Apollo: The Race to the Moon Read Online Free PDF

an engineer named Robert R. Gilruth.
    Gilruth, forty-five, avuncular and balding, was the prototypical Langley engineer. As a boy in Duluth, Minnesota, Gilruth had made model airplanes out of balsa with rubber-band engines. By the time he was in his teens, he was writing to the N.A.C.A. for technical papers on wing sections. At the University of Minnesota he helped design and build the Laird Watt, the fastest airplane in the world. He went to work at Langley in 1937 and was assigned to Flight Test Engineering. By the time World War II began, he ran the division.
    Unlike Wernher von Braun, who had been fascinated by space flight from the time he was a teenager, Gilruth got into the space business by accident. It was the middle of World War II, and Gilruth was receiving urgent requests for data on drag at transonic speeds. The Langley wind tunnels couldn’t provide it, because wind tunnels in those days were all closed-throat, and closed-throat tunnels choked at about Mach .85. Since Gilruth couldn’t get data on transonic speeds in the wind tunnel, he had to create something that actually went faster than the speed of sound.
    Gilruth calculated that a properly streamlined shape dropped from a sufficient height would break the sound barrier. He and his engineers created such a shape, added some instrumentation, and dropped it from a B-29 at 30,000 feet. The bomb-like shape achieved a velocity of Mach 1.2 and Robert Gilruth provided the American aviation industry with its first good look at the transonic flight environment. Then it occurred to Gilruth and his engineers that they could drive the Mach numbers much higher if they mounted their supersonic shape on a rocket. That was an attractive prospect to the N.A.C.A. and the Air Force, because the X-1, the first plane intended to fly faster than the speed of sound, was already on the drawing boards. In early 1945 Gilruth was given a small supplementary appropriation to open a testing facility. He chose a site at Wallops Island, Virginia, a deserted stretch of Atlantic coast across the Chesapeake Bay seventy miles northeast of Langley. Space flight still had nothing to do with it. Gilruth, now running a unit called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (P.A.R.D.), was just trying to get data about heat transfer at high Mach numbers.
    But there wasn’t much to do at Wallops in the off-hours, and Max Faget had a collection of Astounding Science Fiction that everybody kept swapping around, Gilruth as enthusiastically as anyone. Besides, it was impossible to fire rockets into the sky for long without beginning to think about space flight. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, as P.A.R.D. began working with multi-stage rockets, Gilruth and his engineers became the American civilians who knew more than anybody else about how to build a craft that could be put on top of a rocket and survive the dynamic stresses of launch and then the heat and deceleration of entry.
    When Eisenhower decreed that military experts on these topics were out of bounds, Gilruth became the natural choice for the person to lead an effort to send a man into space. He was appointed director of a small new entity created on November 5, 1958, called the Space Task Group.
    “That famous Space Task Group is akin to the Mayflower,” one man who wasn’t a member pointed out, “considering how many people tell you they were in it.” As a matter of historical record, there were just forty-five in the first boat. From Langley, there were twenty-seven men (all engineers) and eight women (all secretaries and “computers,” as the women who worked the calculating machines were called). Another ten engineers were assigned to the Space Task Group from Lewis Lab in Cleveland.
    From the beginning, the Space Task Group had a catch-as-catch-can quality. Half of the men assigned to the Space Task Group from Langley were handpicked by Gilruth. But Tommy Thompson, the director at Langley, didn’t want his laboratories