Apollo's Ugly Duckling

So far, all of the craft designed to carry men into the space age have had the clean-lined look of the Mercury and Gemini capsules. By comparison, the lunar module (LM) that lifted from Cape Kennedy last week was the ugliest of ducklings. Bulging and misshapen, bristling with squiggles of antennas, the LM seemed more the creation of scientists gone mad than a craft entrusted with Project Apollo's most crucial task: to land astronauts on the moon and lift them off again. But in a seven-hour test flight, LM last week performed like a full-fledged space swan.

Launched by the same Saturn I rocket atop which the fatal Apollo fire occurred last year, the LM was protected on its flight through the atmosphere by a nose cone and a cone-shaped adapter. After the second stage had been inserted into orbit, the nose cone was jettisoned and the adapter's four panels slowly opened like the petals of a flower, exposing LM to its natural environment: the vacuum of space, in which it can fly as efficiently as a streamlined rocket. Then, on command from LM's on-board computer, the craft briefly fired its 100-lb.-thrust attitude-control rockets, detaching itself from the adapter base and settling into its own orbit.

Cautious Computer. Nearly five hours later, when the cold of space had stabilized the craft's temperature to the point it would be in the vicinity of the moon, LM began a scheduled twelve-minute burn of its 10,000-lb.-thrust descent engine, which was to begin at 10% of its rated power and gradually throttle up to almost full operational power after 26 seconds. The operation was designed to simulate the burn that would put the LM on a trajectory from the moon-orbiting Apollo command ship to the lunar surface. But after only four seconds of firing, the descent engine was shut down by LM's overcautious computer, which had sensed trouble because thrust was not being built up as rapidly as planned.

Undismayed, ground controllers under the direction of Flight Director Eugene Kranz, 34, quickly determined that nothing was basically wrong with the descent engine. Bypassing LM's computer, they ordered the descent engine to fire again. This time, and on a subsequent test, it performed perfectly, burning for the entire 26-second period. Had astronauts been aboard the LM, said George Mueller, NASA's director of manned flight, they would have almost certainly recognized the problem and immediately refired the engine before they crashed onto the moon.

Three Proofs. To simulate an emergency "fire-in-the-hole" situation in which astronauts descending toward the moon in the LM are suddenly forced to return to the orbiting mother ship, controllers again fired the descent engine. While it was burning, they also fired the 3,500-lb.-thrust ascent engine, which will be used to lift the astronauts off the surface of the moon. Blasting its flame directly into a depression atop LM's descent stage, the engine separated the ascent stage--consisting of the ascent engine and the two-man LM cockpit--and pulled it away from the descent stage. In one final burn, controllers fired the ascent engine for 6 1/2 minutes before its fuel supply ran out. Because LM will never operate in the earth's atmosphere and therefore has no heat shield, no recovery attempt was made. The ascent stage, slowed by the final engine burn, plunged into the atmosphere and was incinerated.

Thus, in a single test, NASA was able to prove that both LM engines work well, that the descent engine can be throttled in space--the first big operational engine to do so--and that the Apollo mission could be safely aborted, if necessary, during the final descent to the lunar surface. The near-perfect results may enable NASA to cancel plans for a second unmanned LM flight and to move directly into a manned orbital flight--to check out LM's life-support systems--late in 1968. Looking further ahead, LM's success has also raised hopes that the U.S. may yet land men on the moon before 1970.

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