Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(10)

“I want you to keep a log of people I talk to,” he said. “And I want     it kept under a secret cover sheet.”

Low made a list of key NASA managers and engineers and asked Wyatt to     call them in. She’d worked for her boss for two years and knew him to be a precise     and serious man. His subjects and verbs always agreed, even while he gave dictation,     and he would sunbathe on the weekends with his briefcase beside him, never missing a     chance to think or plan. More than anything, Low was efficient; he did not ask for     things or take a person’s time more than was necessary. On this day, he was     requesting the time of several important men, and right away.

He began by seeing two experts—one on NASA safety rules, the     other on trajectories, the flight path a rocket would take to its     destination.

Then he called in a legend.

Christopher Columbus Kraft was already a name known to America when he     walked into Low’s office that morning. An aeronautical engineer by training, Kraft     had begun his career in 1944 at age twenty at NACA, the precursor agency to NASA.     Small, fit, and serious, with slicked-back black hair graying at the temples, Kraft     had masterminded the concept of Mission Control, a central location where nearly all     aspects of a spaceflight were managed and supported. By 1965, he’d appeared on the     cover of Time magazine. In the accompanying article, he     compared his role as flight director to that of a symphony conductor. “The conductor     can’t play all the instruments—he may not even be able to play any one of     them,” Kraft said. “But he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he     knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be     drumming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That’s what we do here.” The     magazine noted that Kraft took “an almost angry pride in his work”—an     assessment with which many at NASA agreed. Now he was the director of flight     operations for NASA, responsible for the overall planning, training, and execution     of manned spaceflight. Whenever Low had a problem, he went to Kraft. Almost always,     that problem got solved.

The men shook hands, then Low put a question to Kraft: Could Apollo 8     fly to the Moon in December?

Kraft could have spent the day listing all the reasons why that was     impossible. Instead, he just asked, “How?”

“By leaving the lunar module behind,” Low said.

The command and service modules, Low reminded Kraft, were in fine     shape. Technically, there was no reason those two components couldn’t fly without     the troubled lunar module, leapfrog the missions of the next two Apollo flights, and     go directly to the Moon.

The idea seemed heresy to Kraft. No man had ever flown more than 853     miles above Earth’s surface. Now Low was proposing to send three astronauts a     quarter of a million miles away, and to do it half a year sooner than anyone at NASA     had planned. As if that weren’t enough, Low was proposing to skip not one but two     preparatory Apollo flights, violating one of NASA’s foundational philosophies: that     missions be incremental to assure mastery and success.

And yet Kraft saw elegance, even genius, in the plan. Low wasn’t     proposing to land Apollo 8 on the Moon, just to fly around it, so no lunar module     was necessary. By going in December, NASA could prove many of the systems and     procedures, and much of the equipment and technology, required for a lunar landing.     It could gain valuable deep space experience, and avoid the months of downtime that     would come from delaying Apollo 8 until the lunar module was ready. That would put     the agency back on track to make Kennedy’s deadline. And there was another benefit:     A December launch gave America a chance to beat the Soviets to the Moon.

Still, the logistical challenges seemed insurmountable to Kraft.

Mission Control would need to be readied, trajectories and navigation     calculated, an entire deep space communication network finished, an astronaut crew     quickly trained, the flight control team brought up to speed and made confident, new     software written, instrumentation calibrated. Even if Apollo 8 somehow flew to the     Moon and back, NASA would not, as matters presently stood, be able to retrieve the     crew, as the agency had yet to schedule an operation for recovering the astronauts     when their capsule splashed down in middle of the ocean. Engineers hadn’t even run a     trajectory analysis to account for the phases of the Moon in December, or lunar     lighting at that time of year, or the position of the Moon relative to Earth during     such a flight.

Even if NASA could manage all that, the risks of undertaking a lunar     mission in December were enormous. Kraft could hardly scribble a list of them fast     enough on his steno pad, but two stood out above the rest.