13 Minutes to the Moon: 3. Long Island Eagle

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What you're hearing is Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the cramped cabin of their bizarre-looking spacecraft Eagle during the final three minutes of their descent to the moon.

They're standing up as they fly, and both of them peer through small triangular windows in front of them as they work the controls.

Buzz Aldrin is calling out the altitudes and rates of descent as they approach the lunar surface.

Here, they're just 750 feet above it.

Now they're at 600 feet, about 200 meters from the surface.

You may have heard Neil Armstrong say, pretty rocky area.

He's talking about the landing site they're currently headed toward, and it's not what they were expecting.

It's littered with large boulders and it's certainly not a safe area to try and touch down.

And so, to avoid potential disaster, he changes course and flies Eagle over the treacherous expanse of rocks by slowing his descent rate.

And instead, he's now moving forwards at speed.

He's improvising.

Apollo 11's flight director, Gene Krantz, recalled the drama.

Armstrong has to pick out a landing site.

And he's very close to the surface, and instead of moving slowly horizontally, he's moving very rapidly.

I mean, we've never seen anybody flying it this way in training.

To add to the tension, Eagle is close to running out of fuel.

During all this, the spidery-looking spacecraft twinkles in the brilliant sunlight.

It has the appearance of something half-finished, half-realized.

It's flimsy and strange.

It looks like nothing on Earth.

Because, of course, it was never meant for the Earth.

We choose to go to the moon.

Cap Conworld, go for landing.

Eagle, gift in your gopher landing over.

of that 18 foot, we're gonna make it a thing.

Roger, low level, 16, 60 seconds.

We've had shutdown.

We cut you down, Eagle.

Tranquility base here.

The eagle has landed.

It took two spacecraft to get Apollo 11 to the surface of the Moon, launched together on top of the gigantic Saturn V rocket.

One was the command and service module, Apollo's mothership, Columbia.

This craft went into orbit around the Moon, served as the crew's main accommodation for most of the eight-day mission, and carried them back to the Earth.

The second spacecraft was the lunar module, called Eagle, which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface of the Moon like a dinghy dispatched from a yacht to explore a desert island.

The drama of the final 13 minutes to the moon revolves around events in the cabin of this extraordinary craft and the communications between the Apollo 11 crew and mission control on Earth.

In this episode, I'll be unpicking the story behind the lunar module and its bizarre design, and hearing firsthand from an astronaut who flew it to the moon.

I'll also meet some of the people who built it, the engineers and technicians on Long Island in New York State, who, through the 1960s, created a flying machine like no other before it.

Was it the best job in the world?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And I had it at 22 years of age, so I peaked, as they say, at an early age.

I was 34 when we landed on the moon.

It's funny, I tell people this was like my second engineering job.

I said it was all downhill after that, even though I worked on the shuttle and I worked on the space station.

But it's true, though.

That was the highlight of our career.

For them, it was a labor of love and pride.

But as President Kennedy's 1969 deadline loomed ever closer, the pressure was intense.

The engineers worked round the clock.

Everyone worried that the spacecraft wouldn't be ready and that the United States would lose the race to the moon.

I'm Kevin Fong, and from the BBC World Service, this is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

Episode three: The Long Island Eagle.

I am Paul Fjell.

I am an artist.

I specialize in aerospace with a particular enthusiasm for spaceflight.

So I began when I was 16, took a bus down to Kennedy Space Center because I was a space nut and saw Apollo 15 and got addicted because once you've seen a Saturn.

As a spaceflight artist and self-confessed space nut, Paul has a unique perspective on the Apollo lunar module.

Over the years, he's become a world authority on its design and history.

I first met Paul when he was helping to restore a lunar module, or LEM as people call it for short, at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

I was struck straight away by his enthusiasm and his vast knowledge of this space vehicle and the forces that shaped its design.

People are supposed to fly in something that looks smooth and sexy.

And the LEM was not that.

And I was trying to draw it.

And if you look at the facets and, you know, I mean, it really would make your head explode.

So I took that as a challenge to try and understand why is everything the way that it is.

And when I found out that there was a reason for everything on that vehicle I thought this is amazing.

This is an incredible story.

And that whole notion of form follows function, the LEM seems to be an exemplar of that in a really unique way.

Unlike the command module, the lunar module didn't have to have an aerodynamic shape because it never had to fly directly through the Earth's atmosphere.

It's almost impossible to describe the LEM.

There's nothing to compare it to.

For some people, the word ugly is one of the first words that comes to mind.

Paul Fjell puts it like this.

Originally, it was going to be a nice kind of bubble helicopter type design, but that would cost too much in weight.

And so they ended up with little tiny triangular windows, which gives it kind of an angry shape.

It's kind of a cylinder where the crew sits, and then a couple of bulges that are asymmetrical.

This weird asymmetrical thing that looks like it has mumps.

So

looking at it, and it's multifaceted on the top, on the bottom, it's pretty straightforward, just kind of an octagon with four legs popping out the sides.

But it's covered with strange materials, very crinkly gold, looks very pretty like a Christmas wrapping gone bad.

I'm going to unwrap the limb and explore it in all its glory.

Now the astronauts who flew the lunar module also came to love it, even if their first impressions were less than favorable.

Here's Charlie Duke who piloted one to the surface of the moon on Apollo 16 in 1972.

Your first impression was, man, how did this thing ever come about?

Basically flew like a helicopter with a rocket engine instead of a rotor blade.

But it was a great bunch of folks working on it, technicians and engineers, people from all the Long Island area, and they knew what they were doing.

On the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, Grumman, the Long Island company that built the lunar module, released this film celebrating their most famous product.

This unearthly device is a Grumman Lunar Module, the most specialized yet most broadly capable manned space vehicle ever built.

On July 20th, 1969, a sister ship of this one.

Before the lunar module, Grumman had never built anything to fly in space, let alone something to land people in one piece on the moon and return them safely.

No one had ever done that before.

But the company had a successful track record of making military aircraft dating back to the Second World War, and after a competition with other aviation companies, NASA awarded Grumman the contract to design and build the lunar module.

That was at the end of 1962.

As we'll hear later, this great challenge, a giant leap into the unknown, turned out to be much harder than anyone at Grumman had imagined, including the chief architect of the LEM, engineer Tom Kelly.

Here he is in 1966 on an American TV science program called MIT Science Reporter, showing its host their latest work in the plant on Long Island.

This is a full-scale mock-up of the lunar excursion module.

Well if this will never fly why do you have to build such a full-scale model?

Well we need an accurate model in order to check the fit and installation characteristics of all our equipment and also to practice all the operations with the space-suited astronauts.

The vehicle, as you can see, is a two-stage spacecraft.

The lower stage is called the descent stage and is primarily used during the lunar landing.

The descent stage contains the descent propulsion system,

which consists of the descent rocket engine and the tanks and pressurization equipment that supply it with propellants.

In addition to that, we the descent stage, equipped with a revolutionary rocket system, was central to the drama of the last 13 minutes before touchdown.

And stacked on top of that was the equally essential ascent stage, which contained the astronauts in their cabin as well as the systems that allowed them to pilot the spacecraft, plus its own rocket motor to get them back off the surface of the moon.

Today, the Long Island factory in which Tom Kelly's team designed and built the lunar modules no longer exists.

But 30 minutes drive away, there is no better better shrine to those spacecraft than at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.

And listening to its curator, Josh Stoff, you can tell that even half a century later, there's still a genuine pride in the role that Long Island and the Grumman Factory played in the Apollo space program.

And why wouldn't there be?

We're fortunate we have two and a half lunar modules, which is more than any museum on the planet.

And we have that because the lunar module was built locally, which is what we collect, really, is just local products.

At the museum there's even a recreation of a Grumman workshop complete with an original lunar test module.

Here we are.

We're walking into a recreation of the clean room at Grumman so people can kind of get the impression how they were built.

So this is an original lunar module LTA1 lunar test article.

It was the first one ever built and obviously after the engineers designed it they put one together to make sure everything fit properly and worked and all the changes and upgrades they made they would try them out on this first and run all sorts of electrical tests and pressure tests.

This exhibit is done up as it would have been in a clean room when it was being assembled in a nice high bay with scaffolding around the exhibit and on that scaffolding and indeed inside the vehicle itself are mannequins of people wearing clean room suits and hats.

And when the lunar modules are built it was cleaner than the surgical room.

The room was kept at a higher pressure than the other rooms around it so if it was any dust or dirt it would blow out because there was a great concern over dust and dirt and contamination in the spacecraft for a variety of reasons.

Bits of tiny bits of metal or something could short out the electrical system and they were worried about what astronauts would breathe in and zero gravity so it was kept in it was built in a very pure environment as clean as an operating room.

The fantastic thing about this particular exhibit is you can see inside the module itself and its inner workings.

The extremely thin outer metal paneling, the skin of the spacecraft, has been removed.

The whole thing stands at nearly seven meters tall.

This is the only lunar module where you can kind of see the guts of it.

You can see all the fuel tanks and the pressure tanks and where the engines are.

It's kind of strangely beautiful to see it like this.

You'd have trouble immediately recognizing it as a lunar module with wires exposed and none of the paneling of the final article.

Kind of without the skin on it, you could really see how flimsy it was.

How it was built because weight was so critical, lightweight, the skins on it are so thin.

There was only two one-thousandths of an inch of metal between the astronauts and vacuum.

That's like a soda can.

Two one-thousandths of an inch.

Buzz Aldrin in his memoirs wrote that he could have taken a pen and jammed it through the side of the spacecraft.

But it had to be super light because when you're landing on the moon, the heavier you are, the more fuel you have to burn.

They needed to make it so light so they would have more hover time over the moon so they could land safely.

So it was built as light as possible, but the engineers worked it out.

Yes, it's very light and flimsy, but it'll work.

And they all did.

It's astonishing to think that they flew to the moon inside a metal can that was so thin you could, as Buzz Aldrin once remarked, puncture a hole in it using a pen.

But making the vehicle as light as possible maximized its fuel efficiency, and when you're hovering over the moon, desperately looking for somewhere to land, fuel efficiency is what keeps you alive.

And the engine that the precious fuel supplied was one of the true state-of-the-art technologies of the Apollo program.

Taller than a man, the descent engine had to deliver powerful thrust, but uniquely for its time, that thrust had to be controlled the way a driver might control the engine of their car with an accelerator pedal.

That was kind of a unique engine.

It was the first rocket engine ever made that was throttleable because the astronauts had to when they were coming out the land they were steering it and they had to use the throttle to slow their speed or to pick up speed to clear an obstacle or something.

So it was the first one ever made that had a throttle.

Before that all rocket engines were either on or off.

So it was a unique engine and heavily tested and they worked perfectly on every mission.

It's easy to overlook that because you see an awful lot of rocket engines in the space program but that is a true bleeding edge state-of-the-art technology for the 1960s.

It was the only first one ever built like that.

And how was that engine ignited?

They used what was called hypergolic propellants because reliability had to be everything because they only had one shot, everything had to work.

So to make the engines as simple as possible they used two propellants that exploded upon contact.

So you didn't need any electrical system with igniters to set off the fuel.

It's just they would open a valve and they would go into the combustion chamber and just explode right away.

All the engines on the lunar modules just designed for simplicity and reliability more than anything else.

And reliable they had to be.

The descent engine had to be ignited twice to get Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface.

The first time was after they'd undocked Eagle from the command module Columbia, leaving their crewmate Michael Collins in lunar orbit.

This took them out of lunar orbit and on a gently sloping trajectory towards the moon.

Just under an hour later, they fired the engine one more time, and this marked the start of their controlled, powered descent, their final 13 minutes to the moon.

Here's the somewhat scratchy NASA recording from the cabin at that moment.

After the crew's brief countdown to ignition, the engine starts to fire gently at 10%,

but within 30 seconds it ramps up to maximum power.

On the recording, you might just be able to hear Buzz Aldrin saying, Throttle up, looks good.

The engine is pointing and firing in the same direction that Eagle is traveling, so the thrust, now at full power, has the effect of slamming on the brakes.

As a result, rather than coasting over the moon, the spacecraft loses momentum sharply and starts to drop more steeply now it's been captured by the gravity of the moon.

There are only four people left alive who know what it's like to pilot a lunar module to the surface of the moon.

And one of them is Charlie Duke, who also served as Capcom or Capsule Communicator during Apollo 11's final 13 minutes of descent.

Here he is in mission control, talking to Buzz Aldrin in the tense moments as they began their final approach to the lunar surface.

30 seconds to P64.

Roger.

Eagle, so you got 30 seconds to P64.

Eagle Houston coming up 830, you're looking great.

For all manned Apollo missions, Capcom was always another astronaut.

Neil Armstrong had specifically asked that Charlie Duke be the Capcom for Apollo 11's landing because he thought Charlie understood the lunar module systems better than anyone else.

So I just had to meet Charlie Duke to find out firsthand what it was really like to fly an Apollo lander on a trip that took us to his home just outside the city of San Antonio in Texas.

Morning guys.

Charlie, I'm Kevin Thong.

Very nice to meet you.

Nice to see you.

Andrew, great to to meet you, Charlie.

Nice to see you.

Come on here, guys.

Can you have any troll fan in this place?

Oh, no, it's really easy.

We're just saying.

Once we'd sat down, Charlie explained that the first challenge in flying the LEM was making sure that you descended toward the moon at the right speed.

This was done with the descent engine's throttle, which is a bit like the lunar module's accelerator pedal, and the use of a switch that fine-tuned its control.

But the astronauts also had to be able to rotate and tilt the lunar module in the vacuum of space.

This was done with clusters of smaller rockets or thrusters mounted on the outside of the cabin which allowed the astronauts to point the spacecraft in any direction they chose.

Altogether, this was how you flew the lunar module, constantly adjusting both your speed and your attitude or angle as you headed to the surface.

Next to the throttle there was a call a

a rate of descent switch, I guess.

And if you flipped it up, it gave you one foot per second up.

If you flipped it down it gave you one foot per second down and we used it a lot in the final stages of the landing.

In the final stages it's like flying a helicopter except you're using a rocket engine to hold you up rather than a rotor blade.

Because with your attitude control you could put down pressure and you'd go forward.

You could pull back and you'd go backwards.

You could roll left and roll left.

So you could go up, down, right, left, forward, back, anything you want, or hover, just like a helicopter.

But you're using this rocket engine mainly, plus these little attitude control jets.

Now here's Charlie alongside Commander John Young during the mission of Apollo 16 in April 1972 in their lunar module named Orion close to landing.

At this point, they're about 400 meters from the surface.

1400 feet, 44.

Down, looking good.

Right on profile.

You can hear Charlie calling out altitudes and rates of descent as he monitors the readings on their onboard computer.

800 feet, 30 down.

Here, Houston, we're going to be just a little long.

And now, in this clip, they're much closer to touchdown, at only 80 feet.

Listen out for Charlie, noticing the engine exhaust blowing dust off the lunar surface.

Okay, 80 feet, down at three, looking super.

Dare it dot.

Okay, down at three.

When he says down at three, he's telling John Young that they're now descending gently at only three feet per second, essentially no faster than walking speed.

And moments later, Apollo 16's Orion touches down on the lunar surface, and even through dense radio interference, you can tell that Charlie Duke is really quite happy.

The lunar module was difficult to fly and easy to crash.

Here's the normally unshakable Neil Armstrong talking in 2001 about how much the final minutes of the lunar landing worried him.

It's from an interview he did with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

It was far and away the most complex part of the flight.

The systems were very heavily loaded at that time.

The unknowns were rampant.

The systems in this mode had only been tested on Earth and never in the real environment.

There were just a thousand things to worry about in the final descent.

It was, I think, it was hardest for the system and it was hardest for the crews.

But it was the thing that I worried about just because it was so difficult.

Walking around on the surface, you know, on a 10 scale was one,

and I thought that the lunar descent on a 10 scale was probably a 13.

Learning how to pilot the lunar module took time, patience, and a lot of practice in the simulator, a chaotic pile of 1960s electronics and screens that looked like a prehistoric arcade games machine.

Because of its unwieldy appearance, the astronauts called it the train wreck.

If you just jumped into the lunar module and took off with no training, you'd been in really deep trouble.

But we spent 2,000 hours in the simulator.

So we knew the systems.

We knew how it operated.

Our training was very thorough.

We did every maneuver, every descent sequence possible, every emergency.

We practiced over and over and over again.

How many times do you think you'd landed on the moon in simulation before you actually landed on the moon?

I say I probably landed on the moon 2,000 times in simulation, but I crashed 1,000 times too.

So, I mean, they could kill you.

If they wanted to kill you in a simulation,

the instructors, they knew how to do it.

You know, they could fail this, fail that, and you just, you're going to crash.

Through these exhaustive dress rehearsals, the training team in mission control saw to it that nothing was overlooked.

The same, however, can't be said for the matter of crew comfort in the lunar module cabin, which was decidedly less than first class.

There were no seats.

You just stood up or leaned against one of the bulkheads.

So that's where you slept.

We had hammocks.

One went right left, one went four aft.

It seemed real comfortable until you started to get suited up.

Then you tried to get your suit on and you end up about half a meter apart really, less than that.

And because once you get your backpack on, the roof curved like an arch.

And you couldn't, with the backpack on, you couldn't back up against that wall and so that pushed you together.

So far what you've described to me is like trying to live and sleep in a broom cupboard.

You had to have a good storage plan because if you said well I'm going to put my helmet over here and my gloves over there, if you didn't do it the same way every time you lost everything.

And well where are my gloves?

Well that was supposed to be there.

No here they are down here.

Anyway, it was a chore getting suited up, if you will.

And I remember two and a half, three hours maybe until we got rich.

Three hours?

Yeah, until we got, I mean, it was a long process.

It's just incredible to hear Charlie Duke describe sleeping in a hammock in the lunar module on the moon in 1972 when less than a decade earlier the basic design for the vehicle hadn't even been agreed upon.

According to LEM historian Paul Fjelle, it seems Grumman didn't fully understand how to go about the task.

At the beginning of the program, Grumman came up with these notional designs that would help them think through the problem.

How do we land on the moon?

The design they came up with was very simple, about 22,000 pounds, had a nice, glorious bubble canopy with window seats.

And when they won the contract, they thought, okay, we're going to get to build this thing.

And they go to NASA, and NASA said, no, you haven't taken into consideration the redundancy.

We need redundant systems all the way through here.

There's all these secondary things, backups on backups, to make sure that we get there.

Mission success is important.

Crew survival is absolutely critical.

And so, you know, the levels of backups that you have depend on whether or not it's aligned straight through the crew coming out alive or the mission succeeding.

So Grumman had to go back to the drawing board.

To meet NASA's stringent demands for reliability, safety, and weight, they had to get themselves out of the mindset of aircraft manufacturers and into the space space business.

Here's Dick Dunn, who was Grumman's public affairs man for its lunar module project.

You have to remember that the lunar module was designed by aeronautical engineers.

And aeronautical engineers at that time were more concerned with streamlining than they were of anything else.

So the first models of the lunar module were very aerodynamic, they were very smooth, it had a lot of glass in it.

And as the design evolved, the glass is very, very heavy.

It had to go.

So the glass went.

And along with large, heavy windows, out went the seats for the astronauts.

Here's Josh Stoff at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.

The original design had seats, but they eliminated those and they had the astronauts, when they're landing, stand up and look out a small triangular window, which is very close to their face to give them the field of view.

So they got rid of all that glass and gave them very small windows right near their face and that would give them the field of view rather than having large windows all around them.

But even after getting rid of most of the glass and the seats, the lunar module's weight was still not going to meet the target NASA had set for Grumman.

This was no trivial matter.

The spacecraft had to be light enough so that the Saturn rocket could lift it off the Earth and send it on its way to the Moon, but also so that the LEM could carry enough fuel for its landing.

At the contract award, the vehicle was given a weight of 24,000 pounds.

That's fully loaded with fuel and ready to go.

It became very apparent that we were not going to make the weight.

Because as the final design evolved, pieces and parts got added to it and the weight started climbing.

And it was going very, very bad as far as weight.

For the engineers at Grumman, at times it looked like an almost insurmountable challenge.

The message was clear, less was more, but to get to the target weight of 12 tons fully fueled, radical action would be required.

John Devaney was a LEM systems engineer.

We actually had big action centers with big schedules on the wall, you know, how the weight was going up day by day, increasing.

It came to a point where we put together an enormous effort to try and start reducing the weight now.

And we actually had a program where we would spend $10,000 in 1969 dollars to get rid of one pound.

We had whole bunches of engineers who did nothing but analyze how we could get rid of the weight.

In fact, we developed some new machining techniques where they actually chem-milled some of the structure to get it down to the thinnest thing that you wanted.

Chem mill ten.

Chem mill.

It's like etching in glass, okay?

You did it with chemicals, basically.

And you took these structural pieces and instead of machining them, you actually etched them all the way down to the least amount that you could get out of it.

We flew with about 35,000 pounds.

But if you looked at the curves early in the program, we were going to exceed 45,000 pounds.

But weight was always a problem.

And some of the weight reduction strategies in turn caused more problems.

Reducing the thickness of the LEMS metal structure made it more prone to corrosion and cracking.

The fine, lightweight wires in the electrical systems were fragile and susceptible to breakage.

None of this was the stuff you wanted in a spacecraft that would carry national heroes on a history-making mission.

John Devaney, like everyone else, was driven on by the enormous pressures to meet Kennedy's ambitious goal of getting people to the moon and returning them safely to Earth before the decade was out.

The minute you put the guys in the capsule, I mean, these were heroes and everything else.

If we ever lost one, we'd really have a heck of a time trying to explain that.

These guys were bigger than rock stars.

They were patriotic heroes and you didn't want to lose anybody and so we were always making sure that that didn't happen.

We were working like 10 hours a day, you know, six days a week.

At the end we were working, there was even some days that we had to work 16 hours a day to try and catch up.

We're wondering if we were ever going to be able to complete it on time.

What did you think the chances were?

Because I mean this is a project of

unprecedented scale that you're given less than, well, it's about six, it's about seven years to complete, really, by the time you're up and running.

What did you think your chances were of achieving that goal?

I tell you, we had a lot of doubts about it.

I mean,

we had a schedule that says we were going to meet it.

We were going to land it somewhere around July 69, kind of thing.

But I think a lot of people, especially the people who were working in the details, could never figure out this whole thing is going to come together that fast.

And sure enough, Dick Dunn says the timetable started to slide.

Not making a schedule did occur.

We were supposed to fly on Apollo 8.

If you recall, in 1968, in December of 1968,

the Apollo spacecraft went to the moon for the first time.

They didn't land, they flew around, but that was supposed to be a lunar module flight.

So there were disappointments, there was apprehension.

But at that point, in the 1968 period,

we could sort of see the light of day, that we were going to make it, but it was going to be close.

The lunar modules were ready for flight testing with astronauts on board only a few months before Armstrong and Aldrin actually landed on the moon.

The crew of Apollo 9 in March 1969 put the spacecraft through its paces in orbit around the Earth.

Two months later, Apollo 10 carried a module to the Moon for the first time, flying it to 50,000 feet above the lunar surface.

And two months months after that, on Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin completed the journey, adding the final 13 minutes that took them to touchdown.

Back at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island, curator Josh showed me an exhibit which dramatically celebrates that historic landing on the 20th of July 1969.

Well, we'll come into this...

Pretty atmospheric, dark room with spotlights on, looking at a tableau that is a recreation of the Apollo 11 landing, a figure representing Neil Armstrong standing at the foot of the ladder there and next to a real lunar module.

Yes, this is a real lunar module, LM13, that actually would have gone to the moon on Apollo 18 or 19, but NASA got their budget cut and they had to cut the last three missions.

And we have it exhibited on a recreation of the Apollo 11 landing site.

So this is taken from photographs.

We've sculpted the surface the same way.

So we try to recreate that setting and some of the lunar lighting setting in this room.

I mean it it is incredible really to see a real lunar module up close like this.

Not least because as you move around it

you see

how the panels cover, you know, try to cover up for the awkwardness of its shape.

I mean it really does look like the sort of way I wrap Christmas presents.

The appearance of Christmas wrapping paper comes from blankets of crumpled gold coloured material wrapped around most of the lower section of the lunar module.

and like everything else it wasn't there just to make the module look pretty it played an essential role protecting the spacecraft and its crew from the extreme temperatures out in space.

When you're in space, the side of your spacecraft facing the Sun is 250 degrees and the side away from the Sun is 250 degrees below the zero.

So you had to super insulate the spacecraft so that bad things wouldn't happen on the inside.

You don't want it to warp or deform or fuel to heat up or things to overheat and short out.

So it's super well insulated.

But basically this gold foil is a luminized mylar called Kapton and it's about 25 layers thick.

They build it in blankets and attach it.

And they don't want the layers right next to each other.

They actually want a little air in there to give it more insulation.

But obviously when the spacecraft was completed, the last thing done was attaching all the various thermal blankets all over it.

The blankets also protected the spacecraft against the extreme heat from its own engine exhaust.

So the job of insulating the LEM needed great care and attention.

And of course, like just about everything else on Apollo, that responsibility was handed to some of the youngest members of the team, people who were only in their 20s.

My name is Alan Contessa, and during the Apollo program I worked for Grumman.

I was a thermal insulation technician.

Which sounds lofty, but it's basically we insulated the vehicle.

We made the insulation.

Alan normally installed the blankets before the spacecraft were transported to the launch pad in Florida.

But then very close to the launch of Apollo 11, NASA decided it wanted extra thermal protection around the module's legs.

By that time, Eagle had been securely stowed inside the Saturn V rocket, more than 300 feet above the ground.

For Alan, then just 22 years old, this assignment was literally the highlight of his career.

I was fortunate enough to work on top of the Apollo 11 rocket about three weeks before the launch, putting this stuff on.

And it was also very hectic because everybody, all the different crafts were trying to finish up their particular tasks.

And you were crawling into the vehicle to install this insulation, you know, really quite late on in the day.

Just tell me what it was like.

Well, it was almost like an out-of-body experience.

If you've ever seen a construction elevator on a construction site, they're like a wire cage.

So here we got into this little wire cage, about four people could fit into it.

And then you start from the bottom of a huge monster of a rocket and you get up and it gets thinner as it gets up.

And the first time we went on it was at night, so it was lit up and this, all this white surface was reflecting.

It's huge.

It was 35 stories tall.

I don't mind heights as long as it's safe.

And this, to me, looked about as safe as you could get.

Except for the fact that

about a week later they had the rocket fueled up and we were up there.

So we used to joke saying that If something happens, we could be the first people on the moon if this thing blows.

But going on the rocket was probably one of the most exciting things.

If you're working in a space program, this was the top of the world.

So you're up there to install this insulation around the legs of the lunar lander.

And the foot pads.

And there's a picture of you here.

I guess is that an a Polaroid?

That is a Polaroid.

Some guy came.

Yeah,

I was working just looking out the hatch, and you can see the landing gear is not covered.

And there's a plastic bag around the top part of the landing gear to protect it.

And I guess that's like a clean suit, right?

A smock to make sure you don't get debris debris onto the fire.

Actually, I have a hood on my...

This guy caught me with the hood on improperly.

That was supposed to be over my face.

Because I had a mustache, you can see, and my side words were about a quarter of an inch too long, so they had these requirements.

So I just took it.

I wasn't doing anything at that point, so I just took it back off my face.

And this is you in June 69 putting this, this insulation material around those legs, the legs of the Lunar Lander, to make sure I'm stronger.

And I'm 22 years old.

What are they crazy?

Letting us kids near this thing?

But,

you know, we knew what we were doing was very important and historic and all of that stuff.

We were serious.

Serious, dedicated, and proud to be part of the monumental challenge to get the astronauts to the moon and back again, people like Alan Contessa found themselves doing things they couldn't possibly have dreamt of doing in any other walk of life.

But there's no doubting the intense pressure everyone was under.

Paul Fiel has talked to many in the course of his research.

One thing I should say that's always shocked me in talking to the people who work the program.

Landing on the moon by itself as a job, you know, however long it takes, is really, really difficult, especially using the technology of 50 years ago.

What's remarkable is they did it under this extreme time pressure.

It literally felt like a war.

They were working around the clock.

Everybody took personal responsibility for their part of the job.

One of the managers at Grumman said he thought America got the program for 70% of its true cost, the rest being unpaid overtime because everybody took this challenge personally.

And at the end of the program, almost to an individual, people say,

I'm glad I was part of it.

It was the most dramatic, exciting thing in my life.

I would never want to do it again.

In episode four, I'll be jumping back in time to the beginning of 1967, to a terrible event that threatens to stop the United States' bid for the moon in its tracks.

I'll be back at the launch pad at Cape Canaveral to tell the story of the Apollo program's darkest hour, the fire that erupted inside the command module, killing three astronauts who were due to fly on Apollo 1.

My first shift on the Apollo program was the night of the fire.

Just there's quite not much going on and all at once you heard something like

Fire!

And then you heard a scream

Then it was over

I'd be surprised if anybody thought we were ever going to make all the flights and make the first landing on the moon without having lost a crew and a spacecraft.

But it was a shock to have the accident on the ground.

The tragedy exposed deep flaws in the Apollo program.

This crummy spacecraft that we were faced with at the beginning of 1967,

shoddy workmanship, poorly designed.

We thought that we were infallible, you know, that we couldn't make a mistake like that.

But we did have go fever.

The schedule was just tremendous.

But the Apollo 1 fire, as tragic as it was and as awful as it was, may have saved the program.

13 Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service.

Eagle, so you got 30 seconds to P64.

Eagle Houston coming up at 8:30, you're looking great.

13 Minutes to the Moon is produced by Andrew Luck Baker.

Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer.

Additional research and production by Sue Norton and Madeleine Finley.

The series editor is Rami Zabah and the podcast editor is John Minnell.

Thanks to NASA and MIT for archive material.

If you've taken the time to send us comments or rate us, thank you.

It all helps spread the word.

If not, please do leave ratings and reviews.

We'd love to know what you think.

On social media, we're using the hashtag 13 Minutes to the Moon.

That's all one word.

And on our website, you'll find videos, images, and documents.

And there's more to come.

Go to bbcworldservice.com/slash 13 minutes.

I'm Kevin Fong.

Thanks for listening.

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