The Unbroken Chain

Chapter 11 - The height of adventure...

I have always been proud to be a member of the group that worked on launches at the Cape. It was such an exciting and worthwhile job, I know how lucky I was to have been an integral part. Of the thousands and thousands of people who worked in manned spaceflight at KSC, really a very small percentage ever got close to the spacecraft itself. Their jobs were all critical and it somehow seemed unfair that they could not each get a personal view of the machine we sent to the moon. That fact was made evident to me one afternoon after we rolled Apollo 14 out to Pad A.

As I was walking to the elevator on the Mobile Service Structure, an elderly gentleman stopped me. He was one of the janitors.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but aren’t you the man that is in charge of the pad?”

“I am not exactly in charge of the pad, but I am in charge of the spacecraft levels on the structure,” I answered.

“Well,” he continued, “I’ve worked here for over two years and I’ve never seen the spacecraft. What are the chances that I might be able to see it sometime?”

I immediately felt kind of bad for the old guy, as if we had ignored him unfairly.

“How many other janitors do you work with out here?” I asked him. He replied that there was a total of ten.

“Okay, what time is your break?” His answer was 2 o’clock.

“Alright,” I said. “At 2 o’clock I want you and your buddies to report up on Level 4C and I’ll have one of my technical supervisors ready to meet you.”

He was thrilled.

At 2 o’clock sharp, the ten janitors stepped off the elevator. We got them all signed in at the I&E Monitor’s station, cleaned their shoes and emptied their pockets. When they put on the white smocks we provided, you could tell that they felt like rocket scientists. I think for the first time they really felt like they were an important part of the program. And the truth is, they were.

Things were slow that day and we gave them an excellent tour. Years later I was happy to hear that those guys were still going around telling their kids and grandkids about the day they saw the spacecraft that went to the moon.

Apollo 13 really taught us a lot. After a thorough review it was decided to add a third cryo oxygen tank, an auxiliary battery backup to the fuel cells, and emergency drinking water to the spacecraft. And after all the trouble with measles, a new program called the Primary Contact Program was instituted. For the remaining Apollo missions, the crewmen would be in strict quarantine starting at T minus 21 days. They would be restricted to the astronaut quarters in the O&C Building, the training building, the beach house, the flight-line, and the spacecraft level at Pad A. Only necessary personnel were allowed to come in contact with the astronauts. Contacts were immunized against nine different diseases and had to report any illnesses in their families. That actually became J real pain in the neck. I was designated as a primary contact and before each launch, I had to undergo a two-day medical examination. I was probed, stuck, x-rayed, and examined under bright lights. Every person on the primary contact list had to keep the medical office updated. A computer program was developed to keep up with every little infection or illness. I was amazed at how closely the monitored us. One morning I got a telephone call asking why one of my daughters had not gone to school that day. I suggested that the answer was kind of personal, but they would not let it go. “Alright, if you have to know, she b having menstrual cramps.” Nothing got by these people.

A1 Shepard had undoubtedly ruffled a few people in the process of taking command of Apollo 14. Many thought he had been out of the rotation for so long that he might not be able to hack it. He had not participated in any of the major tests and checkouts for Gemini or Apollo and the concern was that he could not get himself up to speed quickly enough. But surprisingly, he reported to the Cape for training very well prepared. He had studied all the systems and procedures and was definitely ready for the mission.

When launch day for Apollo 14 arrived, I had a special gag gift waiting for Shepard. At forty-seven years, he was the oldest man on flight status and had taken a lot of ribbing about it. I came up with a unique piece of “lunar support equipment” for the old geezer — a walking cane. I thought this was going to be a really funny little joke. But Shepard upstaged me. It seems that a popular television show called “Hogan’s Heroes” was being filmed in Miami at the time. It was a comedy about a group of prisoners in a Nazi POW camp during World War II. Shepard had gotten a friend to go down there and acquire a prop from the show - a plastic replica of a German army helmet. On the front he had labeled it “Col. Guenter Klink” and had adorned its sides with swastikas. I put the helmet on and everyone really laughed. Very funny! Cameras in the white room picked up the whole thing and it was broadcast live over the television.

NASA management in general, and Dr. Debus in particular, were livid. After the launch they came down on me like a truckload of bricks. The issue stopped short of becoming a scandal, but I really took a lot of heat for the incident. Why were they all over me, I asked them? Shepard was the one they should be angry with. I really thought they overreacted to the whole thing. It was a very funny little gag and, to this day, that helmet is proudly displayed in my living room. Whenever someone comes to visit, they always want to put it on.

The flights scheduled to follow Apollo 14 all had extensive scientific biases. Six men had set foot on the moon so far. We knew how to get them up there and get them back. With only three flights remaining in the program, politics started to enter the picture. Of course tangible science from the moon was badly needed, but everyone and his brother began pushing to get their favorite experiments on the manifest. There was a significant amount of infighting in the process.

For us at KSC, it meant many hardware and procedural changes. New tests had to be designed to check out the equipment and our daily scheduling meetings became real challenges. Each experiment manager believed that his experiment was the most important one and thought the vehicle checkout schedule should be adjusted to meet his requirements. One experimenter requested that during the testing of his equipment in the O&C Building, all automobile engines within a wide radius should be shut down for several hours. Begrudgingly, he finally accepted that security would close down the parking lots from midnight until the beginning of the first shift.

Apollos 15 through 17 were each scheduled for extended stays on the lunar surface. Three days. Payload weights were expected to increase substantially. One particularly neat piece of new cargo was the lunar rover. This electric car would more than double the amount of surface that the astronauts could explore. It included a television camera and a radio transmitter relay so that the crew could remain in touch with Houston even if they were out of sight from the LM.

The rover was a very clever piece of engineering. The two-seated car had four-wheel drive and arrived on the moon, collapsed and folded up on the outside of the LM. There was independent steering for both the front and rear wheels Brownish fenders covered the steel-mesh tires and a dish antenna mounted on the front looked like an inverted umbrella. Although an abbreviated version of the rover was used in desert training, most of the testing and training took place a! the Cape so we became very familiar with the little electric buggy.

Behind the training building, an outdoor simulation of the lunar surface was built up and a long road course snaked around the area. It was quickly dubbed the “Rover Racetrack.” Scientists from the U.S. Geological Sunn worked with NASA engineers to create the simulated terrain. Truckloads, even railroad cars full of rocks, boulders, and volcanic cinders were shipped in from around the country. It became commonplace to see astronauts driving the rover and stopping to make simulated sample retrievals.

Apollo 15 proved to be the most successful mission to date. It has been said that we gave some oversized driver’s licenses to Irwin and Scott and a little black book with Playboy pictures in it to A1 Worden, but to be honest. 1 really don’t remember. Worden recalled many years later that he had asked me how 1 was going to get them out if they had an emergency. Smacking a large wrench in my hand I promised to smash my way in through the window.

With a much more relaxed launch schedule, most of us were able to finally reacquaint ourselves with our families. Dinners at home returned to a more normal schedule and I took the family on an extended vacation to the Florida keys. For the first time in years, I was able to involve myself in some school functions. My girls were in their teens and participated in school plays and other activities. I was grateful to have the time to become a part of their lives again. My youngest daughter played in the band and I was volunteered to sell hot dogs and Cokes at the high school football games. We were labeled “band parents” and our job was to generate funds to pay for band uniforms and instruments. North American was going to be the prime contractor for the upcoming Shuttle program and I looked forward to many more years in manned spaceflight. It was a time in my life that I really enjoyed and the future looked very bright.

But life has its own ways of bringing you from wishful thinking to harsh reality. My wife, Henna, returned home from a routine medical examination with terrible news. She had been diagnosed with cancer and would have to begin radiation therapy immediately. All of a sudden everything changed. In my professional life I had been in control of problems and challenges. Now I was delegated to a support function and the rules were entirely foreign to me. I researched the disease in dozens of reference books, but real information was rare and confusing. I felt very inadequate to the task.

The doctors in the Astronaut Office were my greatest source of help. They explained what we could expect and helped me to verbalize it to my children. They outlined the kinds of responses we could anticipate from chemotherapy, radiation, radioactive source implantation, and radical surgery. For the next three years, the wife and I would have quite a battle, but we would also have the finest support system available.

Most of the people I worked with were also very understanding and provided whatever assistance they could. That is, most with one notable exception.

In Mr. Tom O’Malley’s opinion, any activity that might conflict with your work should be minimized. From the time that we received the diagnosis, he was unsympathetic to my new priorities. On top of all that, I think he was probably trying to figure out some way of getting rid of me altogether. Fortunately, I was a favorite of most of the astronauts and that gave me a certain amount of invulnerability. But no amount of protection is perfect. I could tell that he was going to be a problem.

The backup crew for Apollo 14 had consisted of Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Joe Engle. Under normal rotations, it could be assumed that they would be the primary crew for Apollo 17. Deke, however, was under great pressure to get a scientist on the moon and 17 was obviously his last chance to do that. When the crew was officially announced, Harrison Schmitt, a Harvard-bred geologist from New Mexico had replaced Engle.

I felt bad for Joe. He had earned astronaut wings flying the X-15 before ever joining NASA and was said to be one of the best pilots in the program. And he was just a heck of a nice guy. But mission priorities were not based on personality contests so the decision was made.

Schmitt, known more often as Jack than as Harrison, was highly qualified. He had been in charge of most of the geology training that the Apollo astronauts had gone through and had spent a significant amount of time in Houston’s Lunar Receiving Lab studying returned samples. Even though he had never been in the military, he had undergone all the standard astronaut training and had accrued over fifteen hundred hours flying jets and an additional two hundred in helicopters. There was no question that he was fully capable, but a lot of us still felt badly for Joe.

Apollo 16 was rolled out to Pad 39A in December of 1971. In January, a mistake by a technician caused the rupture of a hypergolic bladder in the CSM. To replace the tank, the heat shield had to be removed. This was not a trivial task since it required that the entire spacecraft had to be demated from the Saturn 5. For the first and only time in the Apollo program, we were forced to roll a Saturn stack back to the VAB for repairs. It took two weeks to complete the process, and by mid-February, the vehicle was once again on the pad. But then, just a few days later, another mistake by a technician caused the rupture of two oxidizer pressure disks. Fortunately, these could be replaced without another rollback to the VAB.

The newspapers were full of stories that too many experienced people had left the program. It was widely reported that the morale of the space program workers was low due to the impending end of Apollo. While it was true that many people were starting to look at other career options, I think the morale in general remained very good. The astronaut office was keeping many of the astronauts on the road visiting KSC and the various contractor sites. The majority of the employees remained in good spirits and were dedicated to making the remaining flights as successful and safe as possible.

One night, following the completion of some repairs to the lunar module simulator, I received a telephone call from Ed Mitchell. He had walked on the moon with A1 Shepard during Apollo 14 and was now serving on the backup crew for Apollo 16. Ed had a warm personality and we got along very well. He was interested in people that were sincere and did not involve himself in gossip and politics. If you knew what you were talking about, he would listen and discuss technical issues with you in any amount of detail. His phone call contained an invitation for me to join him in a checkout of the repaired LM simulator in the training building. Naturally, I jumped at the chance.

Meeting up with Ed, he explained that tonight’s checkout would involve landings at an area on the moon called the Sea of Palms. He knew how eager 1 had been to try my hand at the LM. I had always thought that the time I had spent piloting aircraft and working with Gemini and Apollo simulators would make lunar landings relatively easy. I had studied the controls and layout of the LM some time back and felt fairly confident. However, Ed cautioned that the instructors who ran the simulators always had some tricks up their sleeves.

The simulator, a full-scale replica, was housed in a long white-walled room about two stories tall. Computers and rack-mounted electronics were crammed in everywhere. The room was divided into two sections. A tan Apollo simulator occupied one end while the gray LM simulator filled the other. From the outside, the LM trainer itself looked like a conglomeration of odd geometric shapes all boxed together. But on the inside, it was switch for switch an exact copy of the real spacecraft. On the floor next to the LM was a large replica of the lunar surface. Hovering above that was a camera that could move in all three directions. When the astronauts piloted the simulator they were actually guiding the camera over the model of the lunar landscape. It projected images onto screens in the LM’s two windows giving the impression that the LM itself was moving in response to their control inputs. Special lighting even reproduced the correct sun angles so that shadows and craters would be accurately seen.

Ed let me have the left side - the commander’s position. Except for the fact that we were not weightless, it was a very exacting duplication of a live lunar landing. When you stood there with controllers in your hands, watching the gray surface slide by, you really felt like you were descending to the moon. Had there been some way to simulate reduced gravity (which of course there was not), I think it would have been virtually impossible to tell the difference between a simulation and the real thing.

After a discussion of the controls and some practice scanning the instruments, we were ready to give it a try. Ed read out the forward, lateral, and downward movements while I tweaked the thrusters, navigated through the windows, and monitored the fuel gauges. It was a busy job and things seemed to happen very quickly. On my first attempt, the controllers gave us a radar altimeter failure just one hundred feet from the surface. We initiated an abort and climbed back up for a reset. The next couple of attempts resulted in successful landings, although we nearly slid into a crater on one and bumped into a large boulder on the other. On the third try, I thought 1 had it down pat. Naturally, the instructor decided to spice things up and gave me a stuck rotational thruster. The lander went crazy and spun like a merry-go-round. That really did me in. I boosted us back to altitude while Ed yelled at me to watch the fuel. Frantically, I searched for the circuit breaker that would kill the thruster. After some amount of fumbling, I managed to pull the breaker and somehow continued the landing successfully with fifty seconds of fuel remaining. By that time, I was dripping with sweat. It was obvious to me that it would take a lot more work before I was ready to be a lunar module pilot.

Ed and I switched places and continued the checkout of the LM functions. Altogether we made twenty-two landings. It is a thrill that 1 have relived many times since. I will never be closer to the moon than I was that evening. Ed, thank-you.

At the pad, two flight items on our list that had grown in proportion were the flight crew equipment storage containers. Both in the crew compartment and in the LM. Altogether, there were thirty-three containers in the command module and an equal number in the LM. It now took nine people nearly seven hours to document and store the containers in the CSM. Grumman crews completed their lunar module storage about 30 hours prior to launch while we finished the job in the CSM at approximately T minus 16 hours. Servicing the containers now occupied a great deal of our launch count duties.

On April 16, 1972, John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charlie Duke reported for duty at the white room carrying the royal blue ventilators we had first seen in Apollo 15. For the flight’s commander, Young, I had fashioned a sort of hand on a stick with an outstretched pointing figure. John was constantly getting ribbing from the other astronauts about his stature, so I pointed out that this little gag might help him to reach the switches. With Mattingly’s removal from Apollo 13 because of Charlie Duke’s case of measles, it seemed poetic justice to have the two of them together on this crew. The backup crew had left a little joke for Charlie. Taped to his couch was a sign that said “Typhoid Mary." As for Mattingly, he patiently awaited his turn at boarding, his characteristic boyish grin plainly evident through his bubble helmet.

Charlie Duke was a very affable fellow. Always with a smile on his face, he was an “aw shucks” type of guy. He and I had worked together on the emergency pad egress procedures following the Apollo 1 fire. You would be hard put to find someone who did not like him. A few days earlier I had had the opportunity to give his wife and two children a tour of the white room.

Young and Duke spent over 20 hours on the lunar surface. Watching them bounding around like bunny rabbits, no amount of skepticism could convince anyone that these two guys were not having the times of their lives.

Processing of Apollo 17 proceeded at a leisurely pace during the summer months. Much of the hustle and bustle in the surrounding areas had died down considerably since so many workers had already been let go or transferred. Drives to work were quick, the roadways all quiet. What a difference from my early days in Mercury. Now there were tourist shops and restaurants everywhere you looked. The roads had four lanes and I had air conditioning. But the crowds were gone.

On my birthday, the 28th of August, we rolled Apollo 17 down the crawlerway to the launch pad. As usual, I monitored the process from the 320 foot level. It was a real surprise when Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt appeared at the elevator to join me for part of the ride. They were in great spirits, laughing and joking. We were all aware that this was the last flight to the moon, but the excitement was just as great as if it had been the first.

The final months turned into weeks, and then into days. In mid-November, the crew entered quarantine and we were back in the hectic stages of a launch countdown. It was at this point that I started to have a few sniffles. Damn! Cold symptoms! I reported it to the KSC flight surgeons and they gave me a thorough examination. Everything would be all right, I was told. I could remain on the job, but would have to keep a minimum of thirty feet distance between myself and the flight crew.

A few days later, we were all on the structure for a major test when I got a telephone call. It was Dr. Sam Groom. He identified himself as a flight surgeon from Houston.

“It has been reported to me that you have a cold,” he said.

“Yes, I may have a slight one.”

In a curt voice he said, “I want you to immediately get off the pad. Leave the white room. Now!”

“Sir ” I said, “the only direction I take is from my test conductor. That is my chain of command.”

He started to get angry. “I am the flight surgeon. I don’t have to take that route.”

“Dr. Groom, you will have to take that type of request to the test conductor.”

Now he was really mad. “Damn it, you are a contractor and I am a NASA official. You will do what I say.”

I lost my temper and told him to go to hell and slammed the phone down. It was then that I noticed Gene standing over in the dressing room with a telephone in his hand. He waved at me and yelled out, “Gotcha!” Once again, I had been had.

Naturally, that gotcha required a response and my opportunity came a couple of weeks later. Tire flight crew gave a farewell party to the primary contacts at the beach house. The house had been refurbished and had a beautiful view of the ocean. As with every other house in the vicinity, it was surrounded by clean white sand. We had food and drinks and swapped stories and jokes. Shortly before 8:00 p.m., Gene was reminded that he had a press conference at the O&C Building. He jumped into his Chevy convertible and started to drive off. Except that he wasn’t going anywhere. The engine raced and the tires spun, but the car did not move. He was obviously bogged down in the sand. We all came outside and laughed at him.

“What’s the matter with you people? You can get me to the moon but you can’t get me to a press conference?” he yelled.

Various individuals started giving him advice on how to get a stuck car out of the sand. Put it in forward, put it in reverse. Geno rocked the car back and forth in frustration but it was not moving. As the minutes were ticking away, he was getting more upset. Finally someone decided to help him out.

“Why don’t you take it down off of the block?”

While everyone had been inside enjoying the party, I had slipped out to the car with a jack and had put one of the rear axles up on a 4 by 4. The tire just barely touched the sand.

The launch of Apollo 17 was the most spectacular launch of die entire program. It was the only night launch conducted and crowds once again thronged to the area. Several holds threatened a scrub, but shortly after midnight, the Saturn 5 blasted into the blackness. As the vehicle cleared the tower, the flame seemed much more intense than anything I had ever seen. By the time it was 10 degrees above the horizon, the entire sky lit up in an odd greenish yellow glow. It was like daylight on another planet. It was so bright, in fact, that people thirty miles away reported being able to read a newspaper from its light. For one last time, I was engulfed in the crackling concussion and felt the ground tremble under my feet. And for one last time, three Americans departed Earth for a trip to the moon.

The public, as apathetic as it had become, never realized the finality that came with Apollo 17. There was just enough Saturn-Apollo hardware left for the Skylab program and a joint orbital flight scheduled with the Soviets. After that, Apollo would never fly again. Anywhere. I wondered if my own children would live to see humans once again on the lunar^- surface. Gene Cernan publicly stated after the return of Apollo 17 that it would probably be the last time that man set foot on the moon in the 20th century. I am sorry to report that he was correct.