Read Online Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox
Tags: Science & Math, Technology, Aeronautics & Astronautics, Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Astronomy & Space Science
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launch.
Despite these heroic improvisations, Big Joe was launched two months behind schedule after all. The power supply had been improperly designed: The first time they hooked up power to the capsule, transistors popped, readings were crazy—nothing worked the way it was supposed to. They had to send the capsule back to Lewis, and it wasn’t until September 9, 1959, that the flight finally took place.
“And of course it failed,” Simpkinson sighed. The first stage of the Atlas performed beautifully, lifting off into a clear night sky. But the Atlas didn’t stage properly, the nitrogen thrusters on the capsule didn’t get a chance to demonstrate that they could align the capsule properly for entry, the entry speed wasn’t as high as it was supposed to be. Nothing went quite right. The preparation and launching of spacecraft at the dawn of the space age turned out to be a laborious business, and the participants were still amateurs sitting at the bottom of the learning curve. “We were green as thumbs,” Merritt Preston used to say.
1
Two months after the flight of Big Joe, on November 2, 1959, President Eisenhower signed an executive order transferring Wernher von Braun’s rocket engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville to NASA. It was the indispensable step for making NASA legitimate, giving that young and uncertain agency an infusion of talent it could have gotten nowhere else.
The division of responsibility was clean: The Space Task Group had jurisdiction over the spacecraft while the people at Marshall had jurisdiction over the launch vehicle.* The development of the working relationship took time, and there would always be rivalry. But with the addition of the Germans, it became possible to go to the moon.
[* Here, in one place, are the genealogies and official nomenclature of the NASA centers principally involved in the space program: (1) For the spacecraft: The manned space program began at Langley Research Center, where the Space Task Group was an organizationally independent entity. In November 1961, the Space Task Group became the Manned Spacecraft Center (M.S.C.) located at Houston, Texas. In 1973, M.S.C. was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (Johnson, or J.S.C.). (2) For the launch vehicle: In the 1950s, von Braun’s group was part of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1959, when von Braun joined NASA, it became the nucleus of the newly named George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (Marshall, or M.S.F.C.). (3) For launch operations: The area around Cape Canaveral served as a launch area for all of the armed forces during the 1950s. The initial launch group from Huntsville was called the Missile Firing Laboratory. In 1959, when Redstone Arsenal became Marshall, the Missile Firing Laboratory became the Launch Operations Directorate, still administratively under von Braun. In 1962, the Launch Operations Directorate became an independent center, the Launch Operations Center. It was renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center (Kennedy, or K.S.C.) at the end of 1963, immediately after Kennedy’s assassination.]
By 1959, von Braun’s rocket team had been in the United States for thirteen years following their surrender to the U. S. Army at the end of World War II. At first they had been sent to White Sands in New Mexico, where they were put to work showing the Americans how the V-2 worked. Then in 1950 the Army decided that an inland site was too confining, a decision prompted in part by an unfortunate occasion when the German team put a V-2 into a cemetery south of Juarez. From then on, the larger rockets were launched out over the ocean from Cape Canaveral. The von Braun team itself was moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where the Germans used the facilities of the Redstone Arsenal.
In contrast to the uneasy relationship between the engineers at Langley and the local Virginians, the Germans and the Alabamians got along fine
Despite these heroic improvisations, Big Joe was launched two months behind schedule after all. The power supply had been improperly designed: The first time they hooked up power to the capsule, transistors popped, readings were crazy—nothing worked the way it was supposed to. They had to send the capsule back to Lewis, and it wasn’t until September 9, 1959, that the flight finally took place.
“And of course it failed,” Simpkinson sighed. The first stage of the Atlas performed beautifully, lifting off into a clear night sky. But the Atlas didn’t stage properly, the nitrogen thrusters on the capsule didn’t get a chance to demonstrate that they could align the capsule properly for entry, the entry speed wasn’t as high as it was supposed to be. Nothing went quite right. The preparation and launching of spacecraft at the dawn of the space age turned out to be a laborious business, and the participants were still amateurs sitting at the bottom of the learning curve. “We were green as thumbs,” Merritt Preston used to say.
1
Two months after the flight of Big Joe, on November 2, 1959, President Eisenhower signed an executive order transferring Wernher von Braun’s rocket engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville to NASA. It was the indispensable step for making NASA legitimate, giving that young and uncertain agency an infusion of talent it could have gotten nowhere else.
The division of responsibility was clean: The Space Task Group had jurisdiction over the spacecraft while the people at Marshall had jurisdiction over the launch vehicle.* The development of the working relationship took time, and there would always be rivalry. But with the addition of the Germans, it became possible to go to the moon.
[* Here, in one place, are the genealogies and official nomenclature of the NASA centers principally involved in the space program: (1) For the spacecraft: The manned space program began at Langley Research Center, where the Space Task Group was an organizationally independent entity. In November 1961, the Space Task Group became the Manned Spacecraft Center (M.S.C.) located at Houston, Texas. In 1973, M.S.C. was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (Johnson, or J.S.C.). (2) For the launch vehicle: In the 1950s, von Braun’s group was part of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1959, when von Braun joined NASA, it became the nucleus of the newly named George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (Marshall, or M.S.F.C.). (3) For launch operations: The area around Cape Canaveral served as a launch area for all of the armed forces during the 1950s. The initial launch group from Huntsville was called the Missile Firing Laboratory. In 1959, when Redstone Arsenal became Marshall, the Missile Firing Laboratory became the Launch Operations Directorate, still administratively under von Braun. In 1962, the Launch Operations Directorate became an independent center, the Launch Operations Center. It was renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center (Kennedy, or K.S.C.) at the end of 1963, immediately after Kennedy’s assassination.]
By 1959, von Braun’s rocket team had been in the United States for thirteen years following their surrender to the U. S. Army at the end of World War II. At first they had been sent to White Sands in New Mexico, where they were put to work showing the Americans how the V-2 worked. Then in 1950 the Army decided that an inland site was too confining, a decision prompted in part by an unfortunate occasion when the German team put a V-2 into a cemetery south of Juarez. From then on, the larger rockets were launched out over the ocean from Cape Canaveral. The von Braun team itself was moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where the Germans used the facilities of the Redstone Arsenal.
In contrast to the uneasy relationship between the engineers at Langley and the local Virginians, the Germans and the Alabamians got along fine
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