Read Online Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox - Free Book Online

experimental engines. He had worked with rocket-driven supersonic shapes. He was versed in pyrotechnics. Also in his inventory of talents, though less obviously pertinent, he was the proprietor of an off-hours television repair business and played the trumpet in swing bands that toured the clubs around Cleveland. Simpkinson’s work at Lewis sometimes seemed to be more his hobby than a job—his colleagues would run across his N.A.C.A. paychecks sitting in his desk drawer, uncashed, sometimes half a dozen of them at a time.
    Transcending his specific skills, Simpkinson possessed an unteachable ability to “smell a problem a mile away,” as one of his colleagues put it. The technical term for his expertise was “failure-mode effects analysis,” but at bottom what it meant was that Simpkinson was an engineer who was intimately at home with the hardware. He understood machines.
    Simpkinson was also tenacious as a tick and didn’t mind antagonizing people if he felt the occasion called for it. Rather than waste time trying to get along with the Air Force, he convinced Merritt Preston, his Space Task Group supervisor up at Langley, to arrange for Simpkinson to have his own $50,000 government checking account. When one of his technicians needed a stepladder or a hammer or a lathe, Simpkinson just went to a Cocoa Beach hardware store and wrote a check for it.
    None of the members of the team that Simpkinson led to the Cape had ever checked out a spacecraft; none of them had ever launched one. With neither equipment nor experience, they made it up as they went along. There was the matter of getting the capsule from Hangar S out to the pad, for example. They didn’t have a vehicle for that purpose. No one had thought of it. But Jack Kinzler, the shop foreman from Langley, had just driven down to the Cape in a flatbed truck to join Simpkinson’s group. Simpkinson bought some mattresses and two sheets of plywood with his magic checkbook. They put the mattresses between the panels of plywood and then lashed the capsule onto the top. Pictures still in the files attest to the story, showing a battered pickup with a spacecraft on mattresses pulling up to the pad where an Atlas rocket stands waiting. “Of course, we got a lot of ridicule,” said Kinzler. “But it worked fine.”
    After they had hauled the capsule to the top of the Atlas with a crane, they found that the capsule wouldn’t seat. Somehow, the heat shield had been made about half an inch bigger than the diameter of the Atlas. When they tried to lower it onto the rocket, it perched on the top like a bathtub plug slightly too large for the drain. By now it was the end of June and Big Joe was supposed to launch on the Fourth of July. If they sent the heat shield back to its maker, the General Electric Corporation in Philadelphia, it would be two or three weeks before they got it back again.
    The solution that Simpkinson and Kinzler contrived in 1959 would have been unthinkable even a few years later. As they stood on top of the gantry and contemplated the oversized capsule, it occurred to them that only the heat shield was too big, not the capsule’s metal frame. The heat shield was made of a kind of plastic material. It didn’t contain any electronics. It wasn’t carrying any structural loads. So Simpkinson and Kinzler called for the crane, lowered the capsule to the ground, and transported it back to Hangar S in the pickup. Simpkinson jumped in his station wagon, drove to the Sears store in Orlando, used his checkbook to buy a router, and drove back to the Cape. Meanwhile, Kinzler had made up a device with a pivot mount in the center of the heat shield. Kinzler attached the router to the pivot mount and hand-walked the router around the perimeter of the heat shield, measuring and routing, routing and measuring, until he had shaved off half an inch. They took the capsule back to the pad and hauled it up again. It fit, and they went on with the preparations for