NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Thomas Joseph Kelly, aerospace engineer responsible for working on the Apollo Lunar Module, part 1 of 3

So did you know about Linda Orbit-Rondibu early on? Did you think it was the way to go? Talk just talking to me. I first got involved with Linda Orbit-Rondibu during the proposal that we were writing for the command and service module, the basic Apollo spacecraft. And that was part of a team proposal led by General Electric Company. And we Grumman people did a study in that proposal of Lunar Orbit-Rondibu. Actually we did these studies because we thought maybe we'd get some extra credit for addressing the question of how would NASA actually accomplish the mission because they did not attempt to specify how they would do the mission in that first competition.

So that's when I first got involved. And we compared it with other ways of doing the mission. There were basically two other ways. One was called direct ascent, which required a gigantic rocket booster about three times as big as the Saturn V booster, which was plenty big. And the other scheme was called Earth Orbit-Rondibu. And there you had two Saturn V launches and sent up half of the spacecraft on each and brought them together in Earth orbit and then launched the whole thing to the moon. And then of course with Lunar Orbit-Rondibu you could do it with a single Saturn V launch. And you had a specialized spacecraft which became known as the Lunar Module, which took two of the three astronauts down to the surface of the moon, became their home away from

home while they were there, and then lifted them back up and performed the Rondibu maneuver in Lunar orbit so they could go back to the mothership. And after that they jettisoned the Lunar Module that its job was done. So those were the three schemes. We liked the Lunar Orbit-Rondibu for two main reasons. The biggest one was it was the most efficient way of doing it. I mean you got by with one Saturn V instead of two or this gigantic Nova launch vehicle. And the other reason perhaps equally important was that it set up a requirement for two spacecraft which had two completely different sets of requirements. The command module had the overriding requirement of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere at

very high velocity. And when it did that it heated up because of friction with the Earth's atmosphere at the globe, white hot, it had to be very thickly surrounded with insulation. It had to be solid and aerodynamically shaped in order to do its job. The Lunar Module on the other hand only operated in space or on the moon where the forces were very low, there was no air or atmosphere. So you didn't have to worry about aerodynamic considerations. But the driving force on the lunar module was that it had to be extremely light weight. So the low forces and the absence of aerodynamics enabled you to meet that light weight requirement. Incidentally the reason it had to be light weight was that for every pound of weight that

was brought down to the lunar surface and then back up into lunar orbit. It had to add three pounds of rocket propellant. So it was a four to one growth factor on weight for the lunar module. Wow, that's a lot. Now when you first got the job of designing the lunar module, did you have any clue about where to start? It must have been a pretty daunting task, right? Well it was. Of course we had prepared a proposal for NASA which won us the job. So we had a concept of how to do it. And even some of the earlier studies that we and other people, NASA people, other contractors had done, had all showed some version of a two-stage vehicle with the lower stage or landing stage having big legs, big spindly legs that could land without tipping over on the lunar surface.

And then the upper stage had the crew compartment, the inhabited part of the spacecraft. Now that very earliest concepts had it be just an open platform with the crew just standing out in the open. Our proposal, our original proposal, we made it look like a helicopter cockpit because that's what we were familiar with and for that kind of a job. So it had like a bubble canopy and it had seats and all that. And that was our original proposal. But it was two-stage and the lower stage was the specialized landing stage. Didn't one version have something like people sitting on a bicycle or something? What kind of thing? Well, some of the early studies, as I said, they had them standing out in the open day. They were like holding handlebars or something, yes. Now how similar was it to the bedstead, the thing that you actually tested in Earth

into the Earth's atmosphere? We see pictures of that flying bedstead. It wasn't at all. You mean the actual limb? The limb bore no resemblance to that thing. But bedstead was just a device to try to simulate the one-sixth Earth gravity on Earth. On the moon, the gravitational field is one-sixth as strong as it is on Earth. And one way of simulating that was with a jet engine, cancelling out five-sixths of the weight of this practice vehicle. It was a landing practice vehicle. Incidentally, they stopped using it. It was so dangerous that free-fying, simulating vehicle that it really was considered eventually not to be worthy.

The risk. Well, that's interesting. Now, how did you, this was the first vehicle ever designed to fly outside the Earth atmosphere? I mean, how does one design something like that? How does one test it? It was the first spacecraft that would only operate in space. It never had to return to Earth. In fact, it couldn't return to Earth because it had no protective insulation, so it would burn up if it came back at escape velocity. And that's what happened to it on Apollo 13, by the way. And it did have to come back to the Earth's atmosphere. So it, as I said, it could be very much driven by the functions that it was going to perform. Function dominated over and formed followed. And there was no requirement for aerodynamic smoothness or symmetry or anything like that.

So that's why it ended up looking like a spider with the mumps, one person called it. Okay, great. That's good. Let's see what we're going to take to. The design of the lunar module was dominated by the requirement for lightweight. In fact, early in the program, the weight was growing at an alarming rate as we found out about the need for redundancy and increased reliability of various systems and what have you. And the first thing you know, after we were underway for about a year and a half, it looked like we were going to blow our weight limit completely. So we had to go back and I personally did this, led this effort. We went back overall our drawings.

At that point, we were starting to release drawings and starting to make parts. And we went back very painstakingly through everything and cut out weight. Now we ended up doing a lot of things that made the limb extremely fragile and lightweight. For example, the skin, the aluminum alloy skin of the crew compartment was about 12,000ths of an inch thick. That's equivalent to about three layers of Reynolds wrap that you would use in the kitchen. And I never forget one day, one Sunday I was working and Jim McDivitt came running in and said, hey Kelly, he says, do you know it is a guy wearing combat boots inside the Lem cabin? He could kick his foot right through the wall. So I said, oh, you've got to be kidding. So I would ran down there.

We had a rule at the time. The Lem was being built in a clean area and the rule was you had to put white booties on over your shoes and then you had to put a white smock on, et cetera, on a hat. But we never thought people would wear boots instead of shoes. So I went in there and sure enough, here's this guy with big combat boots on. He's inside this extremely fragile egg shell of a Lem. And so we immediately changed that rule, you had to go down to your socks or else put little slippers on that we had for people. So it was very fragile. The wiring was fragile, the wiring we went in. So within the factory we had this big fixture that could hold the whole essence stage or the whole decent stage and it just rotated it around at odd ball angles until all the stuff fell out of it.

And it was amazing what we got. We put a big plastic sheet under it and we would sweep up all this stuff which was mostly nuts and bolts and occasionally screwdriver or something like that. Why did you do that? We did that because any of this extraneous material that was in there at zero G during the mission would just float out and drift around and cause trouble in general. Well, anyway, one time we were doing one of these rotating cleans and there was a big heavy rivet bucking bar had been left in there. And we heard that clatter against the tank and that sent the fear of God through us because we had this big expensive titanium lightweight titanium tank propellant tank in there. And we had to do a whole extra set of pressure tests on the tank and all that to first we inspected it.

We couldn't see any visible damage but we had to do a whole set of special tests on that tank to make sure it was okay. Now, everybody who talks about this, we talk about Kennedy's date, do it by the end of the decade. I know you guys were particularly, what did time, what pressure was time for you in developing the lens? Was that like the big sort of damage that he's hanging over your head? Oh yes, yes. Time was the big pressure because we felt that we were in a race with the Russians to get men to the moon. We were, by the way, but we didn't officially know it because they were keeping the Russians were keeping their side of its secret, but they did indeed have a big program going on. So we had heard this from rumors and we felt that kind of pressure. We also felt the pressure of money and budgets. And in that kind of a program with thousands of people involved, the faster you can do something is also the cheapest way to do it.

If things drag out with all those people on the job, it gets very expensive. So we were under a double-sided set of pressures there. Get there before the Russians and get there within the budget if that all possible. Was NASA leaning on you pretty heavily? Yes, very heavily. Yes, they were pushing us hard. And now in retrospect that all has been revealed about the Russian program and all that, I'm quite sure that some of the NASA higher-ups, certainly the administrator and probably the manager of the Apollo program, knew the intelligence information on the Russian program. We didn't know it, but we felt a result of it in this push of schedule. Now when you won the contract, I'm sure you were very happy, a big deal. Did you ever come to regret it? I mean, how many hours did Tom Kelly used to work along with his team to get this thing ready?

Well, we all worked long hours, but it was a labor of love, I mean, it was the engineering job of a lifetime or of the century, I think. And I think we were also happy to be on this job and we all realized the historic importance of it that nobody really cared, I mean, how long they worked. I saw a thing happen one night where something had gotten messed up and administratively and this one-hole group of technicians and shop workers had not been approved for overtime for that week. And they said, well, what do you mean, we're not through, we have to work overtime. And their boy said, well, you probably won't get paid because it's not been signed off on. And he said, oh, get out of my way and they just worked as long as they had to and that was that. I don't know whether they ever got paid or not to tell you the truth. But that's the kind of attitude it was.

Even the sweeper at Grumman knew that he was working on something momentous. How about the astronauts, how involved did the astronauts get in that LEM spacecraft? I know that Hayes was sleeping the thing and Conrad was always hoping to design it. Did we call that? Yes. Well, the astronauts were quite heavily involved with us in the early days of the program when we were still making wooden mockups and things like that. A few of the astronauts were designated to work with us and help us work out some of the design details and procedures. This was in the very early days. Pete Conrad was one of the fellows who did that. And I remember one of the things that Pete worked on with us quite effectively was the issue about how do you get down to the lunar surface, once we're sitting on the moon.

Originally, we thought the lightest scheme would be kind of a block and tackle scheme that they could let themselves down on this rope and then when they came back with the lunar samples that hoist them back up by a little block and tackle. And that's what we showed them at first. And Pete Conrad tried that out and it was a disaster, I mean, in the space suit. And we had a thing that we called the Peter Pan rig, which again was an attempt to counteract five-sixth of your weight. We had a big hoist at the top of the ceiling in the building and we had a counterweight that was five-sixths of the astronauts' weight. So he was in a harness going up with this rope going up to this counterweight and he's trying to do these maneuvers. Well Pete Conrad is a very funny fellow anyway.

And his antics, when he was trying to maneuver these lunar sample boxes with this cockamami scheme that we had there for the block and tackle, was really something. I mean, it was slapstick comedy at its best. Yes, he quickly convinced us that that was no good. We ended up putting that ladder on the forward leg and we called it a front porch, a platform right outside the egress hatch. So that was one of the things. Now that was in the early days while we still could make big changes. Later on, when the limbs were being completed and tested and the crews who were actually going to fly them were being assigned, the actual flight crew, the primary in the back up crew participated in just about all the major tests that we performed on the limb in

the factory. And that's where Fred Hayes was sleeping overnight inside the cabin and all that. But all of the crews did that. We would run into problems in these tests and we were never sure how long it would take us to fix them. If we were, we'd tell the astronauts and they could go home to the motel and get a little sleep. But sometimes we'd say, you know, gee, we think we'll have it fixed in 15 minutes and then it was half an hour and an hour. So that's how they ended up spending a lot of time there with us. And it says an interesting story about the coolant for the limb and where it came from. I understand. Some guy was mixing it up in his backyard in upstate New York somewhere. That one I couldn't vouch for that. I'll put you that one from bread.

8 number three on roll 157, Apollo 8 ended up being a fabulously successful mission. What did you have to do with that? Well Apollo 8 was originally supposed to be a mission involving the limb and the command and service modules in Earth orbit, which ultimately became Apollo 9. It became Apollo 9 instead of 8 because we weren't ready. We were having a lot of trouble with the early limbs, getting them to pass all their tests and trying to meet our schedules. And we were about three to four months down despite our best efforts to try to make it up. Were you getting heat from NASA? Oh terrible heat, terrible heat. But we did our best but on the other hand nobody including NASA wanted us to cut any corners. So everything was being done by the book and very thoroughly.

But we just couldn't make up the time. So NASA was concerned they had already had a successful Apollo 7 mission with the command and service modules alone in Earth orbit. And they were concerned about letting too much time pass before the next mission losing momentum in the flight program. So George Lowe who was the Apollo spacecraft program manager at that time, he came up with this brilliant suggestion of well look why don't we just leave the limb out and we'll send the command and service modules out to the moon and let them orbit the moon. They can go through the lunar orbit phase of the mission without a limb and it will be a good practice mission because it will still be going through all the steps and sequence of the normal mission except it will leave out the whole landing part.

It took the heat off of you. And it gave us the extra time to finish the limb properly and get our quality problems on the control which we did.