This week marks the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, Michael Collins orbited the moon in the Command Module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided their Lunar Module onto Tranquility Base. The next day, human beings walked for the first time on the moon. Meanwhile, 250,000 miles away, I took my own lunar excursion on our front lawn, with my parents and grandmother, looking up at the moon, along with everybody else on planet Earth. At the time, my world revolved around Project Apollo — at the perfect age for such discoveries, eight. I’d wake early or stay up late to watch blastoffs and splashdowns on black-and-white TV as the moon flights made me a news junkie and lifted me out of my small town world. Of course, it didn’t take long to realize I didn’t have the Right Stuff to be an astronaut or scientist. But the space program boosted my imagination and maybe helped set my life’s trajectory in other ways. In any case, I’ve always felt a personal stake in the story, and felt like it hasn’t yet been told fully in film, not in the way it deserves (i.e. We can put a man on the moon, so why can’t we finally make that definitive movie about it?).
Filmmakers have grabbed onto parts of the story — or tried to bite off too much. Tom Hanks loves Project Apollo at least as much as I do, but I find his From the Earth to the Moon not really up to the larger cultural context. Both he and Ron Howard have some great moments in their films, but lots of smurfy melodrama. The BBC Series Space Race adds more of the bigger picture, the Cold War context — but that necessitates boucoup expository, which they try to graft on documentary style, making for a weird amalgam that probably only the real geeks will sit through. Still, there are some great documentaries. For All Mankind lets the NASA imagery speak for itself, in all its poetry and power. In the Shadow of the Moon supplements that with talking head interviews of the astronauts who walked on the moon, looking back years later apparently still just as dazed as the rest of us by the wonder of it all.
As for books I’ve read, Tom Wolfe is good for a certain amount of fireworks, as he strains to burst the limits of convention to get to the heart of things, but The Right Stuff may lead one to think the rocket jockeys had a monopoly on that quality. Ditto Andrew Chaikin in his superb A Man on the Moon. No doubt, it’s easy to see the astronauts as the heroes of this story. But I wonder if their heroic status can tend to obscure other elements of the adventure of Project Apollo that were part and parcel of the wonder-provoking phenomenon it was — and still is.
None of that to say that Moon Machines finally gets everything right. But, it seems to me, this 2008 documentary sure fills in some critical gaps. And not that it doesn’t have its own gaps. The film interviews German V2 scientists who worked on Apollo without any glimmer of the troubling implications of that. Aside from a quick note that the first Mercury missions were launched by actual ICBMs, there’s little acknowledgment the whole shebang was ultimately powered less by a love of pure knowledge than the drive to be the superest superpower. And there’s no collegial nod given to Soviet rocket scientists, who were as heroically trying to solve the same problems at the same moment — though granted, that would be a harder story to tell, given the Byzantine secrecy that shrouded the USSR’s moon program and their mysterious “Master Designer.” I’m not even saying this telling of the story would have been improved by tying up these loose ends so much as, again, pointing out that this story is so huge that telling it may require a Project Apollo -style program in order to pull all the various pieces together. Without question, though, Moon Machines is indispensable for reclaiming several more key pieces.
For even if America didn’t have any mysterious “Master Designer” whose identity was kept from the world and its own people by the state, how many of us know the names of the designers and technicians who built Apollo? Apart from marquee names like Werner von Braun, I suspect most people are left with some vague notion of a faceless American Ingenuity or maybe even some certain inevitable and anonymous forces of History behind it all.
Astonishingly enough, it turns out Project Apollo actually devised and built by real people with names, names that can still be attached to specific elements of design and innovation. Even more astonishingly, many of those people are still around to tell us this story in their own words — just as the same generation tells their stories in recent documentaries about World War II. Yet this series skips the Ken Burns-style flourishes. There’s no repeated shots of Saturn V on the pad at sunrise with mournful violin music in the background. Moon Machines is more nuts-and-bolts, more down-to-earth, puns intended. This is a documentary as straightforward as this generation of crew-cut and slide-rulered engineers might produce themselves, and they do, in their plainspoken accounting of the problems they had to solve to get man to the moon. Not to say the film isn’t artful, but more like “elegant” as engineers use the term: a practical and efficient detailing of an endless string of engineering problems. How to make stable the most mammoth rocket engines ever fired. How to get what was then a room-sized computer to shrink down into that tiny crowded Command Module. With winsome narration, workaday animation, stock footage and above all, dozens of interviews with the principals, this film tells “the story of the men and women who built the machines that took us to the moon.” (Mostly men, though, as we recall this was a giant leap for MANkind, in a day when women primarily sewed the parachutes and space suits.)
These are the guys who get a few of those nice moments in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13: when they have to improvise a CO2 filter out of parts available in the crippled spacecraft. (And that story is told here at length, from the inside perspective.) There’s a sense in which that scene is paradigmatic for the entire Project Apollo.
It was already three years into The Sixties when President John F. Kennedy made his very public, unequivocal commitment to America sending a man to the moon and back before the decade’s end. Inspiring words — but they must have been terrifying, too, to anyone who had a solid sense of the status quo: Americans were well behind the Soviets in experience, technology and certainly in the number of benchmark successes. The notion of going from almost scratch to landing a man on the moon in little more than a half-dozen years seems — and moreso looking back — CRAZY. There were a million problems to solve to pull off such a thing, many of which couldn’t be known until they’d started and saw how solving them created even further unexpected problems. Entire systems needed to be created, tested, integrated: propulsion, navigation, waste disposal, communications — the whole thing was outrageous. Yet “We choose to go to the moon,” declared Kennedy. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
All those “other things” are what the 400,000 engineers and technicians of NASA and all the many contracted corporations and entities came together to do over the next (shortened) decade. At stake, ultimately, were the lives of the astronauts involved, but in the larger picture there was international prestige and power as this became a proxy battle in the Cold War. Beyond that, there was the gamble of raising expectations for human endeavor in the most public way an risking, in a new media-united world, a species-wide disappointment.
Again and again in Moon Machines, we hear different engineers from different corners of the project conclude that if they hadn’t solved some particular problem in their department, the whole program would have failed — or been delayed, missing that insane deadline. Indeed, the deadline created a high-pressure atmosphere that cost untold marriages and it’s a miracle didn’t cost more lives than it did. As the engineers reflect on the fatal fire in Apollo One, one feels the deep sense of personal connection to a story of technology triumphant. These story isn’t about some mysterious Master Designer. The moon machines were built by, among others:
– John Houbolt, who defied NASA and his boss Werner von Braun to insist that the only way they’d get on and off the moon was not in a big spaceship, but in separate, dockable vehicles.
– Sonny Morea, who managed development of the massive Saturn V engines
– Dick Battin, who was tasked to squeeze one of those room-sized computers into a tiny space ship.
– Don Eyles, then a 22-year-old long-haired programmer, who wrote software for a lunar landing in a world where the notion of software writing had only just been invented.
– Ferenc Pavlics, the General Motors engineer, who somehow managed to keep working on the rover project with his company’s money after NASA had given up on the idea.
– Don Rethke, who was nicknamed “Dr. Flush,” who invented the system to manage personal, er, hygienic needs — also known as the “pee pouch” and “poo pouch”
– Ed Fendell, who operated camera remotely (by arithmetic only, given the delay of communications), to catch that last lunar module lifting off from surface of the moon.
Theirs were among the million flashes of insight, the middle-of-the-night epiphanies, the solutions for problems nobody had ever faced or knew existed before the project began.
For a reality-check, consider this: at the time, the computer they finally did squeeze into that moon machine had the equivalent computing power of 1/50,000th of a portable MP3 player (so they say here). Their accomplishments seem akin to those giant prehistoric construction jobs, like the Pyramids or Stonehenge, which seem so unlikely that people have attributed them to “ancient astronauts” (again, the astronauts get all the credit!) No wonder there are people who think the whole space program was shot on a movie soundstage!
Moon Machines is divided into six forty-minute episodes: The Saturn V Rocket; The Command Module; The Navigation Computer; The Lunar Module; The Space Suit; The Lunar Rover. Each episode features the actual builders of these things taking us through the process of each system, the obstacles, breakthroughs, failures, near-miss disasters, problems caused by other teams (as when adding weight to one element affects everything else). There’s amazing equipment testing footage I’d never seen, including of the tiny “Little Joe” rocket for testing the Command Module, which blew up and turned out to be instead a great test of the capsule’s Escape Rocket.
That they got all those problems solved and each bit of technology invented, tested, manufactured and able to work together is a miracle. That they got it all done by that crazy deadline an even bigger miracle. That there were as few fatalities as there were, well, the whole thing brings me back to eight-year-old awe. “It was the best thing I ever did,” says one of the engineers here. Indeed. Maybe the best thing we ever did as a nation, or,in some sense, as a species. Moon Machines is a geek’s dream, but not so geeky that anyone who watches it won’t be filled, like the engineers themselves express, like I feel, with gratitude that it really happened, and we could have been a part of it.