Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (7 page)

The ascent stage contained the crew compartment and cockpit in which the two astronauts who flew the spacecraft between the Moon’s surface and lunar orbit lived, ate, and slept while on the Moon. This stage contained most of the electronics systems: GNC; communications, radar, and instrumentation; the reaction control system (RCS), with its sixteen small rocket engines that allowed the pilots to control and maneuver the LM in flight; and the environmental control system (ECS), which provided conditioned oxygen and water to the crew for life support and the spacesuits and backpacks needed to go outside the LM’s pressurized cabin. The crew compartment had two access hatches: one on top for docking with, and crew transfer into, the command module, and one forward for crew egress to the lunar surface via a platform. An external docking module allowed either hatch to dock with the CM as a redundancy provision.

The crew compartment was modeled after that of helicopters, with the astronauts seated in a large forward-facing glass bubble with an instrument panel between them. The landing gear had five fixed legs that just fit within the spacecraft/LM adapter (SLA), inside which the LM was housed at launch from Cape Canaveral. This landing-gear design was what yacht racers would call a “rule beater”: it barely satisfied the critical tip-over and surface-penetration requirements of the RFP without the added complexity of an extendable landing-gear mechanism, its five legs providing enough tread width and pad area within the SLA space envelope to make this possible. Even as we submitted the proposal, I did not expect the real LM to have a fixed landing gear because the slightest change in design assumptions or LM weight would negate this approach, but it was simple and lightweight for the proposal.

The lunar module proposal design. (Courtesy Northrop/Grumman Corporation) (
Illustration credit 3.1
)

The conceptual design met all of NASA’s performance requirements and weighed only twenty-two thousand pounds fully loaded, well below the RFP limit of twenty-six thousand pounds. Grumman’s model shop, accustomed to making beautifully lacquered and detailed display models of airplanes, did the best they could with our ugly duckling, but it remained an alien machine suited to other worlds. The nickname “Bug,” which NASA often used in their studies, still seemed to fit our creation.

The last of NASA’s technical questions was a zinger: What are the five most important considerations in the design of the LM? List in order of descending importance and explain your reasons for selection.

I sensed this was a make-or-break question and kept revising our answer until the end. With my technical group I drew up lists of candidate issues and the reasons they were important. Stern, Watson, Gardiner, and I reviewed and debated these and sought opinions widely, from Gavin, Murder, and Ferdman, and from key players, such as Bob Mullaney, Bill Rathke, Bob Carbee, and Arnold Whitaker, who were named in the proposed project organization to join us if we won. At the printer’s deadline, Stern and I finalized the list:

1. Propulsion design and development

2. Flight control system design and development

3. Reliability

4. Weight control

5. LM configuration
²

We hoped this would agree with the list Max Faget and his designers had in their minds. Recalling our first meeting on LM with Faget and his group at Langley Research Center, I felt confident that our similar engineering approach and reasoning would lead us to the same answer.

In the program management section of the proposal, NASA asked for the company’s related experience and performance, our proposed LM program organization and its relationships to the rest of Grumman, our facility and manpower capability, a make or buy plan, and cost estimates. Gavin and Ferdman ran this part of the proposal, but my engineers and I were heavily involved, as our requirements and plans affected everyone else. For example, one of the technical questions asked us to explain our test and development program plans. These established a far-flung series of LM test-beds, test facilities, and qualification programs that consumed a major portion of the time, money, and manpower needed to complete the LMs. Engineers provided the manpower estimates for the design and test phases of the program and part of the manufacturing phase. Making the cost numbers add up and agree with our descriptions of program content required many iterations.

An aerospace proposal team works as hard as they can to produce the best possible proposal until time runs out. For two months our team of about eighty engineers discussed, debated, analyzed, and wrote our responses to NASA’s exam, cramming as much as we could into one hundred pages of print and illustrations. We included a large foldout general-arrangement drawing of our LM design that showed many of its components, complex functional block diagrams of systems, and a large flow diagram of the development plan. We selected subcontractors and suppliers for LM’s subsystems and major components after holding minicompetitions, and their key people helped with our proposal. The whole team routinely worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, relentlessly driven by the belief that our competitors were working at least as long and hard as we were and our only
chance of winning was to give it everything we had. Like an eight-oared crew, we did not want to have anything left when we crossed the finish line.

Inside our windowless warren, we lost track of time. One evening when our full crew was hard at work, three maintenance men intruded into our space carrying large stepladders, pipe wrenches, and other tools. Without a word to any of us, they set up the ladders and started dismantling the sprinkler system over our heads. When flakes of rust and then a thin stream of water showered down on the pages I was reviewing, I sprang up to protest. The workmen retreated in the face of my determined objections, but not before telling me who their boss was and assuring me that, whether or not I liked it, the sprinkler system work had to be done.

The next morning I complained to Al Munier and asked him to get the sprinkler work stopped until work on the proposal had been completed. Returning to the day’s activities, I forgot all about the matter. Late that afternoon, however, Al called me into his office. He upbraided me for being rude to the workmen and said that if I worked more efficiently I would not have to be in the office in the middle of the night. I started to object but quickly stopped. Looking at Al’s face I saw the warning signs of an impending temper tantrum.

When Al’s temper took hold, his face flushed, his eyes narrowed, and his lips compressed into a hard, thin line. He accused me of arrogance, insensitivity, and inefficiency and told me the sprinkler system had to go in, whether or not I liked it, and while the workmen were there they would clean the light fixtures and paint the ceiling too. Then he abruptly ordered me out of his office.

Every evening for the next three weeks we faced a daunting succession of distractions and interference. First the plumbers installed new overhead sprinkler pipes, then the cleaners and electricians dusted and wiped the overhead fluorescent light fixtures, adding new fixtures and replacing burned-out bulbs. Then the painters, with their long rollers, white caps, and paint-spattered coveralls, worked on the walls and ceilings. All this sent debris showering down on the desks and floors of our area. It was comical, considering all the work we had to do and our need to concentrate on imagining the design of a unique spacecraft. We survived by packing up our papers and drawings when they appeared, spreading drop cloths over our clean desks, and borrowing desks in an undisturbed area on the far side of the mezzanine. In the brief moments I had time to think, I wondered whether the company understood the importance of winning this contract.

Two days before the submittal deadline, we turned the proposal over to the document production process. Erick and I gave the galley proofs and graphics a final end-to-end read-through and handed it all to the proposal editor, who took it to the nearby outside print shop for final makeup and printing. Then we joined the rest of the proposal team for a celebratory lunch. I had reluctantly agreed to the team’s request to schedule the lunch before the proposal was actually delivered to NASA because the Labor Day weekend
was approaching and many of our people wanted to stretch it by taking off the preceding Friday. After all the long hours they had put in, I did not want to appear ungrateful. But when I walked into the restaurant and saw our people enjoying cocktails, my stomach knotted up. What if we all suddenly had to go back to work? I never liked having alcohol anywhere near the job.

I had been in the restaurant about twenty minutes when a waiter told me I had a phone call. It was Saul at the printers. There were two problems: first, when the final page layouts were completed, the book was almost a whole page too long. Something had to be cut. And second, as Saul was reading through the proofs, he discovered an inconsistency between our answers to two of the questions. Which one was correct?

I thought Saul and I could fix the problems ourselves, and so I quickly headed for the door, but Erick saw me leaving and followed. The printer was in a squat gray building just outside the fence from our area of the Grumman complex. We found Saul with our editor and the printer’s project leader poring over page layouts. Erick and I joined them, and after about an hour we had marked up enough snippets for deletion to bring the proposal within one hundred pages. We were unable to resolve the inconsistency, however, and were forced to call back three experts from the luncheon. We discovered several other statements in our rereading that seemed questionable and had to be verified with the people who wrote them. Before long we had about ten people in the printers, trying mightily to focus on minute details of the proposal after coming from what had developed into a roaring party. To their credit, they were soon able to satisfy me and Erick about their sections or make minor modifications for added clarity, but it was a frantic couple of hours before all the loose ends were secured and the proposal was again declared finished.

The next evening I was finishing dinner with Joan and the kids when a call came in from Saul. He had safely delivered our proposal two hours before the deadline. Hallelujah! At last it was over. I looked forward to taking the next two weeks off, using some long-deferred vacation time. After a few days at home, Joan and I would get away by ourselves for a week in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the Blue Ridge Mountains while her parents stayed in our house with the children. Sleeping late and seeing the outside world again after being sealed in the time tunnel. I could hardly wait.

4

The Fat Lady Sings

Three weeks after the LM proposal was submitted I flew to Houston on the luxurious Grumman Gulfstream with the LM program team and some of the company’s senior executives to brief NASA on the “salient features” of our proposal and to answer their questions. The briefing, “orals” before an invisible audience in a darkened auditorium, were an ordeal, but thanks to thorough rehearsals we acquitted ourselves well.

On the trip down and back I found that Clint Towl and Bill Schwendler were almost as excited about going to the Moon as I was. In an expansive moment on the return flight, Schwendler promised to fly us down for dinner at Antoine’s, the renowned New Orleans restaurant, if we won the contract. Towl was aghast and assured us that this was so counter to Schwendler’s conservative nature that he would never follow through, even if we did win. Towl knew his friend and colleague well—no more was ever said about Bill Schwendler’s promise.

About two weeks after the orals our administrative planning was abruptly halted by a phone call from Bob Mullaney summoning me and other project leaders to drop everything for a “fire drill,” our expression for a sudden emergency task that must take priority over all others. (Now more smoothly referred to by management consultants as “crisis management.”)

The fire drill was a list of questions from the NASA Source Evaluation Board that had to be answered within one day. It was not just an exercise but an attempt by NASA to gain additional information they needed in evaluating our proposal. They were serious questions, probing our plans and capability for doing the work and our interpretation of certain technical requirements. Ferdman got the deadline extended, and at his urging, Gavin decided to assemble a small group and deliver the answers in person. In less than forty-eight hours we wrote a thirty-page miniproposal and handed it to an astonished Bob Piland, head of the NASA evaluation team in Houston. We had the
opportunity to discuss some of our answers with Piland and restate the main themes of our proposal. On the flight back to New York we were giddy at the thought that an incredible adventure appeared almost within our reach, and we fantasized about its possibilities. Mullaney, Ferdman, and I fairly vibrated in our seats with suppressed excitement.

After the orals and the fire drill, it was difficult to get back into the routine work of planning how we would perform the job if we won. Rumors swirled daily, alternately tantalizing us and dashing our hopes. We tried to ignore them, telling one another, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings.” But it was no use; I for one could not concentrate without drifting into fantasy, imagining how wonderful it would be to win this prize sought by all the giants of aerospace, and to design and build a manned spaceship to land on the Moon. What would it look like, and how could we ever design and build it in time? My colleagues and I were suspended in a time warp of anticipation, drifting from rumor to rumor in a fuzzy haze, believing that things would turn out well for us.

The rumors of the prior week focused on election day, Tuesday, 6 November 1962. Some said the LM contract would be awarded before the election to gain favor with voters in the selected state and region; others maintained it would be delayed until after the election to avoid disappointing the losers. Election day arrived with still no word, so half the rumor was proven false.