Of a Fire on the Moon
So a host of numbers were passed back and forth again. Then the astronauts proceeded to report the amount of radiation they had been subjected to while passing through space that day. It was within proper bounds—no more than the radiation offered by the dentist who takes an X ray of your teeth—no medication was suggested. As usual, Armstrong had received the most radiation and Aldrin the least, but this was characteristic—Armstrong’s pulse rate and heartbeat were always the highest of the three.
Now came final instructions for the night on the cryo heaters and fans. The liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were required to be heated before reaching the electrodes, but any excess heat was obliged to be dissipated. The process of warming and cooling, adjusting the flow, and purging the lines, went on constantly, and commands to turn specific heaters and fans on or off had come up to the astronauts all day. Collins had a comment later:
Those fuel cells … are funny things. It’s not that they either work or don’t work. They are like human beings; they have their little ups and downs. Some of them have bad days and then they sort of cure themselves. Others are hypochondriacs, they put out lots of electricity, but they do it only bitterly with much complaining and groaning, and you have to worry about them and sort of pat them and talk to them sweetly.
In fact the fuel cells were very funny things—they were an element as untried as any piece of equipment in rocket engineering for they derived their power from the mysterious ability of hydrogen and oxygen atoms to travel as hydrogen and hydroxyl ions through melted potassium hydroxide at close to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and a pressure of four atmospheres, a careful balance to be all the while maintained between the formation of water vapor and the building of electrical potential—no easy matter to strip electrons from oxygen and pass them over as a voltage loading to the hydrogen electrode—the fuel cells were still another step into the caverns of not completely charted electrical phenomena.*
Now their day was finally done and the crew had supper and went to sleep about 9:30 at night, eastern daylight time, with the spacecraft 134,000 nautical miles from earth. They had traveled a little over forty thousand miles in their working day, and would travel another 25,000 nautical miles during the twelve hours of sleep. There was at this stage so little to do that no call was put into them until 8:40 in the morning at which time they had approached within 64,000 miles of the moon.
The morning of the third day proceeded like the morning of the second day. Let us live with that routine once again. Batteries were charged and waste water was dumped. Midcourse Correction Number 3 was canceled. Capcom reported consumables of fuel, hydrogen and oxygen; spacecraft answered with their own percentages, which had been independently measured. Then a report on the hours they slept: Armstrong 8, Collins 9, Aldrin 8. Good, but not a record. The Apollo 10 crew had reported ten hours of sleep one night. Next a description of what could be seen on earth. Then a discussion of PTC mode.
CAPCOM: … As a result of your waste-water dump, it looks like the PTC mode has been disturbed somewhat. We’re showing you about twenty degrees out in pitch right now on about six degrees in yaw which is significantly greater—about twice as much—a little more than twice as much as the deviation you had prior to the waste-water dump. We’re watching it down here, though, and we’ll let you know if we think any corrective action is required. Over.
ALDRIN: Okay, maybe next time we ought to split that in half. We could put half on one side and half on the other or something like that.
CAPCOM: Yes, we could do that. We were actually pretty interested in seeing what the effects on PTC would be in a waste-water dump. We don’t recall ever having performed a waste-water dump during PTC on previous missions. Over.
ALDRIN: Well, now we know.
CAPCOM: Roger.
A little later:
CAPCOM (BRUCE MCCANDLESS): Apollo 11, Houston.
COLLINS: Go ahead, Houston.
CAPCOM: Roger. We have been working under the assumption that we would take about an hour for the interference from a waste-water dump to dissipate to the point where you can reasonably take star sightings for platform alignment navigation or something of this sort. If you have a spare minute or two, could you comment on the observation conditions now. Over?
COLLINS: Yes. Stand by one, Bruce.
CAPCOM: Okay.
COLLINS: My guess would be that a telescope is rather useless, but you can differentiate in the sextant between water droplets and stars by the difference in their motion.
CAPCOM: Okay, Mike. I guess that we’ve still got—what you are saying is that we’ve still got a lot of water droplets visible, but you can pick them out and distinguish them in the sextant then.
COLLINS: Right. I think so, but Buzz is looking through it now. Just a second.
CAPCOM: Okay.
ALDRIN: Houston, Apollo 11. It looks like at this time the sextant would be quite usable for any alignment. There’s actually very few verticals that need to be aligned.
CAPCOM: Roger, Buzz. How about the telescope? Is it useful now?
ALDRIN: Well, it’s not quite as useful. It doesn’t seem to be. Depending on the position of the sun it’s got that band that seems to go across the center. I don’t think it’s because of the waste-water particles that it would lack its effectiveness. Over.
CAPCOM: Roger. What—is this band something that’s deposited on the outside of the optics? Over.
ALDRIN: No, it’s a reflection from the sun.
CAPCOM: Roger.
COLLINS: The sun bounces off the Lem structure. With the Lem attached, the telescope is just about useless. Those star charts that Ed has provided I think would be most useful if we had to use the—if for some reason we had to burn through the telescope we could use those as a guide for what we’re looking at and say, well, that bright blob over there has got to be that star because that’s the position we’re in, but so far we’ve not been able to pick out any decent star patterns while docked with the Lem using the telescope.
CAPCOM: This is Houston. We copy.
The waste-water dump set up a cloud of spherical icicles bright as diamonds in the void, and the particles traveled like a cloud of insects around the ship and dissipated only as slowly as the speed of the dribbling velocity with which they had trickled through the vent. It would of course have been simple to have propelled the waste water out at speed, but the greater force employed would have affected the trajectory of the ship, even as it had affected the roll this morning in PTC. In space, since there was a relative void of relations, so every little event was related to everything else. Droplets of urine could look like stars, droplets of urine could serve as projectiles to correct a rocket in trajectory.
But it was a routine day. The charge on Battery B was terminated, the parameters of Luna 15 were reported. The morning news was also reported—at 2:30 in the afternoon. An item about the world’s porridge eating championship in Corby, England, inspired some happiness among the astronauts. Hemingway was crossing Andy Hardy.
COLLINS: I’d like to enter Aldrin in the oatmeal eating contest next time.
CAPCOM: Is he pretty good at that?
COLLINS: He’s doing his share up here.
CAPCOM: You all just finished your meal not long ago, didn’t you?
ALDRIN: I’m still eating.
CAPCOM: Okay, is that—
COLLINS: He’s on his nineteenth bowl.
A little later:
CAPCOM: Roger. Are you having any difficulties with gas in the food bags like the janitor reported?
COLLINS: Well, that’s intermittently affirmative, Bruce. We have these two hydrogen filters which work fine as long as you don’t hook them up to a food bag. But the entryway into the food bag has enough back pressure to cause the filters to start losing their efficiency. A couple of times I’ve been tempted to go through that dry-out procedure, but we found that simply by leaving the filters alone for a couple of hours, their efficiency seems to be restored.
CAPCOM: Ro
ger, we copy.
COLLINS: Their efficiency ranges anywhere from darn near perfect to terrible just depending on the individual characteristics of the food bags we’re putting through it. Some of the food bags are so crumpled near the entryway that there’s no way we can work them loose to prevent back pressure.
CAPCOM: Roger.
This endless preciosity of specification was necessary. In relation to their equipment, the trip was not unique, but merely another store of information in the continuing line of missions from the past which would lead toward expeditions in the future. So everything was important—the malfunctions in the oxygen transducer, and the glare from the foil wrappings of the Lem, the time it took the waste-water cloud to disperse, and the hours they slept, the unexpected reactions of the computer. Everything was important. After a while everything began to seem equally important, even the crumpling of the food bags. Like narcissists, like children, like old people, the astronauts all exhibited a single-minded emphasis on each detail which arrived before them, large or small. Just as prostitutes or male trade give equal attention to each unwinding detail, “and then I bought ham and eggs and the ham was too rubbery and I got disgusted and crossed the street and bought a paper and a guy came along and pulled out a gun and held up this old lady right in front of me and then the cops came and there was a hassle and I skipped off and went window shopping and saw this leather suede jacket”—just as old people measuring the length of their days in the constriction of each breath cannot therefore imagine anything more important than their diet, the fluctuations of their disease, and the regularity of family visits; just as children are absorbed in the sensuous exploitation of each instant, for any new experience may turn to magic or the commencement of a new habit (and thus nothing can be ignored); just as narcissists can be indifferent to no shift in the mood, for each ripple of mood is a wave which will illumine or erode their beauty, just as a prostitute or male hustler takes each detail in full and equal measures of readiness and indifference, for each new encounter is either the law, sex, money, violence, boredom, outright rejection, or new adornment, so everything in the astronauts’ finicky man-supported and prone-to-malfunctioning, unhealthy, plastic, odor-sealed, and odor-filtered environment was of equal news and interest because not only did their lives depend upon such constant and promiscuous concentration, but the style of their endeavor was implicit with it. Embarked on a heroic vault and subjected to a monotonous round of monitoring and mechanical housekeeping in relation to objects they could never comprehend sufficiently well, they existed in capsule like the real embodiments they were of technological man, forever engaged in activities whose controls he wields until he controls them no more, powerful, expert, philosophically naïve, jargon-ridden, and resolutely divorced from any language with grandeur to match the proportions of his endeavor. Constantly watched, every last function they performed monitored in one way or recorded in another, it was a little like working with God: every last detail of one’s moves was observed. So they had burst clear through paranoia—they could tell themselves they were collaborating with the intents and detections of the Almighty. No wonder they spoke in the mood-smashed, random-item sequences of the modern world, where the depth of the thought was not nearly so important as the ability to brook interruption, and then interruption upon interruption, to live in an environment so formless and externally directed that weightlessness was the next and logical step, to suffer shortwave radio and the life of static like deaf people communicating in a factory which produces nothing but noisemakers and celebration horns, yes, let us quit this accounting of their third day, let us dispense with their next television show, their LM Delta P, their O2 flow alarm, their platform realignments and further water dumps, their Delta H updates, their cryo checks, their reports on the docking latches, the disassembly and reinstallation of the probe, drogue and hatch to the Lunar Module, their entrance into the Lem, their examination, their television humor—now near to the humor at a drunken party, “Hello, there, earthlings,” let us pass over the new data for the Alternate and Contingency checklist, the switch positions on the high-gain antenna, the changes in the glycol flow for the radiators, the small shifts in the Lunar Module mission rules, the supper and the music played, the check on the placements of the landing site obliques, the correction of typos on the APS DPS fuel card, the listing of three adjustments in the Mission Rule’s GO–NO GO card file, the check on the gyroscope drift, the discussion of abort programs above or below low gate with consequent loss of thrust axis, the status report, the Delta P again, it all comes in with lists and pieces and interrupted parts, comments on the tone in the alarm signals and the ubiquitous use of the word “great” for anything that works as well as it was designed to work, great, great, great, the television show was great, and the last waste-water dump, the Saturn performance and the Service Propulsion Motor performance, the burps and the bursts of the thrusters. It was the small-town reaction to the grim miracles of the modern world, everything was great, a bite of steak, a chocolate bar, a movie which made you laugh, a high focus on a television screen—great, great, great, great. The famine of American life was in the sound of the word.
Still up they climbed, up that narrow pass between their diminishing acceleration and the decreasing force of the earth’s gravity, and as they climbed, up from the great mass of the earth, so they came nearer to the influence of the moon. That night in sleep, third night out, they would pass over from the earth’s domain to the pull of the lunar sphere, and as if to tip a lance in recognition of the oncoming moment, the Passive Thermal Control began to act in curious fashion.
CAPCOM: … Mike, could you give us some help? This PTC is strange, it’s not like anything we’ve seen before. We were wondering if you all have had any vents or any odd data that could help us out, over.
COLLINS: I didn’t understand that. Say again.
CAPCOM: Roger, we’re looking at a, sort of a funny-looking PTC. We’ve already drifted out to seventy degrees in pitch and we’re wondering if you all had any vents or any such thing as that, that could have caused us to pick up these rates to drive us off, over.
COLLINS: Negative, Charlie. We don’t know of anything.
CAPCOM: Roger.
COLLINS: Unless it’s got something to do with that entry from the position that we want to be in. I don’t know.
CAPCOM: Roger, when we started off it looked real fine to us, now it’s drifting off with a funny pattern that we haven’t seen previously on a flight, and we’re just trying to figure out, I think we’ll probably start it over again. We’ll be with you momentarily, over.
COLLINS: Okay.
CAPCOM: Apollo 11, Houston. We hate to say it, but we’d like to terminate this PTC and start over again. We have no assurance that we’re going to get it through the sleep period. With this funny configuration, or funny pattern. We’d like you to stop it now and go back to pitch 090 yaw O and roll, whatever you stop on, over.
COLLINS: Roger.
An hour later, still bothered by the memory of the inexplicable wobble, the following conversation took place:
ARMSTRONG: Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?
CAPCOM: Stand by.
CAPCOM: Apollo 11, Houston, the S-IVB is about six thousand nautical miles from you now, over.
ARMSTRONG: Okay, thank you.
COLLINS: Houston, Apollo 11, how is the PTC?
CAPCOM: Stand by.
CAPCOM: 11, Houston. The PTC looks great to us, over.
COLLINS: Hey, do you have any idea what happened to the previous one?
CAPCOM: We have absolutely no idea, over.
COLLINS: Okay. Did it look like it was all right and just all of a sudden start diverting?
CAPCOM: Negative, if you look at the plot, which we’ll save for you and let you see it postflight. It started off immediately on the first rev and just spiraled out to about oh, twenty degrees in pitch, and then it seemed to be setting up a spiral around an offset p
itch point of about twenty degrees off from ninety degrees, but we didn’t want to take a chance that it would become stable at that point. We thought it might diverge so we told you and started over again, over.
COLLINS: Okay, no complaints. I was just curious as to what had happened.
Beyond the psychology of machines was the unformed psychology of space—was there some equivalent of haunted houses and creaking doors which now laid odd changes of attitude into Apollo 11? Consider your psychological state when you are weightless and therefore as disposable to floating as a particle of dust, conceive of an environment where your shoes are covered with a hooked-fiber plastic in order to keep them stuck to the floor, an environment where the easiest way to look through a telescope is to float toward the eyepiece like a swimmer, head down, eye raised to peer through at contact, yes the astronauts’ idea of space was obliged to be more filled than the layman’s with a sense of the domains of space.
A space which consists of domains—it is like thinking of a house with no walls and no ceiling. How can we call it a house? Yet if we conceive of heat so constantly generated that it keeps a particular volume of air at the same temperature, if we think of a field of force about the roofless house which keeps off rain and snow and repels all wind, if we conceive of this house as a sanctuary in open air protected by invisible zones of demarcation quite the equal of any wall or roof, then we can begin to think of the real nature of space. For there are redoubts and radiation-free harbors in the seas of space and the earth resides in one of them. The astronauts knew there were belts of radiation around the earth, and a field of magnetic force generated out of the depths of molten iron in the core of the earth itself. Beyond the atmosphere, out, forty thousand miles out, was the magnetosphere, a kingdom of subatomic particles thought to have originated from the sun but now charged by the earth—the earth had thus formed an electrical cavity about itself, an enclave of space wherein to protect itself against the gales of cosmic rays. But then all of the solar system could be said to inhabit still a larger vessel in greater space, for there was the indisputable phenomenon of solar flares which swept out on special occasions from the sun in storms of electrical activity which collapsed the magnetosphere, brightened the aurora, extinguished all long-distance radio communications, and acted like a great cloth or broom to sweep out the solar system, yes the sun swept the great spaces between the planets from sudden onslaughts of galactic cosmic rays which had originated in the explosion of stars far out beyond the sun, stars conceivably malignant, as if the sun were not only the source of life, but the lion at the gates of life defending the bastions of its planets with a fierce tongue to lick the infected space between. And in all of this, three men, and a spacecraft which proceeds for reasons they cannot yet discover, to have tipped that once in PTC, then wobbled just a little with the intimations of a drunken top—it had been nothing, but now, sleep period upon them, it would have been legitimate if the faintest sense of terror had come to visit the long curving aisle of their trajectory.