One Giant Leap

The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

Charles Fishman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501106316
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

The remarkable story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic mission to reach the moon. President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel.When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy's historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience—with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than U.S. astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400, 000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send 24 astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.More than fifty years later, One Giant Leap is the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind's greatest achievements. It's a story filled with surprises—from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today.Charles Fishman introduces readers to the men and women who had to solve 10, 000 problems before astronauts could reach the Moon. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. One Giant Leap is the captivating story of men and women charged with changing the world as we knew it—their leaders, their triumphs, their near disasters, all of which led to arguably the greatest success story, and the greatest adventure story, of the twentieth century.

1

Tranquility Base & the World We All Live In

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

William Safire

speechwriter to President Richard Nixon, text of an undelivered speech¹

For the first Moon walk ever, Sonny Reihm was inside NASA’s Mission Control building, watching every move on the big screen. Reihm was a supervisor for the most important Moon technology after the lunar module itself: the spacesuits, the helmets, the Moon walk boots. And as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got comfortable bouncing around on the Moon and got to work, Reihm got more and more uncomfortable.

The spacesuits themselves were fine. They were the work of Playtex, the folks who brought America the “Cross Your Heart Bra” in the mid-1960s. Playtex had sold the skill of its industrial division to NASA in part with the cheeky observation that the company had a lot of expertise developing clothing that had to be flexible and also form-fitting.²

It was when the cavorting started on the Moon that Reihm got butterflies in his stomach. Aldrin had spent half an hour bumping around in his spacesuit, with his big round helmet, when all of a sudden, here he came bounding from foot to foot like a kid at a playground, right at the video camera he and Armstrong had set up at the far side of their landing site.

Aldrin was romping straight at the world, growing larger and larger, and he was talking about how he’d discovered that you have to watch yourself when you start bouncing around exactly like he was bouncing around, because you couldn’t quite trust your sense of balance in Moon gravity; you might get going too fast, lose your footing, and end up on your belly, skidding along the rocky lunar ground.

“You do have to be rather careful to keep track of where your center of mass is,” Aldrin said, as if his fellow Earthlings might soon find this Moon walk advice useful. “Sometimes, it takes about two or three paces to make sure you’ve got your feet underneath you.”³

Reihm should have been having the most glorious moment of his career. He had joined the industrial division of Playtex, ILC Dover, in 1960 at age twenty-two, and by the time of the Moon landing, before he turned thirty, he had become the Apollo project manager. His team’s blazing white suits were taking men on their first walk on another world. They were a triumph of technology and imagination, not to mention politics and persistence. The spacesuits were completely self-contained spacecraft, with room for just one. They had been tested and tweaked and custom-tailored. But what happened on Earth really didn’t matter, did it—that’s what Reihm was thinking. There was only one test that mattered, and Aldrin was conducting it right there, right now, in full view of the whole world, on the airless Moon, with unabashed enthusiasm.

If Aldrin should trip and land hard on a Moon rock, well, a tear in the suit wouldn’t be a seamstress’s problem. It would be a disaster. The suit would deflate instantly, catastrophically, and the astronaut would die, on TV, in front of the world. That’s what Reihm was thinking about.

The TV camera, set up on a tripod, would have a perfect view. Aldrin ran left, planted his left leg, then cut to the right like an NFL running back dodging tacklers. He did kangaroo hops right past the American flag, but announced that this wasn’t a good way of moving around. “Your forward mobility is not quite as good as it is in the more conventional one foot after another,” he said. Then he disappeared from the camera’s view.

By this time Reihm could barely contain his fretfulness. “That silly bastard is out there running all over the place,” he thought.⁴

Seconds ticked by. The Moon base was quiet. Armstrong was working by the lunar module, his back to the camera. Suddenly Aldrin came dashing in from the left, straight across the landing site, Moon dirt flying from his boots. His narration back to Mission Control was calm, but his speed was anything but. He was doing a Moon run: “As far as saying what a sustained pace might be, I think the one that I’m using now would get rather tiring after several hundred feet.”⁵

Reihm was in a technical support room adjacent to Mission Control, with a group of spacesuit staff, standing by in case anything went wrong. Even though everything was going perfectly, and even though the whole point of the spacesuits was to explore the Moon, Reihm couldn’t wait for it to end. Why in the world was Aldrin acting crazy on the Moon, of all places?

Reihm’s worries weren’t unique to him. Eleanor Foraker had supervised the women who sewed the spacesuits, each suit painstakingly stitched by hand. When the jumping around started, she started thinking about the pressure garment, one of the inner layers of the spacesuit that sealed the astronaut against the vacuum of space. What if all that hopping and tugging caused a leak?

Joe Kosmo was one of the spacesuit designers on the NASA side. He was at home, watching with his family, thinking exactly the same thing Reihm was: “This is great. I hope he doesn’t fall over.”⁶

Reihm knew, of course, that the astronauts were just out there “euphorically enjoying what they were doing.” If the world was excited about the Moon landing, imagine being the two guys who got to do it. In fact, according to the flight plan, right after the landing, Armstrong and Aldrin were scheduled for a five-hour nap. They told Mission Control they wanted to ditch the nap, suit up, and get outside. They hadn’t flown all the way to the Moon in order to sleep.⁷

And there really wasn’t anything to worry about. There was nothing delicate about the spacesuits. Just the opposite. They were marvels: 21 layers of nested fabric, strong enough to stop a micrometeorite, but still flexible enough for Aldrin’s kangaroo hops and quick cuts. Aldrin and Armstrong moved across the Moon with enviable light-footedness.

Still, watching Aldrin dash around, Reihm could “think of nothing but, Please go back up that ladder and get back into the safety of that lunar module. When [they] went back up that ladder and shut that door, it was the happiest moment of my life. It wasn’t until quite a while later that I reveled over the accomplishment.”⁸

Reihm wasn’t thrilled by the Moon walk that he and his colleagues had worked for years to make possible; he was thrilled by its being over, by Armstrong and Aldrin going back inside, sealing the hatch, and repressurizing their cabin.

That anxiety—not just of one man but of a trio on the same team—seems such an unexpected reaction to the climax of the space program’s dash through the 1960s. For Sonny Reihm and Eleanor Foraker and Joe Kosmo, the moment of maximum triumph was also the moment of maximum risk: they knew the thousand things that might go wrong.

Reihm’s anxiety, in fact, is a kind of time machine.

We know how the story ended: every Moon mission was a success. Even Apollo 13, which was a catastrophe, was a triumph. Every spacesuit worked perfectly. Astronauts did trip and fall—they skipped, bunny-hopped, skidded to their knees, did pushups to stand upright, jumped too high, and fell over backward. As crews got more experience and more confidence, they would trot at high speed across the Moon’s surface—carefree—in that distinctive one-sixth-gravity locomotion. Once we got to the Moon, nothing much went wrong, not with the spacesuits or anything else.⁹

But the rockets and spaceships that flew the astronauts to the Moon were far and away the most complex machines ever created. The vast system of support assembled to manage those spaceships was far and away the most elaborate support in history for an expedition. There were so many ways things could go wrong that, for that first mission, President Nixon’s staff had a speech ready in case the astronauts died during the mission. That speech was written before they even blasted off.

Reihm’s anxiety takes us back to the moment when every spaceflight was dangerous and daring. Over and over, NASA pushed the limits of its experience and tested the reliability of what it had created—21 layers of spacesuit fabric—against the unforgiving forces of spaceflight physics. His anxiety takes us back to a moment when the standing and reputation of the United States around the world hung on the soaring ambition of its space program and on the success of those space missions.

Reihm’s anxiety is a time machine because it puts us back in the moments before anyone knew how the story would come out. And it’s a reminder of the mostly unsung men and women who made it possible for Armstrong and Aldrin to leave those distinctive bootprints at Tranquility Base.

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Today the race to the Moon seems touched by magic. The Moon landing has ascended to the realm of American mythology. In our imaginations, it’s a snippet of crackly audio, a calm and slightly hesitant Neil Armstrong stepping from the ladder onto the surface of the Moon, saying, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” It’s the video clip of the Saturn V roaring off the launchpad in Florida, with almost inhuman power, smoke and fire streaming behind it. It’s a brilliant color picture of an astronaut standing on the Moon, saluting the American flag. It’s a phrase: “If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we . . . ?”

It is such a landmark accomplishment that the decade-long journey has been concentrated into a single event, as if on a summer day in 1969, three men climbed into a rocket, flew to the Moon, pulled on their spacesuits, took one small step, planted the American flag, and then came home. How they got there, how many times they went, even why they went—the myth has polished all that away.

The Moon landing was 50 years ago, but the event itself has an immediacy in our minds—a singular brilliant destination, a well-scrubbed cast of astronauts, a well-ordered place called Mission Control staffed with people of calm competence, a series of astonishing accomplishments that managed to get more routine as they became more astonishing.

America reached the Moon without conquering it or capturing it. We landed, and the world came along with us. But the magic, of course, was the result of an incredible effort—an effort unlike any that had been seen before. Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb. In 1961, the year Kennedy formally announced Apollo, NASA spent $1 million on the program for the year. Five years later NASA was spending $1 million every three hours on Apollo, 24 hours a day.¹⁰

On that day, May 25, 1961, when Kennedy asked Congress to send Americans to the Moon before the 1960s were over, NASA had no rockets to launch astronauts to the Moon, no computer portable enough to guide a spaceship to the Moon, no spacesuits to wear on the way, no spaceship to land astronauts on the surface (let alone a Moon car to let them drive around and explore), no network of tracking stations to talk to the astronauts en route. On the day of Kennedy’s speech, no human being had ever opened a hatch in space and gone outside; no two manned spaceships had ever been in space together or ever tried to rendezvous with each other. No one had any real idea what the surface of the Moon was like and what kind of landing craft it would support, because no craft of any kind had landed safely on the Moon and reported back. As Kennedy gave that speech, there was an argument—at MIT no less—about whether engineers could do the math required, could do the navigation required, and do it fast enough, to fly to the Moon and back.

“When [Kennedy] asked us to do that in 1961, it was impossible,” said Chris Kraft, the NASA engineer who created Mission Control. “We made it possible. We, the United States, made it possible.”¹¹

And just eight years later, the spacesuit designers were worried that the astronauts were being too exuberant in their first Moon walk. With perspective, that’s an understandable worry, and also a worry with a certain charm.

The big myth about the race to the Moon contains many small myths. One is that, during this golden age of space exploration, Americans enthusiastically supported NASA and the space program, that Americans wanted to go to the Moon. In fact two American presidents in a row hauled the space program all the way to the Moon with not even half of Americans saying they thought it was worthwhile. The sixties were a wildly tumultuous decade, and while Apollo sometimes seemed to exist in its own bubble of intensity and focus, in a place somehow separate from the Vietnam War and the urban riots and the assassinations, in fact Americans constantly questioned why we were going to the Moon when we couldn’t handle our problems on Earth.

As early as 1964, when asked if America should “go all out to beat the Russians in a manned flight to the moon,” only 26 percent of Americans said yes.¹² Public support for Apollo actually faded as the 1960s went along, despite the saturation coverage of astronauts headed to the Moon. During Christmas 1968, NASA sent three astronauts in an Apollo capsule all the way to the Moon, where they orbited just 70 miles over the surface, and on Christmas Eve, in a live, primetime TV broadcast, they showed pictures of the Moon’s surface out their spaceship windows. Then the three astronauts, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read the first 10 verses of Genesis to what was then the largest TV audience in history. From orbit, Anders took one of the most famous pictures of all time, the photo of the Earth floating in space above the Moon, the first full-color photo of Earth from space, later titled Earthrise, a single image credited with helping inspire the modern environmental movement.¹³

At the end of a chaotic and catastrophic year, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the riots that followed in 168 U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C.; the war protests and campus protests; the rioting around the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the election of Richard Nixon as the president to replace Lyndon Johnson; that moment of arresting unity as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve seemed to briefly redeem an irredeemable year. Out of everything that happened that year, Time magazine chose as “Man of the Year” for 1968 that Apollo 8 crew, Anders, Lovell, and Borman, their triumphant voyage “a particularly welcome gift after a year of disruption and despond.”¹⁴

Their trip meant, among other things, that the United States had made it to the Moon first. Americans had won “the race.” There would be no “Red Moon.” It also meant that the landing Kennedy envisioned would almost certainly happen, as promised, before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 8 was a worldwide triumph for the United States and the prelude to an even greater one. It was thrilling. It provided a sense of satisfaction and pride, even catharsis, for a country that was losing confidence in its ability to do anything, from run its universities to wage war to protect its leaders. The Time “Men of the Year” story said that in 1968, America’s “self-confidence sank to a nadir” because of a growing sense “that American society was afflicted with some profound malaise of spirit and will.” The excitement and anticipation for the actual Moon landing should have been extraordinary.¹⁵

In fact it was anything but universal. Four weeks after Apollo 8’s telecast from lunar orbit, the Harris Poll conducted a survey of Americans about the mission. Asked if they favored landing a man on the Moon, only 39 percent said yes—even as the Moon landings were about to happen. Asked if they thought the space program was worth the $4 billion a year it was costing, 55 percent of Americans said no. That year, 1968, the ...