Flying to the Moon: Chapters 1–5

Mostly it was technical stuff about their schedule, but all of a sudden they said, “. . . watch out for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-O has been living there for four thousand years."

It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband.

By comparing what the two observers see, it is possible to measure an angle—called parallax.

The moon does not spin, but keeps one side pointed toward the earth as it makes a gigantic circle around the earth.

The reason it looks different to us is that, as it goes around the earth in its circular orbit, its angle to the sun keeps changing, and sometimes we see only the light side (“full moon”) or only the dark side (“new moon”) or half and half or mostly dark (“crescent moon”) or mostly light (“gibbous moon”).

It had short wings and a fat, stubby fuselage with a huge engine in front.

My favorite plane was the British Spitfire, which was a beautiful, graceful-looking airplane with a slender fuselage and a curved, elliptical-shaped wing.

I also worried because I am left-handed, and I had to learn to fly with my right hand, since I had to control the throttle with my left (it was way over on the left side).

With a prop, if you change power abruptly, the nose veers to one side or the other.

Called torque, this reaction must be compensated for by your feet pushing on the rudder pedals.

I saw the Libyan Desert, where nomads tend their camels as they did a thousand years ago.

I saw the lush green of Ireland, and the bright blue sea of the Greek islands, and the yellow-gray haze of industrialized Germany.

I had tried the year before to become a NASA astronaut, and had been rejected, but this time I was hopeful—because of the space courses I had taken—that I knew more than before, and that NASA would take me.

The crew will return the favor by exhaling carbon dioxide, which (along with sunlight and water) plants need to live.

Scientists, who love to give long names to things, call this process photosynthesis.

Sputnik weighed 184 pounds, and obviously required a very large rocket to accelerate this mass to a sufficient speed to achieve orbit.

Yuri was a very personable young man, friendly, with a big smile, and he became a hero in Russia and a celebrity in all parts of the world.

Alan Shepard was the first American in space, followed closely by Gus Grissom, but these two flights were not intended to go into orbit, but simply to fly a ballistic arc up a bit over one hundred miles and then fall back down into the sea.

A second way, which we did try, was to dive down in a speeding jet until it got going very fast, pull up abruptly into a steep climb, and then push over into a lazy arc in the shape of a parabola.

Also, the Russian cosmonauts were reported to be having some problems with nausea.

Of course, we couldn’t “moon walk” during Gemini, but we could “space walk” and find out how to design portable breathing and cooling equipment.

If severe enough, a solar flare could cause the crew to become sick, and perhaps even die.

Radio failure was especially worrisome, because if the astronauts couldn’t talk to anybody they would have to do all the navigating back from the moon, without help from radar tracking stations, and computers on earth.

Navigation instruments were being designed, but no one really knew how accurate they would be, and they had to be very, very precise.

We studied astronomy, aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, meteorology, guidance and navigation, and digital computers—to name just a few.

Bill was also a finicky eater, which was nice too, as I will explain later.

They were just minnows, but they looked edible, and I would have loved to eat thirty or forty of them for breakfast.

I thought it took a lot of care to assemble an aircraft, but they were just thrown together compared to the meticulous work being done inside the “white room” at St. Louis.

It says, far better than I can, what flying is all about:
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Al Bean studied recovery systems, which means he had to learn all about the parachutes that lower the spacecraft gently into the ocean, and how the Navy frogmen would bring a raft alongside so that the crew could get out and into a helicopter, and how the spacecraft would then be hoisted aboard the aircraft carrier.

Ted Freeman’s main worry was that one of these monster boosters might blow up and smash the spacecraft to smithereens.

It must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a micrometeorite without losing pressure. It must be compact, light, and rugged.

There is a bladder of thin, soft rubber which acts as the inner tube. Then there is a restraint layer, which holds the bladder in and which conforms to the shape of the astronaut’s body.

The suit designer must be part engineer and part magician to invent a suit that is safe and protective without being cumbersome and rigid.

Whenever we wanted to simulate weightlessness, we flew in the back end of a Boeing KC-135, which was just like the rear of a commercial jet liner, except that all the seats had been removed and the walls had been padded.

For one thing, it was usually quite hot inside the pressure suit, and after a couple of parabolas of strenuous work I would be breathing hard and sweating a lot.

The worst case was the deceleration an astronaut would feel if his rocket engine quit before he reached orbit, causing him to plunge back down into the atmosphere.

Sometimes the forces on your body at high Gs cause tiny blood vessels to rupture, usually in your eyes, so the doctors examine you carefully after a ride on the “Wheel.”