It was a time for checking out the last of the tests. A crisis had occurred already and been solved: a liquid hydrogen line serving the third-stage engine of Saturn V had begun to leak, but the line was shut down. Its twin, hitherto redundant, was now opened to serve. The problem had been solved. If there was a psychology to machines, it was not unduly in prominence this morning. Tests with the astronauts proceeded. Pushes of current were sent out to activate certain needles, then checks of secondary dials could be made, for they were obliged to react to the first dials. There was a list of tests to be made by each astronaut: if rocket safety was designed on any principle, it was built on the idea of precautions founded on other precautions. If there were six hundred and thirteen laws to the Talmud which could not be broken, restraints or fences had been built into the traditional customs to avoid getting near a situation where one might be able to break one of those six hundred and thirteen laws. If you were not supposed to engage in adultery with your neighbor’s wife, the safest precaution, the fence, was never to look at her. Wherever else this construction of safeguards to inhibit even the approach to taboos had entered the Judeo-Christian heritage, certainly it had entered engineering practice. There safety factors abounded. You calculated the greatest stresses a bridge could ever receive, and then built it five times stronger than it needed to be. So now the Emergency Detection System of Apollo-Saturn heaped attention on the whisper of a clue that a slight deviation from the norm could, if it continued to be unbalanced to the tenth of a hundredth of an acceptable degree … the launch was not about to be called off because things were wrong to the tenth of a hundredth, but the dials were there to measure such deviation. The readiness to intercept crises before they began to develop was nowhere richer than in launch systems. Thousands of rockets had not been launched for nothing; the safety precautions were enormous, and they were articulated. There were capacities to abort the mission on the ground and in the air, by automation and by decision, by the crew and by Mission Control. Checks sat upon precautions and points of no return abounded where choices had to be made for GO or NO GO, choices to continue or abort. The limits tolerable to each instrument were laid out, were red-lined on every dial.
IX
Nobody had forgotten the fire. The memory of Grissom, Chaffee and White was always most intense when the crew were in the Command Module and waiting for a lift-off. Virtually trapped at the top of the stack (for even the high-speed elevator would take them thirty seconds to the ground), a gondola had been rigged at Swing-Arm 9 of the Mobile Launcher to slide down a wire to a point on the ground over two thousand feet away. No veteran of roller coasters would necessarily take it in stride, but if fire broke out at the base, and the elevators seemed too slow, the astronauts, lumbering along in heavy space suits, could still work out of their hatch exit, clamber into the gondola, and take the quick ride along the wire to that bunker seven hundred yards away where presumably they would live through the explosion. That was one means of egress in emergency, the elevator was another, but their best means, once the close-out crew had departed in the hour before lift-off, was by means of the Launch Escape Tower, that extra rocket on top of the total stack of Apollo-Saturn. Once the swing-arm could be pulled back, the Launch Escape Tower was ready to be armed. Now if something went wrong, the Command Module would be cut loose instantly from the Service Module by explosive bolts and the Launch Escape Tower, with only the Command Module attached, would zoom off from the rest of Apollo-Saturn and go flying out to sea, there to float down by parachute in the midst, ideally, of a flotilla of Range Recovery ships already waiting, even as the Hornet and its attendant ships were already moving into position in the Pacific for splashdown eight days later.
The thirty-one minute mark was passed in the countdown. A test checked the batteries and fuel cells once again. In all the tests of all the systems and subsystems which went on during the countdown, all the tests of propellants and purge systems, of abort and detection and destruct systems, all monitoring of the loading of the liquid gases, Lox and LH2, all monitoring of the loading of nitrogen and helium for those purge systems which would put pressure on the fuels to move once inside their rocket tanks, and would trigger some of the valves, and clean out systems already used, yes of all the functions of purge and ullage performed by the helium and nitrogen, functions which had to be constantly tested and monitored through the hours of the countdown, and the tests to measure boil-off of the stored fuels, the checkoff of tests for the integrity of the structures, tests for the environmental control of air and the purging of used air in the cabin of the Command Module, the check-out of environmental control in the Lem, the checks of the ability of the motors to swing on their gimbal rings (for Saturn V would direct itself by turning its heavy motors through six degrees of arc), yes and tests of flight control with the small rocket motors called thrusters, tests of instruments already tested, everything proceeding through its place in the countdown, no factor was necessarily more sensitive or more studied or of more concern than the inert nonmoving potentialities of the fuel cells and the batteries, for a rocket had no pistons and no propellers, no belly nor hold for men to move about in, no gears and transmission—it was a ship designed for space, to travel through space, and so it was a curious ship, a braincase on the tip of a firecracker: ultimately it was nothing but fire for force, and electricity for thought, for direction and dialogue between itself and the heavenly body it left, and the heavenly body it would explore. Electricity was half its existence. Without fire it could not move; without electricity it could not think. Say, once up, it could not even light every new fire. So, it came as a surprise to recognize that all the electrical power in Apollo-Saturn was derived from fuel cells and batteries only. A ship the size of a destroyer suggested huge generators, but they would have weighed too much, so the power for Saturn came from batteries, and for Apollo from batteries and fuel cells which used Lox and liquid hydrogen as solution for the electrodes, and therefore was able also to employ the water formed as waste product for the astronauts to drink, an elegant conversion.
While the spark to ignite the mighty motors of Saturn V did not come from the batteries, but from a cable on the ground, the batteries were all there was of electrical power to feed current to the instruments in the first stage and the other stages once in flight, all there was to ignite the five J-2 motors of the second stage, the single J-2 motor of the third stage. Yet these stages and Instrument Unit were powered by only eleven batteries, two fifty-six-volt batteries, nine twenty-eight-volt batteries, their combined weight perhaps not a thousand pounds, and of it all, only two twenty-eight-volt batteries, weighing twenty-two pounds and fifty-five pounds, would serve for all the functions of the mammoth first stage, 33 feet in diameter, 138 feet tall, weight when loaded five million pounds and more—just seventy-seven pounds of battery, total of fifty-six volts, to take care of all that mass, but of course the fuels in the first stage would be consumed at almost three thousand gallons a second, and life in the flight would be only two minutes and forty seconds before the motors would shut down and the giant empty stage cast loose to fall in the sea. So fifty-six volts would doubtless suffice for two and a half minutes of instrument life.
The minutes went by. The closer they came to the moment of lift-off, the less there was to do. Each test was designed to begin at the earliest moment its function could fit into the chain of the process, but everything which could be finished in less than the time allotted was gotten out of the way; this countdown had moved smoothly. At Launch Control Center, in the big firing room three and a half miles across the moors and bogs were rows and rows of consoles with technicians in front of them, television screens, lights, gauges, charts and graphs, TV pictures of Saturn V from sixty possible angles feeding sixty television cameras with different views of the ship and the Launch Pad in operation, and hundreds of technicians before hundreds of gray consoles in a dozen and more rows, key events in the time-line of the launch up on display, and the completion of ea
ch event signaled on the screen by a rectangle lit up with the name of that event. All the tests, check-outs, and readings of all the systems and subsystems now funneled into a climax, an apocalypse of communications for the last few minutes. As the tension of the previous weeks burned into the clear life-giving ozone of these critical instants, these superlivid adrenalins, as each of the systems-engineers reported in on the status check their men had made of their banks of instruments, as each chief responsible for engines, for computers, for commo, for guidance, for abort, for stabilization, for propellants, for purge subsystems, for environmental control came in with GO, GO for the first stage, GO for the second stage, GO for third stage, GO for the Instrument Unit, GO for the Lunar Module, GO for the Service Module, GO for the Command Module, GO for the Launch Escape Tower, GO for the astronauts, the system moved over from man to machine. For the last three minutes the countdown would be automatic; the machines would come in with information so quickly that they would monitor their own systems, approve their own systems, give their own signal for GO or NO GO, the computer was supervising the last hundreds and thousands of events in the last three minutes.
“Good luck and Godspeed from the launch crew,” Paul Donnelly called out on his microphone, and Armstrong, from three and a half miles away answered, “Thank you very much.” Quietly, he added, “We know it’ll be a good flight.” There was confidence between them, the confidence of missionaries, the very air of messianic love—that love which, like Robert Frost’s cube of ice, traveled on its melting.
Automatic sequence, and the members of the launch team stood at their dials looking for red-line values, looking for some last crisis or betrayal, some silent scream of the needle across the red line. The sequence was automatic, but the men were still considered more trustworthy than the machines themselves: the last control, the control above all others was a manual abort. Automatic or no, there was still the psychology of machines to be feared; so, man was still entitled to have the final say if some event which was incomprehensible to the machines occurred, and someone human must decide if the mission proceeded or stopped. On went the sequence. The gas generator valves in the base of Saturn V now closed on command, the main fuel valves from the Mobile Launcher shut off, the Emergency Detection System was activated in every circuit, the exhaust igniters came forward, the explosives for a destruct in midair were made potential, the hydraulic pressure in all systems were checked at once—OK; the voltage in all systems—OK; Instrument Unit ready for firing—OK; check-out valves in ground return position—OK … OK … OK … Oxidizer tanks in the upper stages now pressurized. Transfer to internal power on entire spacecraft. Astronauts report in. They are GO. The guidance system for controlling the ship in flight is now on full internal power. Seconds go by. Fifteen seconds to lift-off. Twelve seconds. The swing-arms begin to pull away. Five hundred volts pass through a cable still attached by its umbilical and goes into the bowels of the rocket to ignite the turbopump exhaust gases which burn the igniter links which trigger an electrical signal to open a four-way valve which opens the main Lox valves and propellants flow into the combuster. In seventeen separate split-second steps are gases ignited into fires which ignite other gases whose exhaust pressures open giant valves which release the orifice in the main tanks and on the fire of other fires are the rocket engines lit.
Eight and nine-tenth seconds before lift-off, the first flames burst out of the base of the rocket motors and vault down a concrete flame trench on the pad, a trench fifty-eight wide and forty-two feet deep. At its center is a cusp of metal concave on both slopes, a flame deflector forty-odd feet high and one million three hundred thousand pounds in weight. It receives all of the fury of the heat and blast as the five engines of the first stage build up in nine seconds to their seven and a half million pounds of thrust. Refractory concrete, volcanic ash, and calcium aluminate are the heat-protective skin for this flame deflector, which proceeds to divide the fires and send them away on each side down the trench to break into open air a hundred feet away on either side. Nozzles in the walls of the flame trench spew thousands of gallons of water a minute to cool the deflector, fifty thousand gallons a minute pour over the Mobile Launcher as the spaceship goes up, steam and smoke worthy of a volcano rise into the sky.
But for the moment the spaceship does not move. Four giant hold-down arms large as flying buttresses hold to a ring at the base of Saturn V while the thrust of the motors builds up in the nine seconds, reaches a power in thrust equal to the weight of the rocket. Does the rocket weigh six million, four hundred and eighty-four thousand, two hundred and eighty pounds? Now the thrust goes up, the flames pour out, now the thrust is four million, five million, six million pounds, an extra million pounds of thrust each instant as those thousands of gallons of fuel rush every second to the motors, now it balances at six million, four hundred and eighty-four thousand, two hundred and eighty pounds. The bulk of Apollo-Saturn is in balance on the pad. Come, you could now levitate it with a finger, but for the hold-down arms. Now in the next second and the next, the thrust is up to full launch, to seven and a half million pounds, more, more than one million pounds of surplus force is now ready to push upward. And still the rocket is restrained. The hold-down arms, large as buttresses, still retain the ship for two more seconds before lift-off. The last check-outs race through the automatic sequence and GO comes back, and the hold-down arms—what engineering in those giants!—pull back, and Apollo-Saturn rises inch by inch in those first seconds, pulling tapered pins through dies to slow the instant of its release. Inch by inch, then foot by foot, slowly, story by story, swing-arm by swing-arm, the swing-arms pulling back in the last five seconds, the last two seconds, umbilicals snapping back, slowly Apollo-Saturn climbs up the length of the Mobile Launcher, the flames of apocalypse no more than the sparks of its chariot, and spectators cry, “Go, baby, go.”
X
As Aquarius continued to write in later days and weeks, and then in the months after Apollo 11 lifted off from the pad at Cape Kennedy and began its trip to the moon, as he continued to brood about the chasm between technology and metaphysics, the psychology of machines and the dreams of men, the omens of the future amid the loss of taboo, the horror of the ascent and his fear of the heavens—was the Devil chief engineer of the ship which went to the moon?—he came at last, through the nice agency of a friend, upon a passage in Revelation, Revelation itself! The passage, 8:6 et sequentia, reads:
Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets made ready to blow them.
The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up …
The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea; and a third of the sea became blood …
The third angel blew his trumpet and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water …
The fourth angel blew his trumpet and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars …
Then I looked and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice, as it flew in mid-heaven, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets which the three angels are about to blow!”
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth …
In appearance the locusts were like horses arrayed for battle; on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lion’s teeth; they had scales like iron breast-plates, and the noise of their w
ings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails like scorpions, and stings, and their power of hurting men for five months lies in their tails. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
Apollyon was not Apollo, no more than ’Aπoλλύωυ is equal to ’Aπoλλωυ. Apollo was in fact the god of light and Artemis, his twin sister, was goddess of the moon. But Aquarius ignored the fact that Apollyon was not Apollo and took it as a sign. However, he also ignored the last two of the seven angels, and so ceased quoting before the sixth blew his trumpet and by fire, smoke, and sulphur was a third of mankind felled by plague. Nor did Aquarius know “that in the days … sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God … should be fulfilled.”