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The Eagle Has Landed

v1.1.1 / chapter 23 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* The US had scored a major coup in sending Apollo 8 around the Moon. NASA followed up the success with two more Apollo test flights, Apollo 9 and 10, to pave the way for the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon in July 1969. The next Moon landing, by Apollo 12, also went smoothly, though by that time doubts about the future of the program were growing.

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[23.1] PREPARING FOR THE MOON LANDING / APOLLO 9 & 10
[23.2] APOLLO 11 LANDS ON THE MOON
[23.3] APOLLO 12
[23.4] MOL FALLS

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[23.1] PREPARING FOR THE MOON LANDING / APOLLO 9 & 10

* The Soviets were discouraged by the fact that the Americans had beaten them to a circumlunar expedition with Apollo 8, and things weren't getting better for them at any great rate:

• The USSR tried to launch another Soyuz 7K-L1 Moon orbiter by a Proton on 20 January 1969, but it never made it to Earth orbit, though the reentry module was recovered in Mongolia.
  
  
• A first attempt was made to launch a "Luna Ye-8" Moon lander on 19 February 1969. The Luna Ye-8 consisted of a lander with a remote-controlled rover on top. The rover, known generally as a "Lunokhod", looked like a tub on eight wire wheels, each with its own motor and suspension. It carried a hinged solar panel on top and sprouted two communications antennas plus a magnetometer boom. It carried a set of instruments, three panoramic cameras, and a navigation camera to allow it to be controlled by a five-man team back on Earth. It was designed to "sleep" through the dark lunar nights when the solar panel couldn't be used, with a radioactive heat source keeping the machine from freezing up.
  
  The entire spacecraft weighed 5,600 kilograms (12,350 pounds), with the rover itself weighing 1,815 kilograms (4,000 pounds). The Luna Ye-8 was launched by a Proton booster. The launch was a failure; the payload shroud disintegrated, leading to loss of the Proton booster less than a minute into flight.
  
  
• The Soviets performed the first launch attempt of a prototype N-1 Moon booster on 21 February 1969, carrying a Soyuz 7K-L1S improved Moon orbiter and a mass model of the LK Moon lander. The launch was a failure as well. The engine control system failed and shut down the booster, and it fell from the sky onto the steppes.

Those around Vasily Mishin began to notice that he was drinking more than was good for him.

* In the meantime, the Americans were methodically preparing for a Moon landing. The Apollo 8 mission had been risky and a big step into the unknown, but it was still basically just a test shot. All the crew had been required to do was go for a ride, admittedly in a contraption that wasn't completely trustworthy and required continuous vigilance, and take pictures. A Moon landing was a much trickier proposition, and that meant making sure things were working properly first.

Two more test flights were scheduled before the actual landing. "Apollo 9" was launched on 3 March 1969 for a ten-day Earth orbit mission. The crew was Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, all Air Force people. The main purpose of the ten-day mission was to evaluate LEM and rendezvous operation.

After checking out CSM and LEM systems for several days, McDivitt and Schweickart got on board the LEM, named "Spider" as an obvious reference to its appearance, and went for a joyride for six hours, venturing as far as 179 kilometers (111 miles) from the CSM, named "Gumdrop" as another reference to appearance, to return and practice the critical rendezvous operation. These were the first American manned spacecraft to be named since the Mercury program; since there were two spacecraft involved in the mission, it was important to give them distinctive callsigns to tell them apart. NASA public relations wasn't happy with the informal choices for names; NASA was supposed to be a serious organization, after all.

Schweickart got such a major case of spacesickness on the mission that the task schedules had to be modified to give him some recovery time. It was the first time an astronaut had admitted to spacesickness, and it came across as a sign of weakness: maybe not coincidentally, he would not fly again. Some of the astronauts felt Schweickart was handed a bad deal. Although everyone tried to conceal it, spacesickness was common, possibly universal, and it was past time that somebody acknowledged it was a problem so it could be dealt with.

* The Americans pushed ahead with another circumlunar shot, "Apollo 10", this time carrying a LEM to practice for an actual landing. The mission was launched on 18 May 1969 and lasted for eight days, the crew consisting of Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, and John Young.

The launch was not entirely smooth, with both the first and second stages suffering from "pogo" that made the crew nervous; the staging also felt like "hitting a brick wall". However, that was nothing compared to what happened during the "trans-lunar injection", the boost out of Earth orbit towards the Moon. The third stage began to vibrate violently, as if it was about to shake itself to pieces. Tom Stafford kept his hand on the abort handle, which would cut off the burn and dump them in a high looping orbit to fall safely back towards Earth. Everyone prayed and held their breath, but finally the rough burn was complete and they were on their way to the Moon. The vibration turned out to be a problem with the booster's pressure relief valves, and was promptly fixed for future launches.

After the three-day flight to the Moon, Stafford and Cernan rode the LEM, named "Snoopy" after the popular PEANUTS cartoon character, down to an altitude of about 15 kilometers (50,000 feet) of the Moon's surface. They went no lower. They must've had some very great regrets of having come so far without being able to take the one last step, but Snoopy was a prototype LEM and too heavy to be used for a landing.

There had actually been some consideration of waiting a month to get a full-spec LEM, but NASA had already taken one big chance with Apollo 8, and when push came to shove nobody felt like sticking their necks out like that again any time soon. Better to do the job methodically, all the more so because the Soviets hadn't even managed to perform a manned circumlunar mission of their own to that time. NASA brass now knew it was extremely unlikely the USSR would be able to pull off a manned Moon landing before the US.

The cruise over the Moon's surface in the LEM went well at first, except for the fact that Stafford had some problems with his cameras, muttering obscenities at them. They were on an open mike to Earth and the public was listening, but Stafford was nicknamed "Mumbles" for good reason and nobody understood him. Then it came time for Stafford and Cernan to drop Snoopy's descent stage and return to the CSM, which was named "Charlie Brown". They began the procedure and Snoopy went into a wild tumble. Cernan said, very loud and totally clear over the open mike: "SON OF A BITCH! What the HELL happened?!"

Stafford grabbed the controls and managed to get the ascent stage stable after it had tumbled eight times. If they had continued their spin for a few more seconds, they would have been strewn across the Moon's landscape. Snoopy made it back to Charlie Brown with no further trouble, and the crew then began their return journey to Earth, landing without incident. Snoopy's somersaults turned out to be due to a pilot error: an automatic guidance mode had been switched on by mistake, and the LEM had been tumbling around, trying to lock on to Charlie Brown.

Much to Cernan's exasperation there was a public outcry, led by an overzealous preacher, over the harsh language. The preacher didn't seem to feel that the fact the astronauts had been engaged in a struggle for survival was any mitigating factor or even an issue, and Cernan was forced to make a public apology. Another annoyance was that NASA public relations finally laid down the law on naming the spacecraft. Although Gene Cernan defended the use of characters from the wildly popular PEANUTS strip, the rule came down that future Apollo spacecraft would have more dignified names.

BACK_TO_TOP

[23.2] APOLLO 11 LANDS ON THE MOON

* NASA was now on track for the first Moon landing, scheduled for early summer 1969. There was no way the USSR could catch the US now, and in fact the gap between the two countries was continuing to widen.

The Soviets launched the first "Luna Ye-8-5" lunar sample-return probe with a Proton booster on 14 June 1969. It was a big spacecraft, with a launch weight of 5,600 kilograms (12,350 pounds). It consisted of a four-footed lander that looked like a mass of spherical and cylindrical tanks, with a simple Earth-return "ascent stage" or "return stage" topped by a spherical reentry module mounted on top. The reentry vehicle would be loaded up by sample collection arm fitted with a drill, and then the return stage would be shot back to Earth, with the reentry module recovered by parachute. The lander stage would return temperature and other data until its batteries ran down. The shot was a failure: the Proton upper stage malfunctioned and the payload didn't make orbit.

The Soviets performed their second launch attempt of an N-1 Moon booster on 3 July 1969. The N-1 lifted off the pad, then fell back with an explosion that was compared to a small nuclear blast. It wrecked much of its ground facility, scattered debris for 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) around, and shattered windows 40 kilometers (25 miles) away. The only fortunate thing was that there were no casualties.

In the meantime, the crew for the Moon landing mission -- Neil Armstrong, Ed Aldrin, and Michael Collins -- and the mission support crews were engaging in drill after drill to prepare for the launch of "Apollo 11", the Moon landing shot. There was frustration at first, with repeated "crashes" during simulations of the Moon landing. Some difficulty was expected, since nobody had ever actually landed a spacecraft under rocket power before, but it was turning out to be harder than expected.

Everyone pushed, and when the launch window came up, they were ready to go. Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 16 July 1969, with roughly a half million spectators in the area to watch. The trip out was uneventful. The crew used a TV camera to give audiences back on Earth a tour of their spacecraft.

Armstrong and Aldrin cast off from the CSM, "Columbia", in the LEM, "Eagle", on 20 July, to take the ride 110 kilometers (70 miles) down to the lunar surface. Collins remained in Columbia to hold the fort, telling his crewmates: "You take care." Armstrong replied: "See you later." CAPCOM Charlie Duke, an expert on the LEM, was on the hot seat for the landing at Armstrong's specific request, asked: "How does it look?" Armstrong replied: "Eagle has wings."

Armstrong fired the descent engine to kill the LEM's orbit velocity, causing the spacecraft to fall towards the lunar surface. Eagle was to set down in one of the Moon's huge flat plains, the Sea of Tranquility. The site had been selected because it appeared to be featureless, simplifying the landing.

Mission control fretted as the LEM went down, since trajectory errors began to mount up toward the redline limit where the crew would be forced to abort their landing and return to orbit. They didn't reach the limit, but they overshot their intended landing site. When Eagle pitched over to begin its final approach, Armstrong saw the terrain he was trying to land on. Instead of being bland and smooth, it was strewn with boulders. Although the landing sequence was supposed to be fully automated, Armstrong decided to take over semi-manual control and fly Eagle over the boulder field.

Armstrong was too preoccupied with the landing to provide much of an explanation of what he was doing. Gene Kranz and the Mission Control team back in Houston knew Armstrong had taken over, but didn't know why. Since Armstrong was the man on the spot, Mission Control had to figure he had good reasons to do what he was doing. Charlie Duke suggested: "I think we'd better be quiet." Everyone just shut up and held their breath to let Armstrong focus on matters at hand.

With every second the LEM remained in flight while Armstrong looked for a landing spot, fuel ran lower towards the limit where the Eagle's crew would be given an ABORT signal. Armstrong would then have no other option but to kick off the LEM's descent stage and blast the ascent stage back into orbit. Not only would the mission be a loss, but since Columbia wouldn't be in any convenient location for a rendezvous, trying to figure out how to link up with the CSM would be troublesome.

Armstrong understood all this, but he had to focus on what he was doing. As it turned out, flying the LEM was easier in practice than it had been in simulation. However, fuel was still draining away. He finally found what looked like a nice flat patch of ground, killed the LEM's forward velocity, and gently dropped the Eagle toward the Moon. They settled down onto the surface so softly that it was a moment before Armstrong knew they had landed. He shut off the descent stage engine; it only had 20 seconds of fuel left. Armstrong told Mission Control: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." It was 3:17 PM Houston time.

The tension broke in Houston. Charlie Duke radioed back: "Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."

There was applause in Mission Control. John Houbolt, the godfather of LOR, recollected that he was there with Wernher von Braun, and von Braun turned to him and said: "Thank you, John." Houbolt described as the biggest compliment he'd ever had in his life. The name of "Tranquility Base" had been made up by the astronauts, and came to a surprise to many in Mission Control. Somehow, it seemed to perfectly fit the moment.

* With the shifting around, nobody was exactly sure where the Eagle had landed. Collins would look for it using the CSM's sextant as he passed over the target area, but he never did spot the lander. As it turned out, they were about 6,400 meters (four miles) off the intended landing site.

The first thing the crew of Eagle did was make sure that the LEM was in shape to take off again, in case they had to leave in a hurry. They were then supposed to get four hours' sleep so they could be rested before they went out on the Moon, but Armstrong and Aldrin felt fine and told Houston they wanted to skip the rest period. Getting sleep was troublesome anyway, since sleeping in the LEM's cab was a little like trying to sleep in a walk-in closet. Mission Control gave the okay.

The two crew suited up. Armstrong went out first, carefully descended the ladder on the Eagle's landing gear, and dropped onto the Moon, declaring: "That's one small step for a man -- a giant leap for mankind."

Everyone thought the words well chosen, but some were surprised that the notoriously reserved Armstrong had said anything at all. The words weren't rehearsed; he later said he came up with them just before he stepped out of the LEM. Deke Slayton commented later that it was just like Armstrong to sit quietly on a decision until it was time for it to be made.

There were those who believed that Armstrong had been given the right to be the first man to set foot on the Moon because he was a civilian and NASA was a civilian agency, but Deke Slayton more or less handed out the crew assignments and his decision-making process was eye-glazingly complicated, driven by schedules, astronaut rankings, NASA directives, and some sense of justice. Slayton later claimed that there had been a clear directive to make sure that a Mercury 7 astronaut was the first on the Moon, but Shepard was still grounded and Slayton didn't rank Cooper's abilities as high enough to warrant command of the first Moon landing mission. Slayton had expected Gus Grissom to take the "giant step", but the fates had intervened.

Gene Cernan later commented in his autobiography that Buzz Aldrin had driven everyone to distraction lobbying to be the first man to set foot on the Moon, and didn't take it well when he was told NO. Cernan clearly had an axe to grind with Aldrin -- Cernan was unusually inclined to grind axes in his memoirs, even going so far as to snipe at an astronaut who had the goddam gall to drive a Porsche instead of a Corvette -- but even the mild-tempered Deke Slayton later commented that Aldrin's dad, a senator, had exerted pressure to have his son be the first man to step on the Moon.

* The spacesuit that the Apollo crew was to wear, the Hamilton Standard / International Latex A7L, was a marvel of engineering, designed to operate over an extreme range of temperatures. As with the David Clark G4C suit, the A7L came in "rescue" and EVA configurations. The A7L was entered from the back, using a sealing zipper scheme to close up the suit, and featured three garments:

• An undergarment. In the IVA configuration, the astronaut wore traditional cloth "long underwear" underneath the suit. In the EVA configuration, the astronaut wore a "liquid-cooling garment (LCG)", like long underwear but laced with a network of water-cooling capillaries. A urine storage system, with a reservoir on the astronaut's belly, and absorptive "diapers" were also worn with the EVA suit; it is unclear if they were normal for the IVA suit.
  
  
• An inner pressure garment, the "Torso & Limb Suit Assembly (TLSA)", with a comfort liner, a bladder layer, and a restraint layer.
  
  
• A thermal / bumper layer, the "Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment (ITMG)" with multilayer thermal insulation, covered with two layers of teflon-coated glass-fiber "Beta cloth" to provide protection from scrapes. The IVA configuration featured a lighter thermal insulation.

The suit featured accordion-style joints to help deal with ballooning, and was generously fitted with pockets and straps for hauling around small items. Boots were built into the suit; there were sealing connection rings for gloves and helmet attached to the TLSA. An astronaut put on a "Communications Carrier Assembly" AKA "snoopy cap" with mikes and earphones before snugging on the helmet, which was an all-transparent polycarbonate plastic bubble that snapped into the neck ring.

The EVA configuration featured a number of accessories:

• A "Portable Life Support System (PLSS)" backpack, providing communications, battery power, breathing air, and drive for the liquid cooling system, with an evaporator to dump the heat from the cooling system. Pressure was maintained at about a quarter of an atmosphere. If the suit sprang a leak, the astronaut could hit a "panic button" that flooded the suit with air as fast as possible, to allow a dash back to safety.
  
  
• An overhelmet or "Extravehicular Visor Assembly (EVVA)", worn over the standard bubble helmet. The visor assembly featured two visors, two side eyeshades, and a center eyeshade. The inner protective visor was transparent, although it included an inner coating that to retain heat. The outer sun visor featured a gold coating for protection from solar ultraviolet.
  
  
• "Lunar surface gloves" or "EVA gloves", as opposed to the IVA gloves used in the spacecraft. Both sets of gloves were made from custom molds of an astronaut's hands. The IVA glove consisted of a pressure glove, with an outer gantlet and palm restraint pulled on over the pressure glove to provide scuff protection and structural strength. The pressure glove was also used with the EVA glove, but it included an outer thermal and mechanical protection "overglove" made up of multiple layers like the ITMG, with a Chromel-R steel mesh outer layer. The EV glove's thumb and fingertips were molded of silicone rubber to provide a little "feel". The outer thermal glove extended well back over the IV glove-TLSA junction. Incidentally, the gloves were notoriously hard on fingernails, causing them to turn black on occasion.
  
  
• Heavy-duty lunar boots worn over the integral booties of the IV suit. The outer layer of the lunar boot was made from metal-woven fabric, except for the ribbed silicone rubber sole; the tongue area was made from Beta cloth. The boot inner layers were made from Beta cloth followed by a thick thermal-bumper layer, with an outer layer of Chomel-R steel cloth to provide durability. The outer soles were made of silicone rubber.

The A7L suit itself weighed 22 kilograms (48 pounds), while the PLSS backpack weight 26 kilograms (57 pounds). The suit could maintain its wearer in temperatures ranging from -180 to +155 degrees Celsius (-290 to +310 degrees Fahrenheit). The A7L suits were custom-fitted to each astronaut, with three made for an astronaut -- one for training, one for flight, one for flight backup.

The suit was necessarily clumsy, but Armstrong found it surprisingly easy to move around in a sixth of the Earth's gravity. He took a surface sample and then, having proven that nothing immediately disastrous would happen to anyone stepping out onto the Moon, was joined by Aldrin, and the two men planted the American flag on the Moon. Planting the flag was not an attempt to claim the Moon for the US, since that was outlawed by the Outer Space Treaty, and in fact a plaque mounted on the base of the LEM made this clear:

   HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH     FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON     JULY 1969 AD     WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND  

The flag was instead rationalized as a tribute to the American Moon effort. The two astronauts then went through their list of scheduled tasks, momentarily interrupted by a short, formal chat with President Richard Nixon. They collected surface samples and laid out two experiments, one being an RTG-powered seismograph, the other a passive reflector, an elaborate mirror that would return laser pulses sent from the Earth, allowing the distance between the two bodies to be determined with extreme precision. The Apollo laser reflectors would provide a significant amount of scientific value over future decades.

They also discovered the interesting properties of lunar dust. If Thomas Gold had been off base thinking the LEM would sink out of sight into moondust, there was still a thick layer of dust everywhere, recording footprints that would take a long, long time to disappear. While the astronauts made an impression on the dust, it also made an impression on them, sticking to their pristine space suits like soot and proving almost as impossible to clean off. It was gritty stuff, there being no erosion processes to grind off its rough edges, and particles of it stuck on the astronauts' gloves easily scratched their face masks. Back inside the LEM, it left an odd smell, something like that of burned gunpowder; the abrasive dust would give some of the Moon voyagers swollen sinuses, a sort of lunar "hay fever".

The Moonwalk only lasted about two and a half hours, and neither of the astronauts strayed more than 60 meters (200 feet) from the LEM. Strictly speaking, Apollo 11 wasn't really a voyage of exploration, but a technology validation exercise. Apollo 11 had landed on the Moon primarily to show that it could be done.

* It had been done, but there still remained the non-trivial issue of getting back again. The crew of the Eagle ate and tried to get some sleep, but hardly got any rest. Light flooding into the cockpit and the chilliness inside made it impossible, and they were wound up anyway.

They rigged up for return to Columbia and lifted off a little before 1:00 PM, Houston time, on the afternoon of 21 July. They had spent less than a day on the Moon. Mike Collins was apprehensive that the Eagle might not be able to make the hookup -- if it didn't, he would have to return to the Earth by himself and leave the bodies of his crewmates behind in Moon space -- but the rendezvous went flawlessly.

The crew prepared to return to Earth, performing the SPS engine burn a little after midnight. The maneuver went perfectly, Collins saying: "Beautiful burn, SPS, I love ya, you are a jewel! WHOOSH!"

The trip back was uneventful, at least up to the end. It wasn't known for decades that Apollo 11 had faced a disaster as it returned to Earth. 72 hours before landfall, USAF Captain Hank Brandli, a meteorologist working with DMSP military weather satellite data, had detected a violent thunderstorm brewing in the landing zone. Brandli knew it would tear the Apollo's parachutes to ribbons, but DMSP was secret and he couldn't simply pick up the phone and call in a warning to NASA. Brandli contacted Navy Captain Willard "Sam" Houston JR, commander of the Fleet Warning Central / Pearl Harbor office, who was cleared on DMSP, and managed to convince him of the threat.

Houston dropped everything he was doing and went up the chain of command to pass on the alarm. He had enough clout to convince the brass there was an issue, even though he couldn't talk about DMSP, and the recovery group, organized around the carrier HORNET, was promptly rerouted. He also called NASA's chief meteorologist and got him on board, and the reentry trajectory was quickly modified to send the capsule in 345 kilometers (215 miles) farther downrange.

Apollo 11 came down precisely in the new landing zone off the coast of Hawaii on 24 July and was recovered by the HORNET. The thunderstorm was in progress in the original landing zone as they were being picked up. The story about the weather hazard didn't come out until the mid-1990s, though Houston got a secret Navy Commendation Medal for his actions.

* After recovery, the crew was promptly quarantined and stayed in quarantine for almost three weeks. There were concerns that there were potentially dangerous microorganisms in the lunar soil, and nobody wanted to take chances. The astronauts thought it the whole thing was idiotic. The original idea had been to pick up the astronauts in the sealed Apollo command module, set it down on a carrier deck, and transfer them through a sealed corridor into the quarantine facility. The problem was that the command module was top-heavy and not very seaworthy, and it was not practical to leave the astronauts inside while it pitched and tipped over in the waves. In training, astronauts had been forced to stay in an Apollo boilerplate rocking in the waves for an extended time, and nearly all of them got seasick.

The "solution" to the quarantine issue was a complicated rigamarole involving dropping the astronauts containment suits before picking them up and disinfecting the capsule after they got out. The astronauts were then placed in a quarantine facility, built by modifying an Airstream mobile home. The scheme was full of holes, and in the unlikely case there were actually dangerous bugs on the Moon, the quarantine procedure was going to do little to keep them from getting into circulation. As an amusement, the astronauts filled out a customs form, dated 24 July, declaring their cargo of "MOON ROCK AND MOON DUST SAMPLES". In response to the query on the form: "Any other condition on board that may lead to the spread of disease[?]" -- they provided a black-humor reply: "TO BE DETERMINED".

* One of the little consequences of the Apollo 11 flight was that Mission Control took up a pool with everyone chipping in to arrange the production of coffee mugs with the Apollo 11 emblem on them, as mementos for the staff. A secretary handled the logistics and the finances, setting up a checking account in a local bank to handle the funds. Everyone got a bit of a shock when an overly enthusiastic NASA inspector general swept down on them, citing the exercise as a violation of NASA codes of business conduct and misuse of the Apollo 11 logo. The secretary's checkbook was confiscated.

Neil Armstrong, in his calm way, had Mike Collins pass the whole issue up to NASA headquarters along with a comment that the Apollo 11 crew had approved use of the logo. The inspector general quickly backed off. Everyone got their mugs, and in fact the IG himself bought one. There was no further trouble with further exercises along this line, though the IG office did continue to keep an eye on such activities to make sure they didn't get out of control.

BACK_TO_TOP

[23.3] APOLLO 12

* Apollo 11 had put Americans on the Moon well within the decade, meeting JFK's 1962 schedule. It had been an impressive achievement. However, American society had changed dramatically in the meantime. Questioning the established order had gone from the actions of the fringe to a mass movement, highlighted by a background of tension as old ethnic class distinctions eroded and the US remained entangled in a muddled war in Southeast Asia. There was much loose talk of revolutions of one sort of another, most of which thankfully remained talk, but in any case the old beliefs were on trial.

There had been concerns that the Moon program was a poor use of resources since day one, but though there was still substantial public support for the effort, criticisms were loud and widespread. Apollo 11 could be considered a watershed of sorts. To that time, NASA had a clear goal for the future. After that time, the agency would have to figure out what to do next and deal with a public and government that had their doubts about spaceflight.

* Of course, the Apollo program wasn't over yet. NASA had hardware in the pipeline to conduct nine more Moon missions. The second Moon landing, "Apollo 12", was to be basically similar to the first in terms of its activities and duration. The crew consisted of Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean, all Navy people. They were a tight crew, like a set of drinking buddies who liked to clown around together -- or possibly they just went along with Conrad, who was about as much of a clown as a good test pilot dared to be.

Apollo 12 lifted off on 14 November 1969 under overcast skies. As the crew climbed into the sky, there was a flash outside and every warning light and indicator went on at once. Conrad yelled at his comrades: "What the HELL was that?!" He then called Houston: "Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here, we had everything in the world drop out." The booster climbed toward the sky, while Mission Control considered an abort. Nothing seemed to be working in a way that was trustworthy for the moment, and in such circumstances nobody could be certain the crew could be safely brought back down. They had less than two minutes to make a decision.

A ground controller named John Aaron finally suggested that the fuel cell system was offline. He had the crew switch to battery backup and then reset the fuel cell system. All the warning lights blinked out, one by one, and the spacecraft made orbit. As it turned out, the Saturn V had been hit by lighting about half a minute after launch, then hit again about a minute later. The mission had come within a breath of abort or even disaster. The crew checked out their systems in orbit and they were all fine, but they would never forget that launch. After things settled out, Conrad said: "Every time I close my eyes, all I see are those lights."

The ground tracking station in Australia reported the spacecraft seemed to be in a very low orbit, too low to permit lunar injection, but more tracking data from other stations indicated that all was fine, the radar in Australia had been affected -- as radar can be at times -- by atmospheric anomalies. There were no further cliffhangers on the way to the Moon. After arrival, Conrad and Bean prepared the LEM, "Intrepid", for the landing, and then cast off from the CSM, "Yankee Clipper". Intrepid was to use a new precision guidance system to set down on the Ocean of Storms next to the Surveyor 3 robot lander, which had landed a little over two and a half years before.

The guidance scheme involved Earth-based measurements of the changes in frequency of the LEM's radio transmissions due to its motion, or "Doppler shift". Not only would this be a useful trick in itself, it would also ensure that nobody lost track of exactly where the LEM had set down, as had happened with Apollo 11. Dick Gordon watched Intrepid float away using his sextant, with the LEM's exhaust nozzle facing him. The lander's engine fired, turning the spacecraft into a glowing ball in the sextant, and Conrad and Bean were on the way down.

NASA had downplayed the intent to land next to Surveyor 3, fearing that the press would claim the mission was a failure if the astronauts missed. The mission team was more earnest about it than they let on, but the astronauts were still skeptical, since the technical heads back on Earth seemed way too confident that the new landing system would work perfectly, and test pilots knew not to put too faith in engineers. However, as Intrepid closed on the Moon's surface, Conrad spotted the Surveyor lander, saying: "Hey, there it is! Son of a gun! Right down the middle of the road!"

As with Apollo 11, the terrain was nastier than had been expected, but Conrad was able to find a smooth spot and set down. After they had settled onto the Moon, Bean slapped him on the back: "Good landing, Pete! Out-STANDING, man!"

A few hours later, they prepared to exit. The Intrepid crew was broadcasting live to the public, just as Eagle's crew had on their Moonwalk, and having Pete Conrad in the public eye made some NASA officials nervous. Conrad came on more like a comedy-relief character actor than an astronaut, a short, wiry, balding guy with gap teeth, lively, joking, often lewd rude and crude. Those who knew Conrad well didn't worry, because he was sharp and knew where to draw the line when he was in public. However, when he hopped off the LEM's landing ladder, his comment was still pure Conrad: "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it's a long one for me!"

Conrad began to work through his checklist of tasks, and was presently joined by Bean. There were those in Mission Control who didn't know Conrad well, and were a little baffled by his humming to himself and occasional cackling laugh, shot off for what seemed to be no reason in particular. Others knew that Conrad hummed to himself when he was preoccupied, but still didn't know what he was laughing about.

As it turned out, each of the two Moonwalkers was executing his sequence of tasks under the direction of a checklist in the form of a small tabbed notebook, attached to the cuff of his spacesuit. The "cuff checklists" had been prepared by the backup crew for the mission, Dave Scott and Jim Allen, and they had been imaginative in their implementation. Not only were the checklists littered with little cartoons of the Moonwalkers as Snoopy characters with occasional jokes, but Scott and Allen had inserted tiny PLAYBOY magazine pinup pictures, along with suggestive comments, mostly about inspections of geologic features. In fact, some of the suggestive comments exactly fit some of the features Conrad encountered, setting him off.

The two astronauts kept busy on the lunar surface, performing two Moonwalk sessions separated by a rest period. They spent a total of almost eight hours "outside". One of their prime objectives was to set up the "Apollo Lunar Scientific Experiments Package (ALSEP)", a suite of instruments including a solar-wind plasma spectrometer, an ion detector, a magnetometer, and a seismograph. The instruments were linked to a central control station with an Earth communications link, with the entire assembly powered by an RTG.

They also took pictures, collected surface samples, and even cut some "souvenirs" off of Surveyor 3 to take back home with them. There was actually a practical reason to take the parts, since they could be examined to see how a spacecraft aged in a space environment. Although the probe had accumulated a thin film of micrometeorite dust, it was otherwise intact.

Intrepid lifted off and linked up with Yankee Clipper, then headed for home. The return trip was no trouble, and they were put in quarantine as the Apollo 11 crew had been. On the way back, Conrad had a little idle time to reflect on the landing. He'd been one of the only four humans to visit the Moon, and he was struck that it really didn't feel that much different from the training. Yes, it was certainly a fine thing, the bragging rights were unbeatable, but at the same time it was still just another job.

* Dick Gordon was a bit disappointed at not having landed on the Moon himself, but he hoped he could come back and finish the job on a later Apollo mission. However, the window was starting to slide shut and Gordon might not have a second chance. NASA canceled the final planned "Apollo 20" mission in January 1970, since the flight hardware was being allocated to the "Skylab" space station, discussed later.

The "Apollo 18" and "Apollo 19" missions seemed to be on uncertain ground, and in fact they would get the axe in the summer. There was even some doubt at NASA that it made sense to do any more Moon landings. Bob Gilruth, had quietly floated as a suggestion for discussion that maybe after two lunar landings, NASA should give up on the Moon for the duration. Apollo was clearly on the way out within a few years. Why not stop now and focus on the longer term? Gilruth was the kind of guy who lay awake at nights worrying about the safety of his astronauts. The simple probability of a ghastly accident increased with every Moon shot, and if NASA lost an Apollo crew, it would not only be unconscionable, it would be a disaster that might wreck the agency. But the result of the discussion was that Apollo should go ahead.

There was also the question of what longer term there really was. In 1969, President Nixon had organized a committee under Vice-President Spiro Agnew to consider long-term space plans, and the committee had come back with grand visions for space shuttles, space stations, men on Mars by 1980. Such committees and plans would become something of a ritual, performed about every decade, and always seemed to end up with the same result: budget cuts.

Even then, people were beginning to wonder how realistic such plans were. Deke Slayton and some other NASA officials went on a visit to the South Pole in early 1970 to look over the station there as a model for a planetary base. Slayton already thought that "Mars by 1980" was unrealistic; after visiting the South Pole, he concluded that the idea of sending a team of astronauts to a remote planetary base and leaving them there without outside contact for a year or more was preposterous.

BACK_TO_TOP

[23.4] MOL FALLS

* While NASA was working on Apollo, the Air Force had continued work on the service's own manned spaceflight program, the Manned Orbital Laboratory. An unmanned test flight of MOL took place on 3 November 1966, using a Gemini B on top of a dummy MOL. There had been of course concerns that the hatch in the heatshield of the Gemini B was a dangerous idea, but reentry of the test capsule was very reassuring, since it welded the hatch solidly shut.

MOL seemed to be on track, but the Apollo 1 disaster forced an expensive review of the program, and later that year the Outer Space Treaty was signed. The OST did not completely demilitarize space, but it imposed enough restrictions on military activities there to create a bias against the idea, and MOL necessarily suffered. Worst of all, the Air Force was heavily committed to the war in VietNam, which soaked up funding and resources.

The program was slipping, with first operational flight now expected in 1972, but it seemed secure in the Johnson Administration, and when the Nixon Administration entered office in early 1969, the White House still seemed in favor of the program. However, the accumulation of pressures against MOL finally went critical. The program was abruptly canceled in June 1969, after the expenditure of $1.3 billion USD. It is estimated that about 10,000 aerospace workers were laid off. The Air Force would never launch men into space.

Some MOL hardware would be put to good use, however. A number of 1.8 meter (5 foot 11 inch) mirrors were cast for a big reconnaissance camera that was to be carried by the MOLs, and they were passed on to a group of astronomers to be fitted to the "Multiple Mirror Telescope", a new telescope design that featured six mirrors on a common mount, which would go into operation on Mount Hopkins in Arizona in 1979.

The MOL pilots mostly returned to flying warplanes. There was a war on, combat service is the way to advancement in the military, and besides that was what they had been trained to do. A handful had the opportunity to make the jump to NASA, and would eventually fly in space. They included Karol Bobko, Bob Crippen, Gordon Fullerton, Henry Hartsfield, Bob Overmyer, Don Peterson, and Dick Truly. Crippen and Truly were actually Navy men attached to the MOL program; much later, Truly would end up doing a stint as a NASA administrator.

One who didn't make the jump, Jim Abrahamson, would eventually become a three-star general and an influential figure in both civilian and military space activities. One MOL astronaut, Major Bob Lawrence, had been killed in the crash of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in 1967. His qualifications were good, and if he had lived, he would have certainly been accepted by NASA, to become the first black astronaut.