A Giant Step for LI

The LEM, built by Grumman, ferries astronauts on a dangerous mission to the moon

By Michael Dorman

'Quantity light.''

Astronaut Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin signaled an alert to Neil Armstrong -- commander of the first manned spacecraft attempting to land on the moon. The signal light indicated they had only 114 seconds' worth of fuel remaining for the descent engine taking them to the lunar surface. If the fuel ran out, they would have to abort the Apollo 11 mission and attempt a risky return to Earth.

But they had not yet found a suitable landing spot. Their lunar excursion module, code-named Eagle and built on Long Island by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., was operating on a computer inadvertently taking them down into a boulder-strewn crater. A landing there might be fatal. The LEM might crash into a boulder. They might topple over. They might land at an angle greater than 30 degrees from the vertical -- making a return takeoff impossible.

Armstrong made a crucial decision. He took control of the spacecraft away from the computer and flew manually past the rocky crater.

Over the radio crackled the voice of Charlie Duke, the capsule communicator at Mission Control in Houston.

``Thirty seconds.''

Thirty seconds of fuel -- and maybe not even that, for estimates were not infallibly precise. Finding a spot smoother and more level than the rocky field, Armstrong descended toward it.

``Forty feet,'' Aldrin reported to Mission Control. ``Things look good. Picking up some dust. Drifting to the right a little. Contact light! OK. Engine stop.'' When the engine stopped, by some estimates, the fuel tank was empty.

A short time later, Armstrong reported: ``Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.''

It was 4:17 p.m., July 20, 1969. Wild applause, cheers and tears filled Mission Control and Grumman's Bethpage plant -- scenes mirrored at a seemingly countless number of locations throughout the world. In one of the great adventures in the history of mankind, humans had made the 225,000-mile journey to the moon.

But back on Long Island the jubilation was mixed with deep concern. Grumman engineers were troubled by doubts largely unrecognized by the public. The astronauts' journey back from the moon would be far more difficult and infinitely more dangerous than the trip to the lunar surface. The question was: Would they actually be able to return safely to Earth?

* * * Thomas J. Kelly, the propulsion expert who headed Grumman's space-exploration operations and became known as the father of the LEM, had been troubleshooting problems constantly throughout the flight. He was stationed in the Spacecraft Analysis Room adjacent to Mission Control at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Center in Houston. A short, dark-haired man with a soft voice and an unflappable air, Kelly had first come under Grumman's wing when he won a scholarship from the company upon graduation from Mepham High School in North Bellmore. He used the scholarship to study engineering at Cornell University, then took a master's from Columbia. Throughout college, he worked summers as an apprentice engineer at Grumman. After college, he served as a Grumman propulsion engineer on missile and military aircraft projects. Now, at 50, he found himself directing Grumman's mission to the moon.

The critical byword for Kelly and other Grumman engineers designing the LEM had been redundancy. The moon mission presented so many risks to the astronauts' lives that the engineers installed a seemingly endless array of redundant backup systems to guard against possible operations failures. In some cases, there were backups upon backups upon backups. But weight limitations made total redundancy impossible.

So there could be no backup for the critical rocket engine designed to lift the Eagle from the moon for the return trip toward Earth. If that engine failed, the astronauts would be stranded forever on the moon.

``There would be nothing we could do except watch them die a long, slow death,'' Kelly said recently.

* * * Tom Kelly and Grumman had ridden a long, tortuous flight path merely to gain the opportunity to prevent such an unthinkable disaster. In the early 1960s, Grumman -- known chiefly as a manufacturer of Navy warplanes -- bid unsuccessfully on a series of government aerospace contracts. Then, with NASA's encouragement, the company volunteered to develop at its own expense a proposal for the space vehicle intended to land on the moon -- a vehicle then called simply the Bug. There was stiff competition among various companies for the contract to build the Bug. NASA was considering three methods of carrying out the mission -- a direct ascent to the lunar surface using a gigantic rocket; an Earth-orbiting rendezvous technique; and a plan that would put a command vehicle in lunar orbit, where it would release a two-stage spacecraft for a round trip to the moon, then a return trip to Earth.

``We thought the rendezvous in lunar orbit was much more efficient than the other ideas.'' Kelly said. ``It wouldn't take all the weight to the moon that the others would. You could leave a lot of the weight in lunar orbit.''

While the engineers were drawing their plans, political forces were at work to bring the LEM contract to Grumman -- with its contemplated millions of dollars and thousands of jobs for the Long Island economy. Nassau Democratic chairman John F. English, a close associate of President John F. Kennedy, made frequent visits to the White House with Nassau County Executive Eugene H. Nickerson to lobby on Grumman's behalf. As English would put it in an interview not long before his death in 1987: ``I was up to my --- in the LEM program.''

On Nov. 7, 1962 -- deliberately waiting until a day after Election Day so it would not be accused of playing politics with a huge government project -- the space agency awarded Grumman the LEM contract. It approved the company's plan for a rendezvous in lunar orbit. Whoops and hollers resounded through the Grumman plant at news of the contract award. The initial contract called for $350 million worth of work. But, in the end, the job would be worth $2.3 billion. At its peak, 7,000 Grumman employees would be assigned to the LEM.

Many of those who worked on the LEM said a contagious enthusiasm and camaraderie swept through the work force during the project. Lifetime friendships were forged. ``It was a very exciting time,'' Tom Kelly said. ``We let our imaginations run wild -- figuring out how to do every step we had to do.''

Often, Grumman employees could be seen in the parking lots after work -- drawing diagrams in the dust on their cars to demonstrate how certain problems on the LEM could be solved.

Although the acronym LEM stood for lunar excursion module, NASA dropped the word ``excursion'' from the name on the theory that it sounded frivolous -- perhaps calling up visions of picnic journeys -- and changed the acronym to LM. But the original LEM tag stuck. The space vehicle that emerged from Bethpage actually did resemble a bug, and not a particularly graceful one at that. Atop four spindly legs stood a lumpy body with what appeared to be spare parts sticking out at bizarre angles. The spacecraft basically consisted of two stages -- a descent stage to carry the astronauts from the command vehicle to the moon and an ascent stage to separate from the other section on the moon and return the astronauts to the command vehicle for the trip back to Earth.

``Form followed function,'' Kelly explained. ``It came out the way it came out.'' Grumman engineers realized, for instance, they could reduce the LEM's weight by cutting back the number of certain rocket-propellant tanks from four to two. But that would remove a semblance of symmetry. ``It made it look as if the LEM had mumps,'' Kelly said. ``But so what? So we did it with two tanks.''

Roger Carpenter, who served on the LEM engineering materials review board, said recently that there was a general misconception about how the spacecraft was built. ``The LEM was not mass-produced,'' he said. ``It was entirely handmade.'' The LEM had more than a million parts, and human hands worked on every one of them. Grumman would eventually build more than a dozen LEMs, and all would be different.

``My job was to fix problems,'' Carpenter said. ``Every day, we had some. We had some windows, for example, that were giving us problems. The LEM, of course, had to be able to withstand very high temperatures. But, when heated, these windows would crack into thousands of pieces. We worked and worked on it, and determined it was a bonding problem. We worked with the supplier and corrected it.''

Steven Hornacek, a telemetry engineer, recalls taking part in sensitive tests on the critical engine designed to lift the spacecraft from the moon. There were numerous valves on the engine. ``All of them had to open at exactly the same time and with the same force,'' Hornacek says. ``The tests had to assure that they would do that.'' Hornacek also recalls tests where the LEM was taken into a hangar and, in conditions approximating the moon's gravity, was dropped from a height of about 20 feet to simulate a lunar landing.

There were also two preparatory LEM flights only months before the first manned moon landing. In the second, Apollo 10, the LEM flew within 50,000 feet of the moon and sent back vivid pictures of the surface.

For seven years, Kelly and his team labored toward the moment when the LEM would be carried aloft on the first manned moon trip. They progressed through simulated flights, actual test flights and the final preparatory flights -- with hundreds of failures, bumps and course corrections along the way. They were still troubled by their main concern -- whether the astronauts could be safely returned to Earth. But they were forced to move ahead. It was time, at last, for the main event.

* * * The Saturn V rocket sat majestically on the launching pad at Cape Kennedy, Fla., bathed in the brilliant glow of floodlights during the early morning hours of July 16. Poised to send the Apollo 11 crew into the heavens, it would be the heaviest vehicle ever fired aloft -- 6,484,289 pounds. Joseph Gavin, Tom Kelly's boss and Grumman's senior vice president in charge of space operations, was at Cape Kennedy to supervise the LEM preparations for the launch. ``There had been a meeting three days before the launch of all the senior people involved in getting ready for the flight,'' Gavin recalled in a recent interview.

``My job was to say the LEM was ready. I said it was. Then, the night before the launch, there were some questions about the loading of a critical helium tank on the LEM. I stayed at the Cape until about 9 o'clock to review and approve the procedures being used. Then I went back to my motel to catch a few hours' sleep, but was back at the Cape by 1 a.m.''

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, each 39, boarded the spacecraft on the launching pad along with Michael Collins, 38, the third astronaut chosen for the mission. Collins would not descend to the lunar surface. Instead, he would pilot a command vehicle called the Columbia, from which the LEM would be launched to the moon. Collins would orbit the moon until Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the command vehicle in the LEM for the trip back to Earth.

``It was tense waiting for the launch,'' Joe Gavin said. ``The LEM had been tested again and again. I'd already made the commitment to launch. I was pretty confident, but there's always doubt.''

After a smooth countdown, the Saturn V rocket lifted off launching pad 39A with wave after wave of thunderous roar and a sense of limitless power. It was 9:32 a.m., just 724 milliseconds behind schedule. As the rocket rose, it shook loose more than 1,000 pounds of ice that had formed on its sides.

The spacecraft was boosted by a rocket into Earth orbit 12 minutes after liftoff. Two and a half hours into the flight, an engine fired for five minutes and sent the vehicle racing through space at 24,245 mph -- pulling it out of the Earth's gravitational force and speeding it toward the moon. Lunar gravity took hold 43,495 miles from the moon.

The astronauts said little during the moon-bound flight. ``It's all dead air and static,'' a Mission Control official reported. But the conversation picked up after the LEM separated from the moon-orbiting command vehicle -- sending Armstrong and Aldrin cruising toward the lunar surface.

``Eagle has wings,'' Armstrong reported. As the astronauts later circled the moon, searching for a landing spot and sending back to Earth television pictures of the surface, a Mission Control capsule communicator asked: ``Would you care to comment on some of those craters as we go by?''

``Just going over Mount Marilyn,'' Armstrong replied, describing a peak NASA had named for the wife of another astronaut, James Lovell. ``Now we're looking at what we call Boot Hill.''

* * * Only minutes after the LEM landed on the moon, there was a demonstration of just how many potential catastrophes confronted the mission. Tom Kelly abruptly found himself in the middle of tense deliberations aimed at averting disaster.

He and other experts in Houston noticed on their flight-monitoring screens alarming increases in the temperature and pressure readings on one of the Eagle's descent-stage fuel lines. After the descent engine shut down, a blockage had apparently developed in the fuel line. Kelly assumed that liquid helium had frozen a slug of fuel left in the line. Residual heat from the engine, which had been operating at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit when the spacecraft landed, was moving up toward the frozen fuel.

``We got nervous because, if the fuel gets hot enough, it's liable to detonate,'' Kelly said in a recent interview. Such an explosion could injure the astronauts or wreck the spacecraft. The fuel temperature rose from 20 degrees to 200. One expert said: ``Another 50 degrees and all bets are off.''

Some engineers called for an immediate abort of the flight, but that was impossible for technical reasons. Kelly suggested ``burping'' the engine, restarting it at 10 percent power for an instant to relieve the pressure.

``But then, guess what?'' Kelly said. ``The problem went away.'' Without any corrective action, the temperature inexplicably dropped to normal.

Kelly knew, however, that the mission could not get that lucky often. And he could not forget the risks inherent in the liftoff from the moon.

* * * Armstrong and Aldrin were supposed to take a rest period after the LEM landed on the moon. But they were keyed up and not sleepy, so they received permission to move directly to their next scheduled activity -- actually walking on the moon. NASA officials hurriedly called on duty Mission Control's so-called Green Team, assigned to monitor the moon walk. John Devaney, a Grumman engineer on duty in Houston, had one particular concern about the walk. ``The landing gear on the LEM was designed to crush during the landing on the moon,'' Devaney said in a recent interview. ``It was full of crunched tinfoil, so it would crush on touchdown. But Armstrong and Aldrin put the LEM down so gently that the landing gear didn't crush. That left the LEM higher off the moon's surface than we expected. I was worried that, when Armstrong dropped off the ladder to the surface, the bottom of the ladder would be so high that he couldn't climb back into the LEM.''

At 10:56 p.m. July 20, Armstrong began descending the ladder in his bulky pressurized suit for the long-anticipated space walk. He seemed to drop gingerly from the bottom step.

``That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,'' he said as he became the first human to set foot on the moon. Those were the words he spoke. Those were the words recorded for posterity. But actually he had misspoken, and the words -- as delivered -- did not quite make sense. It later developed that what he had actually meant to say was: ``That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.''

In what seemed a cautious gait, Armstrong shuffled about the lunar landscape. ``The surface is fine and powdery,'' he reported. ``It adheres in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my foot. I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.''

Aldrin soon joined him. They walked and jumped across the lunar surface for two hours and 14 minutes as a television camera they had set up nearby transmitted live pictures back to millions of fascinated viewers. They deployed the equipment for a batch of continuing experiments and gathered 21 moon rocks. They also planted an American flag on the moon, not as a sign of conquest but as a symbol of national pride. When it was time to return to the LEM, they had no trouble negotiating their way back up the ladder -- uncrushed landing gear or no uncrushed landing gear.

* * * Armstrong and Aldrin were poised in the LEM for takeoff from the moon, knowing full well they were about to stake their lives on the 172-pound ascent engine designed to lift them off the lunar surface. Grumman had tested the engine successfully more than 3,000 times. But, if it somehow failed, the astronauts were well aware they would be stranded on the moon. Since there was only one ascent engine, Grumman had built a simple -- and, it was hoped, problem-free -- device. ``It was pressure-fed, with no pumps,'' Tom Kelly said. ``The propellants ignited on contact, with no ignition system.''

Now, as the engine awaited its critical test, Mission Control radioed: ``You're clear for takeoff.''

``Roger, understand,'' Aldrin replied. ``We're No. 1 on the runway.''

Seconds later, the engine fired with a burst of energy. The LEM's ascent stage separated from the descent stage and rose smoothly from the moon. The Grumman engine had performed flawlessly.

Tom Kelly, in the Spacecraft Analysis Room in Houston, knew immediately the liftoff was successful. ``Once you get the signal for liftoff, it goes very quickly -- bang, like that,'' he said. ``We were very worried about it because the engine and a lot of other things have to work simultaneously. It either goes or it doesn't. Fortunately, it went.''

After a four-hour flight, the LEM rendezvoused on the dark side of the moon with the Columbia command vehicle piloted by Michael Collins. The two vehicles docked. Armstrong and Aldrin were so eager to rejoin Collins that they slid through the passage into the command vehicle even before Houston directed them to do so. A Mission Control official, with a touch of pique, told them: ``You beat us to the punch.''

Columbia's long journey back to Earth was so smooth that only one of three scheduled course-correcting rocket firings actually became necessary. The astronauts slept and relaxed for such long periods that Mission Control once radioed: ``Apollo 11, this is Houston. Are you still up there?''

At dawn on July 24, Apollo 11 splashed into the South Pacific near the Navy aircraft carrier Hornet. The Columbia was almost instantly capsized by 6-foot ocean swells. But a recovery team from the Hornet quickly righted the spacecraft by using large flotation bags. On a rubber life raft, the astronauts were scrubbed down with disinfectants to ward off health hazards encountered on the mission. They were then lifted by helicopter to the Hornet to begin 18 days of quarantine.

At Mission Control, where swarms of people were breaking out the traditional splashdown cigars, a 20-by-10-foot television screen usually employed to display flight information was showing John F. Kennedy's challenge to Americans: ``I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.''

Now, a new message flashed across the screen:

``Mission accomplished -- July, 1969.''

* * * Since the LEM mission effectively ended when the vehicle docked with Columbia, Tom Kelly returned to Long Island to await the end of Apollo 11's journey. He and about 100 other Grumman employees watched the splashdown on television in the Mission Support Room at Bethpage. ``It was a moment of triumph,'' Kelly said. ``We were watching the people in Mission Control on television, lighting cigars. We didn't have any cigars, so we cheered and patted each others' backs.''

Looking back on the Apollo 11 Mission with the perspective of almost three decades, Kelly says, ``It was the greatest thing in my career. And, in hindsight, it was even more significant than we thought at the time. It got NASA finally moving on some broad-based programs that are producing some marvels today. We've now made unmanned landings on Mars. We're learning an enormous amount about the universe. And none of this would have happened without Apollo 11.''