Tennessee Valley Authority Chief Engineer George Palo was having a quiet evening on the night of June 2, 1961. But that changed very quickly.
“His phone rang about midnight: ‘We’ve had a disaster,'" TVA historian Pat Ezzell says. "So he gets into the office, and everybody’s there. The board of directors are there, everybody’s there, talking about, 'what are we gonna do?'”
A wall at the Wheeler Lockin northern Alabama had failed. Concrete blocks fell into the lock, blocking the passageway and rendering the lock useless. Two days later, another collapse caused even more damage. The collapse at Wheeler Lock wasn’t just a TVA problem.
“In August, the Saturn booster rocket was scheduled to be moved through the Wheeler Lock, through the Tennessee navigation system," Ezzell says.
Before people could get to the Moon, NASA needed to figure out how to get them there. The space agency turned to a powerful booster called Saturn. And while it looked good on the drawing board, in the summer of 1961, no one was certain it would fly. The only way to find out was to shoot the thing into space and see if the Saturn’s concept and construction would do the job.
The first-stage booster was built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It was too big to be carried by highway or air, so Marshall engineers decided to float the stage on barges down the Tennessee River. That made TVA's lock system critical to the goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the 1960s. NASA historian Brian Odom says the collapse at Wheeler Lock could mean setbacks for important timelines.
“Time is money, is once piece of it," Odom says. "But also, just making sure you’re where you need to be with certain benchmarks in these programs. You know, the planning for this is well in advance, so getting behind on one piece causes everything else to kind of fall out of place.”
A bottleneck so early in the twenty-two-hundred mile journey from Marshall to Cape Canaveral was unacceptable. TVA went to work almost immediately, roping the Army Corps of Engineers and NASA into a unique solution.
“They created these docks on either side of the dam. They created a road. So that the floating barge would go as far as it could go, then they would put it on land, on a big truck made for that. They would transport it over this road to the other dock, and then put back on the river where it could continue on,” Ezzell says.
With a multi-million-dollar component of President Kennedy’s national priority riding on the line, TVA and NASA teams very slowly and carefully put the plan into action.
It worked. The fragile cargo arrived at Cape Canaveral on August 15 and was set up on its launch pad five days later, no worse for the wear. The Saturn program didn’t miss a step, and the rocket made its nearly-flawless maiden flight on October 27, 1961.
One more Saturn booster was moved on the makeshift road before Wheeler Lock was repaired in the spring of 1962. Once it was back open for business, NASA used the lock many more times, shipping its boosters from the test facility at Marshall, down the Tennessee River and on to ports in Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida.
As NASA explores the possibility of going back to the Moon, the Wheeler Lock still helps move the biggest pieces of the Space Launch System. Last December, Brian Odom says, the lock carried a liquid hydrogen tank more than 130 feet long.
“That stage is one of the largest pieces of hardware that’s ever been tested at Marshall Space Flight Center. That piece was developed in New Orleans. It had to make its way through that water system, through those locks, and now it’s installed in a test stand here.”
Today, the road TVA hacked out of the woods in 1961 is still there. The dock where the Saturn first stage was placed back in the water is now a fishing area. Two years ago, TVA installed a pair of informational signs for visitors. They’re the only explicit clue that something extraordinary happened on a riverbank that linked America to the Moon.