The News Journal from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 49

Supplement if Wsws-Icornal Papers, Wilmington, Del- July 21, 13S3 A7 Artifacts Group Overlooke by Publicity President Richard Nixon. It is it to make it stand out from its; on it messages of goodwill from staff. 50 or more heads of state from dated July 1969. strong," Scheer says, "than if he got out of the spacecraft, fell on his knees and said something from a prepared script." different nations of the world. The messages will be put on the unfurl and set up an American flag, which is intended only to symbolize the fact that the landing was a United States accomplishment, Scheer says.

The flag has a wire sewn into Third, they are to place on the moon's surface a small, silicon disc about an inch and a half in diameter that will have Unveiling the plaque is scheduled as the first symbolic act, Scheer says. Second, the astronauts are to THESE men are true pio which will remain on the moon. The plaque bears the legend, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. We came here in peace for all mankind." THE plaque is signed by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. disc using the photographic techniques of microcircuitry.

neers, true explorers," Scheer At the same time, however, Scheer explains that NASA wanted to be certain that any symbolic acts would characterize the moon landing feat in the manner the nation's policy would deem proper. The result is the decision to unveil a small stainless steel plaque mounted on the descent stage of the lunar module, says. "And it seems to me that if we really want to find out the manner of man, the thing to do is to have them say what Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin and Michael Collins and by on Br aim at 18 Worked they want to say." Set On 'Moon Girl' Film The result: "We flew around have to fly from seven to nine Saturn 5 flights before they the moon if you remember on Apollo 8, the third Saturn 5 to But first must come the successful round trip. When the three astronauts are safely on the water in their Apollo spacecraft, then Von Braun says he could put the first LEM into orbit.

fly. We had the LEM on Apollo With all of the publicity sur-! rounding the first effort to land men on the moon, one small committee within the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis-j tration has gone essentially unnoticed. I This has been the so-called artifacts committee. The task of this committee is simply described: Decide what symbolic acts the first men on the moon should perform to mark the momentous, importance of the event. "We felt the astronauts should do something significant," explains Julian Scheer, NASA assistant administrator for public affairs.

WHILE they should do "something significant," however, the committee was not concerned that they should say anything significant, Scheer says further. "We made one basic judgment early in the game," he recalls. "We would not instruct the astronauts in any way on what to say." Scheer says he recognizes that "there's a chance of them hopping out onto the lunar surface and saying something like, 'Houston, this is Apollo 11. We landed 6.3 kilometers from where we should have. Our oxygen pressure is now 5.2965.

"But that would indicate more to me about Neil Arm "And maybe the first attempt 9, the fourth Saturn 5. Apollo 10 was number five. So with num will relax. He says he will feel "very gratified." to fly to the moon or the first landing attempt would be flight number 12," he says. Then, "to play it safe" they'd seek three more Saturn 5s for a total of 15 of the super-rockets.

Nearly 40 years ago in Germany, an 18-year-old student helped with "little chores" on a movie set in Berlin. Today, the 57-year-old man, Dr. Wernher von Braun, is helping the story told in that early film A Flight to the Moon become reality. "You can see that movie even today," Von Braun says, adding that it was renamed "The Girl in the Moon." In the film the rocket scientist continues, "you can see a vertical assembly building and a big rocket moving out of that thing You wonder that it doesn't look pretty much like Complex 39 here at the Cape." HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969, A. D.

WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND ber six, we land," he says with obvious pleasure. THE result is more than they had bargained for, Von Braun goes on. "We will probably have nine rockets and spacecraft left over that are specifically designed for flights to the moon In addition, however, Von Braun explains both his group "It has been a unique opportunity for me to serve in a program of such magnitude. It has been full of challenges, full of problems, full of frustrations as you would expect. But it still has been a great deal of fun." Will he go to work the next day as usual? "Oh yeah Yeah," he replies automatically.

Then, not so automatically, "Well, maybe and "the spacecraft people" thought they would need a num ber of Saturn IBs to "wring out "And, with just a little more money, we can fly all of these to MIUUII COilMt JUItOMAUl IMTM t. AIMM, Jt. AtlftOMAVI A. AUUMOMO AlltOMAW the moon and get a lot more the spacecraft in lower Earth orbit" before committing it to the moon. Also, 21 Apollo spacecraft were ordered.

science information from the lunar surface than we originally envisioned." THE movie, however, was but I'll be drunk for a couple of days." a celluloid illusion. The Apollo IKMAtt NKOM tMMT, VMM mm or ajmmca Saturn program to land two 'W 4 it U.S. astronauts on the mooon and return them safely to Earth is very much reality the final success of which Von Braun is moon-landing plaque The Apollo 11 ht Hardware Comes Flis Apoll anxiously waiting out now even though his role in the Apollo 11 mission ended with the successful launch five days ago. Von Braun is director of the George C. Marshall Spaceflight Center at Huntsville, Ala.

It was there that the Saturn 5 rocket was developed still the most powerful rocket boost From 3 of 4 Corners of Nation er in this world. booster and the launch rocket's! the altitude chambers, the Instrument Unit. It also serves tests to prove their spaceworthi- ness completed. Apollo 11 prime crew of Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin and the backup crew of Lovell, Anders, and Haise participated in an Apollo 11 Flight Readiness Test. This test was intended to insure that all systems indeed were ready.

Von Braun explains that the Saturn 5 rocket was the "outgrowth of a study we conducted in 1961 after President Kennedy announced we should land on the moon." THERE were three approaches to the moon-landing effort studied, Von Braun says a direct flight, earth-orbit After the spidery legs were put on the module and the rocket engine cone or nozle fitted to the bottom of the CSM, the next step was to package the the function of housing the lunar; module through the launch. riECES of the actual launch rocket began to arrive at about the same time the spacecraft was arriving. The S4B third stage arrived The final major test was a full-blown dress rehearsal of module inside the spacecraft lunar module adapter section and cap that with the CSM. On April 14, the assembled at the space center's Vertical Dr. Wernher von Kraun "I'll be very gratified" "There have been many frustrations" Assembly Building Jan.

19, whereupon it was immediately payload was mounted atop the hooked into the huge computer The trails of the Apollo-Saturn 5 moon rocket from nothing to the moment of truth ignition and liftoff-is a long one that leads from three of the four corners of the U.S. From the Northeast comes the lunar module, which is manufactured by the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. at Bethpage, Long Island. From the Southeast comes the Saturn 5 first stage, which Is produced by The Boeing Co. at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, Ala.

Also from Marshall comes the launch rocket's Instrument Unit, which Is put together and tested by IBM. From the Southeast comes the Apollo Spacecraft, the service module and the second stage of the launch rocket all from the North American Rockwell Downey, Calif. Also, from McDonnell-Douglas in Huntington Beach, comes the S4B third stage of the launch rocket. Kraft Space Pioneer every step in the countdown-including loading rocket fuels-right down to the 8.9-second mark, when, on launch day, the five huge, first-stage engines would be ignited. This was the Countdown De-monstraton Test, a test divided into two parts.

The first was unmanned, the wet portion of the test which includes the fueling of the rocket; the second was the manned portion, the "dry" test in which Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin went through every step they will take the day of launch until the actual complex that monitors tests of the rocket, the countdown and the launch itself. The second stage, called the S2 in space agency jargon, arrived fresh from a test-firing range near Sacramento, Calif, on Feb. 20, It was followed by the Saturn 5 first stage, called the SIC, on Feb. 20, and the Instrument Unit on Feb. 22.

"IT went from 32,000 words in the first of Mercury to 64,000 words by the end of Mercury," the question, however, they needed a computer that could do it after "taking in 20 seconds of data, looking at it, and give us an answer in about 20 sec To the men who eight years ago were given the task of landing a U.S. astronaut safely on the moon, it looked, at that time, like "a helluva job." he says. Instrument Unit, which capped the S4B third stage of the launch rocket. WITH the whole stack mated mechanically and electrically, the first test of the entire Apollo 11 moon rocket was started. This was a so-called "plugs-in test" and included a simulated countdown, launch and flight.

It demonstrated not only that the assembled rocket worked as advertised for this point in the preparations, but that the ground support equipment at Kennedy Space Center, at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, and at communications stations around the world also were functioning properly. On May 20, even while Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas P. Staf Then began the stacking pro onds. "But I think by 1964, we "By the time we got to the pre-rendezvous days of Gemini, it was about 300,000. When we recognized that we could do It," says Christopher Columbus got to the end of the Gemini cess; First the SIC, then the S2, the S4B and, finally, the Instrument Unit.

By March 5, all were mated launch. Kraft director of flight operations for the manned program and we were doing complicated rendezvous, it had gone to about a million and a and the stack stood 282 feet space program. Kraft, a soft-spoken Virgini quarter words. tall so tall that if it were standing on a barge in the an, is 45, one ot tne old-timers "The one we're using for Delaware River, the third stage in America manned space Apollo 11 has more than 5.5 would tower 85 feet above the flight program. He was one of roadway of the Delaware Me the original members of the morial Bridge.

Space Task Group named in mid-1958 to manage Project Mercury. million words," he says, adding that the amount of work needed to make such a program work is almost phenomenal." Kraft says the space agency has had about 400 IBM people working over the past five or ford, John W. Young and Eugene A. Cernan were speeding When that test was completed July 2, Apollo 11 was ready to fly. The next time the countdown clock was started, it was for the real thing the flight destined to make history as man's first effort to set foot on the moon.

Radiation Exposure When the Apollo spacecraft passed exposure through the Earth's Van Allen Belts en route to the moon, its trio of astronaut crewmen were exposed to radiation equivalent to that of a dental ray. AT this point, each system of toward the moon for a dress rendezvous, and a moon-orbit rendezvous. The first of these three initi-tally was the one that looked most promising. It called for a rocket powerful enough to send a spacecraft to the. moon carrying enough fuel to soft-land and then take off again and return directly to earth.

"Such a rocket would have had eight F-l engines, of which the Saturn 5 now has five in the first stage," Von 'Braun said. "We studied such a rocket quite extensively." How extensively the Von Braun team studied the eight-engined Nova monster-rocket is illustrated by the prototype designed to test the theory of clustering groups of large rocket' engines into one booster. THE prototype for the moon rocket was the Saturn 1 booster launched Oct. 27, 1961, from Cape Kennedy. Now called the Saturn IB, that rocket was a cluster of eight engines developing 1.3 million pounds of thrust about an eighth of what was being thought about for the eight-en-gined Nova.

But the Von Braun team finally realized the Nova would take too long to develop and have ready for a moon landing by the end of 1969. As a result, the Saturn 5 was chosen; and, after still more consideration, the moon-rendezvous approach to a moon landing using the lunar module the LEM or LM was decided upon. Von Braun explains, however, that not only were they asked to determine how they would get to and from the moon, but how much flight hardware they would need to accomplish the goal. "At that time, of course," he says, "the basis of experience we had was rocketry mostly in connection with the military establishment. "AND there was a great deal of trial and error involved," says the man who once had to explain time after time why a the rocket stack was tested individually, stage by stage, to THE months of assembly and testing, however, finally begin to bring these three major paths together at Kennedy Space Center, about six months before an Apollo flight Is scheduled.

For Apollo 11, flight hardware began arriving in early January. By this time, the three stages of the launch rocket already had been test fired. By this time also, the two spacecraft the lunar module and the command module had been tested rehearsal of the first landing EVEN so, however, until he insure all were functioning effort, the now 363-foot-tall Apol began to participate, during six years on just the computer lo 11 -Saturn 5 launch vehicle properly before the payload was 1957, in a study of techniques mounted. programs for the Apollo mis sions. for re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, Kraft says he had never really thought much In April, the Apollo command was moved to the launching pad at Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center the nation's moonport.

FROM June 4 to 6, both the about flying men in space. and service modules called the CSM in space language and the module were taken from "AND that doesn't include the number of people I have in my "And I think that's true gen own organization who are devel erally for people within NACA oping the mathematics and the IBM filled the need, Kraft says, by building special equipment for the 7094 computer, which by itself "was really not interested in giving you rapid answers, but just giving you answers." The same computer continued lo be adaptable to the needs of manned spaceflight throughout the two-man Gemini program, Kraft continues, but, for Apollo something new was needed a fact recognized as early as 1962. The solution was found after an industry competition in which IBM was chosen mostly "on the basis of their past experiences and their programming experience as well as their machine capabilities." THE result Is the ability of IBM's 360 computer to compute a complete moon flight plan in from five to 10 minutes an exercise that would take Kraft's mathematicians many months if they tried to do it without the machine. Kraft emphasizes that Project Mercury was started with the philosophy: Let's build that spacecraft and what we have to do to fly it with known developing new only what we have to develop to get the program done as soon as possible and as cheaply a3 possible." "And we did that," he says. MERCURY was flown with a minimum of new technology at that time," he says.

equations associated with the The National Advisory Com logic that goes into the comput er." mittee for Aeronautics (NACA), was the forerunner of today's space agency, the National He explains also that the Aeronautics and Space Adminis tun, tration. cooking back to the space by the manufacturers. Still, there was six more months of testing to be done. First to arrive at Kennedy was the Apollo 11 lunar module. The day was Jan.

8. The module was taken Into a large altitude or vacuum chamber at the space center after an Initial inspection. There, the vehicle destined to make man's first moon-landing attempt was put through Its paces, first unmanned and then manned alternately by the Apollo 11 prime crew of Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. (Buz) Aldrin Jr.

and program 's beginning, Kraft says "the magnitude of the computing task that we had to do on the ground looked very big to us then. demands put on the computer industry by the requirements of manned spaceflight have been a strong force for development of new computer capabilities over the past 10 years. One of the main requirements, he says, was for a computer that not only could compute rapidly once it had been fed information carefully, but one which could take in a large quality of data, digest it and come back with answers doing all three steps rapidly. Such a computer didn't exist in 1958. "Of course, compared to what we are doing now for the Apollo program, what we did then is almost child's play," he adds.

the baclcuo crew of James A. KRAFT Illustrates the growth in complexity of the spaceflight Lovell William A. Anders, and Fred W. Haise Jr. DURING these tests, which program and the increased de launcn was being delayed or mands upon computers.

why a particular rocket didn't When Troject Mercury start took many weeks, the chamber "THE problem we were faced function as it was supposed to ed flying, he explains, the space air was pumped out to simulate mainly such things as horizon scanners and heat seekers used for attitude reference in the function perhaps even blow agency used with its ground with in Mercury," Kraft says, "was being able to determine at the time of launch or at ing up on the launch pad. support equipment an IBM 7094 scientific computer with a spacecraft. 'Most of the rockets saw of iauncn-venicie engine cutoff, or from 30 to 50 experimental word storage compacity before cutoff, what we had to models before they were ulti the vacuum of space at an altitude of 200,000 feet almost 40 miles above the Earth. Similar tests were run in another altitude chamber on the Apollo II command and service modules, which arrived at the space center Jan. 22.

Meanwhile, the so-called do to get the spacecraft safely mately fielded, meaning you back to the ground again. had to precede actual operation al flights with a heck of a lot of 32,000 words. "But we've got a computer aboard the Apollo command module and another 36,000 word computer on the LEM right now that we're carrying to and from the moon," "When we got to Gemini and Apollo, however, that was not the case," Kraft continues. "We began to develop new technology such a3 fuel eel's and cryogenic fuels. We developed new rockets for the spacecraft.

We developed onboard computers, inertia! guidance platforms and guidance systems "That meant you had to determine the position and of the spacecraft accurately i experimental flight, he ex plains. Spacecraft Lunar Module The planners of the Apollo Adapter, better known as the Kraft points out. moon missions, however, SLA (Slah), had arrived at the Continuing the example of space center Jan. 10. enough to know what to do to turn the spacecraft around and fire the retrorockets in a certain time to bring it down at a certain recsvery Not only did they have to be increasing complexity, Kraft The SLA is the sloped section The talks about the growth in size of thought they could do better than that, Von Braun says, because "we thought we had learned a few things." STILL, they thought they'd result has culminated the moon landing mis- now the computer programs used to of the launch rocket that links the Apollo spacecraft and service module to the third stage able to calculate the answer to sions.

operate the spaceflights. The moon provides a fitting backgroun as fuel for the Apollo flight is tested. 4'.