On a cold, gusty Tuesday four days after the Apollo 204 fire, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were buried with full military honors.
Grissom and Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Against a background of bare trees and a hazy blue sky, Grissom was the first to be laid to rest. On hand to pay their respects were the remaining members of the Mercury Seven, along with Bob Gilruth, Chris Kraft, and other NASA people, most of them dressed in dark wool winter coats. President Johnson, clearly grief-stricken, was there as well, doing his best to comfort Grissom’s widow, children, and parents. After a rifle volley and Taps played by a lone bugler, four air force fighters soared low overhead, and then one pulled up and away, leaving an empty slot—the missing-man formation. A few hours later, at one p.m., a similar ceremony for Chaffee commenced. The two crewmates were buried next to each other. Joining the president were members of the Fourteen, the 1963 group of astronauts.
The third astronaut, Ed White, was laid to rest at West Point, his alma mater, on a wooded bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The remaining members of the 1962 astronaut class, the New Nine, were present for White’s service, as were Lady Bird Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. In the chapel before the service, Ed’s widow, Pat, had given Chuck Friedlander an envelope and pointed to the closed door behind which her husband’s casket lay. Friedlander went in, opened the casket, and placed the letter on White’s bandaged remains, over his heart. He left the room and nodded to her. That day would have been the Whites’ fourteenth wedding anniversary.
After Grissom’s burial, Alan Shepard and a few others had a drink at the bar of their hotel, the Georgetown Inn. With tears in his eyes, Shepard said, “I hate those empty-slot flyovers.”
In President Johnson’s official statement following the fire, he had reaffirmed the nation’s commitment to his predecessor’s lunar challenge. But NASA officials were knocked for a loop. The end-of-the-decade target was now “a reasonable possibility” and “no longer a sure thing,” said one. On February 3, 1967, the agency announced it had suspended all manned spaceflights until the cause of the fire was known. That included the three manned Apollo missions scheduled that year.
Regardless, the bloom was off the rose of the U.S. space program. Criticism of spaceflight—particularly the manned kind—had increased over the past few years, and support in Congress and among the public had cooled. Almost a decade after Sputnik and the panic it engendered, open hostilities between the two superpowers appeared far less likely, making the political-prestige argument less vital. In one poll, nine out of ten Americans said that it wouldn’t matter who got to the moon first. Billions were being spent on an unnecessary space stunt and its artificial deadline. Was it worth the exorbitant cost and, now, the loss of life? There was the perception that the billions granted NASA were being shot straight into space. In reality, at the program’s peak, they were funding regular paychecks for 420,000 Americans, and the much-ballyhooed benefits from it were rarely tangible things that one could point to as being valuable. To many, manned spaceflight seemed a gargantuan waste of money that could be put to far better use domestically; there were pressing problems on Earth to deal with, such as poverty, crime, disease, pollution, unemployment, and more. Technology, which NASA embodied, didn’t inspire the same gee-whiz admiration it had a decade ago. Prominent members of the scientific community were also calling for the cancellation of manned spaceflight, since they believed unmanned efforts would be cheaper, safer, and more productive. A burgeoning distrust of the technology that had produced nuclear bombs and deadly chemicals such as DDT and thalidomide further drained the enthusiasm for manned space exploration.
The command-module fire increased the criticism, and Apollo’s cancellation became a distinct possibility. NASA’s response to the tragedy and its handling of the investigation would be crucial to its survival.
Many in NASA—particularly the higher-ups—engaged in self-examination: Could they have said or done anything to prevent the tragedy? Gene Kranz, deputy director of Flight Control under John Hodge, went beyond introspection. After Friday night’s unofficial wake at the Singing Wheel and a weekend spent looking for answers and soul-searching, Kranz decided something more needed to be done.
He called a meeting on Monday of everyone in flight operations as well as all the spacecraft contractors they worked with in Houston. A few outsiders, like Max Faget and Frank Borman, attended. After Hodge opened the session with a summary of the fire and the response to it, Kranz walked onto the auditorium stage and took the microphone.
It was up to the people in that room, he said, to make sure that Grissom and his crew had not died in vain. He placed the blame for the accident squarely on himself—and everyone else there. They had all known there were problems, he pointed out. “Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’” he said.
“We did not do our job,” he continued.
No one in the audience said a word.
“From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough and Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.
“Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.”
He ordered them to go to their offices and write Tough and Competent on their blackboards—and never erase it. “These words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”
Not all flight controllers obeyed that order, even if they agreed with Kranz’s evaluation. Some felt it unnecessary to adopt a public relations campaign to show they could do better. “If you are really tough and competent, you don’t need to advertise it,” Cliff Charlesworth, another flight director, said on the way out of the auditorium. But Kranz’s speech, both critical and inspiring, helped transform the culture of Mission Control, and its tenets were embraced by NASA as a whole. Psychologically, it provided a way forward, channeling the anger, grief, and guilt into a higher level of accountability and excellence.
The day after the fire, Jim Webb met with the president at the White House and persuaded him to allow NASA to handle the investigation. He didn’t tell him the agency had already begun that process the night before, forming a review board and picking members.
The Apollo 204 Review Board’s investigation was thorough. An uncannily perfect reenactment of the fire was conducted with the remaining Block I command module, virtually identical to Grissom’s. Twenty-one panels were set up to cover various systems and subsystems, and fifteen hundred technicians and experts in those areas and others tore apart both modules piece by piece, wire by wire. For the first few weeks, the investigators worked literally around the clock.
Some in the press doubted that an in-depth, impartial investigation and analysis could be made by the committee, since most members were NASA employees. But they underestimated the investigators’ scientific desire, compounded by their grief and guilt, to find out what was wrong and figure out how to fix it. The board’s members felt strongly that they were the only ones who could effectively investigate the disaster.
A Soviet newspaper—Trud, the official publication of Soviet trade unions—blamed the Apollo 204 deaths on the “careless haste” of U.S. space officials in the race to beat the USSR to the moon. There was no mention in Trud or any other Soviet news source of a similar misfortune their own space program had experienced.
What no one in the West would know until it was revealed in the Russian newspaper Izvestia fifteen years after it happened was that a deadly fire had occurred just a few weeks before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. On March 23, 1961, cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko, at twenty-four the youngest cosmonaut trainee, was on the tenth day of his fifteen-day isolation-chamber test. He tossed a cotton pad soaked with rubbing alcohol toward a garbage pail but missed, and it landed on a hot plate that had been left on. The pad ignited in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, and when Bondarenko tried to put out the flames with the sleeve of his woolen coveralls, his clothing caught fire and burned quickly, spreading to his skin and hair. By the time technicians got the chamber open, he was burned over 90 percent of his body and barely alive. Eight hours later, after whispering a few words of apology, he died.
Had the news of that tragedy been released at the time, would it have prodded NASA to reexamine its use of a 100 percent oxygen system? Maybe—but it’s unlikely. There had been four oxygen fires involving military American personnel in the five years before the Apollo tragedy, none of which had resulted in changes at NASA.
The grief and shock felt throughout NASA—particularly in Houston, where so many knew the three men personally—were palpable. For their part, the astronauts knew they had to put the tragedy behind them and get on with it; the test pilots, especially, were accustomed to death. They had lost friends before and knew there was nothing to do but continue the job.
But the nature of the catastrophe and its primary cause—an oversight that was not the fault of one person but of many—meant that getting past it was very difficult for some people, especially the engineers and managers associated with the command-module design, testing, and checkout. During a briefing in Bob Gilruth’s office, one blank-faced engineer walked over to a blackboard, drew a large box with lines leading to smaller boxes below it, and announced it was an organizational chart of heaven. “At the top is God, whom we’ll call Big Daddy,” he began, then lapsed into incoherency. He was flown home in a straitjacket, although he eventually recovered with the help of psychotherapy and electroshock treatment. A McDonnell adviser to the review board descended into severe depression and spent three weeks in a mental institution. Another engineer, one of NASA’s, also went off the deep end, exhibiting outlandish behavior, but he never received treatment and left soon after.
Joe Shea, the brilliant, youthful, high-energy director of the Apollo program, counted several of the astronauts as good friends—he often played handball with them and would get in punning duels with Wally Schirra. Shea had been warned about the dangers of 100 percent oxygen, but he eventually concluded that the safer two-gas setup would be too complicated and only worsen the ongoing weight problem. He blamed himself for the fire and began drinking heavily—a habit quite a few at NASA took up. He became so despondent, he was almost unable to function, especially when it became apparent to everyone that he had been, in Frank Borman’s words, “a poor administrator who had simply let North American’s design mistakes pile up like unnoticed garbage.”
Hearings in both houses of Congress began a week after the fire and continued through May. Webb, some of NASA’s top administrators and managers, and several astronauts were grilled at length in the government’s efforts to ascertain the exact reason for the accident. Webb told a committee that the agency had taken technical risks because of an “austere budget,” which didn’t go over well. More than anything, the congressmen appeared determined to fix blame somewhere—and Webb was just as determined to protect his agency. He told his subordinates that he planned to take the brunt of the criticism, and he did so, especially after a year-old internal NASA report criticizing the work of North American and some of its subcontractors came to light; few of the recommendations in it had been carried out. Webb knew nothing about the report and had to admit that fact, which didn’t help; if he truly hadn’t known about it, he should have, went the reasoning. He clammed up after that and was criticized for being evasive and trying to control the information flow from his agency. The hearings became so harsh and the potential fallout so devastating that one respected astronaut, Tom Stafford, sent a private message to Webb through a mutual friend. “Tell him,” said Stafford, “that if something is not done to straighten out the problems down here, several of us will pull out of the program. I want you to get Webb to do something.” The message emphasized that it wasn’t just external forces Webb had to satisfy but his own people. In addition to defending NASA before Congress, he had to make serious changes in the Apollo program, and fast.
The review board’s thirty-three-hundred-page report, delivered to Congress on April 5 and made public a month later, was an impressively impartial analysis of the fire and a scathing criticism of NASA and North American Aviation methods. It revealed a litany of mistakes, rampant carelessness, and the administrators’ appalling inability to recognize the dangers inherent in an overpressurized, full-oxygen spacecraft loaded with flammable materials. (There were five thousand square inches of Velcro in the command module’s cabin, ten times what should have been there.) Under the conditions of the plugs-out test, the spacecraft had been a death trap. Many observers had predicted that the report would be a whitewash. The harsh self-criticism made clear that it wasn’t.
Yes, some of North American Aviation’s work was sloppy and hurried—the report cited the “ignorance, sloth, and carelessness” of the contractor. But that had been a response to pressure from NASA and its rigorous, unforgiving timetable. Besides, the agency was supposed to be overseeing and approving every step, and it had relaxed its standards on quality control, particularly in final inspections, in its zeal to keep to its schedule.
The review board’s extensive recommendations included the near-complete replacement of combustibles, a quick-opening hatch, improved pad-emergency procedures, and a safer gas atmosphere. The exact cause of the fire was never ascertained, though the likely culprit was a bare wire under Grissom’s couch that had rubbed against something and sparked.
Borman and four other astronauts testified before the House committee in April and expressed confidence in NASA management, which swayed some of the congressmen who had been ready to call for a delay in the Apollo program, as much as five years. After several months, the congressional hearings finally petered out; they hadn’t gotten any further in fixing blame than the review board had. The Senate space committee wouldn’t release its report until January 31, 1968, more than a year after the fire. It contained plenty of criticism and called for further discussion of NASA’s ability to make the end-of-the-decade deadline.
Webb had gradually lost tight control of the program as he had entrusted his administrators with more responsibilities. They had not done their jobs well enough. He regained control with a sweeping series of high-level personnel changes announced in early April. Shea was shunted to a different job at the agency’s Washington, DC, headquarters and replaced by George Low, a longtime NACA and NASA project manager who was smart, dependable, and soft-spoken. Until then, he had been deputy director of MSC—the number-two man at Houston—and this would be a demotion, running a program office, but he took the job for the sake of the agency. After a couple of months in his new job, Shea would resign. North American Aviation also underwent a management shakeup at the highest level and incurred heavy financial penalties; the company spent millions of dollars to fix the issues that had resulted in the accident. They promised to bend over backward to fix and improve the Apollo command-service module and make it the best spacecraft ever built.
The fire provided NASA with the time and the determination to build a safer, more reliable ship and implement improved safety practices and higher levels of quality control. NASA investigators compiled a list of 8,000 potential problems that needed to be resolved, and 1,697 changes were recommended. The NASA configuration control board approved 1,341 alterations. The command module eventually underwent 1,300 changes. Among other improvements, the hatch was redesigned so that it opened outward, easily and in three seconds, flammable materials were replaced with fireproof Beta cloth, and the twenty miles of wiring were consolidated and insulated with Teflon. Further, while the spacecraft was on the ground, its cockpit atmosphere would be a much safer mix of 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen; at liftoff, that would gradually change to 100 percent oxygen. Even the astronaut spacesuits would be made from fire-resistant materials.
Webb was quoted as saying he didn’t think NASA would fully recover “until we make a couple of these birds fly.” Everyone in the organization and every contractor associated with the Apollo spacecraft was more committed than ever to that goal. The fire had made it personal, and now they had an emotional investment in this endeavor.
On April 8, 1967, three days after the Apollo 204 Review Board’s report was released, Slayton gathered eighteen astronauts in a small conference room at MSC. Only one Mercury Seven astronaut, Wally Schirra, was there; the others were the remaining seven of the 1962 group and ten of the 1963 class. NASA had added two more groups since then—six scientists in 1965, for whom the pilot requirement was waived, and nineteen more engineering pilots in 1966—for a total of fifty men in the astronaut corps.
After a few brief comments—“Gentlemen, we won’t make the same mistake twice”—Deke got straight to the point. “The guys who are going to make the first lunar landing are here in this room.” As heart rates accelerated and men looked around at their comrades, Slayton told them who would fly the next few missions and who would back those pilots up. Apollo 7, the first manned flight, would be crewed by Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele (backed up by Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan). Apollo 8, the first test of the LM, would be crewed by Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart (backed up by Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and C. C. Williams). And the crew for the Apollo 9, the first test of the entire package in a high Earth orbit, would be Frank Borman, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders (backed up by Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin).
Assignments for the flights to the moon—there would be at least three—would come later. Slayton finished with, “Be flexible. This stuff will change.”
After the fire, many had predicted that the USSR would overtake the United States in the space race. In the midst of the congressional hearings, on April 23, 1967, the Soviets launched their first manned mission, Soyuz 1, in twenty-five months. Vladimir Komarov, the handsome commander of the three-man sardine can called Voskhod 1, was the cosmonaut chosen to test a new, larger spacecraft model, the Soyuz, in Earth orbit—Korolev had been working on it before his death. Like Gemini, it had a rocket engine that enabled the pilot to maneuver it in space.
For several months leading up to the flight, rumors had been leaking from the USSR of a major new mission in the works. Soviet officials couldn’t resist bragging about the impending spectacle, though one general issued a word of caution: “We do not intend to speed up our program,” he said. “Excessive haste leads to fatal accidents, as in the case of the three American astronauts last January.” The day before the launch, the Associated Press reported that the mission would “include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history—an attempted in-flight hookup between the two ships and a transfer of crews.”
The flight was part of a plan to vault the Soviet space program past the Americans’ in one ambitious mission. Soyuz 2, carrying three cosmonauts, would launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome, then dock with its sister ship the next day. Two of the crew members would EVA to Soyuz 1 and return to Earth with Komarov—an entire Gemini program plus the first crew transfer between spacecraft all in one.
The Soyuz 1 launch went well, as did the first day in space. On the second, complications started; solar panels would not unfold, and stability problems led to the pilot using too much fuel to get his craft under control. During the craft’s seventeenth revolution, ground control attempted to land it, but retrofire did not achieve the proper orientation. On the next orbit, Komarov managed to make a precisely timed manual retrofire and survived reentry through the atmosphere. But his parachute lines became entangled, and Soyuz 1 hit the ground near the edge of the Ural Mountains on the Kazakhstan border. Komarov died on impact, and the retro-rockets blew up, leaving his body a small, black, molten mass. Soyuz 2 was canceled, and the tragedy caused the Soviet program to pause and undergo its own reassessment. Jim Webb suggested that “full cooperation” between the United States and the Soviet Union might have helped save some or all of the two countries’ lost spacefarers. Komarov’s remains were displayed in an open-casket funeral—he had requested it before the flight and had told others the spacecraft wasn’t ready—then interred in the Kremlin Wall, close to Korolev. NASA sent condolences, but privately, many in the agency were relieved. The war might have been a cold one, but it was still a war.
Despite this setback, it was known that Soviet spacemen had been training on helicopters for at least a year; a Russian cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, had let that out in May 1967 during a vodka-filled private meeting with astronauts Mike Collins and Dave Scott at the Paris Air Show. The only reason for helicopter work was to prepare for a lunar landing in a craft similar to the Americans’ lunar module. Belyayev had also revealed that he expected to make a circumlunar flight in the near future.
There were other clues to their moon plans; statements over the previous few years, inadvertent or deliberate, truth or propaganda, made by cosmonauts and academicians had mentioned either orbiting the moon or landing on it. Details were scarce, as usual. But there was no question that there was a Soviet lunar program and that they hoped to beat the Americans to some of the firsts involved.
And there were those rumors of a massive rocket. In July, during the Senate Appropriations Committee hearings, Jim Webb mentioned a giant booster that the Soviets were working on, one that was larger than the Saturn V. News sources began calling it “Webb’s Giant” and referring to it as if it were a mythical creature.
Although its name was unknown to the West, the huge rocket was Korolev’s pet project—the N1. The development of the three-stage behemoth had started in 1964, with thirty clustered engines powering the first stage alone, and it had finally begun to take shape. Recent American spy-satellite photos had revealed evidence—massive launchpads, a larger erector/transporter, and construction facilities—indicating that its thrust might be eight to sixteen million pounds, possibly twice as powerful as the Saturn V. A moon rocket, unquestionably.
Several months after the fire, Marge Slayton, the de facto leader of what had been dubbed the Astronaut Wives Club, concluded that a party was needed to cheer up the troops. She and the rest of the wives organized a dinner fete for astronauts and their spouses only. Marge and Joan Aldrin and Pat Collins, the finance committee, decided there would be an open bar after dinner. The party was held at an upscale restaurant called the King’s Tavern, and everyone had a fine time—until the end of the night, when the bar bill came. It was more than two hundred dollars, much higher than the women had estimated and more than they had collected; the wives had grossly underestimated the number of drinks a large group of astronauts could down. Deke Slayton, who had consumed his share, wrote a check for the difference.
For NASA, there were more tragedies to come. In June 1967, just when the agency was beginning to regain its confidence, it suffered another blow. Shortly after midnight on June 6, near the town of Pearland, south of Houston, astronaut Ed Givens, of the nineteen-man astronaut class of 1966, missed a turn and drove into an embankment. He was killed; two other men in his Volkswagen, also USAF officers, survived. They had been at a party given by an exclusive fliers’ fraternal organization. Four months later, on October 5, Astronaut Clifton “C.C.” Williams, a member of the 1963 Final Fourteen group and on the backup crew for Apollo 9, was flying a brand-new T-38 near Tallahassee, Florida, when one of his aileron controls became stuck. The plane slammed into a dirt road and disintegrated. Williams ejected but at too low an altitude to survive. As the lunar-module pilot for Apollo 12, he would probably have walked on the moon alongside command pilot Pete Conrad. That brought the total number of spacemen killed in one year to six, five Americans and a Russian.
Grissom’s mission was retroactively named Apollo 1; the first manned Apollo mission was designated Apollo 7 (the intervening numbers represented unmanned test flights), and on May 9, 1967, Jim Webb announced its crew: Schirra, Cunningham, and Eisele. They would man a Block II command module that would be placed atop a Saturn IB booster—it had enough thrust to reach orbit but not enough to attain the escape velocity of about 25,000 miles per hour necessary to leave Earth’s gravity and journey to the moon. The LM wasn’t ready yet, so it wouldn’t be aboard, but the crew would remain in orbit at least ten days on a straight shakedown cruise. Jim McDivitt’s crew had been next in line, but NASA brass decided that they were better suited for what became the more complex Apollo 9 mission than Schirra, whose training habits had become lax.
But first, there was plenty of work to do. The command module needed to be made shipshape, and Schirra took it upon himself to ensure it was done right. Gus, his good friend and next-door neighbor on Timber Cove’s Pine Shadows Drive, had been killed in the Block I version, and he was taking this challenge personally.
Schirra had originally been named commander of the second Apollo manned mission, which was slated to go after Gus Grissom’s and planned to be a carbon copy of that one but with lots of science experiments. Schirra hated experiments. Like Grissom, he preferred a straight engineering test flight, unencumbered by what he called “junk.” He had agreed to the mission only because Deke Slayton, still grounded due to his atrial fibrillation, hoped to be cleared for a flight and take it on himself—Wally was just a “caretaker” commander.
But when Slayton’s request to fly was turned down in October 1966, Schirra was left holding the bag—and the mission. He began a steady barrage of complaints about its redundancy and criticisms of the many experiments planned for it, even going so far as to send a two-page list of ultimatums to the Apollo program office. Once again, Wally was determined to show that he was a naval commander and captain of his ship. His crewmates on the mission, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, went along with him; they were both ex-military, after all. And if they had done otherwise, Schirra might have accused them of mutiny, like a spacefaring Captain Bligh, and possibly booted them from his crew.
His bluster backfired. The powers that be at NASA, including Slayton, were unamused. The crew learned indirectly, from a press release, that the mission was canceled. The next manned flight, scheduled for early 1967, would involve the first Apollo rendezvous between the LM and the command-service module—the kind of engineering shakedown flight Schirra lived for.
Only it wouldn’t be Wally’s. The reliable Jim McDivitt would command that one. Schirra and his crew were made backups to Grissom and company. It was humiliating, especially for Schirra—during both Mercury and Gemini, he had initially been a backup, and now it was the same on Apollo. By this time, it was mid-November. Schirra at first refused. Only after Slayton and Grissom practically got on their knees and begged him to take the job did he agree to accept this lesser position.
But following the death of his comrade and the subsequent decision to replace Grissom’s crew with his own, Schirra was no longer the lighthearted Jolly Wally of the endless puns and elaborate gotchas but the Carry Nation of the command module, stalking the halls of North American Aviation’s Downey, California, factory, ordering changes left and right, large and small, some of them necessary, some of them definitely not. This mission, scheduled for late 1968, would be his last, he decided—he would make that announcement a few weeks prior to the launch—but before he left, he would by God make sure that this one would be done right. Apollo 7 became “Wally’s mission.” And Wally’s mission, as he saw it, was to save the space program. Everyone knew he was deadly serious about it because he quit smoking in January 1968.
“We labored day and night getting the first spacecraft ready,” Schirra remembered. He and his crew, and the backup crew, and the support crew (a recent addition—three astronaut trainees who did anything the other two crews couldn’t get to) practically lived at North American Aviation (which merged with Rockwell in September 1967, becoming North American Rockwell) until their Block II command module was ready.
But an astronaut was already in charge of the command-module redesign. After his exemplary work on the Thompson Committee investigating the Apollo 1 fire, the no-nonsense Borman had been assigned by Bob Gilruth to be the official NASA overseer of North American Aviation’s changes. After a few clashes with Schirra, Borman got Gilruth to rein him in and forbade any astronaut to visit North American Aviation without his approval.
North American Aviation had never been as open as Grumman to the astronauts’ requested changes. Even after the fire, there was still a lack of cooperation. One day, Borman climbed into the command-module simulator to try out the controls. When he found that the stick worked exactly the opposite of how it did in an airplane—when he pulled back on it, the nose went down instead of up; when he pushed it forward, the nose went up instead of down—he asked to see the engineer in charge.
“You’ve got the polarity reversed,” Borman said.
“It’s not reversed, Colonel. It’s the way it should be.”
Borman said, “Reverse it so I can fly the damned thing.”
“But this is the way Apollo is going to fly,” the engineer said.
“Not with me or any other astronaut in it,” Borman said. “Fix the goddamned thing or nobody’ll fly it.”
The controls were reversed to conform with the training every astronaut had received since flight school.
Schirra was adamant about one other matter: he wanted the return of pad leader Guenter Wendt. A former Luftwaffe flight engineer during World War II, Wendt had been a McDonnell engineer in charge of supervising final launchpad preparations and closeout procedures during the Mercury and Gemini programs, both of which involved McDonnell spacecraft. He had insisted on complete control before taking the job, and his passion for safety—and his willingness to stand up to anyone who threatened it—was legendary. One day, for instance, Jim McDonnell, aka “Mr. Mac,” the owner-founder of McDonnell, decided to drop by the White Room. When his extended visit began disrupting work, Wendt strongly suggested he get on the gantry elevator. He did.
Wendt kept a two-inch-thick metal pipe at hand, just in case there was an emergency and he had to clobber someone blocking the emergency exit. The slight, bespectacled man in the white cap and coat and black bow tie holding a clipboard had become a good-luck charm to the astronauts, and his presence overseeing the White Room team was reassuring. Wendt was obsessed with the safety of the mission’s crew and his own; even nights when he relaxed on his fishing boat on the Banana River, Wendt would play the what-if game, running through every problem scenario he could think of. John Glenn had nicknamed him “der Führer of der Launchpad” for his strict style and German accent. It was a moniker of affection and appreciation.
But North American Aviation, not McDonnell, was the Apollo command-service module contractor, so Wendt hadn’t been present for the Apollo 204 tests. Now Schirra insisted that Wendt come back, and he lobbied Deke Slayton and North American Aviation’s vice president for his return. When North American Aviation agreed to hire him, Slayton called Wendt personally to ask if he’d do it. Wendt agreed. The Pad Führer was back, to everyone’s relief.
The Atlas rocket that launched John Glenn into orbit had already undergone ninety-one unmanned flights; Gemini’s Titan II, thirty-four. The Saturn V, its first stage alone twenty-one times more powerful than the Atlas, would have just two. But everybody trusted von Braun’s team. After all, he and most of his top supervisors had been working together, and very successfully, for thirty years or more, since Peenemünde and the V-2, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.
On June 20, 1944, under the auspices of the German army, von Braun and his rocket team at Peenemünde had launched a forty-six-foot-high V-2 rocket that became the first to soar into outer space, reaching an altitude of 109 miles. Twenty-three years and four months later, early in the morning of November 9, 1967, the first Saturn V test flight would be attempted at Kennedy Space Center. The Apollo “stack” stood 363 feet tall—sixty-two feet higher than the Statue of Liberty—and was two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the V-2. It weighed 6.2 million pounds, and its first stage alone generated 7.6 million pounds from its five huge Rocketdyne F-1 engines—the power necessary to free the spacecraft from the shackles of Earth’s gravity—and would burn 212,000 gallons of kerosene and 346,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, a total of 2,200 tons of fuel, if it cleared the launchpad. The next two stages would burn almost half a million more gallons of fuel.
Just transporting the Saturn’s massive components to Kennedy and assembling them had been a lengthy and complicated process. The first and second stages had been shipped from Huntsville by river barge to the Gulf of Mexico, then down and around Florida and up through the Banana River to Merritt Island. The smaller third stage was flown to the Cape in a specially converted freight aircraft called the Super Guppy; a similar model delivered the command and service modules and the LM. They were joined in the Cape’s Vehicle Assembly Building, a 525-foot-high structure with 1.5 million square feet of floor space that could fit four Saturn V launch vehicles, each in its own bay. When finally constructed, the spacecraft and its launch tower were moved to pad 39A, three and a half miles distant, on a three-thousand-ton tractor called the Crawler that traveled at a speed of one mile an hour.
The test was a year behind schedule. It would have been even further behind if not for a radically new approach.
The Germans at the Marshall Space Flight Center were deliberate and cautious in their work and in their testing. They had planned the initial live test of the Saturn to include the booster’s first stage with dummy upper stages. If that was successful, the next flight test would consist of live first and second stages and a dummy third stage—and so it would continue, with just one major change between flight tests. At least ten tests were planned.
But NASA budget cuts would not permit that extravagance—and the Saturn V fabrication delays meant that such a plodding schedule would dash hopes of achieving a lunar landing before the end of the decade. Enter the forward-thinking George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for manned spaceflight, hired by Jim Webb in September 1963 specifically to reorganize the agency’s unwieldy management structure and improve efficiency. Early in 1964, after studying the Apollo schedule, he decided to implement a testing concept he had successfully used in his previous job at a civilian space technology company: instead of step-by-step trials, all the functional components of the Saturn V would be tested at the same time. After Mueller explained his thinking, most of NASA’s top managers agreed—but not von Braun. When he first heard the idea and realized Mueller also wanted to include a live Apollo command-service module as a payload, he was resistant. If the rocket blew up before the first stage was jettisoned two minutes into the flight, how would they be able to ascertain which component was faulty? The risk of failure seemed much too high. But von Braun’s Teutonic deliberateness eventually wilted, and he bowed to the logic, and the necessity, of the “all-up” approach. “It sounded reckless, but George Mueller’s reasoning was impeccable,” he wrote years later. All-up testing would become integral to the program.
By November 1967, it was clear that Congress had lost all of its early enthusiasm for spaceflight, manned or unmanned. The country was waging a costly, bloody, unpopular war in Vietnam. Young U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and few Americans understood what exactly they were dying for. And at home, things were chaotic—there were campus protests over the war that climaxed in a one-hundred-thousand-strong march on Washington, race riots in cities across America that included twenty-six dead in Newark and forty-three dead in Detroit, and multiple problems with the president’s well-meaning but expensive and inefficiently administered Great Society programs. The Apollo 1 fire had been the last straw for Congress. The president refused to increase taxes, so he looked to the space program to provide relief. NASA’s 1968 budget had been slashed by $420 million. Virtually every program except Apollo was put on hold, and that included planetary probes such as the ambitious Project Voyager, originally scheduled to launch in 1973 and land a life-detection capsule on Mars. (The successful Viking program would grow out of Project Voyager, and the Voyager name would be given to a new deep-space probe launched a decade later.)
A lot was riding on the successful flight of this new vehicle and its millions of functional parts, more than just fulfilling Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade directive. If NASA failed to meet its self-imposed deadline, it would be a black eye for American political commitment, technological competence, and prestige. Thousands of NASA employees would be furloughed or fired, and the agency’s centers would be put on standby status. Another disaster would not only ruin any chance of meeting Kennedy’s deadline but probably finish Apollo for good.
At exactly 7:00 a.m., on November 9, 1967, ignition occurred, and seconds later the monster rocket began to slowly lift off pad 39A. The noise was louder and the sound pressure it generated was greater than anyone there had ever experienced. As it continued higher and then arced to the southeast, an eight-hundred-foot-long flame spewed from the first stage. Three orbits and almost nine hours later, the command module floated down into the Pacific near Midway Island. The mission was deemed a complete success. It had achieved every one of its goals, including a simulated lunar trajectory that had taken the spacecraft eleven thousand miles into space and resulted in a plunge into the atmosphere at 24,900 miles per hour. The big service propulsion system (SPS) engine in the rear of the service module did its job and propelled the spacecraft back down to Earth, and the guidance system navigated it through precise reentry maneuvers. The Saturn V worked—and so had Mueller’s daring all-up approach. NASA might still be able to make Kennedy’s deadline.