Apollo 5 on 22 January 1968 was the first flight test of the Lunar Module, unmanned, in Earth orbit. There were problems. The computer shut down the LM’s descent engine prematurely on its first burn. Flight controllers took over and continued with an alternative mission. Now another question arose: should they repeat the flight? After considerable technical debate, it was decided that the next flight with the LM would be manned – which it was, fourteen months later. Apollo 6, three months after Apollo 5, was to be a simple repeat of Apollo 4, but it wasn’t.
For the first two minutes of Apollo 6’s flight, the five F-1 engines on the first stage burned normally, but then experienced peculiar thrust variations, like a pogo stick, lasting about 30 seconds. Then when the second stage was operational and four minutes into a six-minute ‘burn’, two of the five engines shut down, requiring the others to fire for an additional 59 seconds to compensate. After a difficult ascent, during which the upper stage was at times flying backwards, it ended up in the wrong orbit. As if that wasn’t enough, the upper stage fired to reignite for its second burn to place it into a higher orbit. ‘If this had been a manned flight,’ wrote Slayton in his memoir, Deke, ‘the escape tower on the Apollo would have been commanded to fire, pulling the spacecraft away from the Saturn for a parachute landing in the Atlantic.’
By March 1968, NASA had still to fully recover from the Apollo 1 tragedy and was months away from flying a piloted Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit, let alone in lunar orbit. Many Soviet officials believed that it would take a miracle for the Americans to successfully carry out a sequential series of successful Apollo missions in the months leading to a first landing by the decade’s end. But in many ways, the Russians were viewing American capabilities like their own. Failures were an accepted part of the Soviet space effort, more so than in the US.
In a diary entry in March 1968, Kamanin wrote:
It took us three extra years to build the N1 and the L3, which let the United States take the lead. The Americans have already carried out the first test flight of a lunar spacecraft, and in 1969 they plan to perform five manned flights under the Apollo program.
Their test Moon ship lifted off on 2 March 1968, into a circular Earth orbit. Soon afterwards the Block D booster stage fired for 459 seconds to put it into a highly elliptical orbit with a high point of 354,000 km – lunar distance. TASS did not announce anything of note about the launch, except to name the spaceship Zond 4 (zond being the generic Russian word for ‘probe’). At the end of its mission it evidently passed through the atmosphere safely and was about to deploy its parachutes near the West African coast when the emergency destruct system on the descent capsule ignited. A destructive charge had been included on the spacecraft for fear that the Americans may get hold of it. Another test flight took place the following month. This time the third stage failed to ignite and the emergency rescue system was activated. The political leadership was extremely worried by the accumulating series of failures in the program. Despite them, Mishin was ordered to accelerate the pace of work on the L1 to launch a crew around the Moon by October 1968.
A test flight around the Moon was scheduled for July but days before, as the rocket and spacecraft were being tested on the pad, the Block D stage suddenly exploded, killing one person. The aftermath of the accident was extremely dangerous. Observers watched in terror. The lunar spacecraft and part of Block D were balanced, ready to fall and explode at any time. Engineers risked their lives dismantling the explosive wreckage. The July and August lunar launch windows were abandoned.
On 6 May Neil Armstrong came close to being killed. He was flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston. This was basically a single jet engine pointed downwards. Called the ‘flying bedstead’, it was notoriously tricky to handle. On a simulated lunar descent, leaking propellant caused a total failure of his flight controls and forced Armstrong to eject. Alan Bean, one of the intake of astronauts after Armstrong, saw him that afternoon back at his desk in the astronaut office. Bean then heard colleagues in the hall talking about the accident, and asked them, ‘When did this happen?’ About an hour ago, they replied. Bean returned to Armstrong and said, ‘I just heard the funniest story!’ Armstrong said, ‘What?’ ‘I heard that you bailed out of the LLRV an hour ago.’ ‘Yeah, I did,’ replied Armstrong. ‘I lost control and had to bail out of the darn thing.’ ‘I can’t think of another person,’ Bean recalls, ‘let alone another astronaut, who would have just gone back to his office after ejecting a fraction of a second before getting killed.’
In the summer of 1968 the US press was full of rumours about the impending launch of a super-heavyweight Soviet rocket comparable to the Saturn 5. The media in the West did not know the details about how badly it was going for the Russians. James Webb, said: ‘there are no signs that the Soviets are cutting back as we are. New test and launch facilities are steadily added, and a number of spaceflight systems more advanced than any heretofore used are nearing completion.’ Later, George Mueller wrote in a memorandum distributed to Apollo contractors that the Russians were developing a ‘large booster, larger by a factor of two, than our Saturn 5’.
As summer gave way to autumn the piloted circumlunar program was getting into deeper trouble. In four tests of the L1 spacecraft since late 1967 there had been three complete failures and one partial success – the mission of Zond 4 in March 1968. Another L1 spacecraft had been destroyed during ground preparations for a test launch in July 1968. It was under this cloud that the first of the three remaining L1 spacecraft arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for a new series of attempts beginning with the lunar launch window in September. This time the L1 launch was perfect. The Proton booster lifted off on 15 September with the Moon suspended tantalisingly above the pad. At an altitude of 160 km, the third stage ignited and after a tense 251 seconds the stack went into a perfect Earth orbit of 191 by 219 km. After a circuit around Earth the Block D fired a second time to send it towards the Moon. Shortly afterwards the Soviet press announced the launch, designating the mission Zond 5. It was the first time in their circumlunar program that a spacecraft had been successfully sent towards the Moon. Engineers and cosmonauts were jubilant. A few days later it circled around the Moon at a distance of 1,960 km and was flung onto a return trajectory towards Earth. It splashed down on 21 September in the Indian Ocean, where it was hauled in by the Soviet Navy – watched closely by the US Navy. A pair of tortoises were on board, among other animals, and they survived their ordeal, becoming the first earthlings to go to the Moon.
Those responsible for the Russians’ large booster – the N1 – knew it was a gamble. The so-called Council for the Problems of Mastering the Moon met on 9 October to discuss the overall status of the Soviet lunar landing program. Mishin said that the first N1 flight model would only be able to lift a disappointing 76 tons but a modification of the second stage would allow the attainment of the 95 tons needed for a lunar landing by a single cosmonaut. More improvements might make it possible to take two cosmonauts to the Moon’s surface. Academy of Sciences President Keldysh was one of the strongest supporters of the two-cosmonaut plan, considering sending just one cosmonaut very risky; but then he made the somewhat reckless proposal that they should seriously consider landing two cosmonauts to the Moon on the very first launch of the N1. If that was impossible, then the mission should be to land a lone cosmonaut. Brezhnev was keen for some success and is reported to have said: ‘We should prepare for a manned mission to the Moon straight after the first successful launch of the N1, without waiting for it to be finally developed.’ Brezhnev’s demands emphasize the gap between the people building the spacecraft and those who controlled the money. One could say that the politicians did not understand the true engineering facts of the situation, but then again, the engineers themselves seemed to be turning a blind eye towards them.
The Zond 5 mission was the first real success in the L1 Moon program. It allowed the USSR to plan on flying a crew on a circumlunar mission in January 1969, dependent upon two more successful L1 flights, even though many realized that was wishful thinking. The cosmonauts had almost completed their training program and it was hoped that one of the crews would make history as the first humans to fly from Earth to the Moon. But the men training for a circumlunar mission were not the only cosmonauts preparing for spaceflight in the fall of 1968. By August, cosmonauts Beregovoi, Volynov, and Shatalov had completed their preparation for the first piloted Soyuz mission since the Soyuz 1 tragedy more than a year before.
More by luck than planning, the Soviet ‘return to flight’ Soyuz mission would take place in time for the 51st anniversary of the October Revolution. The idea was to carry out a manned repeat of the successful automated docking of a year before; that is, for one cosmonaut in an active Soyuz to link up with a passive automated Soyuz. The two ships would remain docked for a few hours before separating and carrying out independent missions. Such a conservative rendezvous and docking mission would hopefully lead the way for the long-delayed inter-ship cosmonaut transfer attempt. The Soviet political leadership was anxious to resume space missions after the long gap, particularly because of NASA’s forthcoming Apollo 7 mission in October – the first manned US spaceflight since the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967.
Consider the mood of America as it approached the end of 1968, by any accounting one of the unhappiest years of the 20th century. It was a year of riots, burning cities, sickening assassinations, and universities forced to close their doors. In Vietnam the twelve-month toll of American dead rose to 15,000, and the cost of the war topped $25 billion. By mid-December the country’s despair was reflected in the Associated Press’s nationwide poll of editors, who chose as the two top stories of 1968 the slayings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; Time magazine picked a generic symbol, ‘the dissenter’, as its Man of the Year. The poll and the Man of the Year were scheduled for year-end publication.
Webb left NASA on 7 October. He had several reasons, some of them personal, some of them strategic. He had been in the job for eight years and it had taken its toll; however, the next year could see the Moon landing and it would be a fine climax to his role if he was the administrator when it happened. On the other hand there were political issues. Johnson had told him that he was not running for president in 1968 and protocol dictated that on the arrival of a new president, all heads of agencies like NASA offered their resignations. But the first manned Apollo flight was coming, as well as Apollo 8’s voyage around the Moon. Webb felt that if anything went wrong he didn’t want to be a defensive administrator but have the freedom outside NASA to defend it. It would also give whoever won the presidential race – Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey – a clean sheet should there be any loss of life. As expected, Thomas Paine, took over as acting administrator.
The redesigned Apollo capsule was launched as Apollo 7 on 11 October 1968 from Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy. On board were Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham – the Apollo 1 backup crew. It was not only the United States’ return to flight after the tragedy but an important shakedown flight to test the cone-shaped Apollo Command Module for the first time in space, along with its associated Service Module. It was also the first manned flight of a Saturn booster; in this case, the Saturn 1B variant. Sixty-eight metres tall, men had never ridden into space on a more powerful rocket.
Schirra was now 45 years old and making his third spaceflight. Alongside him were two rookies. Knowing that it was almost certainly his last trip into space, Schirra was determined that it should be a perfect mission and especially Schirra’s mission. Unfortunately, shortly after lift-off he developed a cold.
The mission was to include a television broadcast from the Command Module. Schirra tells the story:
We launched on a Friday. I remember this very specifically. In orbit, our so-called Friday night, Donn Eisele was on watch and Cunningham and I were supposed to be sleeping. And I hear Donn saying, ‘Wally won’t like that.’ I put on my mike and listened in. ‘Oh, we’re supposed to put on the television tomorrow morning.’ I said, ‘Well, we didn’t have it in the schedule, gentlemen. That doesn’t go on till Sunday morning.’ I should have said, ‘I don’t want to interrupt Howdy Doody [a popular TV program]’, but I wouldn’t have gotten away with it. What I really was saying, ‘We have not checked this system out. It’s in the flight plan to be checked at this point in time. We’ll check it at that point in time.’
We did The Wally, Walt, and Donn Show Sunday. But by then, everybody was saying, ‘These guys are getting testy up there. They’re not mutinied, but they’re not going along with the flight controllers.’ I have yet to meet a flight controller that ever died falling out of a chair. That was my whole attitude from then on. ‘Don’t mess with me, guys! This is my command’, and I wasn’t kidding. And, ‘I’ll take all the advice, all the information you can give me, but don’t push us around.’ We’re still worried about whether this is a safe spacecraft or not. We had even gotten to the point where they were going to shave all our hair off in case there was a fire. And why am I going to start running a TV show for somebody if I haven’t checked the camera out, all the electrical circuits, piece by piece? Ah-hah, it works. Now we’ll show you TV. Oddly enough, we got an Emmy for that Wally, Walt, and Donn Show, so I can’t really say it was a bad deal.
Well, Apollo 7 became very important. If we had not had a success on Apollo 7, we really don’t know what would’ve happened to the space program. Another accident and the fainthearted in the country, as we have a tendency to be, would’ve been clamouring to stop it. There was some real bickering back and forth between Wally and the ground. I, frankly, have never felt like I had any kind of a problem with the ground, but Wally was still demonstrating that it was Wally’s flight and Wally was in charge. He has maintained since, that he felt the responsibility. He’s never said that what he did was anything except the responsible thing to do. I really think it’s a case of, on some instances, Wally wanting to insist he was in charge when nobody cared who was in charge anyway.
The mission lasted almost eleven days and was successful. They simulated many of the events that would be required for a mission to the Moon. At one stage their rocket propelled them into a 269-mile-high orbit; ‘that was a real kick in the pants,’ exclaimed Schirra. Re-entry was normal, although Schirra refused to don his helmet for the procedure. The Apollo equipment received a thumbs-up, even if the commander of the flight didn’t. Prior to the flight the Apollo 7 crew did not have a good reputation. According to Collins, Schirra was late to work every morning and never apologized, and never tried to catch up with the schedule. Cunningham ‘bitched’ all the time and Eisele served as a good-natured referee who didn’t quite understand what was going on half the time. After the mission none of them flew in space again. But Wally’s flight was an ending rather than a beginning. It marked the end of the slippage in the Apollo program.
Just a few days after Apollo 7 returned, the unmanned Soyuz 2 passed over its launch site and Soyuz 3 lifted off with Colonel Georgi Beregovoi aboard. It was the first ever piloted launch from Site 31, the second launch complex at the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the 25th manned spaceflight. At 47 years old, Beregovoi was the oldest person to go into space at the time. When in orbit the Igla automated docking system brought Soyuz 3 to within 200 metres of Soyuz 2 before Beregovoi took over manual control. But the two ships were not aligned perfectly and instead of stabilising his ship along a direct axis to Soyuz 2, Beregovoi put his spacecraft into an incorrect orientation. This meant that Soyuz 2’s radar system, sensing something was wrong, automatically turned its nose away to prevent what it saw as an incorrect docking. Beregovoi did not see the problem and performed a fly-around, and then tried to approach Soyuz 2 for a second time but the same thing happened, by which time he had almost exhausted all the propellant he had available for such manoeuvres, meaning that further docking attempts had to be called off. For three days, 22 hours, and 50 minutes Beregovoi had circled the Earth, completing 64 orbits, and while his flight may not have been successful, at least it was not a disaster.
Because of delays with the next flight-ready L1 vehicle, the Russians had to forgo the October lunar launch window, thus shifting any possible launch into November. Soviet space planners were aware of the rumours of an Apollo lunar-orbital mission by the end of the year so they resorted to their usual public tactic of obfuscation, giving contradictory positions. On 14 October Academician Sedov, who was representing the Soviet Union at the 19th Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in New York, said that the ‘question of sending astronauts to the Moon at this time is not an item on our agenda. The exploration of the Moon is possible, but is not a priority.’ It was a lie.
The success of the Apollo 7 mission crystallized an audacious idea that had been kicked around at NASA. It was in early August that George Low, the Deputy Director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, ordered his staff to work on a plan in which an Apollo Command and Service Module launched on a Saturn 5 would go directly to lunar orbit. It was a risky decision as it would be only the third launch of the Saturn 5 booster, the first time men had flown on it, as well as the obvious fact that the risks of a going into lunar orbit were far greater than going into orbit around the Earth. But the advantages were many in technical and scientific knowledge as well as a demonstration of what the United States could achieve. A few weeks later NASA HQ gave its approval for the mission provided that Apollo 7 was successful. Undoubtedly, another reason was the fact that Zond 5 had gone around the Moon and, as far as NASA knew, a Soviet manned circumlunar flight could take place at any time. The Russians had a lunar launch window in December 1968. Would they be able to upstage Apollo 8?
How did Deke Slayton select the men to fly? Mostly by seniority. An astronaut stood in line until his turn came, though the order of assignment within his own group was important. ‘They are a durn good bunch of guys, real fine troops, a bunch of chargers,’ said Slayton in 1972. ‘It’s not the kind of organization where you have to keep pointing people in the right direction and kicking them to get them to go. Everybody would like to fly every mission, but that’s impossible, of course. They all understand that, even if it makes some of them unhappy.’ Slayton was rarely accused of unfairness, a remarkable achievement considering the stakes involved; his own eventual assignment, at age 48, to the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz docking mission (detente in space) was universally popular.
Not all astronauts were equal, of course. Before the first manned Apollo flights, six crews had been formed, commanded by Schirra, Borman, McDivitt, Stafford, Armstrong, and Conrad. Before he flew Apollo 7, Schirra announced he was quitting afterwards, and that left five. Which one would land first on the Moon? It depended on the luck of the draw. ‘All the crews were essentially equal,’ said Slayton, ‘and we had confidence that any one of them could have done that first job.’
At one time either Borman or McDivitt seemed likeliest to be first on the Moon; after they flew their early Gemini missions they were sent straight to Apollo instead of being recycled into later Gemini flights. But in 1968 two things happened to derail this prospect: McDivitt, scheduled to lift off on the first Saturn 5 (Apollo 8), declined the opportunity because it would not carry the LM, on which he had practised so long. Borman, scheduled for Apollo 9, was ‘highly enthusiastic’ about Apollo 8, LM or no LM, but in deference to wife and children he decided that it would be his last flight.
Borman’s backup was Armstrong; McDivitt’s was Conrad. In each case, the backup shifted with the prime, so Armstrong in the normal rotation of commanding the third mission after being a backup, became commander of Apollo 11, which was considered to be the first landing mission, and Conrad lost his chance to be first man on the Moon by moving to Apollo 12. There was also the possibility that Apollo 10, commanded by Stafford, might be the first Moon lander because George Mueller initially saw no point in going to the Moon a second time without touching down. But the LM wasn’t completely adapted for the task (it weighed too much) and the program management decided that they were not ready for the big step.
Apollo 7’s achievement led to a rapid review of Apollo 8’s options. The Apollo 7 astronauts went through six days of debriefing for the benefit of Apollo 8, and on 28 October the Manned Space Flight Management Council chaired by Mueller met at Houston to investigate every phase of the forthcoming mission. Next day came a lengthy systems review of the Apollo 8 spacecraft, which had been designated 103. Paine made the go/no go review of the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission on 11 November at NASA Headquarters in Washington. By this time, nearly all the sceptics had become converts. At the end of the meeting Mueller put a recommendation for lunar orbit into writing, and Paine approved it. He telephoned the decision to the White House, and the message was laid on President Johnson’s desk while he was conferring with Richard M. Nixon, elected his successor six days earlier.