To the Moon and Back

By Jackie French and Bryan Sullivan

NEW REVISED EDITION TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST MOON LANDING

Who were the Honeysuckle Creek mob? And how did they assist the first moon landing?

When man took the first step on the moon it was a bunch of Australian technicians who tracked the spacecraft and sent the first television pictures to the world. No, not at Parkes - the movie 'The Dish' got it wrong. They were from Honeysuckle Creek in the ACT.

This is their story, told by Bryan Sullivan, one of the technicians on duty at the time, and his wife, children's author Jackie French. And to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing, Bryan and Jackie have revisited this book to reflect on the enormous strides that technology has made since this book was first published in 2004.

Winner of the 2005 CBC Eve Pownall Award for Information Books in 2005, To the Moon and Back includes information about the space program and the birth of the internet, as well as supplying the answers to questions such as: How do you go to the toilet in a spacecraft? Have the astronauts ever seen an alien? What made the moon? Can I have a holiday in space?


PRAISE

'... fascinating insights into the part that the Australians played in getting the astronauts to the moon and back.' -- Bestselling author, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780730491323

Jackie French

Jackie French was born in Sydney in 1953, grew up in Brisbane, graduated from the University of Queensland and moved to her present home in NSW bush land in her mid twenties. Over the past 10 years she has published over a hundred books on diverse subjects ranging from children’s fiction to pest control!

Book preview

A Note From Dr Karl . . .

In 1969 I was 21 years old, and working as a physicist at the steelworks near Wollongong. I had been reading one science fiction story every day since I was about 14, so of course I was a great fan of the space program.

On 21 July 1969, I walked out of the central laboratories and crossed the bridge to the cafeteria on the other side of the six-lane highway that ran through the steelworks. My timing was perfect. I saw Armstrong jump down onto the surface of the Moon, and then both Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the Moon.

A few more decades would pass before I discovered how complicated each Saturn V rocket was, and how close to disaster each Apollo mission came. At that time, only constant on-the-run fixes got the astronauts to the Moon and back.

For example, the switch that controlled the rocket motor that would blast the Apollo 11 landing craft, Eagle, back into orbit was broken by the support backpack on one of the astronaut’s spacesuits. The internal workings of the switch were perfectly fine, but the toggle (the bit that you flicked up or down) was broken. The switch wouldn’t work, even when they shoved the broken toggle into the hole. It had been decided that the astronauts carry no general tools on board the Eagle in order to save weight.

The solution to their dilemma was brilliant.

The astronauts had ballpoint pens — specially made to work in zero gravity — known as Fisher Space Pens. The cartridge inside the pen was filled with dry nitrogen gas (at 4 atmospheres of pressure) that pushed coloured glue, not ink, past the ball out of the nozzle and onto the page. The astronauts unscrewed the Fisher Space Pen and inserted the cartridge into the hole where the toggle used to be.

The replacement switch worked perfectly, and the astronauts were able to take off from the surface of the Moon.

This book gives fascinating insights into the part Australian technicians played in getting the astronauts to the Moon and back. I wish a book like this had been available during the time of the Moon landings, so that I had a better understanding and appreciation of what went on.

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki

A Note to This Edition

Fifteen years ago, my wife Jackie and I wrote this book to explain the (mostly) ignored but vital role that Australia had played in humanity’s journey to the Moon. Back then, it seemed as if our dreams of journeying, not just to the Moon but beyond, had been lost when Apollo 18 remained on the ground and the Apollo program was brought abruptly to an end, leaving only footprints, some rubbish and flags upon the Moon.

No human foot has touched the Moon’s surface since Apollo 17. Our new ‘space age’ is primarily commercial, not soaring upwards for knowledge or just to say ‘we were there’. Yet, the daily fabric of our lives has been forever changed by the unintentional advances made during those heady days of invention and adventure.

Now in 2019, it is 50 years since that first footprint was left in the moon dust. Those 50 years have gone so quickly, and have brought so much. But at last, Japan, the United States and private companies plan to take people to the Moon: to study, to experiment, to be tourists or miners, or even to create a base from which we may send out ships into the vast darkness beyond our world.

Apollo 11 began as a dream. Maybe these new plans will remain only words. But just like when, as a young man, I watched the Moon and thought, I am helping to send humanity there, and back again, tonight, as an old man, I will watch the Moon and think, Hello, old friend. Perhaps soon you and Earth’s family of nations will meet again.

Bryan Sullivan, 2019

INTRODUCTION

The Emu in the Sky

True stories have many beginnings.

Perhaps the story of Honeysuckle Creek and of man’s journey to the Moon began more than 40,000 years ago, when the people of the Ngunnawal and other Indigenous nations who lived and visited near what would one day be called Honeysuckle Creek gazed up each night between the hills at the Emu in the Sky.

When we look up at the night sky we see lines of stars dotted across the blackness. The stars form shapes — Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross. But the shape of the Emu in the Sky is formed from the dark spaces of the Milky Way, not from the stars. Its head is near the Southern Cross, its body stretches across Scorpio and, in winter, its legs reach to the horizon.

You can only see the Emu if you are far away from man-made light — in towns there are too many bright lights to see most of the stars, so the dark shapes between them are lost as well.

When the Indigenous space watchers saw the Emu in the Sky with its legs folded up under its body (or in our terms, the densest part of the Milky Way was rising), they knew that they would have lots of eggs to eat because male emus on Earth would then be sitting on their eggs.

Even today you can see Aboriginal rock-art emus near Honeysuckle Creek in the shape of the Emu in the Sky.

And still every month the full Moon rises, round and golden, above the tiny creek among the trees — where there was once a space tracking station that followed the journey of the men who travelled to the Moon.

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HOW WAS THE MOON FORMED?

The asteroid collision that helped wipe out the dinosaurs was only a hiccup compared to the collision that made the Moon 4.5 billion years ago! Earth was still molten then. In fact it wasn’t really Earth as we know it today, but a ‘proto-Earth’ — a planet only half the mass it is now. However it was rapidly getting bigger as it gobbled up rubble that had condensed from the dust cloud swirling around the young Sun.

A rival planet was also orbiting the Sun dangerously close to our ‘proto-Earth’. This giant blob was about one-third the size of Earth. Both were hot, turbulent places with molten rock mantles wrapped around ferocious dense cores of liquid iron.

One day the two planets collided, spewing enough dust, rock and vapour into orbit to form a broad ring about 12,000 kilometres above Earth. The Moon was formed from the outer edge of the ring of dust and rock while the inner part of the ring fell back to Earth. The new ‘Moon’ then slowly swung further out into orbit about 380,000 kilometres from Earth — which is where it is now.

How do we know? Why couldn’t the Moon have been formed from giant swirls of matter spat out by a madly turning early Earth?

The answer is iron. When the two giant bodies collided their heavy molten iron cores melted together, while part of the rocky outer parts splashed out to make the Moon. So now 30 per cent of Earth is iron, but iron only makes up 2 per cent of the Moon. If the Moon had been made from the same material as the whole Earth, it would have a similar percentage of iron and other matter.

It all probably happened very fast — a few hours for the two planets to collide, a few weeks for the present Earth to form from what had been two mini planets, with a ‘young Moon’ orbiting about 20,000 kilometres away.

That ‘ancient Earth’ was still much smaller than our Earth is now. It took about 50 million years of more asteroid and meteor collisions to make Earth and the Moon the actual sizes they are now. The close presence of the Moon and its gravity gradually slowed down the madly spinning Earth giving us the comfortable 24-hour day we now have.

Most other planets have moons that are tiny compared to ours — our Moon is about one-quarter the size of Earth. Having a big moon close by stops Earth from wobbling around too much on its axis — giving us regular seasons with no wild climate swings.

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CHAPTER 1

The Space Race

There was another beginning, of course — in 1961 — when the young American President, John F. Kennedy, promised that the United States would land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade.

Human beings had already gone to the Moon, but only in our imaginations. We had been gazing at it, wondering what was there, studying it ever since Galileo’s first modern telescope could show us those strange markings were craters.

Science fiction stories and comic strips had talked of colonising the Moon for decades. But even though German scientists had created rockets that might be able to fly above Earth’s atmosphere during World War II — and the same scientists were now working for the United States or the Soviet Union — by the 1960s most scientists and technicians thought that a journey to the Moon was still decades away — if it was possible at all. How could a human being possibly survive the cold, the vacuum of space, and the massive forces needed to lift a spacecraft off this planet? Those were the days of the Space Race — the competition between the United States and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) to dominate space for world supremacy and power. But there was more to it than that. Behind the vast amounts of money poured into the Space Race by the two superpowers there lay dreams and ideals.

President Kennedy was a young man of energy and vision, and he had a young man’s dream. He and other young scientists, technicians and dreamers of the time weren’t intimidated by the thought that what they were attempting had never been done before.

There was no direct tactical advantage in being the first man to walk on the Moon, and collecting moon rocks and discovering how and why they were so different from those on Earth would not help you build bombs to kill people of other nations.

The 1960s was a time of incredible idealism. It was a generation where young people wore flowers in their hair and dreamt of a world of peace and love. Scientists imagined a world where technology would solve all the world’s problems and robots would serve us breakfast before we jumped on a hovercraft to get to work. It seemed as though human beings could invent anything. It was the Russians who put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit in 1957. This provoked the then United States President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, into forming the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

At that stage the American space budget was still limited, and their first three attempts at launching a rocket into space had disastrous results. The first rocket exploded just after launch in a searing fireball.

The second one failed to reach the speed required to escape Earth’s gravity, so it burnt up as it fell back to Earth. On the third attempt the booster rocket failed, which spun the rocket back to Earth.

Meanwhile, the Russian spaceship Mechta (Luna 1 as it was also known) was the first man-made object to break away from Earth’s gravity. It was followed by an unmanned Russian spacecraft that actually crashed on the Moon, and yet another that orbited the Moon taking photos of its far side — the side that is always turned away from Earth.

It wasn’t long before the Russians also sent the first man into space — Yuri Gagarin.

The Americans — and the newly elected President Kennedy — were under pressure to catch up and do something spectacular to show the world that they weren’t going to be left behind. On 25 May 1961, President Kennedy announced: ‘I believe that 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 Earth.’

This was the birth of the Apollo project, named after Apollo, the ancient Greek god of the Moon, as well as of Learning, Science and Youth.

Yes, President Kennedy wanted to beat the Russians. Yes, the space program that finally took a man to the Moon was based on war technology — and part of a war-like build-up. But it was not just about beating the Russians. (Later President Kennedy would suggest to the Russians that the two nations collaborate in space research and exploration — a mission on behalf of all peoples of the world.)

It was an expression of humanity’s passion to understand the universe — and to travel further and further into outer space. At the beginning of the 1960s, however, it still looked like an impossible dream.

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THE GERMAN ROCKETS OF WORLD WAR II

The rocket engineering that finally took astronauts to the Moon probably began with the German V2 rockets of World War II. These giant, long-range missiles ran on liquid fuel and were designed to fly long distances before they fell to the cities below and destroyed, on impact, all things around them. The rockets were the brainchild of Wernher von Braun and his team. At the end of the war von Braun and other German engineers emigrated to the United States, while others went to work in the Soviet Union.

Although the German rockets were made to destroy English cities, von Braun and his team dreamt of using their rocket designs to build spacecraft for space exploration, not war. Now others were following this dream too.

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CHAPTER 2

The First Man in Space

Yuri Gagarin looked like a hero should — he was intelligent, fit, and had a smile that lit up a room. He grew up in Russia during World War II, hiding in a bunker from German soldiers in the farming village where his father was a carpenter and his mother a dairy maid.

After the war Gagarin became a pilot in the air force, and when Russia launched the first spacecraft, Sputnik, into outer space he dreamt of being the first man to travel beyond Earth. He applied for space-flight training and was accepted.

Like other would-be astronauts Yuri had to go through extraordinary training. He was placed in low pressure chambers (to test his endurance at high altitude), exposed to searing heat and freezing cold, subjected to deafening noises, and whirled around at incredibly high speeds.

The Russian scientists did not know what