Teamwork
While I was not yet alive when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, I am inspired by it and by the 400,000 people who made it and the missions that followed it possible. Those are the people we often forget. We know the names of the astronauts and some of the flight directors, but there were so many others. We don't know the names of the mission control guys, the people who wrote computer code, the team that ran the simulators, the engineers from Northrop Grumman who designed and built the Lunar Module, the ladies who hand-sewed the EVA suits, or the people who printed the books explaining what each error meant when an alarm went off; but we would not have won the space race without them.
In his last transmission before returning to Earth, Neil Armstrong paused to credit all of those who got him and his crewmates to the moon. He said, "We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Goodnight from Apollo 11.”
Last Friday, I watched Apollo 13 to begin my celebration of this anniversary. If that movie shows anything, it is the value of the team in the Apollo missions. Ken Mattingly, who had been scrubbed from the flight, worked tirelessly with John Aaron to come up with a power-up procedure that would fit within their remaining power supply. Before a move could be made, each member of mission control had to give the "Go" based on their own area of responsibility because no one person could interpret that much data on their own. When the three astronauts have to complete an engine burn without their guidance computer, each member was needed to do it successfully. Fred Haise was in charge of the pitch while Jim Lovell handled the other two rotation directions, and Jack Swigert made sure they burned the engines for the precise amount of time needed. One person could not have completed that burn. My favorite scene in the movie is when the carbon dioxide scrubbers on the LM have become saturated and the ones from the other ship are a different shape. The backroom guys dump all of the stuff they have on the ship onto a table and say, "We need to make this fit into the hole for this using only that." And, then, guess what? They do. Not only do they build one at mission control, but they also write the procedures to communicate via radio so that the guys onboard can build one as well. Do you feel the teamwork it took to get those men home alive? Every mission required the work of thousands of men and women, not just the three who got ticker-tape parades at the end.
Transparently Learning From Failure
As we look back on Apollo from decades away, it can be easy to think it was all smooth sailing. After all, we landed on the moon within the decade and on our first try. That belief, however, would do a disservice to the people who sacrificed in order to fulfill Kennedy's wish.
In the earliest days, when rockets were unused missiles from the war, things didn't always go as planned. Consider "the four-inch flight" of the Mercury Redstone rocket. Aside from the hit to morale it certainly caused, it provided an opportunity for learning no successful launch would have. Gene Krantz had only just begun work at NASA when it happened. In his book, Failure is Not an Option, he said, "I had gained something precious. I now knew how much I didn't know." They regrouped, analyzed what went wrong, corrected it, and never made that mistake again. Not only was the failure visible to anyone who had been around, but it was also filmed and can be found on youtube today. We didn't hide our failures; we learned from them.
The most well-known failure of the era is the Apollo 1 fire. While performing the routine "plugs out" test, a spark from a frayed wire ignited the high-pressure oxygen in the capsule, killing Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom. The reason this is so well-known is that it was on the news that night, and transcripts of the Congressional hearing were published in the papers. Each day, as Frank Borman led the investigation, NASA updated the public on their findings. Because of that transparency and answering press inquiries, the causes were ultimately found and dealt with. After the explosion of the Challenger in 1986, President Regan addressed the nation. Of all the great moments in that four-minute speech, one of my favorites is the line, "I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute." He recognized that the public nature of our space program was never more important than during a disaster.
You may not know that the Soviets had similar failures to ours. They made announcements of their successes, but they kept their failures tightly held secrets. Some of them we only learned of in the late '80s. Even within their space program, failures were no to be openly spoken of. How can failures be learned from and addressed if they are not discussed? They can't be. The difference in reaction to setbacks is ultimately how we beat the Russians to the moon. They remained ahead of us until they experienced a failure because secrecy will never beat the attitude that we "gain something precious" when we learn from our failures.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, we should celebrate Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. We should not forget Michael Collins, the unsung member of the trio. We should watch the documentaries on CNN and PBS. I will be watching The Right Stuff. Let's take a moment, during all of that, to celebrate those whose names we do not know and be grateful that they made us, the American people, part of that One Giant Leap for Mankind.
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