The Apollo Missions

The Incredible Story of the Race to the Moon

David Baker

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789504392
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Space Science

Long has the moon captured the imagination of world; from science fiction to astrology; howling wolves to lunar calendars. To President John F. Kennedy, however, the moon was a destination. To put a man on the moon would be to challenge Russia's recent achievements in space exploration and assert the US's technological prowess on the world stage. As we know, the mission was a success, and yet while everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong's iconic line and his bold tread on the moon's dusty surface, few are privy to the events leading up to this moment. Former NASA engineer, David Baker, gives a behind-the-scenes account of the space race, including the political impetus behind the mission, the Apollo 8's lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, as well as some of the tale's tragedies. Bursting with fascinating stories, striking photographs of the team and exclusive material provided by NASA personnel, this book perfectly captures the risk, complexity and gravitas of this immense journey.

Chapter 1

Why go to the moon?

It was Thursday, 25 May 1961 when John F. Kennedy, barely four months into his presidency of the United States, was driven the short distance across Washington, DC from the White House to the Capitol to deliver an address before a Joint Session of Congress. Such events were not rare but hardly common. He was there to deliver a speech on “Urgent National Needs” and it was to be a seminal moment in the history of the world. Only a few knew what he was about to say.

Kennedy’s oration began by reminding his audience that these were “extraordinary times”, and that the United States was living under the terrible threat of Communist hegemony, while affirming that the United States was “not against any man – or any nation – or any system – except as it is hostile to freedom.” For a while his speech centred on the need for a strong economy, and for support to vulnerable nations seeking independence and freedom from autocracy, describing the United States’ role as to “preserve and promote the ideals that we share with all mankind.”

Not for some time did he focus in on his actual theme, directing his audience to the new age of space, albeit barely into its fourth year, declaring it to be “an adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” He continued, “… we have examined where we are strong and where we are not, where we may succeed and where we may not. Now it is time to take longer strides – time for a great new American enterprise – time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.”

After explaining that US leadership had been lacking and that “our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others”, Kennedy came to the reason they were all there, to issue a challenge so monumental that no one, anywhere, had full knowledge of how to achieve it: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

The lunar sphere, not as viewed from Earth but from a spacecraft coming around the right-hand limb looking back partly at the far side. From whichever angle, the Moon has unified artists, musicians, poets, scientists and engineers.

40-kopek Russian stamp commemorates the launch of Sputnik, “first in the world”, a symbol of Soviet success to a nation recovering from having lost more of its people during the Second World War than all the other combatant nations combined.

On 25 May 1961 President Kennedy addresses a joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives to proclaim the national goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is behind him on the left, and Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House, is on the right. In 1958 Johnson had pushed through the bill founding NASA and three years later orchestrated the decision to go for the Moon.

A place for dreamers

From time immemorial, the Moon had played an important role in art, music, fiction and romance. Now it was to be the tip of a technological virility pole stretching all the way from the United States to the Moon’s dusty surface, upon which could be planted the flag of political and ideological supremacy. If achieved, this would send a clear signal to the rest of the world that the United States had passed the Soviet Union in the Space Race and would go on to achieve even greater things in science, technology and engineering; an invitation to coalesce around a winning ideology of political democracy and industrial capitalism.

In declaring the Moon goal, Kennedy saw it in precisely that light, imbuing it with a certain romanticism, seeking to race the Soviet Union for technological supremacy over distant worlds, demonstrating to politically uncommitted nations that the system of government espoused by the United States was capable of accepting any challenge, meeting any goal – and winning. Paradoxically, Kennedy would always deny that he had launched the United States on a race to the Moon. But in reality, he had, prompted by the connection which had already become entrenched in public thinking: that technological superiority was a yardstick by which to measure the progress of a nation.

Born in March 1934 on a collective farm in the village of Klushino, Yuri Gagarin was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1955 and selected for cosmonaut training five years later. After making history as the first man into space on 12 April 1961, he was refused permission to fly another space mission and died in an aircraft accident on 27 March 1968.

It was also a direct response to a survey conducted quietly in major cities around the world in which ordinary citizens were asked which country they rated as most likely to be the pre-eminent nation of the future. Before the launch of the Soviet Yuri Gagarin, who on 12 April 1961 became the world’s first spaceman, the United States was generally considered the top nation in terms of human progress. Within a week of that momentous event, however, right across Europe except in the UK, the Soviet Union was propelled to top spot in public opinion. France, Germany, Italy and Belgium believed the Soviet Union would very quickly outstrip the United States. This was a shock to Americans – at least those who knew of this survey, carried out by the US Information Service through its embassies. But the results were probably not surprising, given that already, on 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union had become the first country to place an artificial satellite (known as Sputnik) in orbit in space – followed a month later by a second satellite, carrying a dog named Laika, the first living thing to orbit the Earth.

The challenge facing a flagging United States was all the more poignant since one of President Kennedy’s main campaign promises before he was voted into office in November 1960 was never again to let the country suffer an embarrassing technological defeat by the Soviet Union. More than one newspaper equated the embarrassment of Gagarin’s flight to the United States’ “second Pearl Harbor moment”. Yet, ironically, it was because the Soviet Union put the first spaceman into orbit that the Moon challenge was laid down by Kennedy, for if the United States had been first in sending one of its astronauts into space, honour would have been satisfied.

It had been a close thing. NASA – the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration – opened for business on 1 October 1958, one year after Sputnik, the result of the US political élite’s decision to set up a civilian space agency that would also be an arm of the government, with programmes and projects directed towards making the United States great in space. This new agency had a pedigree, for it grew out of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which had been formed in 1915 to spearhead US research into the new science of aeronautics and to carry out wind-tunnel tests on wing shapes and fuselage forms.

Supporting industry for 42 years, the NACA underpinned US aeronautical progress with industrial demand during World War II, providing technological capabilities to develop the tools for an overwhelming application of force in helping defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan between December 1941 and August 1945. It had also been instrumental in pushing development of a civil aviation industry, which by the beginning of the war in Europe in 1939 had outclassed that of any other country, including providing research tests for flying boats, seaplanes and long-range airliners.

After the war, the NACA immediately began research into high-flying aircraft and high-speed projects, and was instrumental in supporting the US Air Force to push the Bell X-1 through the sound barrier when “Chuck” Yeager passed Mach 1 (the speed of sound) in October 1947. The NACA was also interested in rocket research, but the United States had wasted two decades since March 1926 when Dr Robert Goddard became the first man to fire a liquid propellant rocket, from a cabbage patch at Auburn, Massachusetts, opening a door to space propulsion that only liquid motors could initially provide.

From the 1930s onwards, the awareness that rocket flight might be possible in the near future informed a wide range of comics and science fiction novels, attracting readers such as this young soldier trapped in the Warsaw uprising in 1944 and reading a Flash Gordon novel!

Destiny among the stars

During the 1930s, science fiction had been furtive ground for comic-book writers and film-makers, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon appearing in print and on screen to envision a future no one believed could become reality within their lifetime. International symbols of a future world, they provided a ready supply of material, establishing a backdrop to isolated pockets of serious research. However, from September 1944, when the Germans began launching several thousand V-2 rockets against Antwerp and London, the future seemed not quite so far away.

A key player in the development of the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun was brought to the United States after the war and began to give shape to a programme involving a wide range of ballistic rockets and missiles for which the US Army provided money and facilities. For a few years von Braun and his team worked with an increasing number of Army engineers and scientists to develop better versi...