NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Maxime "Max" Faget, a mechanical engineer who worked on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, part 2 of 3

No, I really never word too much about them. I was mining my own business, and I said we did have some reconnaissance satellites that indicated that the Russians were building a very large rocket, which you were planning to go to the moon with, and in one set of pictures it was on a launch pad, and the next day they went and flew over, the launch pad was a mess, they had a big explosion on the pad, so their very large lunar rocket apparently blew up on them, and since that time we have found out indeed that's what happened. They had a huge rocket size of the Saturn, many more engines on it than the Saturn, and I actually killed a great number of people when it went off on the pad. I want to ask you about the Gemini Mark II space capsule,

was that a leap, big leap forward? No, Gemini was a minor improvement on Mercury from the standpoint of the basic concept. It did have one very important feature, it could maneuver in space. It carried a second module, which we call the adapter, but actually it was like a service module, which allowed it to stay in orbit a lot longer, which allowed it to do maneuvers in orbit. It had a two-man crew, the hatches could open, the hatches should say, it could open one of their orbit, and Geiss could go out and walk in space, as they said, and so we gained a lot, a lot of operational capability. It was really a training vehicle for the people that were going to operate the power program, and it was

excellent for that. Talk to me about the Saturn all-up test. Was that a bold move for NASA that test, and it's so wide? Well, it was sort of bold, but we at that time had come to the point in our engineering, we had a lot more confidence in it. In the case of Merck, we had a great number of tests as we built up the capability, but we were exploring ideas then. In the case of the Saturn all-up thing, we had a much bigger engineering team on it. Both ourselves and Marshall were better equipped, and it made sense to do it. Getting into the scientists, the lunar geologists and so forth, were you aware when they started

to come into the program, and how did you feel about that aspect of things, when they first arrived? Well, we anticipated this. As you know, Schumacher, one of the scientists that was big in the lunar program, I actually tried to recruit him to come to work for us when we first had the program, and he decided he didn't want to do that. The scientists wanted to be separate from the development organization, which I can understand, but we anticipated that we were going to do science on the moon, and that we did need a science capability. For a while, we had a science organization within the Man's Spacecraft Center that was anticipating the activity on the moon, and incidentally, just about everything that the scientists asked for, we'd already anticipated, and we're working to make that feasible for

him. So there wasn't resentment between the geologists and the engineers or the astronauts and so forth? I think the biggest problem had to do with control of the mission. The scientists wanted to take over control of the mission, and they wanted to take over control of the astronauts while they were walking on the moon, and they didn't have anything to do with the engineering and development, but did have a lot to do with the people that were trying to operate the mission. And of course, they refused. They refused to let the scientists come in and dictate what the astronauts were going to do. They said, sure, you can train the astronauts to do what you want them to do on the moon, but you're not going to tell them where to walk, you're not going to tell them which stone to pick up, which is kind of the thing. Shoemaker wanted to tell them to do. And he said, no, we're not going to do that. Okay. Cut. Terrific.

Why did Hesse and Shoemaker lead? Well, he left the program. Now, he's never part of our program. He always worked for a different agency in the government, but he left the program, I guess, because we were not doing the program the way he'd like to see it done. He really wanted to be able to have direct communications with the astronauts when they were on the surface of the moon and tell them what to do. And we felt that was not necessary that the astronauts could make up their own minds. They weren't a bunch of dummies. And if you game a little training in geology, that they could do a good job. And it turned out they did an excellent job. Well, site selection. Where the various missions were going to land became quite a heated debate. What was your concern about where people landed?

We designed a vehicle to land on a certain kind of surface. And within, after that was done, that was between the operations people and the scientists on where to go. And I never thought that they had a very heated debate about this. We did have some problems with the kind of equipment that should be carried. Shoemaker, for instance, saw we only carried black and white film. Black and white film is much more forgiving if you don't have the right lens or opening and things like that. And then we just got a broader range. But we just said we're going to use cart film because people on earth are going to want to see what the moon really looked like. And so we carried colored film. It turned out, by the way, that the moon was not just a bunch of different shades of gray that actually had some other colors, some brown and some shades of green, things like that, mixed in with

the gray. Of course, it's deeply, mostly gray. What was your most apprehensive moment in the entire Apollo program, the moment that you felt things weren't going right? Well, of course, after the fire, we had a very serious situation when we had a fire. And we then had to design a vehicle so that it would be fireproof on a pad as well as, you know, after the lead. By the way, a fire is a lot less likely once you get in 0G, because in 1G, fire will create the convective currents which will draw fresh oxygen into the flame, whereas in 0G, we won't do that. But anyway, we really tried hard to make the vehicle

fireproof and it turned out we couldn't do it with 100% oxygen in there. So we ended up coming up with a mixed atmosphere at liftoff, which was 40% nitrogen and 60% oxygen. Now, when this dropped down to 5 psi, when we got in the orbit, you still had a breathable oxygen atmosphere. And by the time we got to the moon, all of the nitrogen leaked out and we essentially had a complete oxygen environment in there, which was what we wanted from the standpoint of bends and things like that. What's your footage shot? It's cut for a second. Well, it may have disappointed some people. I was not particularly disappointed. By the time that happened, from the standpoint of engineering, we were busy working on the shuttle and for

our concern, the lunar landings were done deal and they were expensive. So we were able to use one of the leftover sirens to put our skylab up, which was very important. And I think that was a good thing to do. Well, good. On L.O.R., I'll tell you what you think of the hoopo. Well, Hobo was a rather pushy guy. I didn't know that about it. He was carrying someone else's idea and marketing it, which was the proper thing to do. We had a little problem with it at first because he was going around and saying that the lunar module was going away 5,000 pounds. In fact, it started off much less than that. But after he got wise

a little bit, he came up with an estimated way to 5,000 pounds. Of course, this was ridiculous. And we knew it. So rather than being able to accept the idea early on, we had this little discussion going, which first of all, he's got involved. And finally, we did design the lamb in it. We thought we could design it for 20,000 pounds. That's actually 28,000 pounds. So from the standpoint of imagination, the idea of lunar orbit around it was very good. From the standpoint of turning into a practical design, they were pretty far off the ball. Gotcha. Didn't take that so a long time to get there.

Wasn't it a big debate? Well, well, the begin with, when Werner, going brawn, decided that he could not make a nobleman, that he was going to make a Saturn, direct his direct descent without. So then, at that time, we at the Man Space Grinder, Space Craft Center, had just about decided that we'd like the lunar orbit around it. So really the debate turned out to be a debate between the people at the Man Space Craft Center with the people at Huntsville, Alabama. And that debate, they wanted to go earth orbit around the blue, because they wanted to be able to get themselves involved with the rendezvous procedure. And the rendezvous needs two great big Saturns and orbit, like a very interesting

and attractive engineering problem to them. And I could understand that. On the other hand, we wanted to do the lunar orbit around the blue, because of the reasons I told you. We started not liking the idea at all of landing the command and service module on the moon and having to take off with this big mess on the moon, with the lunar crash and all those other things. So we were pretty much set that lunar orbit around it was a way to go. So we had this debate between the two. And one day, Joshi, who came head of our Apollo program, he was managing the program, said, let's go down to Huntsville and talk to the burner. And we had a pretty much calm discussion there. And Von Braun said, sure, okay, we'll do it. And that ended the whole thing right there. So the debate was really settled between the

two centers, as opposed to something that got kicked up the headquarters where the managers were going to solve the problem. We didn't think that was the right thing to do, you know, the burner. What did you think going way back? What did you think when Kennedy first said, we want to go to the moon and put a man on the moon by the end of the decade? Did you think it was an ambitious plan, two ambitious plan? No, I didn't think it was a challenge. I mean, it looked like a lot of fun to me. So I never complained about the difficulties, the engineering problems, and so forth. We built a very good organization around the program. We built a center here with the program. That was a challenge. When we came down to Houston, we had a lot of things on the fire. At that time, we hadn't finished the market program. We were still getting,

we hadn't made the first lunar, first Earth orbit with Mercury. We just started the Germany program. We just started the power program. On top of all that, we were big as hell trying to design how the space centers should look and what kind of buildings and what kind of facilities we had. So we really had pretty interesting first two, three years here in Houston, and again, everything on the way. It was a very, very, very interesting time. When you look back over your shoulder at that capsule back there, what kind of thoughts do you have? Oh, I like, I like Mercury. That was there. That was my pride and joy. That was probably one of the best things I ever thought of. It was the Mercury vehicle and it was the right thing at the right time. There was any other design to get men in the orbit by the Americans would have taken

a lot longer simply because the Mercury was the only practical way to put something on the Atlas and doing it in a reasonable amount of time. Did you have a lot of complaints from the astronauts and others that it didn't look like a flying machine? We had a lot of complaints before we had astronauts that it looked like a flying machine. At the time that Mercury was born, conceived and born as a program, I was at the Langley Research Center which did aeronautical research. The faster we went, the more important it became to make things streamlined. This is about the most unstreamed line thing you could ever think of. As a matter of fact, the whole concept was to make an unstreamed line as opposed to stream line. Why? The Mercury. Why? Why? Because the higher drag vehicles have less heating during entry than the low drag vehicle vehicles. When you enter the

atmosphere, when something enters the atmosphere, it slows down on kind of drag. Now, when you have a blunt face like that, you create a huge shockwave and all the drag is related to the shockwave and all the heat goes into the shockwave. If you don't have that, you've got a very stream line vehicle. Then you get in with what's normally term, which is not an accurate term, it's called friction drag which is dragged that's taken by the skin friction of the vehicle and all the heat goes into the vehicle as opposed to the going of the shockwave. Well, if you made a very streamlined vehicle and tried to enter on a Mercury vehicle, it would probably, well, nowadays, it had to be covered with a hell of a blade if in order to survive. This was much, much lighter than any of the approach,

just simply because it created this big shockwave. A lot of people reacted to that design as not being aerodynamic. That's right, but that was the idea. It was to make it just as high drag as possible and then high drag was all, of course, in the shockwave. The other nice part about the vehicle is that there is the heat shield itself, which takes the majority of the heat and then is the afterbody. Now, afterbody gets a little bit of heat from friction drag, but it's so low that it can all be made out of metal. And the only part that you have to put the blade of material is on this limit area of the nose. Great, trick up quickly. Know how you're so big. What would it take to build? Okay, Mark. Well, as you know, we put a lot of money into the launch facilities. We have

a special crawler and other things to carry the launch vehicle from where it's assembled out to the pad. And you can imagine carrying roughly twice the weight out there. Now, the immediate problem was Michou. This is a building in New Orleans that was where the Saturn was to be built. It was at the Michou facility. Now, that did not have enough height. There was not enough clear height there to build anything bigger than the Saturn. And I think that's really the immediate limiting factor. And so Bernard von Braun decided that he'd build a bigger vehicle that would fit in the intimacy shoe. And that turned out to be the Saturn. And we just skinned by that weight.

We used all the capacity in Saturn to do our missions. And we did a very nice job, I think, in between us and the people at Huntsville, Alabama of getting the lunar program done. I might mention that to Kennedy said, we're going to do that in this decade. Now, he said that in 1962. So we didn't have a decade. We had eight years left over decades. And we did it. We did it within the decade as he's predicted. Great. Great. Max, thank you very much. That's right. That's what he talked about. Well, that was about here. He was talking about the capital there.

Yeah. Okay. So one last thing, Max. Could I make one statement? Absolutely. The whole concept. The whole concept of high drag versus low drag. The whole concept of high drag as opposed to low drag was first thought of by a man named Harvey Allen, who worked out at the Ames Laboratory. And he came over this concept because the military were having a very hard time with ballistic missiles getting the warhead to penetrate into the atmosphere and not break up because of heating. So he proposed to use high drag war as opposed to what was commonly used, which was some cone shape, which was very low drag.

They were having a hard time doing that. So I just borrowed his idea from Stan. I really thought it was a wonderful idea. So we use that in Mercury. All right. Now, one last thing is I want you to describe to me how enormous the NOVA rocket would have been, what it would have taken to actually, what kind of time would it have taken to get that thing built? Could we have made Kennedy's deadline if we had gone with the NOVA rocket? All right. The launch facilities too. And everything that would support it. Ready? Sure.