One Giant Leap by Leon Wagener

Author:Leon Wagener
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Apollo 1 tragedy was a pivotal moment for the American space program. It could have ended it entirely, and many hoped it would. After months of intensive investigation, acrimonious debate, and bitter charges and countercharges, it was decided America would land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, just as President Kennedy had hoped. The legacy of the lost men of Apollo 1 would be a new, revitalized space program. The men whose lives were going to be on the line would finally have a major say in how the machines they would live or die in were designed. While that doesn’t seem a radical concept, it meant changing the basic philosophy of a bureaucratic dinosaur spending hundreds of billions in today’s dollars, employing 400,000 people and purchasing from 100,000 contractors. It was going to be a tough beast to turn around.

There were many added safety features, such as hatches that blew outward at the touch of a panic button, the installation of a soundly engineered abort system to blast the astronauts out of harm’s way if a rocket exploded under them on the launchpad, as well as hundreds of other features that supplied a margin of safety or just comfort and convenience, something else that had been almost totally ignored.

In Building 9 at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crew members, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Mike Collins, were scrambling to ready themselves for their epochal journey. It was, as Buzz Aldrin’s wife, Joan, put it, “normalcy tinged with hysteria.”

Learning to fly the lunar module in simulations, Armstrong had to abort many times; once he crashed on the moon’s surface, a mistake that would have meant certain death. People in and out of NASA, including many in government and the press, questioned whether the Apollo 11 astronauts could be ready by July 1969. There were still major problems, including an aggravating shortage of training equipment. Until James McDivitt’s Apollo 9 completed its mission in early March, Armstrong’s group was third in line to use the simulators. The Apollo 9 astronauts needed the lunar-landing module simulator just as much as Armstrong because, even though they were only going into earth orbit, McDivitt’s crew was scheduled to fly the LM in space, more than a hundred miles from the mother ship, then redock. Still, Armstrong was frustrated and concerned that he couldn’t use the time to strengthen his skills on the simulator, which was the closest engineers could come to duplicating the hazardous trip from the moon-orbiting command capsule to the lunar surface, and with luck hopefully back again.

Armstrong was even more concerned about not being allowed to practice on the weird-looking lunar landing training vehicle (LLTV), which was called the “flying bedstead,” since it resembled a bed without a mattress. The wingless jet-propelled device simulated the journey to the moon’s surface in a way no computer screen could. It landed and took off on pipelike legs and flew vertically, powered by a single jet engine in the middle of the craft.

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