In fact, there wasn’t much the crew could do. The vapor cloud had cleared, but the problem had not. The minimum safe distance from a loaded Saturn V was three and a half miles.Īs the crew approached the launch pad, Coester watched them on the Firing Room screen, headset on and ready to coach them. It was a dangerous mission even an incompletely fueled rocket is like a bomb. Launch Control decided to send a red crew-three technicians and a safety person-to the launch pad to fix the leak. All eyes were on Coester and his crew to find a solution. Despite the paused countdown clock, NASA hadn’t aborted the mission. With Coester’s team huddled, the astronauts sat suited up in the transfer van that would drive them to the launch pad. We have a leak in a valve located in a system associated with replenishing liquid hydrogen for the third stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle.” Source: NASA We have discovered a problem at the launch pad itself as the crew is about to arrive. As the prime crew for Apollo 11, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Aldrin, are on the terminal part of their trip to the launch pad in the transfer van, it’s now making the curve toward pad. Transcript: NASA Apollo Saturn Launch Control: “This is Apollo Saturn Launch Control T minus 2 hours, 45 minutes, 55 seconds and counting. We stopped the flow, and we said, ‘Okay, what can we do to fix this thing?’” I didn’t really worry about any of the political or geopolitical problems of it,” Coester says. The worst that could happen, he reasoned, was that they’d scrub the launch. Now Coester and his colleagues would have to override that programming, fix the leak, and manually finish fuelling the rocket from their consoles.Ī lot was riding on the launch-for NASA for the country’s sense of national pride and for Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin scheduled to blast into space atop 260,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen fuel. “One of the big IBM mainframes that took up a whole room,” as Coester describes it, the machine had been preprogrammed with the propellant loading sequence. Up until then, the NASA computer had been running the show. That personal setback was nothing compared to a hydrogen gas leak waiting to blow. Not one to let a dramatic turn shake his resolve, Coester had sent his resume to Boeing, where he soon became a contractor on Project Apollo. Naval Academy, but the onset of a serious heart condition had cut short his naval career as an engineering officer for the Civil Engineer Corps. He’d graduated six years earlier from the U.S. Stephen Coester, pictured second from right.ĭespite his youth, Coester was already accustomed to remaining calm in the face of setbacks. But even with so much on the line, he kept a clear head. Standing at his console in a starched white shirt and tie, Coester still looked like an eager kid at 28. This was the mission that would take Americans to the moon.Įngineer Stephen Coester was in charge of the hydrogen propellant loading team-and that leaking valve. In less than two hours, three astronauts were supposed to climb into the rocket. Three and a half miles away in NASA’s launch control center, the team at the consoles in Firing Room One watched the closed-circuit TV footage as the vapor cloud grew. The Saturn V rocket was being filled with fuel when a leak detector went off.Ī white vapor cloud suddenly billowed around the rocket perched on the Cape Canaveral launch pad. on July 16, 1969-four and a half hours until the scheduled launch of Apollo 11-NASA encountered a problem. Sara Cerruti Senior Director of Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax.Įditor’s note: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 launch, Field Service Digital interviewed former NASA engineer Stephen Coester, who directed a crucial repair mission hours before the launch that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon.Īt roughly 2:30 a.m.
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