The F-1s performed flawlessly on every one of the Saturn V's 13 manned and unmanned launches from 1967 to 1973. The vehicle sent a dozen astronauts to the surface of the moon, as well as scientific equipment and hardware, including three 10-foot-long lunar rovers.
"It was 100% reliable," Biggs said.
Far side of the moon
Just as the engineers managed to solve the problems with the first-stage engines, trouble developed with the second-stage J-2s. Two minutes into a test flight on April 4, 1968, a little more than a year before the launch of Apollo 11, two of the J-2s shut down early. Pieces of the third stage fell off. The craft was supposed to circle the moon and return, but it never got out of Earth's orbit.
This event caused consternation at NASA's highest levels.
Paul Coffman headed up one of two teams assigned to figure out what went wrong -- and fast.
"There was a fair amount of pressure to resolve these issues quickly," said Coffman, who now lives in Thousand Oaks.
The failure was traced to a coupling on a flexible fuel line, which workers replaced with stainless steel pipe. As a result, the flight of Apollo 8 in December 1968 went off as scheduled. The crew of Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell Jr. orbited the moon 10 times in 20 hours, becoming the first humans to see the far side of the moon.
The mission was a resounding success, at last putting to rest doubts about the Saturn V.
Lunar pioneers
Seven months later, Apollo 11 roared off the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center. Biggs was home in Canoga Park on the evening of July 20, watching the same muddy image of Armstrong's first small step with the rest of America.
"The whole neighborhood turned out," he said. "I remember everybody was out on the sidewalk."
Coffman was on his way back from Northern California, where he had raced his Triumph Spitfire sports car. He stopped every hour or so at bars along the way to check on the status of the spacecraft.
"I was most of the way home before I saw that grainy image [of Armstrong] on TV. I think it was in Fresno," Coffman said. "The feeling was just euphoria."
The Soviet N-1 flew just four times, all unmanned. It blew up every time.
The end came in 1972, when the last test rocket disintegrated 25 miles above Earth due to the same combustion instability problems that had bedeviled the Saturn V. The Soviets quietly disbanded their moon-landing program.
Today, Biggs, Stangeland and Coffman still work in various capacities at Rocketdyne. Stangeland is a consultant. Biggs' title is principal engineer.
They realize they are part of a departing generation of lunar pioneers, but they are not quite ready to shuffle off into history.
At 74, Coffman is at work on a new version of the J-2, a key part of the Ares 1 rocket being built to carry astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2020.
"How can you have more fun and feel more useful than to participate in the second version" of the space race? Coffman said, laughing.
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john.johnson@latimes.com
