Each Apollo astronaut had been allotted a particular area of expertise. New Nine astronaut Mike Collins was entrusted with pressure suits and spacewalks. He was also assigned one of the Apollo Command Modules for the ‘care and feeding of’. The design and construction of the Command Module had been contracted out to the engineering firm North American. Collins’ particular module, 014, was currently undergoing final assembly at North American’s plant. Collins was tasked with getting to know the machine intimately; not just the workings, but also what was going to go in it: all kinds of test equipment, medical experiments – including a wired-up frog, and a collapsible bike.
Command Module 012 had been assigned to the first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 1. An early test version, 002, had been put into orbit at the end of January 1966. There were to be many such test launches in the weeks and months that followed. Gemini had been complicated, but Apollo was something else altogether. In the command module ‘there were three hundred of one type of switch alone’.
The astronauts had been surprised when North American rather than McDonnell had first won the contract to build the Command Module. Collins was critical of the company. It had become clear to him that they had a long way to go before they matched the professionalism of McDonnell, the main contractor that had worked on Mercury and Gemini. The McDonnell Aircraft Company had welcomed the design input of the astronauts. North American did not. The Apollo engineers gained a reputation for being arrogant. They didn’t want to know anything about what had happened on Mercury or Gemini: ‘a veil came down, the eyes became slightly glassy, and one was informed – generally in a cool and faintly supercilious tone – that it was simply not done that way on Apollo’. And when they weren’t arrogant, some of the Apollo engineers seemed naive; or worse, over-confident. Collins said that it was as if nothing had been learned from Mercury and Gemini, everything had to begin afresh.
Nothing major appeared to be going wrong with Collins’ Command Module but he was frustrated by a litany of minor imperfections and irritations. Every day there were slippages in the timetable. There were more serious problems elsewhere: a service module (017) ruptured during a test because the wrong kind of aluminium had been used. It was rumoured that there were problems with the construction of the second stage of Saturn V.
Apollo I’s flight module (012) – supposedly fully finished and flight-worthy – was delivered at the end of 1966. On 27 January 1967 the crew of Apollo 1 – Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee – clambered aboard 012, which had been placed into position on top of a Saturn IB booster rocket at Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy. The rocket wasn’t fuelled. It was to be just a routine check of the systems before the manned flight scheduled for 21 February.
Inside the capsule Chaffee complained of the smell, which he said was like sour buttermilk. Then there were radio glitches between the different buildings. Grissom was furious: ‘How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings? I can’t hear a thing you’re saying. Jesus Christ!’ And then, after five hours, Grissom radioed the message: ‘We’ve got a fire in the capsule.’ And then White shouted: ‘Hey, we’re burning up in here.’ And then there were screams, and then there was the sound of static.
All three astronauts died within minutes. Some said NASA had lost its finest pilot in Gus Grissom. He might well have been first on the moon if he had lived. Apollo I was to have been Roger Chaffee’s first mission. Ed White’s wife, Pat, never recovered. She committed suicide in 1983, after a number of failed attempts over the years. Grissom had once told his wife, Betty, ‘If I die, have a party.’ Betty sued North American for $10 million. She was eventually paid $350,000 in an out-of-court settlement, as were the wives of the other crew members.
The Armstrongs had been close to the Whites, and were neighbours. When a fire had broken out at the Armstrongs’ home in 1964, Ed White had helped save Armstrong’s son from the burning building. ‘Ed was able to help me save the situation, but I was not in a position to be able to help him,’ Armstrong said after the Apollo fire, or what would forever after be known simply as The Fire.
Those who heard the radio transmission said the screams haunted them ever afterwards. Those who tried to open the escape hatch said it was the smell of burning they never forgot. And somehow the fact that the fire had happened on the ground made it so much worse.
On 5 April 1967, not four months after the fire, an investigation delivered to Congress a 19lb document several thousand pages long. Over 2,000 people had been on the investigation team. Mike Collins’ 014 Command Module was taken apart. Over 1,400 errors were detected, and 10 possible causes of the disaster were identified, all of them electrical failures. Inside the capsule was ‘a jungle of wire that had been invaded over and over again by workmen changing, and snipping, and adding, and splicing, until the whole thing was simply one big potential short circuit’. The fire had most likely been caused by a short setting fire to a piece of Velcro, but a single cause was never identified. That there was a superfluity of possible causes was all the more damning. It had been a serious mistake to make the environment 100 per cent oxygen; there was too much combustible material in the capsule; worse, there were no proper procedures; too many changes had been approved without proper checks being made afterwards to ensure that the changes had been properly effected.
The accident report criticized the management style of North American, and soon accusations were made, at congressional hearings and in the press, of corruption. It turned out that North American hadn’t even won the competition – though the difference in the scores NASA had given them were small, and the pressure at the time to make a decision had been immense. What became clear from the report was how much power Webb had.
Under intense questioning by Congress, Webb and others prevaricated. In the press NASA was said to stand for Never a Straight Answer. The congressional hearings became more and more acrimonious. At one point New Nine astronaut Frank Borman shouted at them to stop the witch hunt. NASA’s management style also came in for criticism. Webb was devastated. He had thought that NASA’s management structure could become a model for all types of business, and even be used to alleviate poverty and homelessness. He had talked about ‘Space Age management’. His vision was in ruins. He saw now that he had got too close to Joe Shea, the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO), who was in overall charge of Command Module progress. Webb realized that Shea and Mueller had been in too much of a rush. The management structure would need changing again. Shea was eased out, and George Low, who had been deputy director of the Manned Space Center, was brought in as the new manager of ASPO. Shea, a devout Catholic, had been critical of North American himself in the past, and was weighed down with guilt, feeling he should have done more to avert the disaster.
Most damaging of all to Webb’s authority was the revelation during the investigation that Mueller had, late in 1965, commissioned a report into safety procedures, but the subsequent report, named the Phillips Report, had been kept from him. When he was ambushed at a congressional committee meeting, and told that the fire risk had already been assessed, it was clear Webb had no idea what report the congressmen were talking about.
Apollo had got off to a very bad start. There was a moment when it looked as if Project Apollo would be cancelled before it had really begun. There were strong factions at work in America at the time that would have liked to have seen Apollo brought low. By the mid-1960s there were 36,000 people working on Apollo within NASA, but there were 10 times as many working on Apollo in the private sector. The counter-culture that defined itself around ideas of scepticism and anti-authoritarianism was on the rise; to many Americans it would have come as no surprise to learn that companies like North American were corrupt, that the very same companies which were making the armaments that were fuelling the war in Vietnam were also absorbing most of NASA’s vast budget, their tax dollars.
Apollo was stalled for 20 months. During the hiatus, Group 3 astronaut Gene Cernan told Deke Slayton that he wanted to serve in Vietnam. Slayton told him he was free to go but that there was no guarantee they’d have a place for him when he got back. Cernan chose to stay.
It became clear that it wasn’t only the Command Module that was faulty. Nor was North American the only problematic contractor. When the Lunar Module was delivered by the Grumman company in June 1967, it didn’t fit inside its protective shroud. It was judged not fit to fly. Rocco Petrone, NASA’s Chief of Launch Operation, laid into the manufacturers: ‘What kind of two-bit garbage are you running up in Bethpage?’ With hindsight Apollo’s ability to turn itself around in the period after the accident was one of its greatest achievements. Perhaps the accident had saved the project from some worse disaster further down the line. NASA and its contractors rose to the challenge. Out of acrimony came cooperation. Project Apollo was able to grow up. Cernan later wrote about how impressed he was by Grumman, that the workers there were so wedded to Apollo that they kissed each Lunar Module before sending it from the factory to NASA. George Low, as the new manager of ASPO, took responsibility for the redesign of the Command Module. They made 1,341 alterations at a cost of $75 million. Everything was made non-flammable. The 100 per cent oxygen environment inside the capsule would only kick in after the launch; before then the astronauts were to breathe a less flammable mixture of nitrogen and oxygen.
After the death of Sergei Korolev, the Soviet space programme was having its own problems. The first manned Soyuz mission was launched on 23 April 1967, just under three months after the Apollo 1 fire. The pilot, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, had told friends and colleagues that he thought the flight was doomed. Even though hundreds of faults had been reported, the decision to fly had been taken at the highest political levels, probably in an attempt to take advantage of the Apollo fire. Gagarin offered to fly in Komarov’s stead, knowing that the authorities wouldn’t allow the mission to go ahead if there was a chance a national hero might be killed; but Komarov refused to take the chance of putting Gagarin’s life at risk. The launch took place as scheduled, and at first everything went without a hitch. But some way into the flight the spacecraft failed and, for 26 hours, span out of control. Komarov had time to bid his wife Valentina goodbye by videophone. In the usual secretive way of the Soviet programme she hadn’t known about the mission in advance. At an American listening post in Istanbul, Komarov was heard talking about the future of their children and how his wife should best arrange financial matters. The future premier Alexey Kosygin was in tears when he came on line. It is said that during his final moments, as he plummeted towards the Russian steppes, still conscious, Komarov cursed Russian bureaucrats with his final breaths, though that might be later mythologizing. Gagarin apparently never recovered. He lived another year, dying when the jet fighter he was piloting spun out of control.
In tribute to the first crew, the name Apollo 1 was not reassigned, and for mysterious, or perhaps merely idiosyncratic reasons, the intended missions Apollo 2 and 3 were scrapped. The next Apollo mission was called Apollo 4. Originally the launch had been anticipated to take place late in 1966. But after The Fire, and because of continuing problems with the manufacture of Saturn V’s second stage, the launch of Apollo 4 was put back.
In early July the DODGE (Department of Defense Gravitational Experiment) military satellite was launched. The director of DODGE predicted an educational use for satellites; almost no one foresaw – apart perhaps from von Braun – the power of the satellite to change life on Earth utterly. Curiously, the evidence was already there for anyone to see. Just a few days earlier the BBC had broadcast a live TV show called Our World, conceived by BBC executive Aubrey Singer, joining much of the world together for the first time by airwaves. Artists from 19 countries performed, including Picasso and Maria Callas. During the closing segment from the UK, The Beatles, dressed in gorgeous hippy gear and surrounded by flowers, sang ‘All You Need is Love’ for the first time. The broadcast had been made possible only because of the existence of the latest geosynchronous satellites. A satellite put into orbit at 23,000 miles falls around the Earth at the same rate as the Earth spins on its axis, with the result that the satellite remains at the same point above the Earth’s surface. The first geosynchronous satellite, Intelsat 1, known as Early Bird, had been launched in December 1965, and was used to broadcast the live splashdown of Gemini VI-A. Intelsats 1, 2 and 3, and NASA’s ATS-1 – the latter launched at the end of 1966 and used to broadcast weather data – were all brought into play to broadcast Our World to an audience, variously estimated, of between 400 and 700 million viewers.
Less than a week after the BBC broadcast, the DODGE satellite transmitted back to Earth the first colour images of the full Earth. The best of them, taken from altitudes around 20,000 miles above the Gulf of Mexico, showing the movement of a hurricane, were subsequently published in the Washington Post. At the time few newspapers had the technology to publish in colour, and the Washington Post only did so rarely. The photographs weren’t of particularly high quality; the colours were muted, the focus blurry. Again, the world failed to notice the momentousness of the achievement.
The Apollo 4 launch had been rescheduled for mid-October, but even then there were further delays. Over a period of 17 days fuel-pumps failed, computers crashed. ‘Can we ever get this baby to go?’ Rocco Petrone, director of launch operations, asked despairingly, ‘Can we ever get all the green lights to come on at the same time?’ Then, on 9 November, success. The launch was the first full test of the rocket Chris Kraft called von Braun’s masterpiece. ‘It’s not a noise,’ Collins said of the launch of Saturn V. ‘It’s a presence. From the tip of toes to the top of head, this machine suddenly reaches out and grabs you, and shakes, and as it crackles and roars, suddenly you realize the meaning of 7.5 million lbs of thrust.’ Saturn V was capable of hoisting a massive 120-ton payload into Earth orbit (compared to the 11 tons of a Saturn I, or 16 tons of Saturn IB), or taking a 45-ton payload into outer space. In the CBS television studio von Braun was heard to shout, ‘Go baby, go!’ Though the studio was three miles away its windows were blown in by the sound waves. The rocket’s power, and what would prove to be its reliability, would in large part contribute to NASA’s coming triumphs.
Much of modern technology works because each tiny part is perfectly engineered. It was what von Braun understood in his bones. Hundreds of thousands of parts needed to work, not only together but each reliably in itself: ‘When all of the elements of a complicated installation are practically trouble-free, the installation in its entirety also becomes practically trouble-free,’ he once said. The rocket was a mark of the success of the team as a team, and of von Braun as its leader. Von Braun would say from time to time that for all the power of teamwork, ‘most significant advances in science and technology have not emanated from teams but from singular efforts of dedicated and solitary individuals’. Saturn was an example, as The Spirit of St Louis had been, where both together had been necessary.
A camera mounted on the capsule on top of the rocket captured 700 images. Apollo 4 returned with the first colour negatives of the full Earth – the whole Earth seen in full illumination, the counterpart of the full moon – taken from 11,000 miles above its surface. After splashdown, the camera was retrieved and the negatives developed. In their first press release about the mission NASA didn’t mention the photos. The photographs were later made available publicly but yet again didn’t make much impact.
In early November ATS-3 had been launched and it, too, sent back some of the first photographs, again in muted colour, of a fully illuminated Earth. The images were released by NASA a week after the photos from Apollo 4. The press reported that the photos were of great interest from a meteorological point of view. It had still not sunk in that we were looking at the answer to an ancient question: what did the Earth look like seen from the outside? On the evidence of these photographs, a kind of drab blue-and-white sphere.
At the end of January the Apollo 5 mission, using a Saturn IB rocket as the booster, put a Lunar Module into orbit for the first time. At the beginning of April the Apollo 6 mission was a second, unmanned, test of the Saturn V. Apollo 6 was not as successful a mission as the first test, Apollo 4, had been. Two of the engines failed after launch and the Saturn V rocket became highly unstable, shaking violently for a time; an effect called pogoing. At one point the rocket flipped over and was pointing Earthwards. The controllers had their fingers on the abort button. The rocket eventually levelled out. Several instruments in the command capsule had been shaken into radio silence, and part of the metal shroud that protected the delicate Lunar Module fell off. The poor performance of Saturn V on its second outing might have attracted a great deal of attention, but on that same day, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Riots erupted across the country. During the next few days, 39 people died, 34 of whom were black.
In what space historian Piers Bizony describes as ‘probably one of the cleverest and fastest (and least known) engineering achievements in history’, von Braun and his team fixed the pogo-ing problem in less than a month. Ground tests seemed to show that the fix worked.
Three months later George Low suggested a change to the Apollo sequence of missions. Apollo 8 had initially been scheduled to be a second test of the Lunar Module in Earth orbit. Why not use that flight to send a crew to the moon instead? Webb’s first reaction was, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ But the more he thought about it, the more he was persuaded. Although the first test of the Lunar Module in Earth orbit had been a success, the Lunar Module itself was still thought to be too heavy to risk a manned moon landing. A second test at this stage would be a waste of a mission, and JFK’s deadline was in danger of being missed. Why not turn the delay into an advantage?
11 October 1968. Apollo 7. Launch vehicle: Saturn IB. Crew: Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, Walt Cunningham. Length of mission: 10 days, 20 hours, 9 minutes, 3 seconds.
As a rehearsal for the first manned lunar mission, Apollo 7 took place entirely in Earth orbit. It has come to be known as the most bad-tempered of all the Apollo missions. The Commander, Wally Schirra, was on a short fuse and his mood seems to have infected his crewmates, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham. Schirra cancelled a planned TV broadcast at the last minute; he argued with the NASA flight controllers, calling one of them an idiot, which put him in very bad odour; and he refused to carry out what he called ‘some crazy test we’ve never heard of before’. The astronauts said they didn’t like the food, and then to cap it all they each developed head colds and refused to wear their helmets during re-entry. Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations, generously put Schirra’s irritableness down to fear, and a delayed reaction to the death in the Apollo 1 fire of his friend and next-door neighbor Gus Grissom. Deke Slayton, in charge of flight crew operations, was less generous. None of the crew ever flew for NASA again.
Donn Eisele, Wally Schirra and Walt Cunningham
Four days after the crew of Apollo 7 was safely returned to Earth, cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy brought his Soyuz 3 spacecraft into rendezvous with an unmanned Soyuz 2. The planned docking failed. The facts coolly presented decades later would seem to show that the Soviets were now some way behind the Americans in the race to the moon. At the time, it wasn’t so clear. The CIA reported to NASA that the Soviets were intending a manned fly-by of the moon before the end of the year.
Several months earlier, the Soviets had launched the first in a series of Zond missions that attempted to loop around the moon. The flights took advantage of the so-called free return trajectory which uses the moon’s own gravitational field to sling the craft back to Earth again. The Zonds were stripped-down versions of Sergei Korolev’s Soyuz. They were launched on a Proton rocket, designed by Korolev’s rival Vladimir Chelomei. The Proton wasn’t powerful enough to put a craft into orbit around the moon, and certainly not to land astronauts on the moon, but it might be capable of taking a craft on this looping trajectory around the moon. At a pinch the Proton might just about be able to send a Zond craft and two cosmonauts around the moon and back to Earth again. It was the best the Soviets could hope for.
The Soviets’ first – unmanned – attempt at a fly-by of the moon was a success until re-entry, when the craft’s guidance system failed. Three days after the launch of Apollo 7, a second attempt brought a cargo that included tortoises, insects and bacteria to within 1,200 miles of the surface of the moon. The tortoises lost 10 per cent of their body weight but returned otherwise unharmed. It is quite possible that somewhere in the former USSR the first living creatures to fly past the moon are still alive. Also on board was a tape machine that played and broadcast a recording of a cosmonaut talking. When NASA picked up the signal, it was, for a moment or two, sent into a panic.
The Soviets had scheduled a further unmanned fly-by for November, which they hoped to follow up with a manned fly-by the following month, but that mission, as the first mission had, developed problems on the return flight. The cabin depressurized, killing its cargo of assorted living creatures, and then when the craft re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere the parachutes failed to deploy. The manned mission planned for December was cancelled.
What the Soviet programme desperately needed was the power of Korolev’s massive N1 rocket, but Korolev was dead and the rocket was behind schedule. NASA was unaware that the Soviets were struggling. Von Braun still thought they were going to beat them: ‘All our information indicates that the Russian program is richer than ours . . . I’m convinced that, unless something dramatic happens, the Russians are going to fly rings around us.’