Engineers of massive rocket engines fueled Apollo’s success

Los Angeles Times

It wasn’t a young president’s brash promise that enabled Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to take those first halting steps on the lunar surface 40 years ago Monday. Nor was it the courage of the astronauts themselves.

The success of America’s big bet in space depended on the ability of young, unheralded engineers to build rocket engines that were both powerful enough and reliable enough to wrench the spacecraft from Earth’s jealous grasp and send it winging to the lunar surface.

The result of their work was the mammoth Saturn V, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle of its time. It was as tall as a 40-story building, with engines that gulped swimming pools worth of fuel every second. Producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, Saturn V was so powerful that during a test at Cape Canaveral, Fla., it rained ceiling tiles on the head of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, watching from four miles away.

“What set us apart was our ability to build a very big rocket to get us to the moon,” said Roger Launius, the Smithsonian Institution’s space historian, reflecting on the race with the then-Soviet Union to reach the moon first. “The Russians were never able to do that.”

Southern California was at the center of this huge technological leap. The rocket that would get us to the moon was composed of three parts, or stages. North American Aviation in Seal Beach, a coastal community south of Los Angeles, built the second stage — plus the astronauts’ command module, scaling up its Downey plant southeast of downtown LA to 25,000 employees to do so. Douglas Aircraft in Huntington Beach, near Seal Beach, made the third stage.

The massive engines that would power each of the stages were the responsibility of Rocketdyne in the San Fernando Valley, then a division of North American and now managed by Pratt & Whitney. As NASA management fretted that precious time was ticking away, Rocketdyne’s engineers battled combustion problems and a dangerously faulty start-up sequence on the first-stage engines, and the failure of two second-stage engines in a key test less than a year before Apollo 11’s scheduled launch.

Those engineers were every bit the typical postwar working stiffs.

“Everybody was young,” said Joe Stangeland, a structural specialist who worked on the first-stage F-1 engine. “Anyone over 30 was a veteran. I owned a $13,000 house and spent 16 hours a day working.”

Today, those engineers are part of a vanishing generation, the junior members in their 70s.

Stangeland, 73, and two other Rocketdyne vets who played key roles in the development of the Saturn V — Bob Biggs, who worked on the F-1, and Paul Coffman, assigned to the second-stage J-2 engine — said the moon race was both thrilling and exhausting.