The Unbroken Chain

Chapter 10 - Breaks in the chain...

The selection process for flight crews had been a somewhat standard affair since the earliest of Gemini days. Basically, the backup crew for a mission could plan on being the prime crew three missions later. This seemed to work well and kept everyone motivated and involved. That was, until A1 Shepard reentered the picture.

A1 had been grounded back in 1964 from an inner-ear ailment. He had been training to command the first Gemini flight when he got the bad news. Fortunately for everyone at the Cape, Shepard was in Houston. I don’t think he was very happy with the prognosis. A1 had always been a guy who could take your head off with one clean slice. Having been tied to a desk, he now became a man to be truly feared. Most of the astronauts tried to avoid him as much as possible.

In 1969, Tom Stafford heard about a physician in Los Angeles that had developed a new surgical procedure and passed the news on to Shepard. A1 wasted no time in meeting with the doctor. An examination showed that Shepard’s problem might well be helped by the procedure. He quietly slipped out to LA and took his chances under the knife. Over the next few months his condition improved dramatically and soon he presented himself to the flight surgeons. Amazing! A full recovery and A1 Shepard was back on flight status. He immediately began pressuring Deke for an assignment to a mission.

Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon were already training for Apollo 12, the second lunar landing attempt. They had been the backups on Apollo 9. Gordo Cooper had been the backup commander for Apollo 10 and surely felt he was in line to command Apollo 13. What he got, however, was an offer to act, once again, as backup commander. A1 was clearing the way for his return to space and Gordo didn’t like it one bit.

A1 lobbied hard to get the commander’s slot for Apollo 13, but Deke continued with a previous plan to put Jim Lovell in charge of 13. That would give Shepard more time to get a crew prepared for Apollo 14. So, rotation be damned. Alan Shepard was going to the moon. Poor Gordo turned in his badge and retired from the program in disgust. The chain remained intact, but a clump of shuffled links had appeared.

After Apollo 11, quite a few NASA managers left for greener pastures.

Among them were Sam Phillips, Rocco Petrone, and George Mueller. Walter Kapryan became the new Director of Launch Operations at KSC. Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth had been attained, and public interest in further manned space exploration was on the decline. It was the beginning of what would become a permanent battle between congressional budget makers and NASA planners.

The rollout for Apollo 12 was scheduled for September so I had a few weeks to relax and catch up on some of my personal interests. It was the middle of summer and that meant fishing. I had a 23-foot Fiberglas boat with a small cabin and enclosed head. The head was particularly important since when ladies came on board, their first question was always, “Where’s the bathroom?” My neighbor, Earl, had helped me to build a boat lift on the canal behind my house. It was a pretty neat little setup with an electric hoist. The boat could be raised or lowered in less than five minutes. If we decided to go fishing, we just dropped the boat into the water and off we went. I always kept it stocked with about a dozen fishing poles and all the gear we might need.

There were three basic types of angling that we did. The most exciting was offshore fishing. If we were going offshore, we used big rods with thirty or fifty pound test lines. It would be an all day affair so we loaded up the boat with food and drinks. Now if we were taking astronauts onboard, some of the Cape handlers would tend to get skittish. So we agreed to carry my KSC radio along and report in our position to KSC safety operators all during the day. We were pretty much limited to the range of the radio which was ten to fifteen miles. We also had to remember that sudden storms could move in at any time. Once the waves got up to three feet, it was time to pack it up and come on in.

We had two favorite ways of fishing offshore. One was trolling, with quite a few lines out. We used dead bait and cruised along at a slow rate. With luck, some fish would find us and get hooked up on one of the lines. The other option was to anchor near the buoy lines that the ocean ships used to navigate them way into the port. Certain fish - we called them triple tails - tended to hang around the buoys. For bait we used a little jig, some freshly cut mullet, or live shrimp. On one of these trips, Mike Collins caught a ten-pounder and it put up a terrific fight. You would be surprised at the amount of fight a fish this size could give. Mike was very proud of the catch that day. Although we generally released the fish that we caught, I do remember that we took this one home and filleted it. It was very good eating.

When less time was available, we would go river fishing. Our favorite spot was near the NASA Causeway bridge on the Banana River. Everything on the other side of the bridge was wildlife refuge and no fishing was allowed. But on our side, there were some monstrous fish who strayed across the boundary. Occasionally some astronauts would join us and I would pick them up right there. With a clearance from security, they would climb down a ladder on the concrete pilings and hop directly into the boat. That worked pretty well except when we stayed through a shift change. We got challenged at gun point more than once when returning astronauts to the bridge for disembarkation.

For river fishing, we would take smaller rods with eight to fifteen pound lines. We had the best success using live shrimp or minnows as bait. Primarily we were looking for trout, redfish, and the occasional tarpon. These were all good fighters, with the tarpon being the king and a real rarity. Once Joe Schmitt was with us and latched onto a large fish. He was hanging on for dear life thinking that he wished he had a bigger rod and heavier line. The fish launched out of the water about fifty feet away. It was a beautiful tarpon. Joe worked it carefully for thirty minutes, trying to tire the fish out. Finally, he worked it in close enough to the boat where I could get a net under him. It was a real beauty. We gave some thought to bringing the fish home and having it mounted, but ultimately decided to let him go so that another lucky fisherman could have a crack at him.

The third type of fishing we did with the boat was shrimping. Now shrimping is a very peculiar thing down here in Florida. To begin with, there is a certain season when the shrimp are leaving the river and estuaries, migrating back into the open ocean. During the daytime, they bury themselves in the sand Your only chance at catching them is at night when they do their traveling. A lantern hung over the side of the boat would attract them and we had to keep a sharp eye out. They would only surface for a few seconds and that was our chance to try to scoop them up with long-handled nets.

Hans Gert Meyer was a German science reporter who broadcast a live show from Berlin every Saturday morning. He frequently came to the Cape to cover launches and usually stayed with my family as our house guest. He was a very precise man and I took it on myself to introduce him to fishing. We went out one night to the NASA bridge. My neighbor, Earl, was at the front of the boat having some luck scooping up shrimp with a net. Hans was more interested in fishing with a rod and reel. He bad carefully cut up small squares of mullet and placed them in a very neat line along the side of the boat on the gunwales. Earl came walking back along the edge and stepped on a piece of the cut bait. It was as if he stepped on a bar of wet soap. One foot kicked up so hard that his shoe came flying off and with a splash, he flopped into the water.

“Grab the net! Grab the net!” Earl cried out. He had held it throughout the fall and his only concern was that the shrimp it contained not be lost. Hans never did understand the crazy Americans. I am sure he considered me to be just another one of them.

Everyone seemed to have their own formula for calculating when the shrimp would be running. High tides, low tides, phases of the moon, and temperature usually figured in. But the truth of the matter is that no one ever really figured it out. It remained a hit or miss game and that probably added to the fun of it. Plenty of times we returned home empty handed. Invariably, someone at work the next day would say, “Hey, you guys went in too early. We stayed out until 2:00 a.m. and caught two hundred of them!” Frequently we would see large numbers of crabs floating around on the surface. They were a nuisance to clean, but were delicious if you didn’t mind the work. Even if we did not catch many shrimp, we could usually count on bringing in a garbage can full of crabs as a consolation prize. One night we spotted a large alligator floating in the water not far from the boat. He was the laziest gator I ever saw. He floated there motionlessly with his mouth wide open. Every time a crab floated through, he clamped it shut and swallowed the delicacy. We watched him for nearly an hour with our flashlights. No effort at all on his part. Just holding his mouth open waiting for dinner to swim right in.

Shrimping was a fine art which we took very seriously. We always loved to brag about the nights that we came back with 350 big shrimp. But we never mentioned the other twenty nights when we came back with only three or four.

First there was Gordo. Then there was Geno - Gene Cernan. Now, there was Beano.

Alan Bean was the rookie with the enviable position of being the fourth human scheduled to set his foot on the moon. Beano had been rescued from duty in the Apollo Applications Program, later to be known as Sky lab, by Pete Conrad. He remembered him as a promising student from their days together as naval aviators. The third member of the Apollo 12 crew was Pete’s longtime friend, Dick Gordon. That pair was nearly inseparable.

Unlike Pete and Dick, who were swashbuckling wisecracks. Bean p quiet and diligent. Being several layers down in the pecking order, he was careful about not stepping on too many toes. I barely knew who he was until the era arrived at the Cape to complete their Apollo training. He learned the ropes well from his veteran crew mates, though. He was like their younger brother.

Where the Apollo 11 crew had been three individuals, the Apollo 12 era was a team. They hung out together, blasted around the Cape in matching Corvettes, and became the center of attention wherever they went. 1 had never seen a more colorful and well-matched group.

In early September we rolled the giant Saturn out to Pad 39A. Considerably more time was allotted to preflight preparations now that we no longer had Kennedy’s deadline staring at us. The Countdown Demonstration Test was smoothly completed in October and the launch date of November 14 seemed easily attainable. The one thing we had not anticipated was bad weather.

In the dawn hours, my closeout crew went through our well-practiced rituals. A1 Worden worked inside the command module as we slid the three crewmen into their couches. By the time we were back at the roadblock, dark storm clouds had covered the entire launch complex. President Nixon had just landed in Air Force One at Patrick Air Force Base and was being brought by helicopter to Complex 39. The Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was already in the Launch Control Center. I monitored all the transmissions on the test conductor's channel, but remained very concerned that the launch would be scrubbed. As the count worked its way down, I could not keep from staring at the dark clouds above. A1 Worden and Joe Schmitt stood nearby. Their heads moved up and down, gazing first at the vehicle three miles away, then at the threatening sky.

As the count went through T minus 43 minutes, the specter of a hold at the T-24 minute mark was raised. The weather conditions had reached the marginal point but the three hour launch window gave us a little leeway. Cloud tops were reported at 23,000 feet with some light turbulence below.

At T minus 30 minutes, the announcement was made that the count would continue at least until the T-10 minute mark. Our little white room pulled away from the spacecraft as Swing Arm 9 retracted to its standby position. 1 felt a few sprinkles of cold rain hit my face.

The minutes dragged by. It was chilly, wet, and the winds had picked up slightly. Not at all what I would have selected for a launch day. A few minutes after 11:00 a.m. and the spacecraft was reported on internal power. The T-10 minute mark was approaching and I nervously awaited the announcement of a hold in the countdown. I’m not sure if I was relieved or concerned when we broke through that barrier and the count continued.

Tom Stafford was on CapCom duty and briefed Pete on the current weather conditions. Skip Chauvin polled his people in the LCC. Everything remained nominal.

Final status checks were performed and the new Launch Director, Walt Kapryan, gave a GO. Swing Arm 9 moved back to the umbilical tower in its fully parked position and I heard Skip Chauvin over my headset. “Have a good trip, Pete.” T minus 3 minutes and the firing command was issued. The remainder of the countdown would be conducted by the automatic sequencing of the computers. Pressures inside the fuel tanks began to build as the Saturn prepared for its leap into the stormy skies. At T minus 60 seconds, the entire vehicle was on internal power.

The rain was coming down harder now. Suddenly it seemed like this wasn’t at all a good time to be doing this. T minus 30 seconds and counting.

T minus 20 and another swing arm moved away from the booster. Guidance internal.

T minus 10 seconds.

“Ignition sequence start.”

“5..., 4..., 3..., 2..., 1..., zero.”

“All engines running... Commit. Liftoff. We have liftoff!”

The mighty Saturn 5 plowed upward through the pelting rain. By T plus 15 seconds, it had disappeared into the dark clouds. We could hear the lagging roar of the engines, but the vehicle was only evidenced by the trail of thick smoke that seemed to connect the clouds to Pad 39A. Our job was done and now it was Houston’s flight. I had just pulled off my headset when I saw a bright flash of light. A bolt of lightning snaked down Apollo 12’s smoke trail from the clouds directly to the pad! What was going on? 1 crammed my headset back over my ears.

“Okay, we just lost the platform, gang,” Conrad announced over the radio. “I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out.” Onboard the spacecraft, warning lights had popped on all over the console. The fuel cells had gone offline and they were on battery power. Every indication was of a dying spacecraft. The booster, however, was alive and well pushing them high above the inclement weather. With staging coming up momentarily, the crewmen could not have been in a more chaotic situation. Beano waited for the first stage to be jettisoned before flipping a switch on the panel. Suddenly the fuel cells were online again and normal power was restored.

Conrad reported in. “We’re weeding out our problems here. I don’t know what happened. I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.”

And lightning it was. Two strikes, actually. The booster and smoke trail had acted together like a giant lightning rod, connected firmly to the pad. The massive electrical spike had tripped every breaker in the spacecraft. Although the system was recycled successfully, the guidance platform was still out. That, however, was something they could sort out once they were on orbit.

At the fallback area, we split up for our post launch duties. Worden headed to the VIP viewing site and I made my way to the press site to give nn interviews. It had certainly been an exciting launch. Not one that I cared to repeat, though.

The Apollo 12 crew had little trouble in reestablishing the guidance platform. After the dangerous boost to orbit, the mission took on textbook qualities. Three days later, they had landed the LM within walking distance of their target: the unmanned Surveyor 3 vehicle which had touched down on the moon two years earlier.

As Pete Conrad descended the ladder to the lunar surface, he prepared for his historic first words. “Whoopee!... Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it’s a long one for me.”

The public would have surely been treated to a wonderful show as Pete and A1 giggled and joked their way through their EVAs. Unfortunately, the video camera’s optics were damaged by a chance glimpse of the sun during deployment. Although their initial first steps were televised, the loss of the camera meant that the moonwalks would have to be monitored by audio only But it was very clear to everyone that the crew was having a ball during the entire mission. They laughed, giggled, sang, and whistled. Newspaper headlines called them “Lunar Comics” and referred to the lunar landing as having “A Character All Its Own.”

After the flight, someone on the pad got a piece of grounding rod from the gantry and cut it into three pieces. Placing them on plaques they were presented to the crew. The plaques read “In fond memory of the electrifying launch of Apollo XII”.

Ultimately, the success of Apollo 12 did not have the impact on the public that we had hoped for. We had set a national goal of putting a man on the moon. Achieving that, we proved we could do it again with even more impressive results. But the public saw things differently. The stagnating war in Viet Nam was like a cancer. It sapped the nation’s will and its resources. Threats of the Cold War with Russia had faded. No longer did preeminence in space seem a priority to the average man in the street. I think it was roughly in this time period that funding cuts forced the cancellation of Apollos 18, 19, and 20.

I had hoped that Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s footsteps on the moon would be the first of many. My goal was to see human footsteps on Mars during my career. Sadly, though, public sentiment turned back to Earthly issues. The initial links in our chain, our foundation of public support, had weakened. To this day, I could never understand how we could hold the moon in our hands, plot courses to the planets, then simply let it all go. A very sad lesson in short-sightedness and the public’s desire for security at the expense of long term exploration. You could not put it any better than a prophetic statement President Johnson was said to have made a couple of years earlier: “It’s unfortunate, but the way the American people are, now that they have developed all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it away.” He obviously could see the handwriting on the wall.

Having soundly won the race to the moon, the launch schedule started to stretch out a bit and I was able to see the family a little more often. I remember one episode involving my middle daughter. She had been taking horseback riding lessons for some time and had progressed to the point where she was competing in shows. She had gotten quite good. On one weekend I was out at the stables helping her clean up. Who would I see walking by but my old nemesis, North American vice president Tom O’Malley.

We traded a few pleasantries and agreed that we were both doing the same thing - shoveling horse shit. Then he came up with the real reason for the encounter.

“You know, Guenter, my daughter has been practicing very hard for the show next week.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “mine has, too.” O’Malley continued. “Well, she really has her heart set on winning it so I was wondering if you might ask your daughter to sit this one out?” That really ticked me off. “There is no way that I can do that,” I said. “It would not be fair to either girl. If your daughter rides better than mine, she will win.” Mr. O’Malley stomped off in a huff.

After Gordo, Geno, and Beano, there was Freddo. Fred Haise. A delightful man who came close to being on the crew for Apollo 11. Haise had served on the Apollo 8 backup crew with Armstrong and Aldrin. Under standard rotation, that would have placed him in the prime crew for Apollo 11. Initially it had looked like Collins would be flying with Borman and Anders on Apollo 8. but some unexpected neck surgery got him temporarily grounded. So, 1 guess Slayton and Shepard decided it was only fair that Collins be given the command module pilot’s slot on 11. Apollo 13 was the next flight up for grabs, and that one went to Lovell, Haise, and Ken Mattingly.

The Countdown Demonstration Test for Apollo 13 was performed in March. During cryogenics tanking tests of the fuel cells, one of the oxygen tanks would not drain properly. Application of tank heaters and pressure cycling did manage to get the tank drained. This was unusual, but the decision was made to fly with it. Tin at decision started the chain of events that would soon risk the lives of the three crewmen.

A few days after the completion of the CDDT, we had a “funny thing” happen at the oxygen storage facility. Technicians were dumping a large amount of detanked oxygen into a ditch. Turning instantly into an invisible gas. the oxygen spilled over the banks into the path of an approaching security car. Suddenly it was afire and the driver jumped out to safety. A second security car pulled in behind the burning auto to offer assistance only to catch fire, too. Then, to really add insult to injury, a third car pulled up to investigate. In seconds it was blazing along with the first two. By the time crews managed to get the fires put out, all three cars had been reduced to blackened hulks. A couple of days later, we received our daily schedules with a Snoopy cartoon drawn on it. It depicted NASA’s new way of getting replacement cars for the fleet - by burning up the old ones.

The launch countdown for Apollo 13 started on the 5th of April, 1970. Immediately, a major problem appeared and it wasn’t one that anybody had expected. Charlie Duke, a member of the backup crew, contracted a case of the measles. In the process, he exposed everyone else. Blood tests showed that both Lovell and Haise had immunity to the disease, but Ken Mattingly had missed it as a child. That meant that he could easily come down with it during the mission. Dr. Chuck Berry recommended that he be removed from the crew as a precaution. With the countdown still in progress, Mattingly’s backup, Jack Swigert, jumped into the simulators to prepare for flight.

As the April 11 launch date approached, it became obvious that the news media had little interest in the event. Less than 700 reporters were registered at the press site and the typical deluge of tourists failed to materialize. Evening news broadcasts mentioned the upcoming flight almost as a footnote to the other news items. Sadly, I recognized that the lack of media interest reflected the lack of interest from the general public. It was not a good feeling.

In a spooky set of circumstances, Apollo 13 launched into the sky at 13:13 Houston time. Many of the television stations around the country did not even bother to broadcast it. It wasn’t until two days later, April 13th, that the public finally took notice. Apollo 13 was three-quarters of the way to the moon. I was in the LCC when Lovell echoed Swigert’s radio transmission, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” From the tone of their voices, and their invocation of the dreaded word “problem,” I knew that something serious was wrong. It took just a few minutes to grasp the magnitude of it. Low voltages in the electrical system, pressure in oxygen tank 1 dropping, oxygen tank 2 empty, and warning lights all over the instrument panel. The fuel cells were dying and breathable oxygen was escaping into space. It could not have been much worse.

I jumped to a phone and called the Rockwell base manager to give him the news. He gave me instructions to call all the system managers to get their people in. We would likely have to strip out a lot of data to support the engineers in Houston and in Downey, California.

With only battery power and a very small amount of oxygen available to the command module, the crew powered it down and retreated into the lunar module which contained its own life support systems. Controllers needed the quickest way to get the crew safely home - and no one was sure if that was possible. It was decided to send them on to the moon and let the lunar gravity sling them around onto a return trajectory back to Earth. The biggest issue was trying to figure out how to stretch the LM’s limited resources to last the four days the journey required.

All of a sudden, the world was interested in Apollo again. Television shows were preempted with news reports and the crew’s status was headlined on the newspapers’ front pages. I remember that it really irritated me. Great science, great technology, and great adventure were not enough. It took the threat of death to get the public’s attention.

In the well-known story of courage and determination, the crew did make it back safely to Earth. As they jettisoned the service module prior to reentry, they had the opportunity to photograph the damage. An entire panel had been blown out exposing a mangled mass. Oxygen tank 2 had exploded, the result of an arc in a thermal switch. We later discovered that the switch was meant to operate on a 28 volt system as per 1962 specs. However, in 1965 the specs were revised to allow for 65 volts. Beech Aircraft, supplier of the tanks, neglected to replace the switches, and both NASA and North American failed to catch the error.

The chain contained hundreds of thousands of links. There were so many that we could not even identify them all. Was it fair of us to expect to discover and replace every weak link before a tragedy occurred? It certainly was our goal, but everyone secretly worried that each launch brought us closer to the loss of a crew. This time our chain had broken and the lunar surface had been lost. Ingenuity and contingency training allowed us to replace the defective links and save the three astronauts. But it was a close one. Very close. 1 suspect that before every launch, hundreds of people lay awake in their beds, hoping and praying that the links they were responsible for would not fail. It was a nightmare we all endured.