Dan Snow's History Hit - The Apollo Program

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Getting to the moon was no easy feat, no matter how confident Kennedy may have sounded in his famous 1961 speech. NASA built a team from the ground up, and there were plenty of moments where it seemed as if they weren't going to make it. After all, it was hard to feel safe when a pen could go straight through the module. Kevin Fong is part of the NHS emergency response team for major fatality incidents like terror attacks. He's also an anaesthetist, a lecturer in physiology at UCL and an expert in space medicine. He joined me on the podcast to explore our first moments on the surface of the moon. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. You know, of all the people I've had on the podcast, I haven't had many more remarkable thinkers and broadcasters than Kevin Fong. He's a scientist here in the UK, he's worked with NASA, he's working currently on the COVID response for NHS England, but he's also involved in high mortality, high morbidity terrorist attacks as well, and the planning for them. And he's also an advisor to Virgin Galactic, and as I say, worked for NASA on the effect of space on the human body. He's the perfect person to present the BBC's smash hit podcast called 30 Minutes to the Moon on the Apollo mission to the moon. It's a follow-up on Apollo 13. As this week's rerun, we're choosing the best from our back catalogue. I wanted to give this one another airing. It's an absolutely fantastic episode. Kevin Fong talking to me all about the extraordinary, extraordinary moment when humans

first landed on the moon. It's just totally brilliant. If you want to watch documentaries that are either about the Apollo mission or anything else, we've got lots of history documentaries on History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It's the world's best history channel and there's no aliens on it. What can I say? It's brilliant. Go and check it out. If you use the code POD1, because you're a podcast listener, you get a special introductory deal. A month for free, and then next month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. I mean, that's super cheap. Go and do it, everybody. And you can listen to all these back episodes of the podcast as well. They're all up on there. But in the meantime, here is Kevin Fong. Enjoy.

But in the meantime, here is Kevin Fong. Enjoy. So we got the most expensive civilian project in the history of the human race to talk about in the course of this podcast. So where should we start? I mean, what was the how did humans go about landing on the moon? Well, I mean, that's the crazy thing. And I part of this podcast series is about is how, but how did we do it? Because Kennedy gives that speech to Congress in 1961 setting his country on course for the moon and you think, okay, well, obviously he knows that someone knows

how to get there, but no one knows. No one knows. The furthest they've been from the surface of the Earth is 250 nautical miles, and now he's going, let's go 250, 000 miles um and as he gives that speech at nasa people are scrabbling for oh my god how are we going to do this no one knows how big does the rocket need to be how many pieces of vehicle do we need to send who do we need to send how are we going to get there and so they have to invent the techniques and the technology and that has to be done by a workforce that isn't recruited. So they're just

hiring people as fast as they possibly can because they know they need to because it's war. It's the Cold War. It's this ideological war for technological supremacy in the United States over the Soviet Union. So it begins there and they invent all the technology they require

in that short decade. God, it just makes you think what we could do if we put our minds to it. The story, it's almost depressing. Well, this is, I mean, it's really important. The 20th century, if it taught us anything, it taught us that if you face a complex problem, but that there's no fundamental obstacle to it, if it's an engineering problem and you throw resource at it, then you solve it

inside of a decade. It happens with the Manhattan Project. The first time we see nuclear fission is in 1939 in a laboratory and you weaponize it inside of six years after that. The Apollo Project, you know, president says we'll go to the moon in 61. You're on the surface of the moon in 69. HIV is a good example. You know, you realise it's a killer in the mid-90s. It's a fatal illness, and now it's consistent with a normal life expectancy. So, yes, it tells

us something really important about us, about the problems that we face now, which is, if there's a will, and it's just engineering, we can get there. And I feel like that. I feel there's an important lesson 50 years on for us nuclear fusion which would be really really important why don't we have an apollo level effort to tell us how far into the future nuclear fusion is because if you approached it the same way you approached

apollo in 10 years time if you didn't have it there'd be something pretty wrong exactly and then we could go uh carbon negative into the atmosphere and the world would be a great place so they throw a lot of resource at this what are the biggest challenges that they've got to overcome it's air flights and so

now they need a rocket big enough to lift your vehicle and a larger vehicle from the earth to the Moon, they need to travel faster because you need to go not to orbit, you need to go close to 25,000 miles an hour to escape the escape velocity of the Earth to get yourself all the way to the Moon. When you get to the Moon, you need to work out how you're going to land on the Moon,

how you're going to split your vehicles up. They choose this bizarre architecture. They choose to do this thing called lunar orbit rendezvous, which means that you send one big rocket, two vehicles all the way to the moon together, and then you split those vehicles up. You land one on the surface, and then it has to come off the surface

and back up into orbit around the moon. They have to get together, and then they have to come home. And all of this is just absurd. You know, in 1961, all of these things just are the stuff of pure fantasy. And yet, they do it all. They do it all in the course of that decade. And what about the individuals? How do they start trying to choose the people that are going to go on this mission? So astronaut selection is quite a thing. You know, when they start doing it at the time of Mercury when Alan Shepard and John

Glenn first fly, they don't know what space is. They don't know what physical threats and hardships space will offer. So they just choose the healthiest, toughest people they can find who can fly aircraft because they just don't know. So basically they just make the most resilient

physical specimens who are also amazing pilots that they can find. That's how you get there, and that's kind of what they select for Apollo. And you need the best test pilots you can find, because this is the mother of all test pilot projects. These guys are going to be flying the most complicated vehicles in the history of the species, in an environment where there's nowhere to safely crash land. If you stuff it up on the moon, that's it.

Thanks for coming. You're not coming home. So it's a particular kind of person. But it's not just the astronauts. The astronauts are just the tip of this gargantuan iceberg. It is the tears and tears and tears of people who follow it. There are the flight directors, the flight controllers, but there's the back rooms technical support. There's the guys out in the factory controllers, but there's the backroom's technical support. There's the guys out in the factory. The success

of the mission depends as much on the guy who puts the foil insulation around the legs of the lunar lander as it does the guy who's behind the desk in mission control. If anyone screws up, everyone dies. And there were bad accidents, weren't there, in the early...

in the first few years? Well, the episode that we're just actually putting to bed at the moment is all about the Apollo 1 fire, where three astronauts die in a horrific fire on the launch pad in 1967. And so that's one of the things that's worth remembering. So we know that there was an Apollo 1 fire, but actually it hadn't quite occurred to me how late in the game it happens. It happens in 1967 you know so so two years just over two years before they actually get onto the moon and they kill a crew of astronauts and that story was one as we unpicked it during the making of 13 minutes to the moon um as as we unpicked it i realized there was much more to it than I thought. You know, up until 67, NASA are basically falling over themselves in their efforts to get to the moon before the decade is out.

And actually, it's a bit of a mess. We talked to people who said, look, you know, in 64, between 64 and 67, everything's behind schedule. The lunar module, the vehicle that's going to land on the moon, is behind schedule. It's not going to be ready in time for the early testing. The command module, the thing that they fly to the moon in, is kind of, it's just a really bad vehicle. It's really bad workmanship. It's really badly put together. And this pressure and this sort of like pressure to try and deliver, what they call go fever, you know, we've got to go, we've got to go, we've got to go.

fever, you know, we've got to go, we've got to go, we've got to go. All of that conspires to create a situation in which in 1967, you put a crew into a badly designed, badly maintained capsule, you fill it with pure oxygen, and there's faulty wiring in that cabin. And the rest is history. You know, you kill Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White. And at that point, NASA could have said, well, that's it, we're done, we're not going to the moon. But in fact, what they do is they recalibrate their culture, they reset their culture, they realize that they've got to change everything about their culture and the way they're doing things, and they redouble their efforts. And in the 21 months that follows that, NASA is a changed organisation. You see, when we tell this story of Apollo, it's as if Kennedy makes his speech,

everyone hears his rallying cry, and then everyone executes this perfect eight-, nine-year programme of work to get everyone to the moon. But actually, it's a mess, and it's a mess for probably the first half of that eight- or nine-year effort. And so the fire, and we had George Abbey, George Abbey, sort of, you know, a huge figure, a really totemic figure in the history of human spaceflight at NASA. He said, it's a terrible, terrible price to pay, terrible sacrifice.

But if we hadn't had the Apollo 1 fire, if we hadn't had that to reset our culture, we probably wouldn't have got to the moon by 69 we may never have got to the moon Why do you call it 13 minutes to the moon? So it's such a huge huge

topic isn't it? It's a decade of work, it's 400,000 people there's so much technical information we thought where can we focus this what is the unique what is the crescendo this this whole story and what what's the unique the unique thing that we can focus upon and for us it was that 13 minutes of descent so when when armstrong and aldrin fire the descent engine on the lunar module above the moon to commit them to the to the moon's

gravity to start their attempt at landing because up until that point in 69 no one has done that and it's the period of mission that 13 minutes from taking them out of earth orbit onto the moon that 13 minute period taking them out of lunar orbit onto the moon that armstrong most worried about he said and on record he said know, it was rampant with unknowns. I was worried about it. And, you know, this is a guy who doesn't worry about much. And he was right. He was right. So they're in moon orbit.

They're in lunar orbit. There's three of them in the, what's that spacecraft called? So they're in the command module. Now, the command module is that cone-shaped vehicle that you see. And you've got to think of that a bit like your, it's like a yacht, you know, that has your accommodation and your food and your amenities. It's actually relatively comfortable and relatively capable compared to the lunar module, which is that spidery angular vehicle that you see, which is flimsy.

It's very, very light. It's kind of like, you of like the dinghy that you take off your yacht to go and visit a nearby island. In fact, that's exactly the design of that mission. So Michael Collins is left in the command module. We interviewed him. He was fantastic to interview. It was quite hard to interview, actually, but fantastic. And so he waits in orbit around the moon, and he's got a big job. If it all goes wrong, he has to fly down and rescue them. If they're aborting off the moon and he's got a big job. If it all goes wrong, he has to fly down and rescue them.

If they're aborting off the moon, he has to kind of fly down and pick them up as they're coming off and so people underestimate how important his role. He was the second most senior person on that mission. It's Armstrong, Collins and then Aldrin. Aldrin's the most junior pilot on that mission. Anyway, Armstrong and Aldrin are coming off. They're going down to Aldrin

and it's a ridiculously ridiculous vehicle. It looks like nothing on Earth because it's never meant to fly on Earth. It has no aerodynamic features. They're inside it. It's a thin-skinned vehicle. It has to be light. It's so thin-skinned that if you took a pen, you could stick it through the skin of the vehicle. That's what they're in. That's what

they're sealed in to protect them against the vacuum of space. And they're coming down. And as soon as they start into that descent, things start to go wrong. So Armstrong was absolutely right to worry about the 13 minutes because everything happens. Communication starts to play up. And Armstrong says, we'd rehearsed everything. We hadn't rehearsed bad communications. They track their progress across the moon's surface.

And Armstrong knows that they're seeing some of the lunar features too quickly some of the craters and some of the mountains are coming up too quickly so he's going too fast they're going to miss their landing site and that's important because if they come down in the wrong place they're going to damage the vehicle, they're going to get onto the moon and they're never going to get off of it again and then if that's not enough, then they have problems

with the onboard computer which they absolutely depend upon. They can't fly this vehicle on their own. They need a computer to assist them. And that starts to throw up error code after error code after error code. And then if that's not enough, as they get close to the surface, Armstrong has to take some control back from the computer to try and manually affect the landing because they're about to come down in a boulder field.

And he very nearly runs out of fuel. He gets down to about 20 seconds of fuel 30 seconds of fuel before he actually sets it down and everyone in mission control thinks well we're done we're not getting to the moon today we might crash he still lands it there's an incredible 13 minutes land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Every week. And then they land successfully on the moon. Have they ever told anyone, did they celebrate? Were they just thinking about the next five, ten minutes, an hour? Or what was that moment like when they're sitting on the moon's surface?

And that's what you think, isn't it? So once you've landed on the moon, it's time for massive, massive celebration. But we talked to them about this. In fact, we talked to not just some of the astronauts, but the mission controllers. And here's the thing. When you land on the moon, your problems are far from over. So actually what you hear in the mission audio is them sort of saying, we've landed. is them sort of saying, we've landed, and then they've got a group, they've got,

after the landing, they've got the stay, no stay decision. So just because you've landed on the moon, can you stay there? Or are you going to need to take off instantly? They didn't know what the moon was really made of at that point. Was the vehicle going to sink? Was it going to fall over? If they were on a slope that was too steep, they were going to have to lift straight away. So they actually, for the first few minutes after they get there there's a furious work rate for them and the mission controllers trying to make sure that something

awful isn't going to happen and they're going to just get the hell out of there because you know the risk is far from over so there's a very muted celebration um uh and then they get on with the business of knowing whether or not they're safe and i think after that then you know you have to understand that once you're on the moon you're still in the most alien and exposed environment any human being in the history i guess in the history of our species has ever been in and so you know armstrong was all about the job and so you know he he he he wouldn't have been high-fiving Aldrin for very long I don't think it's from from your description of the center if it hadn't been

some Armstrong was the difference between success and failure his his skill there it's really interesting I think an awful lot about this because informs actually the work I do as a doctor. Armstrong is absolutely essential. You need an Armstrong because you need someone inside the loop of control of this complex system. But he's necessary, but he's not sufficient. So you need Aldrin, you need Collins up top, you need the guys who built the vehicles, you need the flight director,

you need the flight controllers who are running all of the subsystems. No one can see all the moving parts. And this is really best illustrated by one of the interviewees we had, my favourite. We spoke to about five or six astronauts in the making of this. But my favourite interview was actually this junior flight controller who at the time was 26 years old. His name was Stephen Bales.

And he's epic. His story is epic. I loved it. We went to his house near New Jersey, sat down with him. He's a lovely guy. He is like the Luke Skywalker of the Apollo program. He grows up in Iowa in farmland. He walks out into the fields at night. He looks at the sky, dreams of the stars and the adventurous space. He equipped himself with an engineering degree. He goes off to Houston to the hustle and bustle. He's a T-boy. He gives visiting dignitaries tours of mission control, but finally earns himself a place to work on the desks in his dream place.

And he proves himself. He proves himself through training and simulation. And so in the end, when they're selecting the team of guys who's going to be in the room to assist the Apollo 11 landing, he finds himself behind the guidance officer's desk, one of the most critical desks. He's 20, 26. And it was funny because when we interviewed him, he's still even 50 years on. I don't think he could quite believe he'd been there. You know, he said to us, you know, there was this 26 this 26, 26-year-old kid, and I could stop the space mission. I mean, even then he couldn't.

And here's the thing. At one point during the mission, Armstrong sees these error codes flashing up on his crappy computer in the cabin of this vehicle. 1202 alarm. He doesn't know what it means. Armstrong doesn't know what it means. The flight director doesn't know what it means. Nobody knows. And if the computer falls over, they die. That's it. Done. Period. So Armstrong calls down, what it means. The flight director doesn't know what it means. Nobody knows. And if the computer falls over, they die.

That's it. Done. Period. So Armstrong calls down, says 12.02. What does it mean? It goes to him. And so now, with only a few minutes left before you're supposed to land on the surface, Armstrong is saying, what the hell's going on? Do I abort? Am I going to die?

What's going to happen? It's come down and all eyes now turn to this 26-year-old boy from Iowa who's sitting behind the desk. And he's like, well, what do you reckon, Steve? And Steve, fortunately, well, not fortunately, he works hard. And so he is prepared for this. He has every single alarm code documented, he and his backroom team. And they have, in 15 seconds, they have this little chatter and they say, we're okay to go.

Go, tell them to go. And he makes the decision that saves the mission. You know, boy, for a mile, 26. I don't know what you were doing at 26, but I wasn't saving space missions. And then, so how long do they spend on the moon? So that was Flags and Footprints' job. So they're there for not very long. They're there for a few hours, really.

And, you you know as the Apollo program continues so you've got 11 program you've got six landings total 11 through 17 so the first few missions are really just pathfinder missions get out walk around get the flag down get the hell out of there before something unknown happens as we move on through Apollo 15 is the first time they've got so confident. And then they're taking lunar rovers up there. So they're driving around the moon. So the J missions, which are 15, 16 and 17, you know, they're driving buggies around the moon. And they're then spending several days there camping on the moon.

And in fact, one of the people we spoke to was Charlie Duke from Apollo 16, who actually spent several, you know, a good couple of days on the moon. And he talks about, you know, a good couple of days on the moon and he talks about you know, camping on the moon, you string up there's a bit of gravity, not the same gravity on Earth, there's a bit of gravity so you string up a hammock but the cabin's so small that you know, you can't have this side by side so you sort of have this crucifix hammock arrangement inside the cabin

there's not really enough room for both of you to put your spacesuits on because once you've done that you've occupied all the space in the cabin uh and you just got to kind of learn to live there and then you know go out for a little walk on the moon and drive on the moon and come back so so apollo 11 really is about getting onto the moon and knowing you can get there land safely and staying long enough to pick up a few rocks and get the hell out of there but the true exploration happens in the missions after that it's worth remembering so while those guys up a few rocks and get the hell out of there. But the true exploration happens in the missions after that. It's worth remembering, so while those guys are spending a few days on the moon, that

one solo guy is still in the mothership, just orbiting the moon all by themselves. So that's Michael Collins and we've got almost an entire programme dedicated to him because he's kind of like the third man of Apollo 11, you know, everyone goes, there's Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and who's the other guy and Michael Collins is I mean so underrated in terms of his role and importance in all of this, he is a fantastic pilot he is by far and away the most emotionally

I guess in touch and together of all the people who give accounts of the Apollo period and we went to interview him and it was fantastic as we were told actually he's a notoriously difficult interviewee at at times well he doesn't suffer falls lightly and so you thought i better have all my ducks in a row when i go and interview him and it was funny because in he was fantastic and he was very very generous but it was like he's a fighter pilot and it was like being in

a dog fight with a fighter pilot because you'd think oh i'll ask him this question and as soon as you thought you had him where you wanted him he was behind you and hosing you down with the guns. And you thought, God. But he talked to us about how his job was to be there preparing for if it didn't work out. He was supposed to be there as the last line of defence if there was an abort during the landing or if something went wrong as they're flying off the surface

and the engines didn't work properly. He would have to swoop down and fly down somehow and pick this vehicle up you know this isn't just like flying a plane this is flying a spacecraft with completely different handling um and and if it went wrong everything would depend on him so so he was up there and he had a very quiet time up there uh while they were on the surface. But all the time he had to be prepared to effect that rescue. And that's what he was trained for. Well, I'm sure he was difficult, but the BBC sent the right guy. No one gets behind Kevin Fong. And so they spent a couple of hours on the surface.

You said they hadn't got any fuel left. So how do they take off and get back to the ship in lunar orbit? So really the lunar module is kind of almost like two spacecraft in one.'s an upper stage and a lower stage the lower stage is the descent stage and it's got this very sophisticated engine on it that you can throttle so up until this point rocket engines were either on or they were off but the descent stage has this engine on it that you can throttle so you can control you control the engine of your car with an accelerator pedal and the uh the upper stage has this boost back to orbit engine on it and and the both the two are on top of each other so yes they've used up almost all of the fuel in the descent engine but the ascent engine the second engine is is in the top half this vehicle and that's what lifts

them off off the uh the moon so yeah so that. So that's how they get back to orbit. So there's so many different spacecraft all in one here. So they get back on this tiny little spacecraft. So the rest of the mission goes okay? Well, you see, this thing, this lunar orbit rendezvous, which means that you first take two spacecraft together to the moon, then you split off, you land one, and then you come off, join up with your buddy Michael Collins in orbit,

and you fly back to the moon in the command module. That rendezvous is non-trivial. It requires you to fly in formation, but fly in formation around the moon, 250,000 miles from Earth, and if anything goes wrong with that rendezvous, if you, you know, prang the other vehicle and spring a leak in it no one's coming to help you you're done up there and so all of that flying was extraordinarily precise and important um but despite the ludicrous description of those maneuvers it is the best and only way to do that mission. So, yes, so they get together and then they come home. But coming home, again, is non-trivial

because you're flying home as fast as anyone's ever travelled at 25,000 odd miles an hour. And then you have to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at exactly the right angle. You know, too shallow and you skip off and you disappear forever. Too steep and you stoof into the atmosphere and you burn up in a ball of flame. So exactly the right angle

and then splash down in the ocean and then you get picked up by your navy. When we next send people to the moon, will the human factor be taken out of it? Will computers do all the flying? And I guess I'm asking, therefore, will they have to send pilots just asking for a friend it's interesting isn't it because in fact the narrative we have of the apollo lunar landing is the popular narrative is slightly wrong

you know we say it was this computer that was sort of about as sophisticated as a digital watch and it was up to nothing and in the end it falls over, and Armstrong takes manual control, flies the vehicle to the surface like a space-age tiger moth. And that's only partly true. Yes, Armstrong was a superlative pilot and super cool under pressure, but he is the all-important interface

between this very sophisticated computer, and actually the computer does a lot of heavy lifting for them. The computer smooths out the difference between the pilot's intent and the actual action. You know, no pilot could have controlled all of the valves and all the mechanisms that were required to fire the rockets and the thrusters to get the vehicle in exactly the right place. It's just too complicated. So yes you needed an armstrong there in the final moments to manage some of the decisions now if history has taught us anything the way to make these complicated systems safe is to paint the human out the loop wherever you can that's why you and i are 10 times more likely to survive in our cars today than we were when we were growing

up and and it's why road safety and aviation safety has improved since the middle of the 20th century. That said, you always, I don't think you will ever get to the point where you can fully paint the human out of the loop of any of these systems. Because at some point, the last line of mitigation has to be a human being able to play some part in that system and and you know try and prevent what is about to be an awful failure so when we next go to the moon will there be a largely automated landing yes that the computers will assist you all the way down and and you may be able to do a hands-free landing you may be able to let the computer do it but there will always be human pilots in the loop of that just in case something goes wrong. You can't.

It's hard to engineer systems otherwise. Looks like the kids are going back to flight school. I've got big plans for them. Living out my fantasies through my children. My daughter's going to do it. Okay, so Kevin, how can everyone listen to this podcast? So this is 13 Minutes to the Moon. It's a podcast for the BBC World Service, So, Kevin, how can everyone listen to this podcast? So this is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

It's a podcast for the BBC World Service, so you can get it through BBC Sounds or wherever you're listening to this, however you get your podcasts, you can get it on that. Great. Thank you very much, Kevin Fong. That was brilliant, dude. I've never had the history of my childhood. All the information about our children's history

are lost. This part of the history of our country I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour,

it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.