MOON LANDING This East Bay man helped Apollo 11 crew return home
GE engineer designed parachutes that let space capsule splash down safely
PLEASANTON >> After the Apollo 11 crew took a giant leap for mankind by landing on the moon 50 years ago, Mac Smith anxiously watched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins descend through Earth’s atmosphere toward the Pacific Ocean.
It wasn’t until splashdown — four days after the Eagle made its historic landing on July 20, 1969, on the moon’s Tranquility Bay — that Smith felt both jubilation and relief. The parachute he helped design had successfully unfurled and safely landed the astronauts’ capsule in waters 900 miles southwest of Hawaii.
A few years later at an aeronautical conference, he would finally meet Armstrong, “an occasion that you al
“All of this was done with unbelievable precision and knowing that these things had never been done before.”
ways remember,” Smith said in a recent interview in his home at the Stoneridge Creek senior living community in Pleasanton.
As fate would have it, Smith isn’t the only person at Stoneridge Creek who was involved in the Apollo 11 mission.
According to Stoneridge Creek, residents Richard and Caye Johnson both worked in the quarantine facility at NASA/Johnson Space Center. Another resident, Stanley Sun, did some research for the mission as a graduate student. Then there’s Han Moi, who did thermal analysis for the lunar lander module but to this day can’t disclose anything more about that work because it’s still top-secret. Stoneridge Creek is putting together a display of artifacts, photos, magazine articles and research papers collected by the residents.
Smith, 88, recalls all the fanfare that surrounded the astronauts back in those Cold War days when President John F. Kennedy declared that the space race with Russia was officially on. Astronauts, especially those who took the epic first flight to the moon, were America’s heroes.
Asked how he got involved with the Apollo 11 mission, Smith said, “It’s almost a classic example of being at the right place at the right time.”
He was hired in 1956 by General Electric in Philadelphia, then the headquarters for the company’s missile and space division. GE at the time had contracts with the U.S. Air Force to develop the front end for reentry vehicles on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Smith’s job in experimental aerodynamics was to gather data and test what happens to capsules that reenter the atmosphere.
From those experiments, Smith and his team designed the Apollo 11’s parachute. He said the big challenge was designing it to properly deploy at the right time, explaining that when a capsule hurtles back down from space it creates a wake of shock waves upon hitting the atmosphere about 100,000 feet above Earth. The wake double backs to the rear of the capsule, creating such a force that parachutes kept failing to deploy.
“This turned out to be a very significant finding,” Smith said about the socalled reverse wake flow. “We never knew that before those days.”
That discovery was made when Smith worked on Project Corona, a program so highly classified that his wife of 64 years, Mary Lou, said she wasn’t allowed to know his whereabouts at certain times during that period. During the Cold War, Project Corona created spy satellites for the Air Force and CIA that took pictures over forbidden areas of Eastern Europe and Asia, according to the CIA website.
GE got a contract with NASA to develop the front end of the command module where astronauts sat. It was the first time three people would be going up to space in a heavy vehicle.
“Coming back was rather a sporting proposition because we were going to reenter directly into the Earth’s atmosphere,” Smith said.
Could a parachute be designed to deploy and slow the capsule from supersonic speed all the way down to 20 to 30 mph by the time it landed in water so the astronauts could survive?
“Yes, is the answer. We did,” Smith said.
Because NASA feared they might sink before being retrieved by ships, the agency initially wanted its capsules to land on the ground, Smith said. But after concluding that would be virtually impossible to do safely, NASA settled for ocean splashdowns.
The parachutes Smith’s team created were about 20 feet in diameter and designed so that if one failed, the two others would be able to carry the weight of the capsule. That’s exactly what happened with Apollo 14 in 1971.
The tests “were fascinating” because they had to be done at supersonic speeds, Smith said.
For the big test of his team’s parachute, Smith said, GE convinced the Air Force to hook a capsule under a supersonic F-101 jet fighter at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, fly it up to 35,000 feet, then dive down at Mach 1.1 or 1.2 — faster than the speed of sound — before cutting the capsule loose to see if the chute would work.
“All of this was done with unbelievable precision and knowing that these things had never been done before,” Smith said.
NASA chose the parachute he recommended for the Apollo 11 splashdown, Smith said, recalling how he watched the historic event with his wife in front of a small television set.
After Apollo 11, Smith continued to work for GE 24 more years, including for a while at the company’s plant in San Jose. He went on to become a consultant, even an expert on failure analysis situations — which included dissecting what happened in the Challenger disaster when seven astronauts died Jan. 28, 1986. He spent five years consulting at Kennedy Space Center, to make sure NASA’s next flights wouldn’t end in catastrophe.
As for the Apollo 11 mission, “it was an adventure of a lifetime just to have this little piece,” Smith said. “It was really neat.”