AN EDITORIAL BY JOHN W • CAMPBELL
One of the pleasant things about the s job of editing this magazine is that I can legitimately take time off to watch such events as the Apollo Moon walks and splashdown. And the Apollo 14 splashdown was really something worth watching—on color TV, of course, because those on the scene couldn't see as well what was happening.
As Walter Schirra said, while being the ex-astronaut-commentator on the CBS network, "I'm seeing this better than I did during my own training!"
The coverage of Apollo 14 was far superior to that of previous plashdowns—thanks, in large part, to the fact that the U.S. Navy's helicopter-carrier New Orleans, that managed the recovery, is primarily an antisubmarine warfare ship, with the finest and latest in antisub gear.
The photo-helicopter that carried the TV and movie cameras is specially equipped for photo-surveil lance; it has specially designed gyro-stabilized stable-platform mounts for long-range cameras and certain less widely publicized gear. The stable platform stays level, despite pitching, yawing and rolling motions of the helicopter. Anyone who's used a pair of binoculars, a hand-held telescope, or a telescopic lens on his camera knows how those optical gadgets magnify the slightest motions. Without the stable platform, the long-reach camera lenses are worse than useless; motion produces blur that destroys the picture entirely. With it, the long-lenses brought the apparent viewpoint closer to the descending Apollo capsule than any human being could get, while maintaining such astonishingly high resolution that the seams in the metal capsule were visible.
And it was a beautiful picture—the bright orange parachutes against the clear blue sky, with the gray-green ocean below.
And since the capsule was picked up by the photo-ship before the drogue chutes opened, they must have been (1) using an exceedingly long-focus lens, and (2) Shepherd, Mitchell, Roosa & Co. must have come in with the same sort of 87-foot accuracy that they achieved on the Moon.
Apollo 14 was a complete success—and demonstrated several points that merit some careful evaluation for the whole future Space program.
Item No. 1 is the matter of the difference between a "glitch" and a disaster. A glitch is a malfunction, or misfunction, that can be overcome with a little ingenuity and some unorthodox procedure; a disaster is an irreversible and unrecoverable breakdown.
But the important hidden-assumption factor in that is the question of what means for recovery are available. On Apollo 13 there was a semi-disaster; the mission had to be aborted because of the irreplaceable loss of the oxygen supplies needed to power both the fuel cells and the human crew. However, it was partially overcome by the ingenuity of the human crew plus the engineering crew on Earth—and the forethought of the planners who designed and built the Apollos. The Lunar lander had originally been designed with the thought in mind that it could serve as a rescue system in case the service module became inoperative for some reason.
But this depended on the human crew applying unorthodox procedures, and flanging up jury-rigs that weren't supposed to be possible. The loss of the fuel cells meant there was no electrical power supply to charge the small batteries in the absolutely essential command capsule; those batteries are normally kept charged by the fuel cells until the last half hour or so after the service module has been separated for the final passage through the atmosphere and splashdown, not for the many hours that were involved in Apollo 13's return.
Without the fuel cells, there was no way of getting power to them to recharge them for reentry—unless somebody rewired the electrical system of both the LEM and the Command capsule.
The batteries used in the Command capsule are rechargeable silver-zinc cells; it takes about 35 volts to push charge into them. The fuel cells deliver between 28 and 32 volts, depending on load; the fuel-cell current was, normally, fed into a "DC transformer"—a solid-state oscillator that converted the battery current to AC, a transformer that stepped up the voltage, and a regulator-rectifier system that reconverted to DC at the desired voltage.
The descent stage of the LEM is powered by big—thousands of ampere-hours—silver-zinc batteries of the primary type—i.e., like ordinary dry calls, they can't be recharged. (That type can be made more compact to store more energy per pound, and in the intended use, it's a one-way, one-shot application anyway.) So there was plenty of stored electrical energy in the LEM—which couldn't reenter the atmosphere. And not enough in the Command capsule, which had to reenter. And the LEM battery, which had plenty of power, didn't have a high enough voltage. Since it hadn't been designed to be a power-source for the Command capsule, it had no "DC transformer".
The answer was relatively simple—just run a cable from the big LEM battery to the DC transformer the fuel cells normally fed, and recharge the Command capsule battery that way.
Very simple if there's a competent man on board to do it. Not quite so simple if you're trying to remote control it through radio links however.
The glitch of power supply Apollo 13, then, was a glitch, not disaster, because men were there to carry out ingenious, and unorthodox procedures.
This makes the difference between a glitch and a disaster come down come down to "Who's there to do something about it?"
The first glitch of Apollo 14 was the failure of the docking mechanism to behave as it was supposed It wasn't anything serious—the crew simply by-passed the recalcitrant probe-and-drogue equipment, and made a direct "hard dock" with the LEM.
Without the crew, it would have been a disaster, however; the crew did something that the equipment wasn't designed to be able to do.
Then there was that other glitch, when the computer got zonked somehow, and signaled "ABORT"—and would have automatically thrown the ascent stage into operation, discarding the descent stage entirely, if they'd been in process of making a landing at the time.
Obviously, without the crew, that would have been a disaster so far as the Lunar mission was concerned. The machinery might have successfully completed the program, and returned the Command capsule safely to Earth—which would have been interesting, but pretty futile if no Lunar work had been accomplished. The aborted mission would have cost millions—just as much, of course, as the successful mission—roughly, $400 million. However, the crew, with the help of a young computer program designer at MIT, some 200,000 miles away, converted the potential disaster into a simple glitch; they determined what the cause of the false signal was, and the program expert designed a new program that bypassed that section of the computer completely.
That, incidentally, is quite a neat trick; the trouble was caused by a defective switch—a failure of the computer hardware. The program he designer, in effect, "fixed" the defective hardware, by redesigning the software, the program.
This is more-or-less equivalent to what happens when a dog has an injured leg; he reprograms his neuro- muscular coordination program, and develops a three-legged gait that bypasses the defective "hardware."
(Horses, incidentally, are unable to do this; that's why a horse that broke a leg had to be shot, while a dog could simply be splinted for a while. The horse's computer can't be reprogrammed.)
I've commented that the unmanned, instrumented-probe type mission equivalent to Apollo 14 would have cost nearly as much as the manned mission did, but "everybody knows" that instrumented, but unmanned, probes are much cheaper. We have the Russians' word for it!
The Russians' unmanned probes, so far, are of two types: First, a softlander that collected a small sample, and returned to Earth with it, and second, the Lunokhod Moon-crawler that crawls around examining the surface.
The first brought back a couple of heaping tablespoons of Moon dust, contaminated with gases from the landing rockets, and with no selectivity.
Apollo 14 brought back nearly 100 pounds of rocks carefully selected by well-trained geologist-astronauts, well documented as to the conditions under which they were found.
The Russian achievement was real, and I'm not downgrading it but I do want a little honest evaluation. It was not equivalent to getting selected, documented, and massive samples.
The most fascinating questions to be answered by the Lunar material has to do with the age of the Moon. The small and unselected sample isn't apt to reveal much in that department.
Lunokhod, on the other hand, has TV eyes and manipulators with which it can select samples. It has various X-ray and nuclear test equipment with which it can report on simple analyses—but for real analysis of Lunar material extremely sophisticated and very massive equipment is essential. A scanning electron microscope is a bit too complex to fit in a Lunokhod type device, for instance. The material has to be returned to Earth for analysis.
And this Lunokhod alone can't do; what can be done, of course, is to send two soft-landers to the Moon, one carrying a Lunokhod, and one carrying a reascent capsule capable of the round-trip journey back to Earth, with the load of samples Lunokhod has been directed to pick up and put in the second soft-lander.
That method would give carefully selected samples, from a fairly wide area in the vicinity of the landers, and bring them back uncontaminated to Earth.
Only . . . well, let's see; this requires two launch vehicles capable of boosting pretty large-scale soft-landers to the Moon, and land safely pretty considerable masses of equipment on the Moon. Both must land successfully within a small distance—not over 100 miles, let's say—of each other. If either one fails, the other won't have much use.
Those two big vehicles aren't going to be such a hell of a lot cheaper than an Apollo flight, actually, when you take into account the fact that they're going to be totally dependent on a great deal of very complex technical equipment—and that there will be no glitches, only disasters.
The first Russian effort to bring back a sample of the Moon was timed to get there just ahead of Apollo 11; it was a good try, but some minor glitch ballooned into a disaster; it didn't soft land, and they had to crash it on the Moon.
In accounting the comparative cost of manned vs. unmanned probes to the Moon, any honest accountancy outfit would have to tack on a huge fee as the insurance cost—and that might make the economics of the thing stop looking quite so one-sided! Particularly when you add the requirement that the product—samples returned to Earth—must be of comparable magnitude and value.
On the matter of bargain prices, one might note that the Apollo program could have saved several thousand dollars by using some of Kodak's $10 Instamatic cameras, instead of the expensive Hasselblads. They're both cameras, aren't they? While it's true that television-controlled-from-Earth Lunokhods do permit the chair-bound explorers to select samples by seeing them on TV, and operating Lunokhod's manipulators, there's a problem. The quality of color TV pictures the cameras of the Apollo 11 and 14 missions sent back to Earth are certainly enormously inferior to the quality of the photographs the men took on the Moon. I wonder how good a job of sample selection could be done via television pictures, how it would compare with the selectivity achieved by trained, observing eyes on the spot?
Apollo 14 was the first of the Apollo shots that was primarily a scientific mission; the previous Apollos, right from Apollo 1 through Apollo 12, were primarily engineering development-and-test missions, seeking to work out the problems involved in a round-trip to the Moon.
Apollo 13 would have been the first mainly-scientific mission—but it turned out to be an unexpected further development-and-test mission, too.
Apollo 11 and 12 did do some immensely valuable scientific work, of course, but the primary mission was engineering; did we have a vehicle that would do the job, were the suits workable on the Moon, and were men capable of working well on the Moon in those suits.
That was a job for test pilots—despite the back-seat-drivers in the scientist department.
Apollo 14 was the first mission wherein scientific exploration on the Moon could get started; Apollo 15 will carry a Moon-car to transport the explorers, and allow of much greater geological study. Apollos 16 and 17 are planned to greatly expand the scientific study of the Moon.
Now one thing of considerable interest has come out recently; the British periodical New Scientist carried an article by an ex-NASA astronaut trainee, a scientist who had resigned from the program out of disgusted boredom and a sense of not getting anywhere, explaining precisely why he had resigned. Essentially, it was because he was a trained and qualified scientist, and NASA insisted on giving him courses in circuit diagrams and nuts-and-bolts "How to build an Apollo capsule" which he found extremely repetitive, deadly boring, and completely irrelevant to his interest in scientific study of the Moon.
He was, in other words, of that mental school that learns to drive a car on the basis of "You turn this key thing that way, until the engine starts roaring. Then you push this gimmick here over this way, and then step on this thing, and away you go." It's a mental type that finds the how and why and interaction of mechanism exceedingly boring and uninteresting. It's the inverse of the devoted mechanician who considers theory and mathematics a lot of senseless mumbo jumbo—give him a blueprint and a circuit diagram, however, and he can build the thing so it hums beautiful music.
He quite properly resigned; he might be a hot-shot geologist—theoretical type—but he simply didn't have the type of mind that belonged in anything so complex, so highly sophisticated, and so delicate as a Lunar module.
Perhaps NASA should look for geologists among the mining engineering profession, rather than the theoretical scientist group; at this stage of space exploration every man in the Lunar capsule has to be equipment oriented, as well as being a real rock-hound.
As NASA has said, it's easier to teach a test pilot the concepts of geology than to teach the pure scientist the necessary appreciation of the intricate mechanism he must share responsibility for.
Moreover, the NASA courses in geology are something very special. The recipe goes more or less like this: you start with a selected man, who has demonstrated an extremely high ability to learn, and learn rapidly. (You don't get to be a first-rank test pilot if you can't learn the characteristics of every new ship you're assigned to test, and learn it fast!) He's also a highly trained engineer, with degrees in various scientific disciplines, and one of the type that learns new material for fun.
Since he already has the basic scientific disciplines such as physics, chemistry and mathematics, you don't have to spend several years indoctrinating him in how to think in a scientific, objective manner. You don't need to teach him elementary calculus, and spend four years or so getting him started toward geology; instead you devote his time to studying what it is he needs to know. He doesn't need any oceanography; he's going to the Moon. He does need to have a sound knowledge of vulcanism, impact dynamics, rock types, and the dynamics of planetary crustal forces.
And he doesn't get it all from books; he gets taken on selected field trips that are dillies, to see what various type of igneous rocks are like—to see and feel various types of volcanoes and lava flows. He's given a hard-headed, practical, direct-experience cram course in geology.
And starting with a man with demonstrated phenomenal ability to learn—he wouldn't be in the astronaut program if he hadn't already demonstrated that—he can and will learn a lot more geology in a few months than the average university Ph.D. accumulates.
There are a lot of other characteristics that NASA demands of astronauts; after all, they can afford to be exceedingly choosy, because they don't need a thousand of them. Some are obvious; an astronaut must be an athletic man in prime condition; genius intellect won't make up for the inability to wriggle through the LEM hatch in a spacesuit, or a tendency to black out any time the acceleration exceeds 3-Gs. Some requirements are not so obvious, until you think a bit. One man, otherwise fully qualified, was dropped from the program because of a single factor; he suffered from stage fright.
If you consider the sort of glaring public attention the astronauts have to face without blowing up, without stammering some ghastly misstatement, you'll see why it's essential that an astronaut be a cool performer under unlimited attention.
Nevertheless, it's predictably human that many scientists feel that NASA should allow them to run those missions—or give them instrumented probes that they can control the way they just know they should be!
Finally, Apollo 14 demonstrated one other thing; men on Earth, logically figuring out what should be done by their agents on the Moon, can not reach the optimum answers. They assigned Shepherd and Mitchell too many, too complex tasks, and too many definite "go here, do this, then collect that . . ." detailed tasks. That much could not be accomplished under the harsh, difficult conditions.
Men on the Moon can do a better job of self-assignment, because they have the data that no Earthbound man has. If he had it, obviously he wouldn't be so hungry to get it!
Let the Man in the Moon decide what to do next!
THE EDITOR