After that came a third stage with a single engine that would give the astronauts the final kick into Earth orbit and would later be lit a second time to sling them out toward the moon.
This extraordinary machine was also extraordinarily dangerous. When the first stage was lit and the rocket was just beginning to haul itself off the pad, the engines would be generating 160 million horsepower—as much energy as would be produced if every river and stream in the United States were running through a single hydroelectric turbine at once. Only a nuclear explosion could produce a louder man-made sound than a Saturn V taking off. And if the rocket went rogue and exploded on takeoff, well, the physicists had pretty good numbers on that, too: they calculated that the blast would create a fireball 1,408 feet in diameter, burn for 33.9 seconds, and generate temperatures in excess of 2,500 degrees.
The first launch of the monster machine—the mission called Apollo 4—had taken place on the morning of November 9, 1967. The show was sensational. Spectators crowded the Florida coast the way they usually would only for a manned flight, and they got what they came for.
“My golly, our building’s shaking here! Our building’s shaking!” shouted Walter Cronkite in his temporary studio, three miles from the launch site. Cronkite had always reacted to rockets the way a small boy reacts to diesel locomotives, and he didn’t care who knew it. Inside the makeshift newsroom, the picture window facing the launchpad—built extra large to allow the newsmen to see what they were describing—began rattling in its frame. The crew in the booth leapt forward to hold it in place. Cronkite, clearly having the time of his life, helped them.
“The roar is terrific!” he called as the building’s ominous-sounding tremors became audible to viewers. “This big glass window is shaking, we’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go! Part of our roof is coming in here!”
Things weren’t much calmer in the firing room that was Cape Kennedy’s Mission Control. Plaster dust rained down from the ceiling, settling on consoles that were typically kept free of the slightest bit of dirt. The engine’s thunder—which reached 135 to 140 decibels, exceeding the pain threshold, and produced tectonic vibrations that were detected by seismometers as far north as New York—could easily be heard inside the reinforced building. The controllers whooped and cheered at their dusty desks. Even Wernher von Braun, who was using binoculars to watch the launch through the firing room’s more robust window, allowed himself a moment of jubilation.
“Go, baby, go!” shouted the German designer, who had never been heard to call anyone or anything “baby” before.
It took less than twelve minutes for the third stage of the Saturn and the unmanned Apollo spacecraft to reach Earth orbit, and once the rocket and its cargo got there, they did everything that was asked of them. The Apollo beamed healthy vital signs down to Houston, reassuring administrators that if astronauts had been aboard, they’d be just fine. Just under three hours—or two orbits—into the flight, the third stage fired to boost the Apollo from its safe, 119-mile-high orbit to a nosebleed altitude of 11,000 miles; after this, the command module separated and executed the acrobatic, deep-space reentry flawlessly, landing less than ten miles from the prime splashdown site near Hawaii.
“That was the best birthday candle I ever had!” Arthur Rudolph, a von Braun assistant who’d turned sixty that day, exulted to reporters after emerging from the launch room.
That perfect trip, however, would turn out to be the last gift NASA would get from its big rocket for a while. The launch of Apollo 5 came just over two months later. This time a smaller, two-stage Saturn 1B rocket carried a lunar module—given the honorific LEM-1—to orbit so that NASA could see how the little lander worked. In what might have been a portent, the top stage of the Saturn 1B was the same one that would have helped carry Grissom, White, and Chaffee to space and was part of the stack that had been on the pad the night the men died. The stage hadn’t been damaged by the fire, and with Congress ready to pounce on any sign of waste, NASA wasn’t about to throw the thing away just because it was unlucky.
Even so, the mission did seem to be snakebit. The Saturn 1B did its minimal job, getting the LEM into orbit, but the lander itself underperformed. Its computer misread the commands being sent to it, causing its descent engine to cut off far too early. And when its ascent stage separated, the computer tripped up again, never recording that half the mass of the ship was gone, leaving the ascent stage tumbling through its orbit as it tried to regain its balance in the wrongheaded belief that it weighed twice as much as it actually did.
The newspapers were charitable, declaring the mission a qualified success, if only because the LEM had finally flown. But on a moon mission, the LEM would have almost a zero tolerance for error, and a lander that flew like the LEM-1 would have surely killed its crew.
The last of the unmanned flights—or the last if NASA had any hope that Apollo 7 would finally return American astronauts to space—was set for three months later, on April 4, 1968, when the Saturn V would fly for the second time. The hope was that with Apollo 6, the big booster would give the space agency its swagger again.
This launch of the Saturn rocket was as spectacular as the first. But two minutes into the flight, unstable fuel pressures in the first stage caused the rocket to bounce up and down like a pogo stick as it flew, oscillating so rapidly that it threatened the structural stability of the whole stack. Any astronauts who had been aboard would have been injured, perhaps badly; as it was, the violent shaking knocked loose two of the petal-like panels in the upper compartment that would have been carrying a lunar module if one had been on board.
No sooner had the first stage been jettisoned and the second stage lit than it, too, became unstable. That caused two of the five engines to cut out completely and—according to the alarming telemetry data coming down from the ship—also caused a twelve-inch structural I-beam inside the stage to bend; this, in turn, threatened to shake the engines loose completely. That would lead to what the engineers would call a “catastrophic failure,” and what everyone else would call an explosion. Somehow, the second stage continued to function and the third stage limped into orbit with the Apollo spacecraft atop it, but there was no dressing up the outcome of this mission.
“This was a disaster,” Kraft said after he emerged from Mission Control, daring anyone inside NASA to try to prettify what had just happened. “I want to emphasize that. It was a disaster.”
Seventeen months had now elapsed since an American astronaut had flown in space. Only twenty months remained before one of them was supposed to set foot on the moon. For the moment, America’s space program seemed to be moving in reverse.
* * *
If there was anything good about Apollo 6, it was the mission’s brevity: it began at one second after 7:00 a.m. eastern time and ended less than two hours later with the splashdown of the command module in the central Pacific. And although it was a terrible day for Kraft, for NASA, and for the Apollo program as a whole, the press reports on the disappointing mission would prove to be fleeting.
Ten hours after the Saturn V’s command module splashed down, at 6:05 p.m. central time, the Reverend Martin Luther King stepped onto the balcony outside of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a city that was in the midst of a sanitation workers’ strike. King was in town to deliver a speech on the workers’ behalf. Standing with him on the balcony was Ben Branch, a bandleader and jazz saxophonist who was due to perform at a union gathering that evening.
“Ben, make sure you play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ in the meeting tonight,” King said. “Play it real pretty.”
At that moment, a bullet from a Remington Model 760 rifle—fired from a rooming house some fifty yards away—struck King in the cheek, jaw, neck, and jugular vein. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital, but there would be no recovering from his wounds. He was pronounced dead just over an hour later.
Even before King’s assassination, it seemed certain that 1968 was going to be a blood-soaked year. At the end of January—during Tet Nguyen Dan, the Vietnamese New Year—more than 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops flooded across the demilitarized zone, striking thirteen major targets in South Vietnam and one hundred smaller towns and villages. The attacks would lead to 165,000 casualties on both sides and more than 14,000 civilian casualties. The term “Tet Offensive” would immediately enter the vernacular as shorthand for both the hopelessness of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the spent force that Lyndon Johnson’s once-promising administration had become.
Johnson himself seemed to know it. On the evening of March 31, he had delivered a televised address to the nation, ostensibly to talk about the conduct of the war. But he clearly had more on his mind: at the end of the broadcast he dropped a political bombshell, announcing, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
If Johnson thought that sacrificing his political life would calm the furies that were raging that year, he was mistaken. In the wake of Martin Luther King’s murder, ten major cities—including Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.—erupted in riots, resulting in dozens of deaths, thousands of arrests, and tens of millions of dollars in property damage. The fight to succeed Johnson turned ugly, too, as the various wings of his party tore themselves apart. In June, Senator Robert Kennedy, who had become a candidate for president only three months earlier, was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel, just minutes after winning the California primary. The delegates he won that night were pledged to a ghost, and once again the mourners and the drummers and the catafalque for a Kennedy appeared. And still the violence raged on: in August, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, twenty-three thousand club-wielding police officers descended on ten thousand antiwar demonstrators, leading to what would later be called a “police riot.”
Through it all—quietly, doggedly—the engineers and planners and astronauts at NASA labored on. In their windowless rooms, on their guarded bases, they lost track nearly altogether of the flaming world around them. To the extent that they noticed the explosions of violence at all, it was only as a dull thumping beyond the walls, a dim flashing through a very thick scrim.