Читать книгу Piercing the Horizon - Sunny Tsiao - Страница 11

Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas—2:15 p.m. Central Time, July 20, 1969

He could see the whole room from where he sat. NASA called it the MOCR, or Mission Operations Control Room, but the rest of the world knew it simply as “Houston,” a room born of the space age. The nerve center of America’s manned spaceflight program was impressive enough, but was actually quite a bit smaller than it appeared on television. Unless there was a simulation of a spaceflight or an actual mission in progress, Mission Control usually sat empty, with lights dimmed, chairs pushed in under the rows of control consoles, and monitors turned off. Only the whisper of air blowing out of the air-conditioning vents disturbed the silence.

But on this sweltering, humid Sunday afternoon in July 1969, the room was abuzz with pensive excitement. An unmistakable sense of anxiousness, the anticipation of what was about to happen, hung in the air. Mission Control was teeming with flight controllers, mostly young engineers who only three or four years before were studying mathematics and science in college. Now their full attention was on a constant stream of data in the form of numbers and letters that flickered before them on their black-and-white monitors. To the untrained eye, the figures looked like a cryptic alphabet from an obscure, long-lost mathematical language. But to the controllers, the data meant more—much more. And on this occasion, the telemetry had traveled nearly a quarter of a million miles to reach Houston. It was data that was coming from the moon.

From behind a glass wall separating the VIP viewing area from the floor of the MOCR, Tom Paine focused his attention on a greenish-yellow icon on the large projection screen at the front of the room. It slowly made its way across the screen. Shaped somewhat like the odd-looking Apollo lunar module (LM), it showed the position of the faraway spacecraft as it finally began its long-awaited powered descent to the surface of the moon. The final landing sequence would take only twelve minutes, but NASA had been waiting to make that engine burn for eight years.

Voice transmissions coming over the speakers told him what was happening. The voice signals were surprisingly clear, interrupted only on occasion by some garble and static that one would expect, whether listening to a live broadcast of a baseball game from just down the street or, in this case, two men narrating their own landing onto the surface of the moon. Earlier, Flight Director Gene Kranz, the tough, former Saber Jet pilot who was now directing Mission Control’s “White Team,” had ordered the doors of the MOCR locked. A final status check around the room followed. Each flight controller declared an emphatic “GO!” into his headset.

Two hundred thirty-eight thousand miles away, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin closed a sequence of circuit breakers that fired lunar module Eagle’s descent stage engine to initiate the powered descent sequence. The engine burn slowed them down just enough, gradually taking them out of lunar orbit and onto a predetermined path. At first, only the instruments told them that they were actually descending. But before long, the craters, boulders, and finally the rocks of the moon became very clear. The spacecraft pitched over and the dramatic lunar panorama filled their windows as they approached the landing area. If everything went well, they would be on the surface in the next few minutes.

Four days earlier, Paine was there at the Kennedy Space Center as Apollo 11 left Earth in mankind’s first attempt to land on the surface of the moon. The flight was the high point of Project Apollo, America’s historic quest to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth by the end of 1969.

He was in Houston now with the largest contingent of US space officials ever gathered in one place.¹ Only four months earlier, President Richard Nixon had appointed the forty-eight-year-old engineer from California to be the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On his watch, human beings began to journey away from the confines of planet Earth for the first time on missions to explore another celestial body.

Nearly fifty years later, those historic flights still hold their place as the zenith of America’s space program and the accomplishment for which it is most recognized around the globe. From those epochal voyages came paragons of the space age, pioneering and creative geniuses who saw what was possible and made it all happen. Circumstances had now put Paine among those on the brink of making history.

As the descent stage engine continued to burn, the spacecraft slowed, dropping closer and closer to the surface. The icon on the screen showed that the lunar module was on the correct approach trajectory. He was confident that Armstrong and Aldrin would soon be safely on the surface.

For Tom Paine, human beings’ exploration of the moon was the first step in pioneering the vast frontier of outer space. In the span of just a few short decades after the turn of the twentieth century, the rapid progress of technology had revolutionized the way people lived. All facets of human society were being advanced to one degree or another. Most tantalizing was that space travel had become a reality.

The years during and after the Second World War had been transformational. Rapid advances in science and engineering made people think that the right use of technology could overcome even the most daunting of society’s ills. It was in this dynamic setting that Paine’s career began. Computers were still in their infancy; “high-tech” had not yet been invented. He and other engineers of the day creatively devised new ways to apply discoveries in the fields of material science, electronics, and aerospace to everyday life. They used slide rules and vacuum tubes instead of keyboard and mouse. Their ingenuity revolutionized transportation, manufacturing, and weaponry. An ardent futurist, Paine believed that technology held the key to a good future for humanity, not only here on Earth but, one day perhaps, in the borderless expanse of outer space.

Twentieth-century technology of all kinds intrigued him. Ships especially piqued his interest. Neil Armstrong still remembered, just a year before his own passing, that Tom Paine was as fascinated with how airships—those impressively titanic, lighter-than-air, passenger-ferrying marvels of aeronautical engineering that were largely abandoned after the fiery Hindenburg disaster—were able to cross the Atlantic as he was with how a fragile spaceship like the Apollo lunar module could fly two men down to soft-land on the surface of the moon.²

Second only to space exploration was Paine’s lifelong passion for submarines. He made considerable contributions to the field as an engineer. As a historian also, he worked in many ways to preserve the artifacts, histories, and memories of the boats that fought in World War II. The breadth of his work has been recognized in recent years by the US Naval Academy for its unique scholarly and historical significance.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw great leaps and unexpected accomplishments in the field of aeronautics and astronautics. Those achievements became the new barometer by which the prowess of a nation was measured on the world stage. It began in earnest in the years leading up to World War II. Airplanes moved from the realm of mere curiosity to being useful machines for transportation and war.

The pace picked up dramatically after 1945. It reached a crescendo in the 1960s as the competition to be the torchbearer pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. The launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 had made sure of this. President John F. Kennedy wasted no time in responding to an unsure and stunned nation. He challenged America to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s.

Sputnik was America’s “Pearl Harbor of Space,” a wake-up call for a distracted nation. Overnight, the Space Race was born. Disbelief and anger at the Soviet launch consumed America’s psyche, from the young who barely understood the meaning of the nebulous images they were seeing on their television screens to the highest leaders at the national level who demanded to know how this could have happened. It was a jarring blow that woke the nation out of complacency and into a technological awakening. It would culminate twelve years later with the flight of Apollo 11.

“A strong demonstration of American technical and military capability is the best assurance we have for maintaining the peace,” Paine said after the successful landing.

I think the space program has had a darn strong influence on what you might call military matters, and I think the demonstration of our capability of landing on the moon was a strong demonstration to the Soviets of the vigor of our leadership and the strength of our society that certainly must have given them pause. When the Soviet leaders [ask themselves] the question “How belligerent can we safely get against the United States[?]” [—]I think America’s space successes must give them pause when their people say “Well hell, we can do everything the Americans can do and do it better.” Well by God, you can’t go to the Moon, and I think it has been a stabilizing and sobering force.³

Paine saw the accomplishment in still larger terms. He affirmed that while the Moon Race dramatically revealed the difference between two competing, ideologically opposed societal systems and their national values, its true significance was always about how far the United States could push itself. “What the landing on the Moon demonstrates is that American space technology has matured, has come of age. It demonstrates that we can do the thing we set out to do. … That’s the real meaning of the accomplishment, not that we beat Russia in a Moon Race.”⁴

Only ten short months remained to Kennedy’s deadline when the US Senate confirmed Paine as the administrator of NASA in March of 1969. The timing of his appointment was important and, for him, incredibly fortuitous. The three highest-profile missions of the moon program (Apollo 8 was the first to orbit the moon; Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon; and Apollo 13 was the only failed attempt to land on the moon) all flew on his watch. Those epochal missions that sent human beings away to explore another place in outer space have not been attempted since the final Apollo flight splashed down in the Central Pacific in December of 1972.

The timing of the lunar program was strikingly compelling. The 1960s was a restless time in America. Social activism, generational distrust, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War defined the decade. A weary public openly questioned what the country was doing in space when the cities were in chaos and young men and women were dying in the faraway jungles of Southeast Asia. The young, especially, questioned authority, the government, and what the American way of life stood for.

Going to the moon became a way to inspire, challenge, and bring the contentious generations together. It suddenly became very important to the nation’s psyche and sense of security that the United States reach the moon first. Paine believed that the space program could accomplish something special, something unique for America and even for the human race. The moon landings proved that a country working together could do something remarkable. As World War II had shown, a challenged nation could bring great power and wealth to transform the world—NASA did the same.⁵

Paine was able to influence the space program at a very high level, and he certainly wanted it all when it came to space. National leaders listened to him. Critics who found him too ambitious and his ideas too untenable listened nevertheless. He made his mark as the administrator of NASA when mankind went to the moon, but his articulate championing of a strong human presence in space in the final decades of the twentieth century may, upon revisiting, turn out to be his greatest contribution and legacy.

In the mid-1980s, the Reagan White House asked Paine what America should do next in space. He responded by championing a plan for how human beings, in the span of one generation, could settle the inner solar system. After the pioneering flights of Project Apollo had faded into the pages of history, he remained vigilant and called for the United States to pick up where it had left off: return to the moon and go on to Mars. Now, one score and five years after his passing, those decisions and imprints can still steer the space program as the US considers charting a way back into outer space beyond the horizon of low-Earth orbit.

A renowned fellow presidential commissioner fondly recalled Paine as a man who was “a wonderful human being who was very shrewd but never gave the impression [of] being shrewd. He … came across as being just kind of an ordinary guy, but he was quite extraordinary.”⁶ To see how Tom Paine came to be a central figure in the US space program, we must open not with the moon and Project Apollo, nor the romance of the high plains of Mars that he hoped human beings would one day settle, nor the saga onboard a US submarine as it perilously fought the Japanese, but in the colonies of the New World at the time of the birth of America. This was a time when visionaries of another kind journeyed across the breadth of an ocean to conquer their dreams.