Charles Murray - Apollo

For all the people who gave their best to Apolloand for their families, who did too.

Foreword to the 2004 Edition

Apollo s publication in 1989 was greeted by good reviews and modest sales. But reviews and sales were overshadowed for us by the books reception among the people of Apollo. Some were pleased that outsiders had finally gotten the details right, some that the wonder of the engineering feats was conveyed to non-engineers, some that we had told the stories of ignored heroes. The reaction we heard most often was that the book captured what being part of Apollo was likethe pressure, esprit, tension, and exhilaration that set the Apollo decade apart from everything else in their lives. Conveying that essence of Apollo had been our goal from the beginning, and we were content.

Then, after a few years, Apollo began to take on a second life. We got letters from people who had nothing to do with the space program who had fallen in love with the book. A Chinese edition was published, and a limited, leather-bound English version sold by subscription. People wrote us trying to locate copies of Apollo , which had become scarce and commanded exorbitant prices. In conference panels or magazine articles about the space program, Apollo kept popping up as the book that people had to read if they wanted to understand how we got to the moon. We kept hearing the question: Why dont you republish the original?

Here it is. We have made a few cosmetic alterations to the text, but otherwise have left the story as we told it in 1989. This decision has already led to some anachronisms. In Chapter 19, we had explained that the cathode-ray tubes in Mission Control were the kind used in commercial television sets. Should we update that for 21st-century readers, who in a few years will know nothing but flat screens? We decided to leave the text unchanged. In Chapter 21, we had written that the computer capacity of the mainframes in the Control Center was smaller than that of some desktop systems. As of 2004, a much more radical comparison is needed to convey how primitive the computers of the late 1960s really were. We heard one recently: The entire Saturn V stackall three stages of the booster plus the command module and the lunar modulehad less computing capacity combined than todays typical cell phone. But you will not find that tidbit in the text. The book Apollo is grounded in the last half of the 1980s, when we were writing it, and we decided not to tamper with that perspective.

The anachronisms point to the biggest change in the way that the story of the Apollo program will be seen as time goes on: The audacity of Apollo becomes more striking as contemporary technology moves farther from the technology that took us to the moon. Consider the case of Ron Howards film Apollo 13 , meticulously accurate in almost everything. Why then do the scenes in Mission Control show charts and graphs on the flight controllers consoles? When the film was shooting, Jerry Bostick, a Flight Operations veteran who was acting as a technical advisor, explained to Howard that he should show the flight controllers looking at black screens filled with columns of white numbers. Howard replied that there are some things that an audience just wont accept, and computer displays as incomprehensible as Bostick described are one of those things. If the screens the controllers used seem unbelievable now, just imagine how they will seem in another ten, twenty, or fifty years. We went to the moon with technology that is fast making the enterprise look like a romantic, impetuous gamble.

Impetuous it wasnt. The Saturn V may not have had any nifty microprocessors on boardthe microprocessor wasnt invented until two years after the first lunar landingbut it worked every time, and its power dwarfed that of any launch vehicle made since. The engineering of the command module and lunar module was so ingenious that it brought the crew of Apollo 13 home despite a catastrophic explosion. The flight operations system, invented from scratch for the space program, proved itself a model of how to make life-and-death decisions in seconds. The proof of the technical excellence of Apollo is its record.

But Apollo was indeed romantic and indeed a gamble. For readers who are new to Apollo, the people and events we describe may already sound like a story from long ago and far away, when people in the public eye took enormous risks and held nothing back. Often things went wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong and they did not falter, did not make excuses, but proceeded onward, taking new risks.

They covered ground in giant strides. Contemplate for a moment the bare bones of their timeline: On November 5, 1958, the United States formed the Space Task Group, consisting of forty-five people. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moonan elapsed time of ten years and nine months. Think back to what you were doing ten years and nine months ago, and realize how short a time that is. Now try to imagine a nation beginning a space program on that day with forty-five people, no launch vehicle, no spacecraft, no launch facilities, no experience with manned space flightand landing on the moon this morning. What the people of Apollo accomplished is already hard to believe. In a few decades, it will be almost beyond imagining. Welcome to their world.

Catherine Bly Cox & Charles Murray

Burkittsville, Maryland

2 July 2004

Acknowledgments

The idea for Apollo came from Jack Trombka, who told us fascinating stories about life in Building 30. Then, after we had written a prcis but decided we didnt have time to do the book, Apollo survived because Amanda Urban, our agent, refused to take us seriouslyand worked out a way that gave us time after all. To Jack and to Binky go our lasting gratitude for making it possible to live in the world of Apollo for the past four years.

At Simon and Schuster, Alice Mayhew first helped us to shape this ungainly project and then provided wise guidance the rest of the way, while David Shipley subjected each chapter, paragraph, and word to an astonishingly accurate editorial judgment.

Robert Sherrod generously opened to us his unique and monumental archive of material on the Apollo Program. We still wish we could read the book that only he could write, but in the absence of that, let it be understood that this book is partly his.