Destination Moon: The Remarkable and Improbable Voyage of Apollo 11
387
Destination Moon: The Remarkable and Improbable Voyage of Apollo 11
387eBook
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Overview
The history of NASA's Apollo program from Earth orbital missions to lunar landings in a propulsive nonfiction narrative.
Only now, it is becoming clear how exceptional and unrepeatable Apollo was. At its height, it employed almost half a million people, many working seven days a week and each determined that “it will not fail because of me.”
Beginning with fighter pilots in World War II, Maurer traces the origins of the Apollo program to a few exceptional soldiers, a Nazi engineer, and a young eager man who would become president.
Packed with adventure, new stories about familiar people, and undeniable danger, Destination Moon takes an unflinching look at a tumultuous time in American history, told expertly by nonfiction author Richard Maurer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626727441 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Roaring Brook Press |
| Publication date: | 06/11/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 387 |
| Lexile: | 1150L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 216 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 10 - 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ENSIGN FAGET'S CLOSE CALL
The vessel drifted silently through a limitless realm. Aboard, only row after row of lights and gauges told the crew that, so far, all was well. Out of contact with any other humans on Earth, they felt alone in a way that was primordial. They could have been on their way to another planet. But they knew something was about to happen, and the sweat was already starting to bead on their faces.
Then, click ... BANG! The craft shook.
They all knew what it was.
Then another click ... BANG! An anxious pause. Click ... BANG!
As the junior officer, Ensign Max Faget, age twenty-three, was hyper-alert for any signs of trouble. He was probably too preoccupied to count the explosions. But others kept a tally.
"Three ... four. They're getting closer."
Click ... BANG! The hull groaned.
The click was the sound of an arriving pressure wave, like the lightning flash that precedes thunder. Then came the main blast of detonating high explosives — depth charges being dropped by Japanese warships trying to kill them, for they were aboard an American submarine and this was World War II.
It was February 20, 1945, the last year of the war, but no one knew that yet. As far as the men in the USS Guavina were concerned, it could be their last minute of the war.
Click ... BANG!
"That's six," someone whispered.
* * *
Like practically every other American at the time, Maxime "Max" Faget (pronounced "fah-ZHAY") was involved in the war effort. The men of his generation were doing the fighting, but millions of others, men and women, were helping out in factories, offices, and hospitals, on farms, railroads, and docks. Those who weren't directly involved participated in other ways — by buying war bonds and, if nothing else, by paying high taxes to support the nation in the largest, most devastating, and most expensive conflict in world history.
It had all started across the sea. In 1937, Japan invaded China. Then in 1939, Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, invaded and quickly overran Poland. Britain and France came to Poland's defense by declaring war on Germany. Within a year, Germany had defeated France and was poised to invade Britain. Italy joined on Germany's side. In June 1941, the war took a surprising turn when Germany changed course and attacked the Soviet Union — previously its partner in a nonaggression pact.
Even more surprisingly, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. President Franklin Roosevelt branded it "a date which will live in infamy" and asked Congress to declare war on Japan, which it immediately did. Soon after, Hitler threw his support behind Japan by declaring war on the United States. A war that had started as a series of regional conflicts in Asia and Europe now encompassed the globe.
What was it all about? Germany wanted control of Europe, and Japan wanted an empire in Asia. American interests in both regions inevitably drew the U.S. into the fighting.
You might think that Germany, Italy, and Japan, known as the Axis powers, would have little chance when most of the rest of the world, known as the Allies, were lined up against them. The Allies included the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, plus the occupied countries and a host of smaller nations. But Germany and Japan had been vigorously preparing for war for years, and their overwhelming success at the outset showed it. By early 1942, they were on the verge of achieving their major war aims. All they had to do was hold on to their winnings.
Faget's small role was to help chip away at those gains.
* * *
And that's why Guavina was at the bottom of the South China Sea, just off the coast of Vietnam. A short time earlier, the submarine had sunk a Japanese tanker carrying badly needed crude oil from Japanese-occupied Indonesia to Japan's home islands. Thanks to American submarines, Japan was increasingly starved of resources. Unfortunately, one of those subs, Guavina, was now cornered by enemy ships determined to destroy it.
Click ... BANG!
The depth charges continued to fall. Guavina's captain, Ralph Lockwood, had ordered "silent running," meaning that all mechanical equipment was turned off — motors, fans, air-conditioning, anything that made noise that could be picked up by the enemy's sonar and betray their location. Most of the crew had nothing to do and waited silently. With the fans and air-conditioning off, the air became stale and hot, making breathing difficult. A thawing turkey in the galley started to smell. No one moved unless they had to. Eighty-five sailors and officers were as still as death.
During the next seven hours, a total of ninety-eight depth charges rocked Guavina. It was one of the most relentless antisubmarine actions of the war. "We experienced hell," Captain Lockwood later wrote in his official report.
"Words cannot express the feelings and emotions that surged through my mind while waiting helplessly," recalled one sailor. He saw that most of the men "had the look of fear on their faces. Everyone reacts differently in times of stress," he noted. "One man sat down on the floor and started to giggle, but soon brought it under control." Another, pouring with sweat, began bumping his head against the bulkhead until he was led away.
The closest explosions caused havoc on the boat. Lightbulbs shattered in their sockets. Cork insulation fell to the deck, where the pieces bounced with each new blast. A pipe broke, and seawater gushed into the mess hall; sailors immediately found a safety valve and stemmed the flood. No one could think of anything but the coming catastrophic crash that would break the hull apart and engulf them in a fatal blast of water.
But it didn't come.
Guavina belonged to a new class of submarines built with a strong hull for deep diving. The same high-tensile steel that could resist water pressure at a depth of up to 900 feet also protected the crew from all but the closest hit. During a lull in the action, when the sub chasers returned to a nearby port for more depth charges, Guavina surfaced, turned on its diesel engines, and headed back into the open ocean, taking stock of damage and giving sailors a desperately needed dose of fresh air.
For Ensign Faget, a Louisiana native making his first war patrol, there were many lessons. He was a recent graduate of Louisiana State University, where he had studied mechanical engineering, and he had just seen unforgettable proof of how a properly engineered craft can sustain humans under the most perilous conditions. Hull, radar, sonar, propulsion, control, communications, environmental systems, weaponry — all were perfectly matched to the task of sinking enemy ships and then escaping.
But an engineer with Faget's ceaselessly inquiring mind, who was also an avid reader of science fiction, might imagine using the same technology for another type of vessel, one that could sail a far vaster ocean. "A submarine is a very high-tech ship — very compact, and full of machinery," Faget reminisced much later, adding, "like a spacecraft."
CHAPTER 2PIRATES OF THE WESTERN PACIFIC
Oddly enough, a submarine during World War II was an ideal place for someone who loved the stars.
In the era before nuclear power allowed submarines to submerge almost indefinitely, a sub could stay underwater for no more than a day or two, powered by a bank of storage batteries. When the batteries ran out, the boat had to surface and switch on air-breathing diesel engines. These recharged the batteries and also provided propulsion, just as a gasoline engine keeps an automobile battery charged while simultaneously turning the wheels.
The usual strategy for a sub was to submerge during the day, when enemy planes and ships could easily spot it. At night, the boat would come up and cruise on diesel power beneath a canopy of stars, searching for prey. This was a good time to make celestial sightings with a sextant to confirm the sub's position.
When lookouts spotted a hostile ship, the boat would dive, taking less than a minute to get everyone inside, close the hatches and vents, flood the ballast tanks, and switch to electric power. The captain would inspect the target through a periscope, maneuver into range, and then fire a salvo of torpedoes. With luck, the underwater missiles would score another success against the Japanese navy or its merchant fleet, bringing the war a little closer to an end.
* * *
Lieutenant (junior grade) Thomas O. Paine loved this game. The same age as Faget, he had a more swashbuckling attitude, perhaps because his father was a Navy man and young Paine had grown up with sea yarns. "We were the last of the corsairs," he bragged about the submarine service. "The life of [a] pirate is given to few people. We were part of the tooth-and-claw simplicity of the sea." For Paine, the unpredictability of war gave the experience a strange clarity. You were always focused on the moment. The past and the future meant nothing, for they could be extinguished — along with your life — in an instant.
Paine had been through his share of close calls. On his fourth war patrol, scheduled to last the usual six to eight weeks, a torpedo aimed at a Japanese cargo ship had malfunctioned and circled back toward his sub, USS Pompon. Only hasty evasive action saved the situation. It was on this voyage that Paine volunteered for a diving emergency. A certified deep-sea diver, he went over the side at night off enemy shores to repair a broken valve in Pompon's sewage system. He succeeded — to the relief of all — and was rewarded with a stiff drink and ten hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Known as the "silent service" for its tactic of striking without warning, the submarine corps appealed to independent-minded young mariners. What could "a mere ensign do" on the massive ships of the surface navy? — mused an officer on another boat. "But submarines," he marveled, "that was a different story. Submariners were younger men, and they were right there in the front lines delivering telling blows."
* * *
During Paine's fifth war patrol in January 1945, Pompon was diving just before dawn while stalking a convoy. As the last man to clear the deck pulled the hatch shut, it jammed and wouldn't close. Seawater immediately cascaded into the control room and began filling the vessel. The diving officer shouted, "Surface! Surface!" High-pressure air shot into the ballast tanks, which was the method for increasing the sub's buoyancy to bring it up. But the flooded compartments pulled the boat down, and only the conning tower and bridge poked above the waves.
The situation was dire. There they were, bobbing low in the water 300 miles from Japan, with enemy ships nearby and the sun coming up, exposing them for all to see. The pumps and blowers were knocked out. So were the radar, sonar, and radio. All the crew could do was organize a bucket brigade to bail out by hand, throwing water over the side, while also trying to fix the most vital equipment. Luckily, they weren't spotted. After seven hours, some of the machinery was working and they resubmerged to finish the repairs in the safety of the deep.
The radio was still out, which meant Pompon couldn't communicate with headquarters. And if headquarters didn't know where Pompon was, then it was an unidentified vessel, subject to attack by American planes and ships. Threatened by friend and foe alike, Pompon gingerly made its way across 3,000 miles of ocean to Midway Island, the only American base that was authorized to receive unscheduled submarines. They arrived on February 11, 1945.
Seven weeks later, Pompon was patched up and ready for another mission. Lieutenant Paine was back aboard, chalking up his sixth war patrol. Surviving that, he embarked in mid-June on his seventh.
* * *
Most submariners were transferred to shore duty after four to six patrols. Their nerves were usually shot by then, since submarines had the highest casualty rate of any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. By the end of the war, nearly one-fifth of America's fighting subs had been destroyed: fifty-two boats. The vast majority were entombed with their crews at the ocean bottom, accounting for the deaths of over 3,500 men.
But the prospect of a watery grave didn't seem to bother Paine. He was having the time of his life. "I saw many strange and wonderful things," he later recalled. "Bali by moonlight, with the smell of the flowers and the spices drifting across the water. Even now I think I could navigate around the island as though it were the back of my hand. Standing watches at night, the heavens became enormously familiar. You could understand the beginnings of myths and legends. Schools of whales accompanied us, sometimes for weeks at a time."
A fan of the writer Joseph Conrad, who penned popular stories about the sea decades before World War II, Paine identified with Conrad's storm-tossed heroes.
"Youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea!" one character exclaims at the end of Conrad's story "Youth." "The good, strong sea, the salt, bitter sea, that could whisper to you and roar at you and knock your breath out of you."
Living at close quarters with men in the prime of life, sharing their dangers, roaming across the wide ocean, diving at a moment's notice, eluding the enemy, and then, at the chosen instant, destroying him in a fiery blast. Above all, playing a part in the greatest war in human history — what more could an adventure-seeking twenty-three-year-old ask?
CHAPTER 3LIEUTENANT SLAYTON FLIES ANOTHER MISSION
If submarines were risky places, then bombers, depending on the mission, could be close to suicidal. World War II saw the birth of strategic bombing, designed to destroy the enemy's morale and its war-fighting industries — as opposed to tactical bombing, which focused on specific battlefield targets such as tanks and supply depots. The improved technology of airplanes made it possible, for the first time in history, to take the battle deep inside enemy territory — not just on a onetime raid but every day, day after day, with the goal of breaking the enemy's will and ability to carry on the conflict.
Since air crews had to be highly trained, the most efficient use of their skills was to keep the crewmembers flying until they were shot down, while having plenty of replacements in training. During World War I — fought between 1914 and 1918 — the life span of pilots on combat duty was just a few weeks. And the planes in that war were simple compared to the complex machines being flown in World II, not to mention the sophisticated defenses that had been developed to shoot them down.
Following the fall of France in 1940, the German air force — called the Luftwaffe — began an eight-month air offensive against Great Britain to soften its defenses for an invasion. Known as the Blitz, this aerial assault on dozens of British cities, carried out mostly at night, failed thanks to Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF), which exacted a heavy toll on Nazi aircraft. The invasion never came. After the Blitz, the British intensified their own bombing campaign against Germany. During July 1941, the RAF averaged over a hundred bombing sorties (attacks by individual aircraft) per day against targets on the European continent. Within two years, the United States had joined the air war, and over 1,000 Allied bombing sorties per day were the norm in Europe, with many more raids by smaller fighter aircraft.
Today it is common to look up in the sky and see an airplane or two. Imagine, though, seeing hundreds at one time. If you lived in eastern England, this was the sight almost every morning during the last two years of the war as Allied bombers headed east toward Germany, flying in tight formation. And every afternoon, you saw a somewhat smaller number returning from their dangerous missions.
* * *
Second Lieutenant Donald K. Slayton was a nineteen-year-old farm boy from Wisconsin fighting on the Mediterranean front of this war. He was assigned to the 340th Bombardment Group of the Twelfth Air Force, U.S. Army Air Forces. The group was stationed in southern Italy, flying bombing missions against bridges, airfields, railroads, and other targets. Just before Slayton arrived in the fall of 1943, Italy had surrendered to the Allies. But German troops immediately occupied the most important Italian defensive positions, and the war in southern Europe raged on.
Slayton was the copilot of a twin-engine B-25 medium bomber. A typical B-25 crew had a pilot, copilot, bombardier, and three gunners, with one gunner doubling as the radio operator. The lead plane in a formation always had a navigator, and the last plane had a photographer to record the bombing results.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Destination Moon"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Richard Maurer.
Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Cast of Characters,
BRIEFING: The Ultimate Destination,
PART 1: War,
1. Ensign Faget's Close Call,
2. Pirates of the Western Pacific,
3. Lieutenant Slayton Flies Another Mission,
4. Captain Phillips Bombs Major von Braun,
5. Major Webb Faces the Big One,
6. "We Need It Yesterday!",
BRIEFING: The NACA,
PART 2: Dreams,
7. America Lands on Its Feet,
8. Von Braun Lands in America,
9. The Cold War,
10. Disney to the Rescue,
11. The Empire Strikes Back,
12. Explorer,
BRIEFING: Russia's Rocket,
PART 3: Spacemen,
13. Max Makes His Pitch,
14. "Let's Get On with It",
15. The Original Seven,
16. The Vice President Finds a Space Chief,
17. "Light This Candle",
18. Go to the Moon,
BRIEFING: The President's Speech,
PART 4: The Plan,
19. Pieces of the Puzzle,
20. How to Get to the Moon, and Back,
21. The Race Heats Up,
22. The Great Escape,
23. General Phillips Joins the Team,
24. "Do Good Work!",
BRIEFING: The Women of Apollo,
PART 5: Crews,
25. Squadron Commander,
26. The Moon Comes into Focus,
27. Neil Armstrong's Wild Ride,
28. "Fire in the Cockpit",
29. "Go, Baby, Go!",
30. The Submariner Takes Charge,
BRIEFING: Lunar Reconnaissance,
PART 6: The Moon,
31. A New Mission Takes Shape,
32. "In the Beginning",
33. Earthrise,
34. Go Fever,
35. Tranquility Base,
36. One Small Step,
EPILOGUE: "We Must Stop",
BRIEFING: Six Landing Sites,
Timeline,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
References,
Photo Credits,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,