Zero Phase Read online

  I chuckle. “Frank’s all right. Helluva pilot. Just about the most decisive man I’ve ever met. I’m probably the only guy that could put up with him for two weeks, but he’s all right.” I eat my so-called sandwiches. It’s odd, because you hardly smell your food. Both because of the gelatin and because your sinuses don’t drain as fast. And the texture’s all off. “We pranked him in orbit. Gemini 6 and 7, we were up there for our rendezvous not too long after the Army Navy game. And between our two missions, Wally and Tom and I realized it was three Annapolis grads and a West Pointer. So after we rendezvoused we were floating nose to nose with them. All part of the flight plan. And they radioed over saying they had a visual acuity test for us. And we looked out the portholes. And they’d put signs over their windows. GO NAVY. BEAT ARMY.”

  Freddo snorts. “What’d Frank do?”

  “He just got all gruff. Said it was a bunch of crap, and why were we wasting time with it. Great pilot, sharp engineer, lousy comedian,” I reminisce. “That was a rough two weeks, though. Once all the fun stuff was done, we were reading to pass the time. Reading. In space. It was just that boring. On 12, with Buzz, we at least had a tighter schedule. But on 7…you’d never think space travel could get...”

  “Aquarius, Houston.” Again, the radio. “We have an update on your location. Based on your crater descriptions, we think you’re at Charlie Quebec 0.6, 65.5. Over.”

  “Roger, Houston. I copy Charlie Quebec 0.6, 65.5.” I wolf down a few bites of sandwich so I can scribble it down. We’ve planned out our traverses on the surface using photographic maps from the earlier missions, and we need this information to navigate once we’re out there.

  Back to the meal. We finish in hurried silence. Scarfing down mediocre food because we’ve got a lot to do before we can eat again. On Gemini 7, once the rendezvous with 6 was over, we were going for endurance, so we got bored. 12 kept us much busier. On Apollo 8, I was back with Frank, who was good at pushing back against the bureaucracy just enough that our schedule didn’t get too cluttered. And now this feels like a total race against the clock. At least here on the surface. Maybe that’s the overall trend. More bureaucracy means more managers and scientists trying to squeeze items onto the checklist. And that means more work. Which makes sense. If an institution spends $375 million on a mission and puts three men in harm’s way, it wants to get its money’s worth. A natural trend. Something some of the Original Seven didn’t understand. Some of them tried to buck it and didn’t get to stay astronauts.

  When I saw 2001, I thought of Gemini 7. At least in that part of the movie when they first show the astronauts on Discovery. Listless, playing chess. Eating, unexcited. Watching news bulletins with dead eyes. Bored. Now that we’re so busy, I am a little jealous. Lord knows I don’t mind the work, but I’d also like to at least relax while we eat. Maybe that’s just how it is, though. When you have one thing, you want the other.

  •••

  I am not an overly religious man either, come to think of it. Not that I equate religion and superstition. We go to church regularly. And everyone knows we read from Genesis back on Apollo 8. It seemed appropriate, and everybody but Madalyn Murray O’Hair seemed to like it, but I have to admit it was Frank’s idea. So I’m not as religiously religious as some people in the astronaut office. But there are some on the other side of the scale, too. Atheists, agnostics, freethinkers. Which is all well and good. It takes all kinds.

  My father passed away when I was 12. Mom had to raise me by herself. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. That’s just how it was.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I had to work for everything I got. They say your father is your first image of God. Mine was there, and then he wasn’t.

  I know a couple guys that pray during every flight. And Gene Kranz prays before every shift in the MOCR. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything like that. Not that I’m morally opposed, but it seems counterproductive. A distraction from the work. God helps those who help themselves.

  •••

  And now it’s time to walk on the moon.

  Almost time, I should say. It’s time to get ready, at least.

  EVA, as you might imagine, requires a very lengthy checklist. You have to put everything in its right place before you start so you can reach it when you need it. And you have to do everything in the right sequence so there’s a minimum of wasted effort. (For instance, we unlock the front hatch before we put our gloves on. It sounds dangerous, especially since the hatch is so thin it bulges outward when the LM’s pressurized. But with an inward-opening hatch and 5 psi inside, there’s no risk of it coming open before we bleed off the cabin pressure, and it’s much easier to unlatch it in bare hands.) It’s times like this that the checklist is a lifesaver, literally and figuratively.

  In the prep phase, I pulled out our little portable magnetic tape player, and we listened to that while we got everything in place. Boots, gloves, LEVA helmets (the over-helmets with the gold visor that we wear over the fishbowls), PLSS packs, RCU units. And all the while, music. First the theme from 2001 and then that Age of Aquarius song. Not so loud as to get in the way if Houston called. Just enough to get excited.

  When we were getting our LEVA helmets out of their bags, we each found letters from our wives. A wonderful touch. Unexpected. Apparently they’d arranged it with Deke, who’d talked to the right people to sneak them in there during the final LM closeout and put them where we wouldn’t see them until we were on the moon. On Apollo 8, once we realized we’d be gone for Christmas, I’d arranged for a surprise for Marilyn. And here it’s great to see she wanted to do something special for me. I won’t go into the contents, but it was a very nice surprise.

  But then we had to get back to the nitty gritty. Filling drink bags so we’ll have water during our 4 ½ hours outside. (A new enhancement. They didn’t have them on 12, and they got very thirsty.) Emptying our urine bags so they won’t overflow. Heads out of the metaphorical clouds and back on the lunar ground.

  •••

  I should mention that I’m by no means special in my capacity for hard work. That’s the thing about Apollo. You see so many people giving 120% every day for years on end, you feel like a slacker if you’re just at 110%.

  So this is a team effort, a tremendously dedicated team of very smart people working very long hours in very disparate locations. Flight controllers in Houston. Pad workers at the Cape. Contractors at Grumman and North American in Long Island and southern California. Subcontractors at Beech Aircraft and Eagle-Picher and MIT and a thousand other places. We’ve spent years not only training and working and planning, but visiting factories, talking to workers who are working every bit as hard as we are but who will never be in the public eye.

  It motivates both ways.

  We are reminded again and again that we’re part of something much larger than ourselves. An organization of tens of thousands. A living breathing thing that learns and adapts from mission to mission. A team of teams that, despite some fits and starts, is now hitting its stride. Turning something into reality that’s been a dream since man first looked up at the sky.

  Meanwhile they get to see that there’s a living breathing human being whose life depends on their handiwork. They get to shake our hands and look us in the eye. And once you’ve looked a man in the eye and you know that his life depends on you, say, getting a weld right or sealing a window properly, you tend to take your work a little more seriously.

  At least, that’s the theory.

  They say practice makes perfect, but only theory’s perfect. Practice can’t be. Is it possible to create a system with millions of components, then assemble and use them so perfectly that nothing will fail? No. If we made all 6.5 million components with a 99.9% reliability rate, we’d still have 6,500 failures.

  The Fire was a big motivator, in its own sad way. We lost three great men. Ed White, in particular, was one of my closest friends in the astronaut office. After that everyone realized that,
no, we were not going to skate by on luck or Divine Providence or whatever, and that good men not only could die but had in fact died. Everyone buckled down and took everything even more seriously after that. Still, it’s statistically certain that some things will go wrong. Like the pogo vibration.

  So it’s been obvious for a while that it won’t be perfect. But we’re not gonna stop trying.

  Given all the brainpower involved, there’s even been a lot of effort towards figuring out ahead of time where things will go wrong. The systems engineers tend to model it out using probability trees. Basically you sketch out a series of events that has to happen, and each failure mode is a branch splitting off. So if you’re, say, starting your car, and you know the ignition system works a certain percentage of the time, and you know each sparkplug fires a certain percentage of the time, and the fuel pumps pump correctly a certain percentage of the time, and so on and so forth, you can sketch it out and figure out the overall percentage of times the car will start, and see if you’re OK with that. And if you’re not, you can add redundancy in some areas and try to get the overall percentages up. Not everywhere—you wouldn’t want to install a second engine, for instance. But in general you can make the main branches thick enough and sturdy enough to get you where you want to go.

  At least on paper.

  •••

  About midway through the EVA procedure, we realize we’re alone. No communication with Houston. We’re cut off from humanity. Talking to ourselves. A quarter of a million miles away from any human who isn’t named Ken Mattingly.

  “Houston, Aquarius, how do you read, over?” Freddo calls. We wait. No answer. We wait a few seconds more. Nothing. “Jim, do you have comm on your PLSS?”

  “Houston, Aquarius, how do you read?” I try. “No, no comm.” We have to iron that out. We can’t go outside if we can’t talk to each other. We can’t stay on the moon if we can’t talk to Houston. “I’ll switch back to ship’s comm.” I cycle the breaker and flip a switch. “Houston, this is Aquarius, do you read, over?”

  A pause. The comm delays are bad for comedy but good for dramatic effect. And then: “Aquarius, Houston. You’re still there?”

  “Roger that, Houston. We seem to have lost comm on the PLSSs. Let’s sync up and try to work through it, over.”

  “OK. Stand by one while we talk procedure down here.”

  “OK, Houston.” We wait. You might think we’d have been panicking already, but that never helps you solve a problem. Especially not up here. The overly emotional types don’t succeed as pilots, let alone astronauts. And the first rule of spaceflight is: If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. You just have to take a breath and think through it. Work the problem.

  “Aquarius, Houston. We’re going to have you go back to the beginning of the PLSS comm check block on the EVA-1 card and verify your switches.”

  “OK, Houston. Back to the PLSS comm check block.” A normal problem-solving technique in spaceflight. When something’s wrong, you go back to the last point in the checklist where everything was right and set your switches back to what they were. Then work through it again, more methodically. Another 2001 line comes to mind—Hal saying “This sort of thing has happened before, and it’s always been due to human error.”

  “Aquarius, first, did you unstow your PLSS antenna?”

  “Yes, we did, Houston.”

  “OK, back we go, then.”

  The checklist cards are hole-punched and held together with ring clips. Like you’d buy at an office supply store. The assemblage hangs from toggle switches on the instrument panel so we can see them while we work. I grab it and flip back to the right spot, and Houston confirms our breaker positions, and then we proceed to test the comms.

  After fifteen minutes, we find the culprit. An audio circuit breaker on my panel that was left out after we cycled them earlier. A glitch in the checklist, which wasn’t completely explicit. I make a mental note to mention it in the postflight debriefing so they can fix it for 14.

  Then we continue. Making sure we’re ready to go outside. Like getting bundled up for an unbelievably bad snowstorm, with a room full of anxious mothers monitoring your every move. Connecting O2 hoses from the PLSSs to the ports on our chest. Donning our helmets. Making sure everything is locked on. Then making sure the locks are locked.

  We are moving to page 2-9. I grab for the checklist and miss. It comes off the toggle switches easily in 1/6th gravity and fall very gently to the floor.

  Freddo and I make a move for them at the same time and then stop. I have a brief awful vision of us somehow banging our helmeted heads so hard we crack one of the fishbowls. An ignominious end to the mission. We’d have to call off the EVA. Leave the moon without going outside. Hear about it for the rest of our lives.

  “We almost pulled a Three Stooges there,” I say.

  “Two Stooges, one in orbit,” Freddo observes. (We’re on a different frequency than the CSM for now, so Ken doesn’t get to listen or respond, but I can almost hear him saying “Speak for yourself, Aquarius.”)

  “All right Aquarius, let us know when you’ve got your gloves on,” Houston says.

  As I mentioned, the gloves are just about the last step before going outside. We are almost there.

  •••

  I was building and flying rockets when I was 12 years old. Poring through Chesley Bonestell illustrations before anyone knew we’d be able to see these things for real. When I was a midshipman, I wrote my thesis on rocketry. I remember reading von Braun’s features in Collier’s at around that same time. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were still flying fighters in Korea, I already wanted something bigger.

  And now it’s all happening. Years of hazy dreams compressed by hard work into hours of dense fantastic reality.

  •••

  “Aquarius, this is Houston. You are go for cabin depress.”

  “OK. Circuit breaker, cabin repress open.” We are setting everything so the environmental system won’t try to repressurize the LM once we dump the O2. “Cabin repress valve closed.”

  “Roger that, Aquarius.”

  I reach for the overhead dump lever. It’s painted black and yellow so you know it’s important. I pull it and hold until the cabin pressure goes down to 3.5 psi. Then we monitor the gauges on our RCUs to make sure our suits are holding a higher pressure.

  “4.8,” Freddo calls out.

  “4.9 and coming down,” I echo. The suits are designed to run at 3.8. We wait until the gauges settle there before finishing the cabin dump. “Holding at 3.8,” I call out at last.

  “3.8,” Freddo echoes.

  “OK, give us a mark for the final depress so we can start our watches,” Houston says.

  My hand goes back to the overhead valve. “3, 2, 1, mark.”

  I pull it open again. The EVA has officially started.

  After 2 minutes, the internal pressure’s below 0.1 psi. Low enough to open the front hatch. My suit pressure has spiked again in response to the pressure drop outside, so when I first reach for the handle I feel like the Michelin man.

  “My suit pressure’s high. I’ll wait for it to come down before I open the hatch.”

  “I’ll get the PLSS feed valves open,” Freddo says. We’re wearing water-cooled underwear. Laced with tiny tubes that cycle to a sublimator on the PLSS, which carries off the residual heat. The valves are tricky to reach on your own, so we help one another out. Another great reason to have landed two people instead of one. “OK. Caution and warning status is good. Water SEP light, pre-amps, ECS.”

  “OK, your water flags are clear,” McCandless calls out.

  The suit pressure’s back down and mobility’s back up. Time to get out. I swing the hatch the rest of the way open while Freddo dims the lights.

  I turn left and kneel. To get out, you have to basically slither feet-first out the open hatch on hands and knees. The LM is a tight squeeze and this is the tightest thing we do. I have to be careful not to scrape
my faceplate on the midstep. Freddo guides me and holds my antenna so it doesn’t snap off. I can feel the hatch frame through my suit. Stopping me. Then Freddo guides my PLSS to drop it a little and I remember to arch my back like in training.

  With that, I’m through.

  There’s a small metal porch outside, and once I’m through the hatch, I’m on it, still crawling backwards. “OK, I’m clear.”

  “Stand by for the jettison bag,” Freddo says. I look up. Through the hatch I can see him moving over to my side of the LM. The bag’s a big white beta cloth thing full of trash we don’t want to haul back into orbit later. Just about the size of a head and torso. Freddo works it through the hatch. I grab it and drop it overboard.

  “All those years in Boy Scouts, I feel like I’m littering,” I say.

  “Don’t worry about littering,” Freddo drawls. “If a park ranger shows up to chew us out, that’s when we gotta worry.”

  Next Freddo passes out the LEC, which is basically a clothesline-type conveyor belt device which we’ll use to haul the rock boxes back up into the LM.

  At last I pull the D-ring to deploy the MESA platform. (This is a folding panel on the side of the spacecraft. There’s a TV camera in there, which is how you were able to see Neil take his first steps on the moon.)

  “OK, we have you on camera,” Houston calls.

  There’s a pleasant lightness to my body as I swing my legs down. I’m in the shadow of the LM but I can see very well, thanks to the surface backscatter.

  “Looking good. We see you coming down the ladder.” Houston again. “The stripes were a great idea.” (After 11 and 12, they couldn’t tell who was who in half the pictures. So my suit has red armbands and leg bands, and my LEVA has a wide red stripe down the middle. And I took the liberty of having them add a blue anchor insignia to it.)

  The LM footpads look like big dinner plates wrapped in gold tinfoil. Right now I can’t see the one beneath me. My RCU is in the way. But assuming the landing struts haven’t compressed, I know the footpad is about a yard below the ladder’s bottom rung. We have to go down the ladder by feel. As I do, it occurs to me I haven’t decided what to say when I set foot on the moon.