Apollo 11 and Nerd Power

More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program. At the time the most famous were the astronauts and the mission commanders, but looking back we focus more and more on the engineers. The men in white shirts, dark ties, and glasses are the ones who made the whole thing happen. I noticed that when the Los Angeles Times ran a celebratory article on the mission, their focus was on the engineers who built the Saturn V's enormous engines. Theirs was a real technological triumph. The massive J-1 engines on the Saturn V's first stage were ten times as big as any rocket engines ever built before. They had to be redesigned 15 times in two years by teams of young engineers working 16-hour days, but the end product worked every time. As we now know, what stopped the Soviet moon program was repeated failures in the engines of their giant N-1 rocket, which blew up every time it was tested.

Apollo depended on hundreds of such teams working separately to create its many completely unprecedented systems. Nobody had ever built a craft that could land on another world and then blast back into orbit, a ship that could keep men alive for weeks in space, or a space suit that could be worn while walking on the moon. The men who did these things loved what they did. They reveled in their importance, and they poured their hearts and minds into their work. I remember a story from the memoirs of one of the Apollo astronauts. The night before launch he was walking around the launch complex when he was challenged by a technician who was working late, checking and rechecking every component of the launch computers. When the astronaut had explained who he was, the technician said, "if anything goes wrong tomorrow, it won't be because of my system." The astronaut realized, he said, that flying to the moon was only possible because hundreds of men had the same dedication to engineering perfection. If the mission failed, it wouldn't be because of them.

Until World War I, scientists were almost universally portrayed in America and Europe as ridiculous eggheads doing pointless things. But the technological progress of the twentieth century brought scientists and engineers to the forefront of competition between nations. When World War II came, all the combatants marshaled their scientists into teams more important than any combat division, and the scientists went to work designing stronger armor, more powerful guns, deeper-diving submarines, faster airplanes, sonar, radar, and eventually the atomic bomb. Those fearful mushroom clouds sealed the ascent of scientists to the pinnacle of military power.

When Kennedy sought a non-military way to challenge the Soviets, he turned again to science, announcing his bold plan to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. Once again the power and prestige of the nation was placed in the hands of the men with slide rules and pocket protectors. I have always been struck by the assertive nerdiness of those men. They made the clothes that looked ridiculous to hippies and hepcats into proud uniforms of intellectual power. You may think we are losers, their attitude said, but we can blow up the world or send a man to the moon, and you can't. Although what they did was in some ways extraordinarily bold, they went about their work with caution and precision. Every drawing was checked and checked again and reviewed by committee after committee. Every part was tested, tested, and tested again. The missions went step by step, each one a little farther into space, a little closer to the moon.

In this picture, the engineers at Mission Control celebrate the successful splashdown of the Apollo 11 crew, July 24, 1969. I celebrate them and their achievement. Apollo 11 was as much as anything the epitome of brainpower, and they supplied the brains.

Apollo 11: Moon Landing

At 2:12 PM EDT on July 20 the LM, with Armstrong and Aldrin on board, separated from the Command Module. At 4:17 PM, the lander was on the moon. There were two potential problems along the way. At 4:14, an alarm sounded because of a computer problem, and Mission Control considered aborting the mission. As soon as they decided that the problem was not critical, Armstrong radioed that the scheduled landing was strewn with large boulders. He took over control of the LM and began flying sideways across the lunar surface, looking for a level spot. Then a low fuel alarm sounded, but it was later determined that this was a false alarm, caused by the fuel sloshing in the tanks. Armstrong ignored the warning and continued flying, and after just two minutes he picked a spot and set the LM down. The first words from the moon were actually technical chatter about engine shutdown and the like. Once the technical details were settled and the engines off, Armstrong sent his famous message: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

The astronauts almost immediately began preparations for their moon walk, EVA in NASA parlance. The hatch was opened at 10:39 PM, and Armstrong began his descent to the surface. He paused on the ladder to take photos of the landing gear, for the engineers, and take a soil sample. Then he continued to the surface, speaking the day's second famous line, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." He was joined by Aldrin. They took pictures, collected samples, set up the flag and two quick experiments. They practiced different ways of moving around. Then they went back to the LM.

At 1:13 AM on July 21, the hatch was closed. Armstrong and Aldrin stowed their gear and their samples, and then they were supposed to sleep. Armstrong couldn't. This famous picture of an elated Aldrin, back in the LM after the spacewalk, explains why.

Apollo 11: the LM

The mission profile that NASA selected for Apollo was called "lunar orbit rendezvous." That is, two spacecraft would travel from the earth to the moon and enter lunar orbit, but only one would descend to the surface of the moon. Nine companies submitted designs for this vehicle, and NASA selected one from Grumman. The main designer was a Grumman engineer named Tom Kelly, one of the many obscure people who contributed their talents to making Apollo work.

The LM was a minimalist craft, its design increasingly refined to reduce weight. Its skin was metal foil so thin you can poke a finger through it. The designers initially wanted five landing legs, but settled on four. In the final redesign, the seats were removed and the windows reduced to tiny triangles. The absence of seats not only made flying it less comfortable, but much less safe should it land roughly. The interior of the crew cabin measured 235 square feet, which is equalivent to a cube 6.2 feet on a side. (Imagine the Apollo 13 astronauts living in that space for a week.) The thing looks rather ridiculous, but on the other hand it worked. One of the great fears of NASA leaders was sending astronauts to the moon and leaving them stranded there, marking our achievement with corpses instead of a flag. Thanks to the LM and its designers, along with some good flying by the mission commanders, that never happened.

The photo was shot by Michael Collins just after the LM separated from the command module.

Apollo 11: the Voyage to the Moon

The Apollo 11 astronauts spent July 17, 18, and most of the 19th on the way from the earth to the moon. Not much on the official timeline. But think, for a moment, about what that was like. Three men in their tiny spaceship, a hundred thousand miles from home, nothing between them and the cold death of space but a thin sheet of metal. Just to sit through that and arrive ready to work at the other end was a feat of emotional control.

Meanwhile, some links, since everybody is celebrating.

At this site you can follow the mission in 40-year-delayed real time.

NASA's collection of restored Apollo 11 videos.
NASA's gallery of Apollo 11 photographs.
NASA's giant collection of thousands of Apollo images.
Youtube moon landing video.

Apollo 11

Forty years ago today, at 1:32 PM, the Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 11 mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral. Apollo 11 is, to me, one of the greatest and most amazing triumphs of humanity. In the course of the mission our species, earthbound for its first hundred thousand years, walked on another world. Through us, the life of earth took a first tentative step beyond its nursery. We stretched the bounds that hold us to our planet and crossed a quarter million miles of empty space to reach the moon. The enormous brains that we so often employ finding new ways to kill each other were put to a more worthy use, and we found that when we make a great enough effort we can do incredible things.

I was seven years old in July of 1969. I remember men on the moon, but my memories are jumbled, and I am no longer sure which memories go with which mission. I don't think it matters. I remember the voices from space, speaking their strange NASA jargon. I remember flickering pictures on our little black and white television. I remember the extraordinary excitement of the time. I remember what happened, and what it meant to watch the world change.

About 6% of Americans tell pollsters that they believe the moon landing was faked. What a sad trap they have fallen into. They have become too cynical to recognize a true victory of the human spirit, too blinded by suspicion to recognize a really great achievement. They probably think they are very clever not to be taken in by the lies that fool others, but it is they who have been taken in. It is a lie that there is no nobility in the world. It is a lie that governments do nothing but cheat, steal, and bamboozle. It is a lie that humans cannot achieve great things. And it is a mistake to always look for fraud, deceit, and propaganda, because while fraud, deceit and propaganda are real, so is wonder.

I know the Apollo program was a spin-off from the Cold War, a child of the strange rivalry between the US and the USSR for leadership of the world. So what? Nobody ever acts from perfectly pure motives. The Cold War could easily have become a global catastrophe, or even the end of our species, but instead it spurred both Americans and Russians to achieve the extraordinary. The Cold War rivalry provided an opportunity to do something that we ought to have done anyway. And when what should be done is done, it is foolish to worry too much about why it was done. Instead, we should celebrate the doing. Today, and for the next seven days, I celebrate the journey to the moon.

Apollo 11: the Saturn V

Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were launched to the moon by a Saturn V, the most powerful rocket ever used in a space mission. It may even have been the most powerful machine ever used for anything, unless you count blowing up abandoned coral atolls as a use, because the power it expended propelling men and machines into space was greater than that of the first atomic bombs. It was 363 feet tall, 33 feet in diameter, and weighed 6,699,000 pounds. Each of its three stages was built by a different company, which some critics said was a recipe for a disaster, but it worked almost perfectly each of the 13 times one was launched. This immense machine was needed to give the Apollo spacecraft the velocity they needed for "translunar injection", that is, to enter the orbital path that would take them to the moon. Relative to the earth, they were traveling about 23,000 miles per hour.