“See these photographs I’m conserving for not forgetting my past”.

That is what
told me William Rutledge, former commander of the mission Apollo 20 the 24th of
December 2006. He put in front of me his archives and video recordings of his extra-
vehicular activities while exploring extraterrestrial spaceships on the far side of the
Moon.

It is difficult to know when the hearts are full and overflowed, but William Rutledge
had decided to speak. I asked thousand questions and I got millions of answers. I’m
presenting here his story, his mission reports, his pictures and videos made during the
flight and on the surface of the Moon.
The book is uncovering the most fascinating adventure of the twentieth century, a
Russian-American mission for discovering a new civilization on the Earth’s satellite. It
is also covering the memories of the first contacts between humans and extraterrestrials
between 1947 and 1976 and the reasons of the cover-up of these informations during
decades.
“Humanity must override tribes and nations, this mission gave me a new
homeland, the Earth”.
 Apollo 20,
the Unknown Mission

“I knew, like many people born in the sixties, that there was no
Moon mission after Apollo 17”- page 18

Thierry Speth

Translated from the French edition by the author

This book has been published the 24th of December 2016
With the original title: Apollo 20 la mission inconnue.
Copyright 2016 by Thierry Speth
ISBN 978-2-9558915-3-7

No part of this book can be reproduced, stored in a digital system, printed, transmitted or shared in any form,
electronic of mechanical, or vocally registered or by any other means without the written authorization of the author.

This story is a fiction. Some public names appear, but any resemblance with people or situations having existed or
occurred is purely accidental. But, of course, it is possible, to believe it is just a testimony.
Apollo 20, the Unknown Mission

Table des matières

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Presentation

Chapter 2 - Europe

Chapter 3 - The Early Nasa

Chapter 4 - Discoveries and Tragedies

Chapter 5 - The Big Secret

Chapter 6- Reconciliations East- West

Chapter 7 - Sverdlovsk

Chapter 8 - The Disappearance of Apollo 19

Chapter 9 - The Dawn of Apollo 20

Chapter 10 - The Gardens of Gethsemane

Chapter 11- Farewell Earth

Chapter 12 - First Explorations

Chapter 13 - Horrors in the Triangle

Chapter 14. The Russian Discovery

Chapter 15 - Back to Apollo 19

Chapter 16 - In the Silence of the Earth

Chapter 17 – Phaeton Descending

Chapter 18-Resurrections
 Introduction

I met the Commander of the Apollo 20 Mission, William Rutledge, in Rwanda in

2006. He lived in Gisenyi, a town located at the border of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, the ancient Zaire. He had chosen to live in a big house with a red roof
and large windows, with a balcony overlooking Lake Kivu. William had a small
garden with two avocado trees and a banana tree. I rented the House next door. His
house was at the first intersection of the city, near the Nengo soccer field. William
Rutledge was a “umuzungu” in Rwandan terms, a “strange” white, “the one who has
not the right color”.

It was said that a lion was living in his property, but this did not prevent him
from being often visited by students who came for the pleasure to chat, or for
learning French. (V).
William was of average size, eternally dressed in jeans, and had kept despite
his age, a juvenile face. Given his experience, I could well see him with the face
engraved as a leather pant, but he kept a comely face, always smiling, and it was
easy to talk. His home, which was anciently fortified, had a section of the enclosure
collapsed, and we saw him often going out by the ruins of its fence, but never by his
door.
 We met the first the day of my arrival. I was out at night to discover the city
along Lake Kivu, and I didn’t realize that the Sun went down at 6 PM. I ignored that
there was no public lighting, and even, that the night had a black ink sky as dark as a
black hole.

I was looking for my way for fifteen minutes and I was starting to panic. My
legs sank in ruts of water, and I stumbled against obstacles. I could see, high in the
sky, a tiara of red and yellow points sputtering, and I knew it was the top of the
Nyiragongo Volcano across the border.
I could also hear a lot of firing from automatic weapons, but I didn’t realize it
was Congolese soldiers celebrating the election of the new President Kabila. I had
no landmarks aside from the Lake, and even, i had to get used to the dark to
distinguish the reflection of the stars on its surface. Without it, I think I would still be
in the depth of Lake Kivu.

That’s the moment I saw a Toyota Hi-ace stop by me, and it was my neighbor
William Rutledge, who was waving for me to go up for taking me home.

Then, we met several times after, during the many power outages, exchanging
some candles. We were only three Europeans in the city, so the contacts were easy
and quickly done. At first, the conversations have never worn on our professional
occupations. Mr. Rutledge and i, had this common point to love Rwanda for the real
human relationships, totally detached from the artificial professional colorings.
 William loved to listen, including my heartbreak stories. It is also Will who
taught me everything about the country. For a while, we only had contacts in the
evening. Only once he asked me for a service. He wanted to know what kind of system
could transfer old videos on a computer.

Although I was a senior photographer, I had little knowledge about video, at

the most, I had copied old 8 mm video tapes or transcoded secam to pal. His request
was about two-inch tapes, a completely unknown format for me.
I contacted a friend of Strasbourg, who had worked at the Belgian RTL channel
in the 1990s. The two inch was an older format, and only a TV channel in Gabon on
the African Territory was able to do something with two inches videos. I told William
about this, who absented himself from time to time to see his friends in the country.

But a little later, we stumbled inside the subject of this book, though
unintentionally. He had offered to help me with cement as he saw me change the
stairs in the garden. I picked a bunch of cement in a small room, a sort of basement
on the slope of his terrain. In his “bric à brac”, I saw a huge helmet equipped with
headlights, gloves and especially a kind of suit, white, flat, smashed, blackened on
some parts, trimmed with belts, ties, clips and printed labels. All that was in bad
condition, but I could not hold me to say;
-What is that? A cosmonaut suit?
-Exactly. He replied, and remained silent.
The rest of the conversation was about cement and the visit of my house owner,
but I felt he was pensive for some time.

I don’t know at which moment we became true friends. By telling sorrows, joys,
through periods of silence in conversations, there are moments where the spirits stay
silent, pensive in a kind of communion, about important topics. And touches after
touches, unexpected visits, the hearts fill up and begin to overflow and it creates a
friendship. I guess we had passed this level.

On Christmas Eve 2006, Gisenyi homes were open, and each walked from
House to House to share some company and enjoy a little Mutzig beer made in
Rwanda. It is the tradition to keep the houses open to visitors at Christmas night and
new year. Whether you are a minister or a widow, you open your house these
nights. That evening, I saw William’s home, and its interior seemed to have changed
a little bit.

I paid a little more attention on his wall, showing pictures of him at the age of
twenty, inside a cockpit of a jet plane, and another one, where he was standing with
two other people dressed in a white spacesuit, thumbs up as a sign of victory, and
there was a military officer dressed in a blue short-sleeved shirt, wearing a mission
patch on the shoulder. In the background there was a machine resembling an
airplane fuselage.
 There were other pictures of him in Russia, a kind of official portrait showing
William with the American flag as well as a group photo showing him with the
American President Gerald Ford and president of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet
Union, Leonid Brezhnev. I began to suspect that William Rutledge, the retired
American citizen, had a a little denser and more interesting past than I thought
before.

William chose this Christmas party for putting in front of me, large format
magnetic tapes, marked “Apollo 20-E-V-A”, audio tapes and a lot of photos. I had in
front of me, without realizing it, one part of the archives from the Apollo 20 mission.

He said; “Look at this, I watch them from time to time to remember my

past.” That was the night he revealed me the outline of the mission. I would have
been skeptical as any reader who begins this book, but it’s the spacesuit that I had
seen in the cellar which convinced me. William had winched it, cleaned, stuffed with
paper to render its original volume. The suit wored an embroidery patch mission,
marked “Apollo 20” and three names, including his own. (V)

I began to frown till covering my eyeballs. I knew, like many people born in the
sixties, that there was no Moon mission after Apollo 17. But it’s another thing to be
facing a spacesuit, its smell, its seams, its metal fasteners, its colored connectors, its
labels written in Russian and English, and the helmet.

And there was this great mission patch as big as a cake, which showed a lunar
scenery and a kind of fuselage or submarine.
William went apart and opened a sliding door which gave access to a working
room, whose wall was covered with photos. These were other images that I have
collected to illustrate his story.

Since I was aged of twenty, I had not spent a sleepless night talking (V). I
asked thousand questions and I got millions of answers in word and pictures. There
was subsequently still hours of discussions during my three visits to Rwanda between
2006 and 2011.
The decoding of William’s video tapes has been the hardest part, there was no
synchro anymore, and images tended to scroll vertically, however, sequences were
breathtaking. It took hours to recover the footage frame by frame, an impossible job
for twenty-two hours of recording on the Moon, but a few sequences are present in
this book and others will be added progressively.

I wasn’t in touch with William some time in 2007, a year where William
traveled a lot, and where it was difficult for me to get a visa for Rwanda.

I patiently transcribed his words, but the bulk of the text comes from the
writing of William himself, or from his original documents I translated. Following my
suggestions, William let me introduce a few notes in the text to enlighten the reader
on a few acronyms or shades, difficult to understand and which have been the subject
of debates with him.

At his request I had to change a few names of individuals still alive, having had
less importance in the program. The writing of the book has been made in French
language, it is now thirty-four years that William resides in a eighty percent
francophone country.
The interest of the electronic book version is in the fact that the icon
(V)allows you to have access to a picture, or a video. You can test your configuration
with this video (V), but you need to read the text in the book to appreciate the
significance.
.

Thierry Speth, December the 20th 2016

 Note;

William Rutledge is using a lot of acronyms to designate objects or flight

procedures of the Apollo 20 flight. The LEM or LM designate the lunar module, the
CSM is the service module, the brain, the motor and the crew compartment, which
houses the capsule allowing the trip back to Earth. The DSKY or disky, is the little
onboard computer located in the Apollo capsule and the Lem.
This device does not calculate the flight path, but controls the movements of both
spaceships. William often talks about the departure site, it is Vandenberg California, so
you won’t hear about Houston, which is used for the civil flights.
The ground team corresponding with Apollo 20 is sometimes designated as
“Vandal Decca”, “Apollo Control”, depending on whether it is the night or day crew
which holds the microphone. The Earth talk to Apollo 20 calling “Eridan” for every
communication with the lunar module, or “Twenty” for the communications with the
service module.
 Chapter 1 - Presentation

My name is William Rutledge, I am now more than 70 years old when writing
this book. I know that my testimony will be a surprise, because it helps to lift secrecy
about a piece of history that the United States can be proud of, about a joint initiative
between two enemies who worked together for a fantastic adventure.
Yet this isn’t the simple disclosure of secrets that motivates me. This personal
adventure is the first one where I almost lost my life and this was happening on the
Moon. There is no one to blame, it was a personal choice. It was worth the
adventure. This happened to me several times after, on Earth, and it was not chosen.

During my life I have experienced too difficult things, so I cannot consider the
story of Apollo 20 as an episode really secret in the history of my country, as a State
secret, a kind of disclosure which would likely hurt countries or individuals. In 1976, I
was convinced that it had to be kept secret and i agreed with the arguments of that time,
i will develop them later.

Today I’m thinking differently, because the collapse of the Communist bloc has
changed the rules of the game. The mirage of the frontiers kept humanity inside an
unhealthy illusion, but the opening of the world at the Space Age, and now Internet age,
made us realize that we are all living in the same boat, which appears much smaller than
in the past.

It would be churlish to light a wood fire inside an Apollo capsule, and everybody
understands today that it is churlish to light the nuclear fire or a bacteriological war on
Earth.
This is one of the achievements of the Apollo program for bringing another vision
of the Earth. Apollo 20 is the decisive episode for understanding how happened the first
contacts between humans and extraterrestrials. Missions Apollo 19, Apollo 20 and
Apollo 21 became the Rosetta stones of a puzzle whose pieces are almost already
known, but not their interactions.

There are a lot of dreams about contacting other civilizations. However,

connecting with a non-human race requires an open mind and a very high level of
tolerance. We, humans, must have the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of
opinions or behaviors that one dislikes or disagrees with.
The first contact has already occurred, and like me, you’re already traveling in
outer space, around the Sun, but the Earth is already a space ship, and you are already at
the right place for another contact.

Nothing predisposed me to be apart of the Apollo 20 space flight, because I was

not born in the USA. It is even the case of all the Apollo 20 crew, no one is born on the
territory of the United States. The team was mixed in every sense of the term, Americans
and Russians gave birth to this mission which brought together military scientists and
civilians, with all kinds of skin colors and geographical origin.
Without wishing to reveal the circumstances of the choice of the crew on this
page, the team consisted of an American born in Europe, a black woman born in Africa
and a Russian who died a decade before the launch. I’ll come back later about this.

I do not like writers who tell you during fifty pages about their youth, the squirrels
they have shot, the first love deceptions, etc… I have let in the text some excerpts from
reports and notes, sometimes written in the present verb structure. I did not change my
notes despite the risk of shocking. There is no ’political correctness .” There are a
bunch of images and videos, because as it is said, a picture is worth a thousand words.
One more thing, I was born in a period where we said “black” and not “Afro
American,” dwarf and not “little size person”, dead and not “barely alive ”. I will speak
without inhibitions about fools and idiots, since there is no honey without vinegar. This
may hurt, it’s my way of expressing myself, as well as in this book I won’t use the
words “Soviet”or"USSR”. It is not forced, I do it instinctively. I’ve heard the Germans
claim that they have been invaded by the nazis. Then, for me, it’s the Russians who were
responsible for their decades of misfortune. This was the subject of much friction with
our Russian colleague before the start of the mission.

Twenty years ago, an ex-military published a book that promised to reveal the
links between extraterrestrial technology and human technological progress. I was
happy to see a former military go to confession before me. Unfortunately this book was
stuffed with platitudes about the lasers and microprocessors, and seasoned with a
chapter that basically said, “I handled the whole case.” There was no technical details
about how things were done, who met who, in which circumstances, no data, etc.
Here, may the reader forgive me, it will be the opposite. Some very technical data
are in the annex, but everything is related in detail, even if can be too precise.

The most incredible, is not that the mission was a first contact, a trip within the
depths of an alien ruin, explorations inside two foreign crashed vessels, autopsies of
several non-human corpses.
No. It is simply that there was a combination of good will at some point during the
East-West tense universe.
Enough ambitions and strength to achieve the impossible in a cold war context.
During this reading, you will have the choice to believe that this is a novel, or
else, you will understand that it is rather a testimony from a lived experience. I will not
resist the temptation to place for you, elements of verification.

Chapter 2 - Europe

I was born in Grimbergen in Belgium, and I didn’t fit a future astronaut

profile. Unless being a son of a U.S. officer on duty in Europe, I was Belgian citizen by
birth and consequently, not even a citizen of the United States. Unlike other astronauts, I
had not killed anyone during the Korea or VietNam war.

But after regular studies in U.K., a scientific degree, as a result of a

disappointment in love, I wanted to continue my career with the Belgian army, which
collaborated with the Anglo-Saxon allies. I witnessed during this post-war period, the
arrival of the new jets. These aircraft were outrageously new. They were not
camouflaged, their bodies were almost chrome and their noise, their speed, their
skyrocketing profiles seemed to usher in a new era and promised singing tomorrows.
 The army seemed a good match. I entered the Royal Technical School of
Saffraenberg. This institution was a mix of top gun and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The sky was crossed all day by the F-84 Thunderjets of the U.S Air Force.

As far as I can remember I have always had an eye on aviation. I’ve always had
an interest for science and technology. As a child, I was the only one to stop and rave in
front of a cutaway model of a car in a garage. As soon as a cardboard box arrived
home, I used it to draw with dials and switches and it became my cockpit.
 At the Saffraenberg School, we had teachers from the U.S. Air Force bringing us
models, jet engines cutaways, and mainly a lot of theory. It was the time of the 3rd
generation of jet aircraft, searching for their final form, where engineers still tore the
Nazi research results to determine if wings had to be right arrow or asymmetric wing.
Very quickly, I could see that I was not interested by the piloting of an aircraft,
flying to the buttocks, this type of flying which shattered the windows of nearby cities
with each pass beyond the sound.

Much of my attention was aroused by blind pilotage, flying in the noble sense of
navigation. The principle of instrument navigation fascinated me. I dreamed of a more
precise navigation than a visual navigation, with gyroscopes or with systems that had to
be developed... The ultimate for me was a long drive from the East to the West Coast,
or the crossing of the Atlantic by a flight scheduled, solved mathematically, invariant,
automatic, fruit of mankind’s intelligence.
At no time did I ever imagine that I would be on a flight between the Earth
and the Moon barely eighteen years later.

At Saffraenberg, we had frequently the visit of a great instructor, coming from a

German base. Robert Lawrence was two years older than me. He aroused the
admiration of all so much he mastered the new jets. During a flight in Germany, he had
saved the life of a pilot by putting the nose of his jet in the exhaust chamber of a
damaged aircraft, he had managed to push it towards the runway at the limits of stall
conditions, allowing his colleague to land without having to eject. The doctor of the
base used to say that a X-ray showed that Lawrence had a supplementary organ in his
rib cage, dedicated to the piloting.

Robert Lawrence was black, it had been a long time since the USAF used the
skills of every pilot without racism, contrary to the civil aviation. He was our master
and my friend. Lawrence encouraged me to bet on the intelligence rather than talent.
“D’you want to be a star or d’you want some money” - he said.

The financial argument was to take in account, the pilots were celebrities,
sure. We rented their skills, their ability to do low altitude flights at full speed. Russian
tanks had to be scared. But these pilots did not have the salary of their pain. New gifted
pilots were arriving each morning and I was not sure to be the best. We didn’t know in
what future we were going to live, or even if we were going to live something, as East-
West tensions were making yoyo.

A good way to anticipate the future was to be qualified, to learn. About this part,
it was helped at Saffraenberg. While finished the 12th grade, I was forced to pass a 9th
degree of draftsman and electrician, we were told that we wouldn’t be good for
anything if we couldn’t read a plan or know how machines are powered.
I got a degree of a mill worker, and there again, they explained to us that we
should know and be able to because the one who knows and who can’t, is not a man. I
spent two years doing my practice on the F-84 Thunderjets, a plane that was quickly
outdated, but brilliant, chromed, shiny, attaching because its conception was
simple. Fortunately there was a pattern of satisfaction, because it was humiliating for a
graduate to pass degrees three years below my level of entry in this school.

This way to learn was an oddity due to the mix of the Belgian Royal School
tradition and Anglo-Saxon traditions.
Fortunately for me, it was one of the priorities of the U.S. Air Force to work on
an instrument flying. During the Korea war, many pilots were lost in the Sea of China
during night flights. They couldn’t find their aircraft carrier as soon as there was a bit of
radio interference. At the speed they were flying, pilots lost their way in a very short
time, consumed all their fuel and made a dive before dying of hypothermia.

An experimental flight New York-Los Angeles had taken military passengers in a

straight flight from one point to another, on a flight entirely driven by gyroscopes. It was
a performance, but what to do in case of a deviation caused by a weather anomaly, what
margin of safety on a no linear flight?
My end of study project was therefore a flight with several stop-overs, several
direction changes with unknown circumstances, and altitude changes . All had to be
uncontrolled by a human being. I found an intellectual satisfaction, but the U.S. Air
Force reminded me that the objective was the delivery of one or more nuclear warheads
within the enemy territory.

I was therefore requested to work on an airplane project that would have a mock
nuclear warhead, and who had to flight along the borders between our allied territories
and our favorite enemies. No matter it was this or that side of the border, it had to be
freaky.

So I had the right to modify an airplane, risking the lives of two observers (they
don’t me banned from risking my life) and all that with means that seemed unlimited,
gyroscopes of basketballs size, step-motors, and the mock atomic bomb made of wood.
Regarding the plane used, my choice was the old Martin Cambera B57. It was
originally a war plane designed for three people, but it had taken so long to develop that
it was partially obsolete for combat flights. It was, however, a good experimental
aircraft and observation, it was used for the photo-reconnaissance and exploration of
the oceans.
Not knowing the details of the experience of Los Angeles, I set myself the goal to
go much further than what I imagined of it . I tortured myself to make this aircraft an
“intelligent” vehicle able to improvise, to take decisions of correction to accomplish its
mission.
Yet, there was no portable on-board computer existing at this time or even
programing language. So I used mechanical programmers of washing machines that
triggered every minute the gyroscope measurement devices, weighing the mercury left in
the wings. If the mercury flowed in a mercury relay, it was making an electrical contact
and the aircraft transferred fuel from the left wing to the right, recovering more easily,
or triggering new altitude measures.

Between the accelerometers, gyroscopes and my washing machine motors, the

power to guide the plane was constantly transferred between several devices. The logic
of the experience was the type “if altitude lost then apply such tension
during...” “Otherwise... and from this time to that time do this.” Unknowingly, it was
computerized, logical, not digital language, but this kind of task was going to be
translated, a little later, into programming language when I’ll work on the Gemini
spacecraft program at NASA.

The day of the experience, I had two observers who were, so called,
“volunteers”. Maybe it is because they had seen my head of young guy barely out of
adolescence, or because they knew that there was twenty-four programmers of washing
machines for piloting, they showed the same head as Union soldiers receiving general
Sherman’s orders.
The flight eventually went well. One bad move was my dog which had attempted
to prevent the takeoff. I had a dog, an Afghan Hound who had a depressive head. I
called him “Bonanza” so much he resembled the actor Lorne Green. My dog seemed to
speak English, because instead of barking he said yeaah yeaah. Another peculiarity, he
reacted in advance when we were about to receive a radio communication, as if was
able to pick up radio broadcasts. In our time he would have been qualified as “radio
sensitive”.

No reader could believe what happened next, but that day, my dog stopped on the
runway and prevented the plane from moving. The flight controller took the microphone
and said;
“Dog on the runway you are clearance to make a route heading 270” and the
dog ran off the runway. The story had made the tour of the base and from that moment,
Bonanza had food on every table of the military camp.
During the flight, altitude changes had altered the aircraft heading, but the
interaction of systems had overtaken problems at four times. Basically each device had
danced at the same rate as the group.

My experience had won a good review, as the following week, a pilot of the U.S.
Air Force wearing the same mock wooden atomic bomb, had fallen asleep during his
flight. He had awakened inside the Russian Territory with his wooden atomic bomb. He
had turned back without being intercepted or even spotted, it was a good demonstration
about the Russian danger which was constantly put in our ears.
I was so busy with my toys that I hadn’t given too much attention to a Russian fact
. The Russia had launch a satellite, a circumferential flight object, a gear which was in
orbit. It was a perpetual flight that needed no more energy to continue its trip and this
projectile was hanging over our heads until the day of the Saint Marmaduke.

Someone was in a position to drop bombs on our heads, as easily as a child

throwing stones from the top of a bridge. The president of the USA himself found this
analogy.
Immediately, the American war machine was starting-up and had given birth to
the NASA. Nevertheless it was a civil administration in charge of space. For my part,
the Russians had achieved a ballistic feat, because this shot had no accurate heading,
and anybody launched at the correct speed could stay indefinitely, balanced between a
gravity that pulled him to the ground and a high speed that pushed him towards the
infinity of outer space.
Like everyone else, I had observed this Sputnik with binoculars. I had also
listened to the characteristic beep on a radio that I had cobbled so it could listen to it on
the forty-megahertz frequency. I must admit that hearing a sound coming from space,
though the spitting interferences had made me a little dizzy. Maybe my work on the
navigation project had absorbed me too much, but I didn’t realize that a form of spatial
or interplanetary navigation could exist.
 Chapter 3 - The Early Nasa

At the same time, I got a scholarship and a mutation in a U.S. Air Force school.
My arrival on American Territory was a novelty. I discovered that the Americans had
absolutely no geography notions. During the 50s, the USA seemed to be a bread crouton
bathed in a foreign soup. Knowing that I came from Belgium, some people were
balancing me acidic words about Europe, which demonstrated that the Americans were
confusing Belgium with Brazil.
I was naïve and I thought first it was a kind of test to see what quantity of bullshit I
was able to handle.

The legend tells us that the American space program was decided the day after
the Kennedy’s speech in 1962. Nothing is more false.
Being a young specialist of navigation, I was dedicated to a probe navigation
program which had to provide suborbital flights above Russia. I was given the files of
an older program entitled “WordPath”. It was a declination of the IGY project, a kind of
international goodwill coordination to make fly a satellite. Unfortunately, it was a
concentration of dullness, and the only real merit of this program had been to point the
importance of the Russian Youri Kondratyuk.

We were in 1960, and during the preparations for my arrival, a crucial episode in
the history of the United States was played. This episode I knew nothing about, had to
change my assignment after my arrival in the United States.

The U-2 incident occurred on May the 1st, 1960. An American spy plane was
shot above the Russia during a mission, it had crashed in the Urals near the town of
Sverdlovsk after fourteen shots of missiles.
US intelligence services believed that the Russians had an intense research
activity in this unfamiliar city. Sverdlovsk was known in theory for an activity in iron
industry. Space was partially the responsibility of Moscow and Kiev in Ukraine.
 In fact, as was to discover by the Apollo 20 crew, it was the Mecca of Space
design and technology, and a place with a lot of unlimited resources. The need to have a
monitoring system on Russia had pushed the United States to engage in the space race.

In 1961, America already had a new president, an elegant guy with a nasal Boston
accent, married to a beautiful plant, a brunette who had spent some long time in the
Parisian nights.
On 12 September 1962, he gave as a goal the nation to take a man on the Moon
before the end of the 1960s.
“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and
do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because
that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. “
This goal was accompanied by a massive influx of public money inside the
private industry. One hundred billion $ would be distributed for building the space
components, systems, pay men and qualify them. A true plan worthy of a Communist
system, to save a declining industry.
We must recognize that the past 10 years, U.S. industry was failing. All the
business investment was devoted to marketing, and nothing for research. Even American
toys for children, stamped in tin metal sheets, did not sell well so dangerous they were
with their cutting edges. The photographic industry was dead, Wollensack, Graflex,
formerly competitive firms, couldn’t produce anything in this space race.
With the space program, small companies would turn into monsters, and others
would rise from nowhere.

Nowhere, this was the place we were. And that president wanted to get results
the next week. NASA had to estimate the amount of brains to be recruited on this or that
part of the program. And I was one of the brains deported on the space program. Not
that I was likely to solve complicated problems. I had not yet serious projects to
solve. The really experienced brains remained affected on ongoing serious projects
such as the F15, F14 or SR 71 blackbird, all of these fabulous birds that would make the
covers of the selection of the readers digest issues during the early 70s.

Upon my arrival to the NASA, I had the surprise to find an old friend of
Saffraenberg. Robert Lawrence, the brilliant instructor had volunteered for the military
part of the Gemini flights, the Manned Orbital Laboratory. He also led the test flights of
X15 machines and prototypes of the future space shuttle, what we called “lifting
bodies”. Robert had a magnificent wife who collected cuddly owl toys, and a son who
adored dolphins. It is Robert who widely contributed socializing the single I was.
Although he was discreet about USAF the projects, I knew that he aimed at the future
space shuttle program which was a continuity of the X-15 program. I was happy being
able to work on the space program. With a few chances I was going to have little
advance on him by working on one of the NASA programs.

The space program was divided as follows:

First the Mercury program was going to be used to set foot in the water and see which
temperature it was. You can believe I’m simplifying, but we even didn’t know if it was
possible to stay alive in space.
How to swallow a glass of water while the absence of gravity will not bring the
water down in the stomach? Won’t water prefer to stick into respiratory ducts, or get
into the lungs at the first breath?
Cosmic radiations, the behavior of materials in new and extreme conditions, it
was the purpose of the Mercury program. The next program, Gemini, was the space
school. Mission after mission, we were going far, space rendez vous, docking, long
duration flights, external activity in outer space...
It was so new that we had to recognize we were all incompetent. Nasa has been
the most flexible of all employers, because he was recruiting 100% incompetent people
in space flight. We were starting from zero.
Nobody was trained to spaceflight or interplanetary navigation. It was the first
example of industrial history, of incompetent minds concentrated in one place, with
unlimited resources. We had to train us by experience, and experience means a
succession of failures.

You probably think I’m exaggerating. We had to get the Moon, but NASA had in
everything and for everything, old used Nazi rockets, and had succeeded by placing a
camera in high altitude, that was dropped by parachute to show us a blurry photo.
This operation was madness. The deadlines were short, non-existent specialists,
we had to get a reputation. Besides, it was expected from us exploits worthy of novel’s
astronauts. We had to forge supermen in brilliant combinations braving all the dangers,
and operational machinery able to do the jobs in all kinds of environments.

We were so poor that our first instinct was to watch all sci-fi movies dealing with
space flight, since Jules Verne until “the conquest of space”.
Modern movies were worse than anything. The devices were badly blasted,
rocket pilots looked instinctively to a rear-view mirror outside, as if they were riding a
car, chatting techno blah-blah made of “magnetic fields” and “sector B”.

The “from the Earth to the Moon” by Jules Verne was completely
illusory. Nobody could shoot for the moon with a gun, nor targeting to shoot a ballistic
projectile. This film, however, had the merit of pointing clearly that we had to shoot a
device where the Moon was going to be, a few days after the shot, because the Moon
revolves around the Earth rather quickly. Therefore, aiming at a fictitious point in space
to be on a date, that was my job, I began to see my role into this story.

Gemini would be the first really piloted space flight, the program of all exploits,
flight with two astronauts, space walk, rendez vous, and docking, orbit changes and it
was my first assignment.
My automatic stuff based on gyroscopes had to be forgotten, I now had to find a
way to work with computers, ships and astronauts, and I was supposed to work on a
true flight of Gemini.

Seven people had been selected for the Mercury program. All of them were pretty
nice people, but when working as a group, they were real dogs.
They were competitors on the hunt for the first place and had oversized egos. All
were good, but some were not too labor-intensive, they preferred to stay on their
“gifts.” How would these people here can fly in pairs?
 Yet, there were two bad guys who had an amused look on the project. Shira and
Grissom. Walter Shira was not only a great guy, he reasoned as a team, but also, had a
higher perception of the program. Although he considered the program seriously, he
would never have made a bad move for getting the first place and he would be able to
abandon the entire program for his family or for principles he judged more important
than the program.
Shira had been originally, very discreetly, at the origin of a shared position for the
defense of the astronauts in the program.

Grissom was also different from the other astronauts. Acrobatics or aviation
exploits tired him for a long time and he was interested by was the interplanetary
Navigator label.I was not on the Mercury program, because I was already working on
the navigation system of the future Gemini program. But I was often in the MAC Hall.
MAC was Mac-Donnel Aircraft Corporation.
Early in the program, the work room was adorned with a model of the Mercury
capsule, made of cardboard layers, with perforations full of wire to tighten the
assembly. It was necessary to do so, to be able to construct and quickly modify a
project, over the versions of the design. It looked like a spaceship coming out of a
sewing workshop.

My washing machine motors stuff was known for two years and the principle was
already well understood. Mercury engineers had formalized the flight plan on a
principle of rotating drums alignment, operating contactors during key moments of the
flight, all with parallel devices, ensuring security to compensate error margins. I
attended the tests of their devices.
These machines had contactors based on pieces of linoleum glued on rotary
drums. Little pieces of floor coverings were used for the settings. It was easy to take off
the pieces of linoleum and stick together somewhere else, for the tests and rehearsals.
At the end, the pieces were put on transparent paper, then redrawn by hand, by a
development plan and put on blueprints. It was the opposite approach to the normal
process. First, we were building something and we planned the whole thing after that.

Such was the State of unrest prevailing on the space program, we worked
constantly in haste. It was so off-convention, that we were considering the astronauts as
future cadavers. No insurance company wanted to ensure the astronauts on life.
I could understand that we chosed a constructor because he announced the lowest
price . I could understand that space was something new, but assemble a capsule first
and make a plan after... It was weird.

Only MAC representatives said that they had already worked like this. Before the
Second World War, the DC3, a large lumbering aircraft, was designed this way. It was
not reassuring nor convincing.
A DC3 could be tested from morning to evening and be changed the same day. Here, a
rocket could be launched once every two months. We had the outer space with all its
traps, and human beings well warm and full of water able to lose abruptly their vital
fluids and being instantly frozen.

James Mc Donnell had come to see us in late 1960 after the launch of Sputnik,
long before Kennedy made his speech. He had stated us that the human flight around the
Earth “was in the corner of the House” and we had to do a round trip to the
Moon “probably towards the year 2010.” The specialist manufacturer of capsule now
had to hurry to finish the job forty years earlier than expected...

The Mercury program astronauts had gone from disappointment to

disappointment. There was a big gap between the image of good health given to the
media, and the reality.
The capsule was not really controllable. It had a command for front and rear
motion, a control of rotation and interruption, but most of the flight was by
preprogramed as with a miniaturized rotating drum engine. When the button was
pressed, it was not possible to go back or to change anything. It was the automatic
stabilization and control system, ASCS.
 Grissom called the capsule his “backpack” to wear. He could sit on the hatch with
the feet out, catch the straps and pull a hang on to find himself wedged in the seat.
For Shira, flying the capsule was “space farting”. In the Earth’s atmosphere, the
engines were a little noisy, but we were far from suspecting their real effectiveness in
space.
It is true that the tiny engines were placed in the nose of the machine, away from
the center of gravity. Mechanically speaking, it’s like trying to park a car by grabbing
the front bumper.
Shira and Grissom had also tinkered with a project of patch mission, showing a
guy with a backpack capsule, spreading buttocks and powering with a fart, all this on a
starry background.
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