Placide D. Nicaise

The creation of MSFC by transferring Army assets on Redstone Arsenal to NASA did not involve any physical relocation. The personnel, buildings and facilities simply became the property of NASA. The 4,000 or so personnel in the Rocket Team were then mostly American, although the original German team members were still in most of the key laboratory and management positions. The team brought with them all the space related projects, such as the Saturn program that had been initiated at ABMA by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as early as the autumn of 1958. This team began reporting to NASA headquarters in Washington DC on July 1, 1960. This split with the Army was permanent. The Army went its own way developing short-range, but high technology battlefield weapons. Huntsville now had two important industries, the Army research and development program that would play an important role in the limited wars to come, and a major NASA center with a mandate to overtake the Soviets in space.

Money began to flow into the new center almost immediately and the pace began to quicken. Shiny white vehicles with the blue NASA logo began to appear everywhere. It was like we had received a shot of adrenaline and the pulse of the whole organization began to surge. Signs of expansion and ground breaking were soon evident. A modern new office building began to rise on the hill to overlook the austere and sprawling laboratory buildings that we had inherited from the Army. This ten-story MSFC headquarters building would be designated 4200, but employees began calling it "the von Braun Hilton."

The Missile Firing Team that had once traveled from Huntsville to Cape Canaveral for each missile firing had gradually moved down there. They continued to work for MSFC for a couple of years after transferring to NASA, but in 1962 the Launch Operation Center (LOC) became an independent organization under Dr. Kurt Debus, and his deputy, Hans Gruene. These members of the original von Braun Rocket Team and their dedicated, some would say fanatical, launch crews now handled launch operations for all NASA centers.

The Cape had a colorful, even a legendary reputation in the early years of rocketry. Engineers camped out there originally because it was a desolate, uninhabited region without any accommodations. Working conditions were not the best among alligators, rattlesnakes, salt spray and the occasional hurricane that blew in off the coast. Yet, there was no place like it for excitement. It grew dramatically and the coast north of Cocoa Beach was soon covered with motels, restaurants and bars along Highway A1A. The Rat Trap was a notorious club near the beach that became a favorite hangout for early launch crews and eventually Mercury Astronauts.

The atmosphere at the Cape was fast-paced and exhilarating with war stories, rumors and accounts of humorous situations making the rounds from one blockhouse to the next. The night before a launch, the "bird" stood in its gantry glowing under spotlights as checkout went on 24 hours a day. The countdown was broadcast on loud speakers all over the Cape to make sure everyone could take cover. Such notices just gave us a chance to sneak out of our blockhouses to watch the launch. People gathered in small groups waiting for the plume of smoke at liftoff. After a few moments, you could see the thin rocket slowly rising above the scrubby landscape on a dagger of flame. The rocket would be high in the sky before the cracking roar came to you from miles away. Sometimes the missiles would go out of control, weaving erratic contrails across the sky and sending the "bird watchers" running for cover. Spectacular explosions, fires and near misses were the order of the day but this just made the next launch more exciting. No one doubted that this wild and dangerous place had a destiny for greatness. It would be the site for one historic launch after another—sending men into space and eventually sending men to the surface of the moon.

Meanwhile, back at Huntsville the city had started to bloom. The population had mushroomed to 72,365 residents by 1960, a 440% increase from 1950 when the Germans first came to town. The city limits expanded from 4.8 to 16 square miles in this same decade. It was the fastest growing area in the nation for much of this time. The city had grown so fast that businesses had moved out along the new Parkway and into new shopping malls as the commercial center of the old city withered and died away. Efforts were made to save it but the expansion had been so swift and on such a scale that the downtown area simply could not accommodate it. Stores that had once stood for decades on the Town Square were closed or converted into law offices. The old courthouse was taken down and a gleaming black tower was going up in its place. The city soon erected its own edifice for their administration offices—a white, marble tower that overlooked Big Spring Park. These icons of progress sprouted up in the dying center of the old city as the boundaries of the new city spread to the Tennessee River and up over the surrounding mountains.

John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and Lyndon B. Johnson became his vice president. Johnson had previously been majority leader and the chairman of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, which gave him great influence over military and space policy. His interest in and influence over such policy only increased after he became vice president. When they took office in 1961 it was obvious that both men intended to put more emphasis on the space program. In April, the Soviets electrified the world with the Yuri Gagarin orbit around the Earth. The new administration apparently decided that this was the last straw from the Russians. They would set the bar so high that Soviet technology could not match it. In President Kennedy’s State of the Union message on May 25, 1961 he said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

This announcement stunned everyone, even advocates of the space program. We wondered if the President hadn’t placed the bar too high for us to reach. After all we had only launched Alan Shepherd into a sub-orbital flight three weeks before (May 5, 1961) with a Mercury Redstone. A lunar mission would require multiple boosters of unbelievable size and power. To develop this technology, build the separate stages, train the astronauts and attempt to make a lunar landing in only 8 ½ years was preposterous. Many wondered if Congress would fund such a program, and if we had the technological base and the industrial capacity to follow through. Back in Huntsville, von Braun just smiled silently to himself. The President of the United States had just proposed a program to fulfill his lifelong dream, and he was director of the center that could make it happen.

The industrial giants such as Chrysler, Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, and North American began setting up operations in Huntsville. Companies on the cutting edge of technology, such as IBM, Bendix, Sperry Rand and General Electric came to town. Some of these companies couldn’t immediately find office space and began setting up in the Lincoln Cotton Mill that had been closed for years. It was renamed the Huntsville Industrial Complex (HIC). Research Park was eventually established west of town for companies to build in a location with convenience access to MSFC. A new Huntsville/Decatur Airport was being built between the sister cities to accommodate the sudden increase in air traffic. The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) moved from its humble beginnings in the Miller Building to its present campus near Research Park. Classes were expanded with an emphasis on engineering and technology. The Rocket City continued to grow with no end in sight.

President Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson flew into Redstone Arsenal in September 1962 along with the NASA administrator, James Webb and the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. They obviously wanted to make sure a lot of the national treasury was not going into a sink-hole in North Alabama. Von Braun and other MSFC notables gave them a tour of the new manufacturing and assembly facilities and the test stand that was going up for the first Saturn stage. I can’t help but believe they were suitably impressed. Anyone that has ever seen that monster test stand rising out of the morning mist from miles away is not likely to forget it.

The entire entourage drove along Rideout and Martin Roads as the employees stood alongside cheering and clapping. Kennedy was tanned and as handsome as a prince as he stood up in his car smiling and waving to the crowd. Johnson sat silently back in his car looking a bit glum, obviously thinking this was Kennedy’s show. Then, somebody in the crowd let out a Texas yell and Lyndon leaped to his feet, smiling and waving. Later, we watched the sleek, blue fuselage of Air Force One climb out of Redstone Airport and head back toward Washington DC. For us, it was time to get back to work to make Kennedy’s goal for a lunar landing into a reality. No one knew it at the time of course, but for him it was just one more stop on the tragic road to Dallas.

The Texas yell didn’t buy us as much good will with Lyndon Johnson as we might have hoped. A Strategic Task Group (STG) had been organized at the Langley Center to manage Project Mercury, the nation’s first manned rocket program. When planning began for the Apollo program, it was decided that this group should form a separate center for astronaut training and mission support called the Manned Space Center (MSC). Some at MSFC thought it might come to Huntsville, but after careful evaluation, Lyndon concluded that the only place that met his criteria, the only logical place in the whole nation that would do was the state of Texas. So by the middle of 1962, MSC was established at Houston. In years to come it was changed to its more appropriate name, the Johnson Space Center (JSC).

The original German team still occupied most of the highest level positions at MSFC as the Saturn program got underway, but by 1962 it employed about 6,500 civil service people. The vast majority of the managers, engineers, technicians and clerks were American born. Young German engineers, some with outstanding technical ability, had migrated in from Europe to join the team. Americans engineers fresh out of universities or former aerospace workers came on board. Everyone worked for one of the original Germans at some level. The Germans were the management chain that held everything together. It was a simple, highly efficient organization that carried direction down from the top and problems back up the chain, all the way to von Braun when necessary. Decisions got made and things got fixed in a hurry. The original Germans were approaching middle age by then and were perhaps not the technical powerhouses that they had once been, but they had the confidence that comes with experience, and the disciplined, detailed minds that lets nothing slip through the crack.

There was a lot of respect for the original German team within the organization and even when we would laugh about some of their eccentric ways, there was never any obvious resentment. Originally, they spoke German among themselves, but von Braun passed down a directive that they would speak English at all times. He didn’t want the Americans to feel isolated or left out of the loop. I never heard another word of German spoken. In the early days, von Braun would walk alone and unexpected into a lab and strike up a conversation with whoever happened to be there. It was not unusual to find him speaking to a technician or even a summer student. This kept his finger on the pulse of the organization and was a tremendous moral boost for the employees.

The Germans could not be easily stereotyped because they had different personalities and abilities. However, some common traits were: they did not suffer fools lightly, they were impatient to get to the core of the problem, they didn’t have much tact, yet they would work with anyone, at any level that was really interested in learning technical details or moving the program forward. There were a lot of turf battles during the Saturn program, but these were between organizations, not between former Germans and Americans.

MSFC still had a tradition of doing things in-house, and constructed some of the first Saturn stages in our own shops, but as launch rate increased the design and building was contracted out to the industrial giants. Chrysler built the S-I & IB stages, Boeing built the S1-C first stage, North American the S-II second stage, Douglas the S-IV and S-IVB third stage and IBM the Instrument Unit that held the electronics equipment. Most of these contractors were brought in-house for indoctrination in the team’s way of doing business. The MSFC teams tested, evaluated and approved all the hardware and software that went into the Saturn Vehicles no matter who built it or where it was built.

When the first Saturn V SI-C stage was fired at Redstone Arsenal, employees for more than a mile away had to evacuate their building and stand in the parking lot. The concern was that the buildings would collapse from shaking Earth or get knocked down by the force of the sonic boom. Fortunately, the old, metal-framed, military buildings survived, but I’m sure none of us will ever forget the quaking earth, our quivering clothes and the overpowering sound that pounded us that day. People ten miles away in downtown Huntsville ran into the street thinking it was an earthquake. Some people a hundred miles away in Birmingham stopped to listen to what sounded like distant, rolling thunder. The mightiest machine that man had ever built had just come alive with unbelievable power—enough power to hurl a 3,000 ton rocket from the surface of the Earth, into orbit, then beyond on a trajectory to the moon.

The facilities being designed to handle the enormous stages were on a scale not previously imagined. Gigantic, high-bay assembly areas opened into super-wide roads to deliver these stages to the test stands and to the barges that floated them down the Tennessee River. These early stages made the long journey to the Gulf of Mexico and then around the peninsula of Florida to Cape Canaveral. The stages were far too large to be carried by land or air. The facilities at the Cape staggered the imagination. The huge vehicle assembly building for stacking the stages was the largest open volume construction ever built. The enormous crawlers that took the vertically stacked vehicle to the pad were almost 400 feet tall and resembled something out of science fiction.

While LOC readied the launch facilities, MSC worked on manned vehicles that were to ride on top of the mighty Saturn. The Command Service Module (CSM) that would wait in lunar orbit, the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) that would go down and return from the surface of the moon, and the Apollo Reentry Capsule that brought the astronauts blazing back into Earth’s atmosphere. Hundreds of thousands of NASA employees, contractors, subcontractors and vendors of every description struggled to make it all come together. They all aimed toward one goal—the goal to send men to the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth before the decade was over.

One afternoon, someone came running into the lab and said, "Kennedy has been shot!" A shock ran through the whole organization. People stopped work, gathered in small groups, spoke in hushed voices. That evening we discovered that he had died and that Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as president. It seemed like an era had come to an end, but it was not the end of the goal that he had set for us. Johnson had the LOC renamed to the John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and we went back to work with a vengeance. We worked from early morning to late at night and sometimes into the early morning hours. In the labs, in the shops and in the blockhouses the machines never stopped humming.

The Saturn I series vehicles went to the pad one by one, and one by one they rose on pillars of flame and flew away, laying the groundwork for the monsters that were to come. Not every flight was flawless, but there was never a catastrophic in-flight failure. There was so much redundancy in the machines and so much dedication in the people that we became convinced that nothing could go wrong. We neglected our health and we neglected our families, but we never neglected the machines. The goal was out in front of us and by then we could almost feel it in our grasp.

One evening I had just gotten home from work when a co-worker called saying, "There has been a fire on the pad in the Apollo capsule. There is no response from the crew." Three astronauts were dead—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The capsule was destroyed. It was a tragedy that shook all of us. Some people that had been in voice contact with the crew during the fire were never the same afterwards. The goal that seemed to be in our grasp only a day before now seemed to be farther away than ever.

Investigations followed. There were long delays and redesign of the Apollo capsule. We seemed to be stunned for a few days, but gradually got back to work on the Saturn vehicles. In a few days we were more driven and obsessed than ever. It was as if we had to do it for our fallen comrades. There were so many launches and so many days and nights in the labs, on the pad, or at the consoles that it all runs together in my memory. One thing that I do remember is when the first monster Saturn V was rolled out to the pad. It stood like a white skyscraper, dominating the landscape at the Cape. People worked around it like ants. The checkout took weeks, the countdown went on and on for 3 days and nights. In the Huntsville Operational Support Center (HOSC) we sat at our consoles for the whole time, eating there, and sleeping there. Von Braun came through for a visit once during a hold in the count. Dozens of us were asleep, heads lolling on the high-back chairs or slumped over the consoles. An aide ran to awaken us, but von Braun stopped him saying, "Wait, let zem sleep. We need zem to be fresh when the count resumes." When it was over, we didn’t know if it was night or day. We finally came outside, blinking in the bright sunlight like bats coming out of a cave.

I’ll also never forget the Apollo 8 mission that began on December 20, 1968. Astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders had ridden to orbit on our Saturn SA-503 in what we called the C-prime—the first mission around the moon. They were coasting in Earth orbit while engineers at MSC, KSC and MSFC were at their consoles searching for any anomaly. We were all on edge, knowing that we only had a year left, but also knowing that we could send three astronauts to their death. We could find nothing wrong, the machines were flawless. Suddenly, the calm, clear voice of mission control announced, "Go for translunar burn." The S-IVB stage reignited, lights flashed on our consoles, needles danced on our recorders and the three astronauts left Earth orbit to go where no human had ever gone before—they were on their way to the moon.

It was four days later, Christmas Eve night, when they were in orbit around the moon, Borman broadcast a Christmas Eve message that was listened to by people from all over the world. The tension was almost unbelievable as we waited for the critical burn out of lunar orbit. Finally, it came and they were on a trajectory back toward Earth. In a couple of days, people held their breath again because the reentry had to be exactly right or they would burn up or skip off into space. They came back into the atmosphere faster than a bullet, blazing like a shooting star. The three main chutes popped open and lowered the smoldering capsule gently into the ocean. Everyone was glued to their TV sets, watching in awe as Navy helicopters snatched them from the water.

We knew that nothing could stop us now. There were only a couple of more intermediate flights, then on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Ed Aldrin, and Mike Collins lifted off from Pad 39A on Apollo 11. A few days later, they were in lunar orbit. Collins stayed with the CSM while Armstrong and Aldrin got into the LEM and headed for the lunar surface. The tension was heart stopping as they hovered and maneuvered trying to find a clear landing spot before they ran out of fuel. Finally, Armstrong’s voice came back thin and high, "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Jubilation broke out at MSC and spread around the world.

On July 20, a decision was made to go out on the lunar surface. As he stepped down on the surface, Armstrong’s voice came back a bit broken up, "That is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Everyone had stayed up into the early morning hours to watch. Ghostly, black and white images showed the astronauts hopping around on the moon’s surface in their bulky space suits. It was the event of the century, the feat that many said could never be done, but we had done it six months ahead of schedule.

Five more Apollo missions went to the surface of the moon. The last, Apollo 17 lifted off from KSC at night. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching from miles away, some in the VIP stands, but most parked on the roadsides of Merritt Island standing beside their cars. In the distance, the Saturn stood like a white tower bathed in searchlights. At ignition, clouds of smoke and steam billowed up from the pad. The monster was held for a few moments by the hold down arms before it was free. The unbelievable thrust and power of the five engines struggled to move the 3,000 tons of propellant and machinery against the forces of gravity. Then, you could see that the machine was winning. It began to rise slowly on a pillow of fire. The landscape was lighted for miles around by the exhaust that was almost as bright as a welding torch. Suddenly, the sound hit us with physical force. Our clothes quivered, the ground shook, people’s mouths were open and their lips moving but no voices were heard. We were captivated by the sound and mesmerized by the sight that no one would ever see again. The mighty Saturn rose from the flat, barren landscape and thundered off into the night sky.

When Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt came streaking home and were routinely plucked from the ocean, everyone thought that this was just the beginning of even bigger adventures in space. The Soviets had given up on even trying to land men on the moon. They appeared to have been bested in space once and for all time. Americans had built the machines to do things that most people thought could never be done. We had made a giant leap in technology and in building the organization to carry out perhaps mankind’s most daring and sophisticated feat—exploration of another world. None of us would have ever guessed that the golden age of Apollo was over.