Month: March 2018

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People We Should Know #33 – James Lovell

James Lovell performing navigation aboard Apollo 8
attrib. wikipedia

March 25, 2018, is Commander Jim Lovell’s 90th birthday.  He is of course part of a very small group of people who know what its like to be placed upon an ignited,  controlled bomb weighing over 6 million pounds fully fueled and delivering over 7.6 million pounds-force through a 33 foot diameter circle achieving a speed at full throttle of 7500 feet per second.  He is one of three men who have ever travelled to the farthest point reached by humanity beyond the earth – 248,655 nautical miles.  He saw 269 sunrises in space and spent about thirty days in space over four missions.

Yet, there is one career attribute that James Lovell holds uniquely among all other space farers.  He is the only man who has circumnavigated to the moon twice…and never placed his foot upon its surface.  The first time was part of the plan.  The second, a failure of mission, that will always be an exemplary  triumph of leadership.  It is the compelling story of dealing with ultimate adversity and facing the fact head on that a personal pinnacle of a storied career would never be achieved, makes James Lovell , on his birthday, Ramparts #33  – People We Should Know.

Though born in Ohio, James Lovell was essentially a Wisconsin boy, raised in Milwaukee and educated at the University of Wisconsin Madison.  His first and overriding interest was flight and rocketry, and to assure his interest be realized, he applied, was accepted and transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy.  Upon graduation he attended flight school and received his naval aviator wings in1954 .  In 1958 he was selected for  Pax River Test Pilot School, met future astronauts Wally Schirra and Charles Conrad there, and graduated first in his class.  By this time, the world’s attention regarding flight had been shifted from the level of the atmosphere, to space itself with the successful launch in 1957 0f Sputnik by the USSR.  The best military test pilots were considered the appropriate candidates for selection for the first humans in space in both the US and USSR, as they competitively lurched toward rocketry capable of such achievements.  As has been told in Tom Wolfe’s epic tale of test pilots and the early space program,  The Right Stuff, some test pilots like legendary Chuck Yeager did not feel the pull to leave the active piloting of an atmospheric vehicle for the passive ride offered of a pilot on a rocket.  But rocketry was  in Lovell’s blood, and he applied for astronaut status.  His test pilot school comrade, Wally Schirra made the first cut to be part of the Mercury 7.  Conrad and Lovell would have to wait to become part of the Next 9 for the planned Gemini program.  Lovell achieved his childhood dream of riding a rocket into space on December 4th, 1965 as part of the Gemini 7 mission with Commander Frank Borman spending 14 days in space and over 200 orbits of the earth, achieving a landmark controlled rendezvous with another craft in space, Gemini 6.  He returned to space in 1966 aboard Gemini 12 with eventual moon walker astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, spending time outside of the vehicle, and successfully docking with another craft.

It is difficult to recall a time when the US space program was achieving on an every three month basis another space milestone, but such was the pace of the last half of the 1960s as both the US and USSR jockeyed to be the first to land on the moon.   The extreme dangers associated with constant tests  in space advancing untested technology eventually caught up with both countries.  In the case of the US, it was realized in the horrific fire aboard Apollo 1, ending the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee on the launch pad.  A pause in the accelerated schedule for Apollo took place for 20 months while the cause of the fire and adjustments to the command module were made and tested.  This had a significant effect on crew selections, and Lovell became one of three crew members of the first human manned craft to orbit the moon, Apollo 8, electrifying the entire world on Christmas Eve 1968 with a poignant reading of biblical Genesis as they were orbiting the earth’s lone terrestrial  satellite.  Apollo’s 8’s spectacular success led to rapid progression to the eventual moon landing of July 20, 1969, of Apollo 11.  Lovell, having been part of the crew first to the moon, looked to his turn to set his feet upon it, and was scheduled for the Apollo 14 voyage as commander of the mission in 1970. A crew re-ordering moved Lovell up in the Apollo series to Apollo 13, and his chance to be the first man twice to the moon, with it.

So set the stage for Apollo 13.  On April 11, 1970, James Lovell led a team of Fred Haise and Jack Swigert into the command module and a launch towards the moon took place, thrusting Lovell into history.  An initial two minute shut down of part of the Saturn V’s main stage brought an initial concern to the commander but it was adjusted for, and the flight continued uneventfully, successfully leaving earth orbit, docking the command module, with attached Service Module,  to the LEM (lunar lander), and heading for the moon.

55 hours into the mission, disaster struck out of nowhere.  Initiating the stirring fans for the oxygen tanks  in the Service Module,  the astronauts were suddenly disturbed by a loud bang, multiple alarms, and oscillations of the vehicle that worsened by the second.  205,000 miles from home, they were faced with a terrible reality, the Command Module’s power and oxygen was rapidly declining, and the source of the catastrophe were ruptured oxygen tanks visually leaking life giving oxygen at a rate that left at most 130 minutes to certain fatality.  Lovell and the ground team at Johnson Space Center in Houston realized the only hope for survival would be closing down of the Command Module and transferring the three man crew into the LEM, built for two, as a life raft.

The blown panels and ruptured oxygen tanks of the Apollo 13 Service Module are visible as the module is eventually  jettisoned.

Critically the distance from earth was such that a direct abort of the mission and return was impossible, and the injured craft would have to be to the moon and slung around it to return to Earth.  Within a few minutes, the mission had gone from Lovell as the crowning achievement of his professional life with a landing and walk on the moon, to a survival mission in a severely crippled craft with huge challenges in a successful return to Earth.  At best, could the craft be cajoled into several more days of diminished power, reduced oxygen, rising carbon dioxide and with minimal understanding as to whether the Command Module, the only means of re-entering safely on Earth, could be resuscitated satisfactorily for the critical re-entry and landing.

It was at this moment of supreme failure and danger, that Lovell shone beyond all commanders previous.  His crew struggled psychologically and physically with the miserable conditions of the craft, with temperatures maintained at 39 degrees, and Fred Haise developing a serious urinary tract infection.  The LEM was not designed for either the oxygen demand nor the carbon dioxide production of three men for longer then a day and a half, and they would need a minimum of three.  Alternative air scrubbers were fashioned on the fly.  Circling the moon at a heightened apogee of orbit resulted in the need for course corrections, that Lovell and his crew by care timed burns navigated by dead reckoning, with a mistake likely to send them bouncing of the earth’s atmosphere to certain death.  The command module, the only means of safely returning to earth would at the appropriate time have to be restarted, the LEM and Service Module safely ejected, and a heat shield that had been juxtaposed to the exploded service module hopefully undamaged.  From the catastrophe of April 14 to the re-entry of April 17th, Lovell kept the crew and himself focused on the task at hand and never wavered.  The dream of the moon was gone forever. It was to achieve the near impossible that interested him now, and with an 82 second extension of the expected re-entry radio silence time, it was not clear to anyone on the ground Lovell and his crew had pulled it off, the first successful intra-space catastrophe and recovery mission.

Lovell did pull it off, and the aborted mission to the moon , despite its failure, remains one of NASA’s most spectacular collaborative successes.  The courage, quick thinking, leadership, and steadiness of Lovell, absorbing and implementing one of the best engineering recovery processes ever achieved by an organizational mission team is one for the books.  James Lovell never got his third shot at the moon.  The NASA moon program ended prematurely with Apollo 17 in 1972, and 46 years later we have yet to go back.  James Lovell at 90 years of age may have missed out of being able to put his foot in moon dust and gaze at the earth from another planetary body, but he can look with pride that he is remembered for his achievements in failure above those that were part of successful missions.  Getting everybody home when it looked impossible is a singular achievement of this long ago era.  If we soon head back, Apollo 13 will be one of the steps that made it possible.

On his ninetieth birthday, Ramparts salutes Commander James Lovell as Someone We Should Know #33.

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People We Should Know #32 – Roger Bannister

Roger Bannister breaks the four minute mile — attrib. GETTY images/Express.co.UK

The above photo freezes in time one of the epic moments of the 20th century.  Much of what passes for civilization today is the concept of celebrity, the idea of being known for being well known — but this is a relatively new laurel. Until recently, Western civilization, particularly since the Enlightenment, had oriented its esteem on the concept of achievement, the idea that any individual regardless of class, on innate ability, could advance society permanently.  The achieving individual sought achievement through identification of their own talents, self directed effort, securing their commitment to attempting to surmount the acknowledged challenge faced by all humanity, and if possible, surmounting it.  The idea of running an arbitrary distance, the mile, under 4 minutes, had long been felt to be outside the physiologic capability of one particular mammal, human beings.  Unlike any other mammal, the fact that such a potential barrier existed uniquely drove some humans to attempt to prove the barrier a myth. On May 6th, 1954 at Oxford, England, Roger Bannister became the first known individual to drive the human body over the distance of a mile under 4 minutes, and another epic story of individual accomplishment thought previously impossible was recorded. With Sir Roger Bannister’s passing March 3rd, 2018 at the age of 88, Ramparts takes this opportunity to celebrate Sir Roger Bannister as People We Should Know #32, most importantly because Sir Roger himself, as multi-faceted individual,  saw this epic achievement as only his life’s third most important contribution to civilization.

With dramatic advances in athletic training now often corrupted by artificial pharmaceutical enhancements, the modern concept of “breaking records” is now looked upon with some cynicism.  Athletes such as Roger Bannister was in 1954, are but a quaint memory.  Roger Bannister was not a professional track athlete.  He was a physician who ran as a side activity, and discovered he was surprisingly good at it.  Rigorous training was what Roger Bannister was attempting to accomplish in the medical field, not the track field.  With an ideal physique for the middle distance race of 5280 feet, or 1500 meters, depending on the event, undergoing minimal training but with an acute sense of physiology, Bannister began to identify as he entered adulthood and track competition, that middle distances,  once thought of as endurance events as opposed to sprints, were instead hybrids. Despite a complicated life that intersected intense medical training with physical training and inhibited Bannister’s focus on athletics, he accepted some fairly advanced training principles for his time, of interval and hill training, to substitute for his inability to exclusively commit to running.

Inspired initially by the 1948 Olympics in London to become a track athlete, Bannister, by  the Helsinki Olympics in 1952,was felt to be a legitimate threat to win the 1500 meters.  In a race in which the first seven participants beat the previous olympic record, Bannister finished a personally disappointing fourth.   He recognized that his approach of intermittent commitment would not be sufficient to defeat the best in the world, and being an innately competitive person, determined he needed to orient himself not just to defeating race participants, but defeating his own perceived limitations.  He set for himself the goal of achieving a sub-four minute mile, a goal which not only had resisted all previous attempts, but would require an average under 60 second quarter mile lap, not felt likely to be physically possible to maintain over a four lap distance.

Bannister, an accomplished person, felt the pull to accomplish more, and looked around him to see others with similar drive.  Through the summer of 1953, Bannister pulled his personal best down some 8 seconds to 4:02 and could see how the epic speed might be achieved. The only question was at to whether he would be the one to first achieve it.   On May 6th, 1954 at Oxford in a local University versus Amateur Athletic track meet, the conditions were positioned,  if his indomitable will was sufficiently present.  The race had future Olympic champions within the field, and it was acknowledged that they would pace the man who was closing in on the barrier, to the extent they could.  There was an atmosphere of potential history making in the air, and three thousand people , and media, showed up to for the mile event to see if the supposed insurmountable barrier could be broken by an Englishman. The wind at times gusting to 25 miles an hour threatened the attempt, but almost on cue it died down at race time and the challenge was on.  By the completion of the third lap, the pacers had positioned Bannister to have a chance, but it would take a sub sixty-second lap to do it, and it would have to be all Roger.  With just under 300 yards to go, Bannister began his kick, passing his pacer, and pushed all alone down the final turn and straightaway.

No modern conveniences for the assembled such as clock ticking in tandem with the runner’s efforts were visible, but everyone knew it would be close, and the swelling roars of the crowd pushed Bannister to leave it all on the finish.  Collapsing past the finish line, a video and multiple photos exist that have saved for us both the effort and the drama.  It was ever more dramatic when the official time announcement was delayed some seconds while multiple stop watches confirmed the time…3 minutes 59.4 seconds … and Roger Bannister entered history of those who have been first.

The record would stand barely a month until it was broken, but no matter, a physician who considered physical capability only one part of a life to be maximized to its full potential had done the ‘impossible’ first, and proved this barrier like many others, an obstacle to be overcome.  Which leads to Sir Roger Bannister’s comment that this achievement was for him only the third of a life dedicated to accomplishment.  Having achieved what he had set out to do as a physical being, Roger Bannister dedicated his life to what he saw as further and  greater  accomplishments, becoming a world renowned neurologist and a loving father and grandfather .

I met Sir Roger Bannister briefly in the 1980s when he came to give a lecture on the obscure area of neurology of dysautonomia for which he was considered an expert.  He and the audience were fully aware that as much as he might be able to clarify the complicated subject of dysautonomia, inevitably everyone wanted to ultimately share in his memory of the day when he stood alone as the fastest miler in history and briefly feel what he felt.  For what was probably the ten-thousandth time, Sir Roger relented and let us share, but only after his lecture of what he felt was his life work was completed.

It is an ironic footnote that the death of Sir Roger Bannister, a neurologist, was announced as a consequence of Parkinson’s Disease, a neurologic condition that inevitably steals an individual’s ability to move.  Ramparts People We  Should Know #32 – Roger Bannister will forever be associated with movement, as a gazelle, and a life that celebrated and worked toward sharing that capability with the world.