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✨ #7 Team Moon

Last updated over 4 years ago
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The final picture was altogether different from the dream. Most thought they’d be going straight to the moon with one spacecraft, land, and come straight back. Instead, as the plan evolved, it called for two very different craft: a command and service module for flight and a lunar module (LM) to land on the surface. No one ever imagined landing on the moon in a seatless, gold-foil-encased, four-legged, spidery-ish thingamajig nicknamed the “LEM.” After all, no one knew what a lunar module was ever supposed to look like. And so, form followed function. Never mind if it looked like a bug.

“I can’t say that I’m aware of any program where more people understood what the schedule was, how important it was, and worked so hard to make it happen. We had a great team,” recalled Joe Gaven, vice president of the Grumman Aerospace Corporation, contractor for the lunar module.

That team at Grumman was 7,500 workers strong. They designed, developed, and built the lunar module, christened Eagle for Apollo 11, from the ground up. Reliability was insisted upon. They had a motto: There is no such thing as a random failure. And failures were eliminated—one by one. Because it was their baby, their handiwork—eight years of their lives—that, very soon, would settle down (fingers crossed) on that giant glowing ball in the inky-black soup of space.

And Onward . . .
Space . . . it’s dangerous out there: micrometeoroids, radiation, airlessness. And coming home would be no picnic either. The compact-car-size space capsule would be greeted and surrounded by searing white-hot flames as it slammed madly back down to Earth.

“In designing the command module, the one thing we had to be sure of was that we could keep the crew alive—that was a big item,” said Max Faget, NASA chief engineer and principal designer of the command module.

Keeping the crew alive under such extreme conditions was indeed a big item. Only the command module, Columbia, would make the complete journey from Earth to the moon and back home again. It would serve as crew living quarters and as the spacecraft control center. And Columbia alone would confront the fiery Earth reentry.
But the wizards at North American Rockwell (NASA’s prime contractor for the command module) were up to the challenge. Fourteen thousand folks there, plus a skilled hodgepodge of eight thousand other companies, toiled to ensure that millions of components on the command module were in top-notch order.

Columbia was off to confront danger. Its builders would need to rely on their eight years of effort to give them confidence for a successful outcome. But it would be five hundred thousand miles before the truth of the matter would be told. Could their command module keep the crew alive?

And Upward . . .
Launch operations at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida was like its own little town. whopping seventeen thousand engineers, technicians, mechanics, contractors, and managers were needed to pull together the Apollo 11 launch. Needed to check, check, check the spacecraft: test it, stack the three rocket stages in the vehicle assembly building, or VAB, roll it out, recheck it, fuel it, and ready it for liftoff.

One of the most critical preparations for launch was the orchestration and performance of the crucial CDDT.

“The Countdown Demonstration Test, or CDDT, gives us confidence that we’re going to get there in time and everything’s going to percolate [work perfectly] together,” explained Ernie Reyes, chief of the Pre-flight Operations Branch for Apollo 11. “It’s a dress rehearsal for the countdown. The only thing we don’t do, is we don’t load the vehicle with all its fluids and juices [rocket fuel].”

Come launch day, Ernie Reyes and about five hundred others would work the consoles from the Firing Room of the Launch Control Center (LCC), the nucleus of launch operations. They would run the controls that would catapult Apollo 11 moonward bound. Five thousand others would directly support them for the actual liftoff.

It was a long, long march to that day, and the little town of KSC became a second home to quite a few folks. Many a lunch—dinners, anniversaries, birthdays—were forsaken in pursuit of Ready to Launch. On July 16, 1969, they were indeed ready. And at 9:32 A.M. . . . whoosh!
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