Some called it luck.
Some called it preparation meeting opportunity.
Some called it destiny.
Some called it arguably the greatest call ever made in the MOCR with the success or failure of a mission hanging in the balance.
The truth is that it was a combination of all these things, and it began on John Aaron’s drive home from a difficult day at work a year or so earlier.
It had been a long day. The MOCR was not actually even controlling the test—Aaron, flight director Glynn Lunney, and maybe a handful of others were just listening in and evaluating whether or not the CSM’s instrumentation and software were in working order. Astronauts—years later, Aaron could not remember which ones—had been flipping switches in the spacecraft all day and into the night, to the point where local test operator “astronauts” had taken over. It was around midnight, and Aaron was already exhausted when the capsule’s systems experienced a complete brownout.
Rather than completely erasing data from his console monitor, the problem instead caused a random set of nonsensical numbers to appear. Aaron could hear controllers at the Cape trying to figure out what had just happened, and to make matters worse, their fix for the situation was not working. Almost immediately, Aaron went to Lunney.
Glynn, I know we’re not supposed to be making inputs during this run, but they’re screwing around with this while they’ve got the whole Command Module powered by only one battery. That battery’s going to heat up and probably quit if we don’t call them.
Lunney knew that when Aaron spoke in virtually any situation, much less one that he felt this strongly about, he could be trusted. Although he was tired, Aaron had the presence of mind to grab some screen shots of the data that had appeared on his monitor. Before he finally headed home for the night, he had hard copies made.
That was the way John Aaron’s brain worked—it was the random numbers on his screen that intrigued him. It was not good enough that the simulation was over. It was not even sufficient that his gut feeling on the battery had been absolutely correct. He had something else on his mind as he trudged to his car in the early morning quiet for the trip home. What caused the upset in the first place, that crazy, random pattern on his readouts?
Aaron and Dick Brown, an instrumentation guru in the CSM SSR back room, spent the entire next day on the issue. The men had first worked together during Gemini, when Brown was with McDonnell Aircraft. So valued was Brown’s input that NASA management convinced him to move over to North American as the company struggled to get its Command Module off the ground. Brown was the unassuming quiet type, steady and hard-working, and almost everyone knew that he was the go-to guy when they needed an in-depth analysis or no-nonsense answer.
Together, Aaron and Brown came up with an answer for the electrical brownout.
The design of the CSM instrumentation was a mixed bag when it came to telemetry. Most subsystems converted their own sensor signals into compatible signals for direct input to onboard meters and a telemetry system for downlink to displays in the MOCR. Nearly fifty others depended on a centrally located box—the Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE)—to convert signals into usable data. A large portion of them were associated with the CSM’s electrical power system. The box had redundant power supplies, and the primary supply contained a trip circuit that would shut the whole thing down if a large swing in direct-current voltage took place. The auxiliary power supply was a backup, and when selected the SCE would attempt to continue to operate even with low input voltage.
That was what had happened during the integrated test. The SCE box’s primary power supply tripped off, with outputs frozen at levels that made no sense whatsoever. Other equipment in the Command Module cycled off due to the undervoltage conditions as well. “Quite a confusing mess to behold,” Aaron recalled. “The test conductor seemed at a loss as to what to do.” Reconnecting the ground power supplies back to the main buses cleared up most of the lights and alarms.
Aaron did not document the solution other than to go over with other EECOMs how the general test configuration had been screwed up. When it came to the odd way the SCE box reacted to the brownout, Aaron did not so much as jot down a note anywhere. He just filed the information away in the deep recesses of his mind, where it waited to be called back up on a moment’s notice.
That moment came at just past 10:22 a.m. in Houston on 14 November 1969, a little more than thirty-six seconds into the flight of Apollo 12.
Mission Rule 1-404 stated it clearly enough, that a vehicle would not be launched when its flight path would carry it through a cumulonimbus—or thunderstorm—cloud formation. Some would later suggest that the rule was waived because President Nixon was at the Cape to watch Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean start their mission, but that was not it. The launch team on site in Florida felt comfortable with launching in the rain, dark clouds hovering just a thousand feet above the launch pad. The sky was so dark in some photos, it appeared as if the liftoff took place in the middle of the night rather than nearly noon. Raindrops splattered a motion-picture camera recording the whole thing.
As soon as the Saturn V began to move upward, chatter started back in the MOCR. Down in the front row, booster officer Frank Van Rensselaer was first up.
Thrust is go, all engines.
Gerry Griffin, working his first ascent in his debut as lead flight director, was all business.
Roger, Booster.
Next came FIDO Jay Greene, who gave a verbal thumbs-up for the roll program that set the Saturn V on its course toward orbit.
Flight, FIDO. We’re go on the RP.
Conrad did not sound much bothered by the commotion. It was almost possible to imagine the gap-toothed grin spreading across his face as he reported back to capcom Jerry Carr.
Roger, cleared the tower. I’ve got a pitch and a roll program, and this baby is really going.
Roger, Pete.
That’s a lovely liftoff. That’s not bad at all.
Conrad spoke way too soon.
The instant retro officer Chuck Deiterich told Griffin that clocks onboard the spacecraft and in the MOCR were in synch, at 36.5 seconds in, a burst of static crackled through headsets in the MOCR. Atmospheric conditions were just right, and lightning sparked by the electrical discharges of the Saturn V and its long contrail back to the ground hammered the vehicle. Fifteen and a half seconds later, it happened again.
With the feedback still ringing in his ears, Griffin shot a glance at the large trajectory display at the front of the room. Was the vehicle spinning wildly out of control? Glynn Lunney was riding shotgun with him that day, and they exchanged a quick glance. Griffin’s first call was not to Aaron, but to Jay Greene.
How you looking, FIDO?
Greene’s response was immediate, and it was good news.
We’re go, Flight. We’re good. Right on target.
The CSM was launched with cabin pressure about a half pound above ambient atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psi. At about 12,000 feet in altitude, the difference grew to about 6 psi. The capsule had to start venting or else come apart at the seams from the inside out. Larry Sheaks, watching over the environmental control systems back in the aeromed SSR, chimed in right on time even as a thousand other thoughts raced through Aaron’s mind.
Cabin relieving, EECOM.
At that moment, Conrad told the room what was already painfully clear.
Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out.
Carr had nothing to offer, other than a simple acknowledgment.
Roger.
“One of the watchwords was, ‘Keep your trap shut until somebody figures out what the situation is,’” said Carr, who likened the scene in the room to pandemonium in those first few seconds. “You don’t send anything up there unless the flight director tells you to. I guess the important thing was to keep your trap shut, listen, and try and understand. If you can help with the problem on the mission control loop, you can do that, but you’ve got no business calling information up to the crew without clearance from the flight director.”
Conrad commenced to reading off the longest litany of launch anomalies anybody in the MOCR had ever heard.
I got three fuel-cell lights, an AC Bus light, a fuel-cell disconnect, AC Bus overload 1 and 2, Main Bus A and B out.
Less than a minute into his first launch as flight director, Griffin knew that the possibility of an abort was all too real. At first, he had thought the problem might just be something as simple as instrumentation. When Conrad started calling off his caution and warning lights, Griffin’s brief glimmer of hope was blown completely out of the water. The simulations he had been through were always tough, but even those did not seem this bad. “I thought, ‘Good God, this can’t be,’” Griffin said. “My next thought was, ‘If we have to abort, let’s get some more altitude and give us more time for the chutes to work.’ An abort is never a good thing. At best, it’s pretty dynamic. At worst, it can be catastrophic.”
The pattern Aaron was seeing on his two monitors was familiar. The numbers, almost to two decimal places, looked the same, but when and where had he seen them before? Sy Liebergot had been on the EECOM console leading up to the launch, and after sticking around following his shift, he remembered Aaron staring intently at his screen not saying a word. As Griffin called out to him, a thought struck Aaron like a ton of bricks.
How’s it . . . how’s it looking, EECOM?
Aaron replied, but it was not to Griffin. He called back to James J. “Jim” Kelly, his electrical power systems controller in the vehicle systems SSR. Kelly was in night school when he got his start at MSC, working as a security guard. He wound up as a sergeant who oversaw the badging station, and it was there that he met the people who set him on a course that eventually led to the SSR. The two men eventually became so close that Kelly usually called Aaron by his family nickname, and “Bud” Aaron had served as the best man at Kelly’s wedding to wife Brenda less than two weeks earlier.
Bud had an idea that he quickly tried to run by Kelly.
Is that the SCE?
His friend sounded unsure.
Well, I don’t know, John. It sure looks like it.
Kelly had been in on monitoring the test the year before, and he called the forty-some-odd-hour grind “the stupidest thing we ever did, but let me tell you what that stupid thing did.” That was where they had both seen the brownout, and he had known about the SCE fix as well. He just did not come back to it as quickly as Aaron. “I’m going to give John Aaron that one,” Kelly said. “Let me tell ya . . . I knew what had happened, I saw what had happened. My mind didn’t click as fast as his, okay? Once he said that, it rang a bell. There was no panic.”
Aaron’s SSR support was interrupted by Griffin again trying to get an answer, this time sounding more insistent.
EECOM, what do you see?
Fifty-one seconds after the first strike, Aaron gave Griffin an answer. There was no uncertainty in his voice as he gave his recommendation, although it might have spilled out of his mouth a bit faster than his Oklahoma drawl might normally have allowed.
Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux.
Aaron was sure the first part of his problem was about to be solved. “When I made the call, I was a hundred percent confident that would fix the problem that I was trying to fix first, and that was to get some valid data,” he said. “I was getting all these nonsensical readouts on my tube, and the crew was talking about all the lights that were on in the spacecraft and all the alarms going off. I was staring at data I knew wasn’t valid.”
The flight director had never heard of the switch before, and did not so much as have a clue as to where it was located.
Say again? SCE to Aux?
Aux.
Griffin repeated the request, almost as if to himself, mulling it over for a split second, trying to figure where the switch was and what it might do to help.
SCE to Aux.
Auxiliary, Flight.
That was enough for Griffin, and he passed Aaron’s call along to Carr to relay to the crew. “It was just a switch we never fiddled with,” said Griffin, the former GNC. “I had worked with John for a long time. I worked side by side with him in Gemini. John had a way of saying and doing things that when he said to do so and so, you could take it to the bank.”
Achieving that kind of faith in his abilities on the part of the flight director was a trait that Aaron had worked on since joining NASA. Carr likened it to the implicit trust marines had in each other while in the field. “Every flight director yearns to have that trust in all the flight controllers, because it’s needed in the heat of battle,” Aaron said. “I will tell you that there could have been other people sitting at that console reporting to Gerry on that flight that might not have been that crisp. Gerry as well as the other flight directors and I had a tremendous rapport, and there was tremendous trust there. I was fortunate enough that when things got in trouble, I was kind of the go-to guy. That’s why I found myself on the launch phase.”
Once he got the go-ahead from Griffin, Carr did not hesitate.
Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to Auxiliary. Over.
Conrad was every bit as perplexed about the switch’s location and purpose as were Griffin and Carr.
NCE to Auxiliary?
Carr quickly corrected him, emphasizing the abbreviation as clearly as he could.
SCE. . . SCE to Auxiliary.
“That crew was more fun than a barrel of monkeys to work with,” Carr said. “Pete was the kind of a guy who could lead beautifully. He would let you know what he needed to have done, and if he thought you needed more instruction, he would tell you how he thought you ought to do it, but then he left you alone and you got the work done. The whole team got to the point where we’d rather die than fail Pete. He was that kind of a leader. I’ve always thought of Pete as my mentor, and I’m sure a lot of other people felt the same way as well.”
Legend would hold that the rookie Bean was the only one of the three crewmen who knew where the SCE switch was located, but that was not actually the case. As a CMP who had helped design controls and displays for the spacecraft, Gordon was familiar with virtually every square inch of the Command Module. He knew not only where to find the switch, but what it did as well. The switch was on the bottom row of Panel C, at the lower-most part of a section extending outward from the right side of the main wall of gauges and switches, within easy reach of Bean’s right hand. While Conrad wondered out loud to the rest of the crew what the hell the SCE was, Bean flipped the switch.
The fix worked, and good data instantly flashed up on monitors in the MOCR and SSR. Before Carr finished repeating the name of the switch to Conrad, Kelly came on the loop to Aaron and uttered some of the most beautiful words either of them had probably ever heard in the MOCR.
Okay, we got it back, EECOM. Looks good.
As he did, Griffin asked once again about the panel. It did not matter, as Aaron echoed his friend’s call almost word for word.
We got it back, Flight. Looks good.
Another few seconds and Kelly was back in Aaron’s ear.
Staging’s set. You want to try and reconnect the fuel cells?
Yeah, let’s do that.
Flight, EECOM.
Go.
Try to put the fuel cells back on the line, and if not, try Batt Charlie to Main A and B.
That got results. The crew began resetting the fuel cells one by one. As soon as the first was reconnected to its bus, voltage increased to the low end of the normal operating range. A large number of caution and warning lights on Aaron’s console blinked off, and once they were all up and running again, most of the spacecraft’s electrical readouts returned to normal.
The flight was not out of the woods just yet. The Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) “eight ball” attitude indicators situated in front of Conrad and Gordon were still spinning wildly, and once the crew had a chance to finally catch its breath, the CMP wanted Buck Willoughby and his back room to get started coming up with some sort of solution.
We’d like to have the GNC guys think about how we’re going to catch that thing, because it’s just drifting, just floating.
Seated to Aaron’s right, Willoughby pulled out a set of schematics and went to work finding the right circuit breakers to pull. Griffin called to see how the work was going.
What do you want to do with the platform now?
We’ll get you an answer in just a second, Flight.
Best hurry.
Down on the capcom console, Carr had a suggestion of his own.
Want to tell him how his IU’s doing? That might make him feel better.
Yeah, tell him he’s right on the trajectory. No problems there.
Carr passed it along, a light tone in his voice.
Apollo 12, Houston. You’re right smack dab on the trajectory. Your IU’s doing a beautiful job.
If Conrad was concerned about anything at that point, it was not possible to tell over the air-to-ground loop. He came back to Carr with almost an all-out giggle in his voice.
Okay. We’re all chuckling up here over the lights. We all said there were so many on we couldn’t read them.
Willoughby called to Griffin with his solution.
Have them take the IMU power to Standby and then back to On.
IMU power to Standby and then to On. You expect that’ll stop it?
Well, it should start the ninety-second cage cycle.
Griffin interrupted him.
Okay, capcom, IMU power to Standby, then to On.
Carr complied, and while Conrad wanted to wait until after getting to orbit, the veteran astronaut came back to the solution a few moments later to clarify.
You want the LMP to turn off the G&N power and then bring it back on, and you want me to use my IMU cage switch, is that right?
Griffin told Carr to have him stand by, and asked Willoughby to confirm. The GNC told the flight director that if the switch did not work, pulling the IMU’s circuit breakers and leaving them off for a while might. They had a running discussion over the course of the next minute or so, Griffin asking if it might be possible to feed a course alignment into the guidance computer’s display and keyboard, otherwise known as a DSKY—pronounced “disc-key.” That was the problem, Willoughby told him. The computer already thought it was aligned, but was missing some key bit of information.
An idea came to Willoughby.
Flight, can they reach Panel 5 circuit breakers?
Should be able to.
That was it.
Flight, GNC.
There was no answer from Griffin, who had his attention on the burn of the S-IVB’s engine, so Willoughby tried again.
Flight, GNC.
Go.
They should be able to pull the Main A, Main B circuit breakers on Panel 5.
Okay.
When Griffin told Carr to have the crew do just that, the capcom protested.
Flight, you really want to do that? We’re almost to a point where they can use the switch now.
Griffin made a snap decision.
They’re probably going to be a little while getting to it, though, while they’re cleaning up the cockpit. Yeah, let’s go ahead and have him pull the circuit breakers.
And so it was that the flight of Apollo 12 got its electrical power and IMU back online. “Buck’s call was a major contributor to the mission’s ultimate success,” said Aaron of Willoughby, a former marine fighter pilot who passed away on 8 September 2009 after a battle with Alzheimer’s. “Had the platform continued in the mode of max rate of tumble, it is doubtful that the platform could have survived. With the IMU platform failed, the mission would have been aborted after a couple of revolutions in low-Earth orbit. Although not well recognized, Buck likely also saved the mission to the moon that day.”
In the Trench, everyone except for Van Rensselaer was having troubles. Booster was good to go throughout the incident. “The ol’ Saturn V just chugged along,” Van Rensselaer said. “It was independently grounded from the Command Module, so the lightning strike did a number on the Command Module, but we didn’t even lose a piece of data on the Saturn V. I just kept telling the flight director, ‘We’re go, Flight. We’re go.’ That was exciting, but for me, it was like just a nominal flight.”
Greene, Deiterich, and guidance officer Gary Renick had not been quite as fortunate. The guidance system had been knocked out, and while the vehicle’s trajectory looked perfect, Renick was responsible for computing the angles between the CSM and the rest of the booster and making sure that both were on the same track. For a few heart-stopping seconds, that appeared not to be the case. “All of a sudden, we got this wild difference when the lightning struck,” Renick remembered. “It was kind of scary for a few seconds there, trying to figure out what the hell happened. Fortunately, the booster just kept right on trucking along. That was probably the scariest time I ever had on console.”
After everything else had been sorted out, the Carnarvon tracking station acquired telemetry from the vehicle nearly five minutes earlier than expected. Greene and Deiterich looked at each other, and they had virtually the same thought. Had the mission’s problems not been solved after all? “The only way we’d acquisition early is if you get there sooner, and if you get there sooner, it means you’re in a lower orbit,” Deiterich said. “We were kind of concerned about that.”
Concerned? That was one way to put it, and Greene had another. “There’s only one way we can get here five minutes early,” he remembered telling Deiterich, “and that’s if we’re reentering and we don’t know where we are.”
The issue turned out to be the result of a multipath error, a phenomenon in which analog waves between the spacecraft and the ground-based radar travel in two or more paths caused by atmospheric reflection and/or refraction. The multipath waves create a “ghost” target, and that was what showed up early. “Scared the hell out of me, but we never told anybody,” Greene concluded.
Author Andrew L. “Andy” Chaikin wrote in his marvelous book A Man on the Moon that the lightning strike would become a war story that Conrad, Gordon, and Bean would enjoy telling for the rest of their lives. It was no different for the men who had lived through it in the MOCR and SSR.
If the blockbuster movie Apollo 13 made men like Gene Kranz and Sy Liebergot famous to the outside world, it was the launch of the flight before it that first made John Aaron a legend. The episode was captured in the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and a space enthusiast once sent Aaron his expired license tag. Its personalized inscription was a familiar one.
SCE to Aux.
Such respect was not limited to Hollywood or space fandom. Much more important to Aaron, he had the respect of his peers. Liebergot remembered once marveling to Rod Loe about his fellow EECOM’s uncanny ability, and Loe’s response was a simple one.
Sy, let me tell you something. You won’t be the first guy that has an inferiority complex about John Aaron, so get over it.
After filing away the brownout during the test the year before, Aaron was in the right place at the right time. “I was the one who happened to be on the console, out of four or five EECOMs that could have been there,” Aaron began. “They would have never seen it and never knew about it. We’d never practiced it. We’d never had even thought about being struck by lightning, which was kind of odd when you think about it. Florida, that’s the lightning capital of the world. It was almost a God-given destiny. We were just very lucky. We were prepared, but I’m telling you, there was a hell of a lot of luck in the Apollo program. It just was meant to be.”
What if Aaron had not seen the very same kind of data dropout during the test the year before? Would he have known what to do when it again took place in real time, with a mission to the moon on the line? Had another EECOM been on duty during the fateful ascent, would he have been familiar with the problem?
In the end, the question of all questions was this.
What if John Aaron had not made the SCE to Aux call when and where he did?
Gerry Griffin had thought about that very question. While he could not say for sure one way or the other, something told him that if the Saturn V had remained on a satisfactory trajectory, he would have continued to ride it to Earth orbit and not called an abort. At that point, surely somebody would have come up with a fix—somebody in the MOCR, the SSR, or any of a number of contractors around the country. If not, Griffin figured that the Trench could have given the crew the correct de-orbit parameters and they could have come home. An abort threw so many uncertainties into the mix, and at the very best, they revolved around where the spacecraft would come down and how far away the closest recovery forces were.
Once Apollo 12 made it to orbit, the question of whether it would be able to continue on to the moon remained. What, if any, damage had the lightning done to the Command and Service Module’s systems? What about the spindly LM housed inside the S-IVB third stage? Had the lightning triggered the pyrotechnics that would release the parachutes after reentry and just before splashdown? Was the heat shield somehow damaged?
Very quietly, Chris Kraft made his rounds through the room. He told Griffin and Aaron separately not to worry about it, that they did not have to go to the moon that day. The decision was Griffin’s, Kraft told the young flight director, and he would stand behind him regardless of which way the call went. “That’s the indicator of a leader, instead of a manager,” Griffin said. “That was his strong suit. We wanted to do things right for him.” By then, Aaron was in a cold sweat after coming through in the clutch the way he had. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and it was Kraft.
That was a great job, young man.
Kraft then asked him to take a couple of orbits and come up with a quick checklist and test sequence to make sure the spacecraft was good to go. “He said, ‘I just came down here to tell you that if you don’t think so, we don’t have to go to the moon today, young man,’” Aaron remembered.
He was not the first person Kraft ever called “young man” and he was certainly not the last, but with so many others, it was followed by an admonishment. A few very simple words, but coming from Kraft, it simply was not possible to underestimate what they meant to the flight controller. Apollo 12 proceeded to the moon because, as far as anybody could tell, there had been no real damage to the Yankee Clipper CSM or the LM Intrepid. If the chutes were bad, reentering immediately was no better an option than in ten days, after Conrad and Bean had their time on the lunar surface. If anything had gone wrong and the crew was lost, Glynn Lunney felt sure it was still the right call to make.
Aaron retired from NASA in the year 2000, and Kraft’s compliment had stuck with him all those years. Kraft showed up at his retirement party, which included both sincere praise and a good-natured roasting. Several speakers were lined up beforehand, but when the master of ceremonies asked if anybody else would like to say anything, Kraft raised his hand. He did not want to speak, but instead had a question for Aaron. The room got quiet, and surely, the steely eyed missile man’s heart skipped a beat. What could Kraft possibly be about to ask?
I want to know on Apollo 12 how you knew that it was okay to go to the moon.
The room got really quiet. Everybody had heard the stories before secondhand, but to hear Aaron explain it to Kraft would surely be priceless. Aaron was twenty-six years old when he made the SCE to Aux call—think about that one for a second—and he had never really contemplated whether or not going to the moon had been the right decision. He was stunned by the question in that setting, in front of all those people.
Aaron started by telling the “young man” story, about how Kraft had come down to his console to tell him that he had done a great job and not to worry about whether or not to make the trip to the moon. The audience, Aaron said, had never heard the story and as far as he was concerned, that was the end of it. It was not. Kraft spoke up again.
Well, young man. I’m still looking for the answer to my question.
Young Man tried again, this time explaining that everything that could be checked had been. There was nothing anybody could do about the chutes or the heat shield, but he felt comfortable with the risk versus reward.
That was good enough for Kraft.
The landing of Apollo 11 bothered Dave Reed.
Yes, it was the first time human beings had set down on another world and, yes, it was historic and momentous and all that. What it had not been was perfect, and Reed was a perfectionist.
Not knowing exactly where the LM came down was not a minor detail, either. Targets were targets, and on Apollo 12, the landing objective was very specific`. The unmanned Surveyor 3 landed in the Ocean of Storms nearly thirty-one months before Conrad and Bean visited, and if there was time, planners wanted to study long-term effects of the lunar environment on its equipment by actually bringing a piece of it back. As a result, Intrepid would have to settle into the Ocean of Storms within easy walking distance.
But how?
Concentrations of mass, known in NASA-speak as “mascons,” tended to wreak havoc on a flight’s lunar orbit. As a flight passed over a mascon, it was pulled ever so slightly toward the moon and then released. The ground tried its best to keep up with it all via tracking, but when time came to separate the LM from the CSM for its descent orbit initiation burn, the Trench had to rely on a track that was one or two revolutions old. The problem was that nobody knew how much the mascons impacted the current orbit or the one that was about to begin.
Emil R. Scheisser was the chief of MPAD’s Orbit Determination Section, Mathematical Physics Branch, and it was up to him to come up with a solution. It was in good hands—Neil Armstrong was once asked about people he had worked with at NASA who stood out in terms of talent and ability, and without hesitation, he replied, “Emil Scheisser! I’d vote for Emil every time.”
What Scheisser came up with was a relatively simple fix. The best Reed could hope to do in the Trench was predict the orbit as if there were no mascons present, and what Scheisser proposed was to compare that with the actual track in order to come up with the difference, known as a downrange error. The error was measured in feet—on Apollo 12, it was 4,200 feet off—and given by trajectory support in the SSR to Reed. The flight’s prime FIDO had it passed up to the crew for entry into the LM’s guidance system with a Noun 69 program update, approximately ninety seconds after the descent burn began.
The answer was not Reed’s, but it was up to him to help put it into practice. He and Conrad had discussed the pinpoint landing at Snowman, a series of five craters that very loosely resembled just that, and the veteran astronaut was unsure if the Trench or anybody else could pull it off. Conrad picked one target, then another, and Reed went right back to work, none the worse for wear. That got Conrad right where it counted.
You can’t hit it anyhow! Target me for the center of the Surveyor crater.
If Conrad thought that he was going to get under Reed’s skin with the new demand, even if it was in jest, he missed the mark.
You got it, babe.
Jerry Bostick remembered Reed being even more specific with Conrad about Surveyor.
I’m going to bring you down on top of it.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their descent to the lunar surface that summer, they had been all business, all the time. Conrad, on the other hand, sounded like an excited sailor coming in for shore leave as he and Bean glided below seven thousand feet in altitude. He all but shouted when he got his first glimpse of Snowman.
Hey, there it is! There it is! Son of a gun! Right down the middle of the road!
Bean was trying his best to stay on task.
Outstanding. Forty-two degrees, Pete. Forty-two. Look out there.
Conrad continued his commentary.
I can’t believe it! Amazing! Fantastic! Forty-two degrees, babe. Just keep talking.
Jerry Carr was back at the capcom console, and when he broke onto the loop to give the go-ahead for landing, there was no reply from the lunar-surface-bound crew. Conrad was having far too good a time.
That’s so fantastic, I can’t believe it.
The boys on the ground do okay.
Bean glanced out the window on the right side of the LM cabin.
Oh! Look at that crater, right where it’s supposed to be.
Reed had done an excellent job, to the point where Intrepid did, in fact, appear to be coming down into the center of Surveyor 3’s nearby large crater. Conrad punched a couple of updates into the guidance computer and then took manual control at about four hundred feet. The last few moments were mostly a steady stream of altitude and descent rate updates from Bean, and Carr gave the same dramatic thirty-second call that Armstrong and Aldrin had heard a few months before. This time, however, it seemed a mere formality.
As they went through their post-landing checklist, Bean was exultant.
Good landing, Pete! Outstanding, man! Beau-TEE-ful!
The target was 170 feet south and 380 feet west of Surveyor 3, so as not to contaminate it with exhaust from the LM or any dust that its descent engine might kick up. Although Conrad and Bean could not see it through either of their windows, Surveyor 3 was just 535 feet away. “Pete Conrad and Al Bean had a few American flags with them on that flight and they gave me one when they returned,” Reed said. “From that mission on, pinpoint landing was assured. Without it, we never could have done the exploration that we needed to accomplish on subsequent flights.”
Within a minute or so of stepping foot on the surface, Conrad spotted it and laughed with Bean.
Boy, you’ll never believe it. Guess what I see sitting on the side of the crater!
The old Surveyor, huh?
The old Surveyor, yes sir. Does that look neat! It can’t be any further than 600 feet from here. How about that?
That was music to Dave Reed’s ears.
As Conrad bounced across the Ocean of Storms alone, Bean stayed behind in the LM to watch over, photograph, and pass equipment back and forth with his cohort. Bean moved from one side of the cabin to the other, and in the process nearly closed the hatch.
The sublimator on their backpacks acted basically as the radiator on a car would, and the outgassing on Bean’s took care of shutting the door the rest of the way. When it shut, cabin pressure in Intrepid rose slightly and that in turn caused Bean’s sublimator to break through and leak out 1.2 pounds of water.
Six minutes into Conrad’s first solo EVA, the issue sounded an alarm. As problems go, it was an easy one to overcome. Once Bean noticed the hatch closed, he opened it back up and returned the cabin to full vacuum. Not surprisingly, he and Conrad were able to joke about it all.
Ahhhh!
What did . . . what did you just do, Al?
Man, I just figured it out.
You sure did. You just blew water out the front of the cabin.
That’s what happened to the PLSS.
What’s that?
Oh, the door had flown shut, like it did before, and it probably bothered the sublimator because it wasn’t in a good vacuum anymore. So the door is probably going to start working in a minute.
I should hope so. When you opened the door, that thing shot iceballs straight out the hatch.
Jim Joki was responsible for the PLSS and he heard the episode unfolding from nearly a quarter of a million miles away. “They were giggling and having a good time,” he remembered. “Those two guys were just the opposite of Neil and Buzz. Neil and Buzz were so technical.” For Joki, the disappointment was that he heard it from the SSR. Responsibility for the EMU had been absorbed by the LM’s telcom console following the flight of Apollo 11, and the position was renamed telmu. Joki had been immersed in the development and testing of the PLSS backpack and considered himself a leading expert, so getting bumped to the back room was hard to swallow. “It was . . . it was,” Joki began. “I felt like sort of a failure.” Jack Knight told him to take heart, that he had been the only person who ever worked the LM EMU console in the front room during a flight. It was consolation, but only a little.
After the flight of Apollo 13, Joki went to work on a master’s degree in physiology. He liked the field so much that he eventually left NASA to go to medical school, and after moving to Seattle, he specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. “We had a parting of the ways,” Joki continued. “Every time I see Kranz, he always says, ‘Joki, you’re the guy that quit on us . . . how ya doin’?’ We’re all buddies now, but I think I probably pissed him off by continuing school.” The role Joki played during the Apollo years continued to be a part of his life, and former flight controllers who visited him in Seattle would marvel at his collection of autographed photos and flown flags.
He heard baby monitors in a hospital once, and was told that they were watching over individuals in a mothership during a nine-month mission. His two careers, he concluded, had not been all that different after all. “I’m doing the same thing as I was in mission control, I treat my patients the same way,” Joki said. “We’re going by mission rules, we have guidelines. I have to take care of all contingencies to get you to a successful completion of that mission.”
Once Bean made it to the surface and inadvertently pointed the lens of the new color television camera at the sun, Joki was not the only one who was just listening in on the EVA. It was fried beyond repair, and there was nothing Ed Fendell or any of his fellow INCOs could do about it. There was no fix to be made.
The world had to listen in on The Pete and Al Show, rather than watch it in living color. The problem was a minor, if somewhat inconvenient, one. The rest of their spacewalks went off almost like clockwork, right up to and including their visit to Surveyor 3 during the second and final EVA. Although he played no particular part in what took place on the lunar surface, Dave Reed was still amazed at how things sometimes unfolded in those days.
Two weeks out from launch, Reed was in a review meeting up on the top floor of Building 1 when the subject of Surveyor 3 came up. It was not a primary objective—just icing on the cake—but scientists wanted its digger arm and camera. The timeline gave Conrad and Bean twenty minutes to get the work done, and Conrad knew it was not going to happen in that short an amount of time using the kind of bulky gloves they would be wearing. George Low had an idea—what they needed was a pair of bolt cutters.
Somebody jumped up and said that, yes, it could be done. All he needed was to line up a rapid-fire procurement team to get specs written up and to solicit bids from contractors. From start to finish, the whole process would take maybe a month. There was only one problem with the plan, Low said.
We’re launching in two weeks.
What happened next was what truly amazed Reed. If the proposed procurement process seemed to be fast at just a month long, Low’s was even quicker. He had the doors closed to the meeting room before giving that same bright, young, energetic engineer his marching orders.
I want you to go to Sears and get two bolt cutters. Bring them back, sand off the Sears label, and stamp them flight qualified. What’s the next item on the agenda?
Simple as that.
Yankee Clipper splashed down into the rough Pacific Ocean just four and a half miles from the recovery ship USS Hornet. The landing was so hard, at some 15 Gs, it not only knocked part of the heat shield loose but also freed a camera from its mount in the cockpit that then whacked Bean just above his right eye. It was a hard landing to be sure, but not nearly as hard as it would have been without parachutes. They had not been damaged in the lightning strike after all, and worked flawlessly.
While one disaster had been averted, the MOCR had not seen anything yet.