The day after Apollo 11 blasted off on its history-making journey, The
New York Times ran a correction to an editorial it had printed 49 years
earlier. The editorial noted: “. . . it is now definitely established that a
rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times
regrets the error.” And so Robert Goddard, one of the fathers of modern
rocketry, stood vindicated, albeit decades after his death.
Without the determination of Goddard and other rocketeers such as Wernher von
Braun, the German scientist behind the V2 who was secretly brought to the US
after the Second World War, the American space programme would, literally,
never have got off the ground. Nobody was going to land on the Moon until
someone had worked out how to fire a manned spacecraft up there — and how to
bring it back.
The Apollo programme was instigated to do just that — to fulfil President
Kennedy’s 1961 vision of putting an American on the Moon by the end of the
decade. The programme was built on the desire to prove scientific supremacy
over the Soviet Union — which was then basking in the glory of having sent a
man into space (Yuri Gagarin). The battle was bitter: when America tried,
and failed, to put up its own satellite after the Soviet’s historic 1957
launch of Sputnik (the world’s first satellite), the Russians cheekily
suggested that America seek technical assistance under the USSR’s programme
to help developing nations.
Shooting for the Moon was never going to be technically straightforward.
Nasa decided the best strategy was a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, which involved
launching a single spacecraft into lunar orbit, then detaching a capsule
from the spacecraft that would land on the Moon. Afterwards, the capsule
would reattach to the spacecraft, and then fire its rockets for the journey
home.
The epic responsibility of Apollo 11’s outward 250,000 mile journey
would lie with an epic rocket, the dimensions of which dwarfed all those
that came before and after. When the expendable Saturn V rocket was wheeled
out for its historic launch, crowned with Apollo 11 and its human
contents, it stood nearly 111m tall, about 20m higher than that other great
icon of American values, the Statue of Liberty. Fully fuelled, it weighed
more than 3,000 tons.
The right rocket was crucial. It needed fuel that would burn in a vacuum (so
oxygen is added to the liquid fuel); it had to generate a thrust big enough
to escape the gravitational pull of Earth but not so big it would blow apart
its payload. The Saturn V staggered its thrust in three stages: the first
powered by a kerosene-type fuel, and the subsequent stages by liquid
hydrogen.
The other major technological triumph, according to Doug Millard, senior space
curator at the Science Museum in London, was the command module of Apollo
11. Named Columbia, this provided the living quarters for Buzz
Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins on the outward and return
journeys. “This was the heart of the mission,” Millard says. “The sheer
quantity of systems, controls, consoles and computing power that had to be
packed into that tiny space was quite astonishing.” It boasted 15 miles of
wiring and more than two million components. And remember, this was 40 years
ago; your mobile phone contains more computing power than Apollo 11.
Most striking was the guidance and navigation system: every manoeuvre needed
to be performed with precision, from getting Apollo to the Moon first time
(not enough fuel to make up for a missed shot) to the delicate
separation/reattachment procedures between the Apollo modules, all done
while pirouetting around the Moon in lunar orbit. Not forgetting the return
requirement to pierce the right bit of the Earth’s atmosphere and splash
down in the right bit of the Pacific, i.e. near a recovery ship.
The two other main sections of the spacecraft were the lunar module Eagle
( the capsule, containing Armstrong and Aldrin, that detached from Apollo
11 to land on the Moon’s surface), and the service module, which
contained propulsion, electrical power and storage for water, air and waste
(it would be jettisoned just before Apollo 11 re-entered the Earth’s
atmosphere).
While Apollo 11 was the ultimate technology showcase, much of the
scientific groundwork for a lunar landing was laid in projects that ran
concurrently. Project Mercury, which ran from 1961 to 1963, was focused on
finding out whether humans could survive in space. It propelled first
monkeys, then chimps, in order to establish that animals could survive the
immense thrusts involved with lift-off, and the return journey through the
Earth’s atmosphere. It was as a result of this work that Alan Shepard, one
of the so-called Mercury Seven astronauts (military test pilots recruited to
train for a manned lunar expedition), became the first American, and the
second man, in space in 1961.
Project Gemini would later test the idea of lunar orbit rendezvous: the
successful separation and reattachment of modules in the serenely beautiful
— and deadly — surroundings of space.
But it was the Apollo programme that collected all the pieces of the
technological jigsaw and arranged them into an historic whole. In this
sense, Apollo broke new ground in project management. An estimated 400,000
people made Apollo 11 happen; they toiled in Nasa outposts across
America, and in the warehouses of the contractors such as Boeing and Douglas.
This, to Millard, is an unsung legacy: “The thing about Apollo was how so many
technologies and teams were marshalled to achieve this one objective. It’s a
story of management science, of how Nasa was able to operate its various
sites, balancing the directions from Washington while allowing Nasa people
to keep some autonomy.
“I’m so impressed by the way these people were brought together, by the scale
of collaboration, co-operation and sheer bloodymindedness involved, and even
more so because that feat has not yet been repeated. It just shows what you
can do when you put your minds to it.”
Indeed. Apollo showed that, when it came to human endeavour, the sky was
absolutely not the limit.
