On 10 August 1966 came the first of the next set of US Moon missions. Lunar Orbiter 1 was launched and it entered orbit of the Moon four days later, returning its first pictures four days after that. Five Lunar Orbiter missions were launched in 1966 and 1967 to map the surface before the Apollo landings. All were successful, and 99 per cent of the Moon was photographed with a resolution of 60 metres or better, ten times what could be achieved by ground-based telescopes. The first three missions were in equatorial orbits focusing on twenty potential landing sites. The fourth and fifth were devoted to broader scientific objectives and were in high-altitude polar orbits. Lunar Orbiter 4 photographed the entire near side and 95 per cent of the far side, and Lunar Orbiter 5 completed the far side coverage.

On 23 August Lunar Orbiter 1 took a picture that caused a sensation, the Earth hanging over the lunar limb. There was our planet lonely and fragile floating in the great cosmic dark. Every person who had ever lived, all known life was confined to a thin skin on that cloud-covered ball we could now all see. In the vastness of space it was an oasis. There are some who maintain that today’s strong environmental movement stems from that picture.

The Soviet Luna 11 entered lunar orbit on 28 August 1966. Luna 12 achieved lunar orbit on 25 October 1966. These spacecraft were equipped with a television system that obtained and transmitted photographs of the lunar surface but they were nowhere near as good as those from the Lunar Orbiters. The technological balance between the superpowers was shifting.

In November 1966, five days into an eight-day mission, Lunar Orbiter 2 was being prepared for its next mapping sequence and turned to take a picture looking at the ejecta ray systems around the 100-km-wide Copernicus crater – scientists were unsure if rayed areas were smoother or rougher than the surface they overlaid. The oblique image of wide Copernicus was immediately called the ‘picture of the century’. In the foreground were the 300-m-high mountains of the crater’s central peak system. From what is understood about the dynamics of the impact that caused this crater about a billion years ago (young in terms of the Moon’s age), the rocks in those central peaks have been raised from far below the Moon’s surface. Analysing them would reveal much about the history and the origin of the Moon. No wonder many astronauts looked at the picture and pointed at those peaks and said ‘Land there.’ Beyond the complex peak system are the ramparts of the crater, and beyond that the Carpathian Mountains.

Surveyor 3 landed on 20 April, touching down near the crater Lansberg in the Ocean of Storms. It bounced several times before settling in a 200-m-wide crater. It had a remote-controlled arm fitted with a scoop; it found that the surface was soft with hard rock at a depth of 15 cm. The next mission occurred on 14 July 1967, when Surveyor 4 was aimed for a landing in the Central Bay. It was the second attempt to land a Surveyor in the centre of the Moon and it failed.

Surveyor 5, the first in the Surveyor series to carry a scientific instrument for analysis of the Moon’s surface, successfully landed on 10 September 1967 in the Sea of Tranquillity not far from where in less than two years men would walk. During the two-week-long lunar day it operated perfectly and transmitted a total of 18,006 television pictures, greater than the combined total from two previously successful Surveyors. The analysis indicated that the lunar surface near the spacecraft was composed of a basaltic rock similar to that found in Greenland.

Surveyor also achieved a minor first. Mission 6 soft-landed on 9 November in Sinus Medii – the Central Bay in the centre of the Moon as seen from Earth – and within a week had sent back nearly 10,000 images as well as data on the composition of the lunar soil. Then its thrusters were fired once again, just two and a half seconds, to lift it four metres and move it a few metres to one side. It was the first ever lift-off from another world. It landed upright and started taking pictures again 35 minutes later. Its stereo camera looked back at where it had rested and showed the imprint of the footpads at the original landing site. One small step for a machine.

With the Surveyor mission goals complete, Surveyor 7 was, like the last of the Rangers, given to the scientists, who chose to send it to one of the Moon’s most spectacular features, the crater with the magnificent ray system that dominates the face of the full Moon. It was to land on the rim of Tycho in the Southern Highlands. On 10 January 1968 it touched down some 30 km from its rim. Scoops of the soil showed it to be like feldspar. This type of rock suggested that the entire surface had once been molten, before the heavier elements sank out of a magma ocean, with the lighter elements floating to the surface to create a fine crystalline crust. It was a vital piece of evidence concerning the origin of the Moon.

1966 was a game-changing year for the Soviet space effort as well, although in a very different way. In December 1965, Korolev had undergone a series of medical tests in Moscow, which indicated he needed a minor operation to remove a bleeding polyp in his intestine. He spent his last day before the operation – 4 January 1966 – at his office, staying late before being admitted to the Kremlin hospital the following day. He had already invited people to celebrate his 59th birthday at a party on 14 January.

Dr Boris Petrovsky, the USSR Minister of Health, removed a small polyp from Korolev’s gastrointestinal tract, causing excessive bleeding. Petrovsky was an accomplished surgeon but it seems he wasn’t prepared for the operation. There were complications. Korolev had not told them that his jaw had been broken in prison (during torture) in 1938, which made it difficult for him to open his mouth wide. His unusually short neck compounded the problem, preventing the use of an intubation tube into his lungs. Instead, the surgeons performed a tracheotomy, inserting a tube in his neck. Korolev bled profusely during the operation and then Petrovsky found what he later described as an ‘immovable malignant tumour which had grown into the rectum and the pelvic wall’. The size of the tumour, larger than a person’s fist, was a shock to those in the operating room. Dr Vishnevsky, a cancer specialist, was called in and the two surgeons completed the operation, but half an hour later, Korolev’s heart stopped and they could not revive him.

His death shocked the Soviet space effort but Korolev’s arch-enemy Glushko, who had worked in a separate design bureau for years, coming up with alternatives to Korolev’s plans, was unperturbed. He was conducting a meeting when his Kremlin phone line rang. He heard the news, hung up, and turned to his audience and said, ‘Sergei Pavlovich is no longer with us.’ He paused for a second and continued, ‘Now where did we leave off?’

Korolev was given a state funeral on 18 January. The urn with his ashes was carried from the House of Unions by Gagarin and others. In Red Square Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders placed it in the Kremlin Wall.

Mishin – who had been with Korolev since they were both scavenging for V-2 parts in 1945 – was clearly the most likely choice as a successor, having been groomed for the role by Korolev for almost a decade. His first job as was to assess the state of the Voskhod program. At the time of Korolev’s death, there were plans for three to four Voskhods and five Soyuz missions in 1966. The first one, Voskhod 3, was to be a long-duration mission with cosmonauts Boris Volynov and Georgi Shonin. The spectacular success of the fourteen-day Gemini 7 flight in December 1965 had given the Soviet mission even more of an impetus. The subsequent Voskhod 4 would be a scientific flight, including artificial gravity experiments with test pilot Georgi Beregovoi and scientist Georgi Katys, while Voskhod 5 would be a military mission that included cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov.

A Voskhod test spacecraft with two dogs was launched in February. The flight lasted nearly 22 days and when physicians examined the dogs upon their return they saw what a dreadful condition they were in: wasting muscles, dehydration, calcium loss, and confusion in readjusting to walking. Their motor systems did not return to normal until eight to ten days later. While Mishin and his colleagues were assessing what had happened, the United Press International Agency reported that the Soviet Union would launch a multi-crewed spacecraft before the end of March 1966, in time for the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party. This was the planned Voskhod 3 mission, by which they intended to regain the duration record. It was to be an outstanding publicity victory for the Soviet space program, but long-duration ground tests of the life-support system did not go well. After fourteen days, the Institute for Biomedical Problems had to abandon them because of a worsening of the cabin atmosphere. Parachute failures during recovery tests were common. Four cosmonauts were in training for the flight but as the problems accumulated it became increasingly clear that there might never be a Voskhod 3 mission. Soon it was cancelled.

All the momentum seemed to be with the Americans. But where their previous manned flight, Gemini 7, had been a routine mission, Gemini 8 certainly would not be. It was to be NASA’s first serious space emergency.

Neil Armstrong had become a civilian test pilot, flying the advanced X-15 rocket-plane out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. Apollo excited him and he applied to be an astronaut. Deke Slayton called him in September 1962 and he became a member of the so-called ‘New Nine’.

Dave Scott came in the following year’s selection, and he and Armstrong were launched in Gemini 8 on 16 March 1966, following an Agena target vehicle into space. Just a few hours after lift-off Armstrong manoeuvred the spacecraft to make the first docking in space. Then the trouble began. Without warning they went into a dangerous spin. Armstrong said later:

When Armstrong and Scott undocked from the Agena ‘all hell really broke loose’, according to the mission’s Flight Director John Hodge.

Jim Lovell could have been one of the Mercury 7 but didn’t make it for a trivial medical reason that was overruled when he joined the astronaut corps at the same time as Armstrong. He was the capsule communicator at the time:

‘With our vision beginning to blur,’ wrote Scott, ‘locating the right switch was not simple.’ Scott was amazed at Armstrong’s skill as he reached for the toggle and grappled with the spacecraft’s hand controller at the same time.

Television stations began interrupting their programs – Batman and, ironically, Lost in Space – to provide live coverage. The retrorockets fired above South Africa and the spacecraft re-entered over the Himalayas. Scott could see nothing through his window. Ten hours and 41 minutes after leaving Cape Kennedy, Gemini 8 splashed down. ‘When Mission Control told us about three-foot waves,’ Scott recalled, ‘they forgot to mention the 20-foot swells!’

Robert Seamans, NASA’s Deputy Administrator, was at a dinner when he was told about the problem. The cool-headedness of Neil Armstrong and David Scott in a life-threatening situation did not go unnoticed. Both of them would walk upon the Moon. Afterwards Armstrong described it as a ‘non-trivial situation’.

The incident provided an insight into the complicated role of the Flight Director. John Hodge had followed the mission rules and played it by the book. But he didn’t consult his boss, the Gemini program manager or the director of the space centre, who were all miffed that they hadn’t been consulted and who took the view that a couple of hours’ wait would not have endangered the crew. John Hodge never served as Flight Director in Mission Control again.

Gemini 9’s crew was Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan (second and third astronaut intake respectively). They were supposed to dock their Gemini with an Agena and perform a lengthy spacewalk but the Agena’s protective metal shroud had failed to come away, giving it what was described as an ‘Angry Alligator’ look. As Tom Stafford was suiting-up for the flight, Deke Slayton, head of astronaut assignments, appeared and told the suit technician to leave the room. Slayton said, ‘I need to talk to you, Tom.’ Stafford takes up the story:

He [Slayton] said, ‘Look, this is the first time we’ve got this long EVA, this rocket pack, and NASA management’s decided that in case Cernan dies out there, you’ve got to bring him back, because we just can’t afford to have a dead astronaut floating around in space.’ […] He left. Gene says, ‘Hey, Tom, Deke was in there talking to you quite a while. What did he say?’ I said, ‘He said he just hoped we’d have a good flight.’

So we got all ready to go and we launched, and it lifted off in June. I remember coming up to it, and you could see the constellation Antares. There was a full Moon out. We got up close, I could see this weird thing. I came right up close to it, and it just broke out in sunrise, and here was the shroud, like that. I call it ‘The Angry Alligator’. Then came time for Cernan to go EVA, and they wanted him to go out and cut loose the shroud, to cut it loose. I looked at it. I could see those sharp edges. We had never practised that. I knew that they had those 300-pound springs there, didn’t know what else. So I vetoed it right there. I said, ‘No way.’

‘Cernan goes out, and the first thing he does is place the rear-view mirror on the docking bar. He’s huffing and puffing. He’s torqueing the hell out of this spacecraft, and I’m pulsing it back to be sure none of the thrusters fire on him. He goes out in front and does a few little manoeuvres and he’s having a very difficult time. […] Then he says, ‘Tom, my back’s killing me. It’s burning up. It’s really killing me.’ I says, ‘What?’ He says, ‘My back.’ I could look in the rear-view mirror, and I could see the Sun. Of course, you never look directly at it. I said, ‘Do you want to get out of the spacecraft?’ He said, ‘No. Keep going, but my back is killing me. It’s burning up.’

So he finally, just before sunset, gets turned around into the seat. We had two lights back there. One of them burned out for some reason, during the vibration of the launch anyway. We had one light. And then a couple of minutes after sunset, he was strapping himself in. […] He fogged over. Whop! He could not see. It was just like that, fog. So we did defog on the visor, and he had overpowered that little water evaporator so much, it was unbelievable.

As if the conditions weren’t bad enough for Cernan, they were having problems with the radio. Stafford continues:

I think we went south of Hawaii, then, before we hit the West Coast of the U.S. We went a long time. It was night time. We saw the Southern Cross go by. What a hell of a lonely place this is. Here you’re 165 miles up, you know, flying, pressurized. Your buddy’s 25 feet back there. He can’t see, and we’d lost one way of two-way com. There’s not a thing you can do until you get daylight. So it came up daylight. He could see it was daylight. I said, ‘Okay, Gene. If this doesn’t burn off fast, we’re going to call it quits and get out of there.’ So after five or ten minutes, nothing happened. So I said, ‘Okay. Call it quits, Gene. Get out of there.’ He couldn’t see. He was absolutely blind and 145 feet away. […] I started reeling in the tether. […] He grabbed a hold of it. I said, ‘Just walk hand over hand.’ So he walked hand over hand, blindfolded. Then I kept pulling. I had this big 125-foot snake in the Gemini cockpit. I kept trying to get it down. […] I said, ‘Look. Take one of your hands and pull down on the helmet as much as you can and put your head up and see if you can take your nose and rub a hole on it.’ So he did that, and he could find a little hole he could see. […] My main thing is to get him in before the next sunset. […] So he came in closer, and I just reached over and grabbed this over-the-center [door] mechanism and slammed it. […] So finally he got back in his seat, raised his visor, and his face was pink, like he’d been in a sauna. He says, ‘Help me get off my gloves, too.’ So I helped him get his gloves off, and his hands were absolutely pink. So I took the water gun and just hosed him down. You shouldn’t squirt water around in a spacecraft. Turns out he lost about ten and a half pounds in two hours and ten minutes outside. […] We landed the next day. […] Finally, after we did splash down, after the final thing, we’re back in the crew quarters having a drink, I told him what Deke had said.

The next mission, Gemini 10, with its crew of John Young and Michael Collins, also had its problems. They also could not see during the spacewalk towards the Agena. Collins says:

The method that we used on Gemini 10 to purge the system, to absorb the exhaled carbon dioxide from your body, were canisters of lithium hydroxide. The stale air went through the lithium hydroxide and it came out purified. Lithium hydroxide is kind of, I think, a granular sort of material, and our best guess was that somehow lithium hydroxide had escaped from some canister and had gotten into the nooks and crannies of the system in the pipes and that there was some triggering mechanism having to do with depressurizing the spacecraft that caused that lithium hydroxide to start billowing up. It went through, and it can be an irritant, and that’s what it was. But to the best of my knowledge, they never established that beyond the shadow of a doubt. All I know is that I couldn’t see and John couldn’t either, and it was frightening for a moment, because the hatch on Gemini was not a very straightforward thing. In other words, you just didn’t go ‘clunk, latch’. I mean it was – you had to look up, and there were little levers and whichnots that had to be fiddled with, and then you had to make sure that all your hoses and stuff were not going to get in the way, and then you had to come down in a certain way and you had to get your body underneath, your knees underneath the instrument panel and kind of ratchet your body down, and it was a tight fit. So it was the kind of stuff that, with practice, you found it became easy to do, but it was visually dependent […] it wasn’t something you ever had trained to do or thought you would have to be doing anything by feel alone.

By the time we got to Gemini 12 with Buzz Aldrin there were handholds and work stations. On the Shuttle, you see it in space. I mean, they don’t go out without being anchored in two or three different ways. But we were stupid; we hadn’t thought of that. So, the point is, I was going over to this Agena, propelling myself with this dorky little gas gun. So anyhow, I was using this little gun to get over to something, to grab something that had not been designed to be grabbed, and I’m in this bulky suit that […] doesn’t want to bend too well, I’m immobilized. I’m having a tough time as I’m going along, pitch, rolling, and yawing, trying to keep this dorky little gun through the centre of mass of my body, and then I arrive at this goddamned Agena, which is not meant to be grabbed, and I’ve got to grab it. So, the first time I grabbed it, I went to the end of it, and it had a docking collar. Docking collars are built to be nice and smooth so that the probe that goes into them will be forced into them. They have smooth lips and edges on them, and that’s what I was grabbing. Well, I grabbed the docking collar. Bulky glove, and my momentum is still carrying me along, so I just slipped, and as I went by, then I went cartwheeling ass over teakettle, up and around and about, until I came to the end of my tether, I went back to the cockpit, and then John Young got a little bit closer to the Agena the second time, and when I went over to it the second time I was able to get my hand down inside a recess between the main body of the Agena and the docking collar where there were some wires, and grab some wires.

There were a couple of rendezvous on Gemini 10. We rendezvoused with two different Agenas: our own Agena, call it Agena 10, and then a dead, inert Agena that had been used by the Gemini 8 flight, that had been up in the sky for a couple of months just sitting there. These Agenas were different in two respects. Agena 10 we could ask questions and it would answer. It had a transponder. So we could ask it, ‘How far away are you?’ and it would tell us. The Gemini 8 Agena had dead batteries. Its transponder could not reply. So when we asked it questions, it would not answer. This meant that we could not find out how far away from the Agena we were. We had to just deduce our range by the apparent size of the Agena or the actual size.

Meanwhile fate had played a hand in getting Buzz Aldrin into space. It was said he was in despair after not being assigned to a prime Gemini crew. He was back up to Gemini 10, which would have meant he would fly on Gemini 13, except that there was to be no Gemini 13. Aldrin was suddenly catapulted to the last mission, Gemini 12, because his next-door neighbour Charles Bassett was killed in a plane crash. Jim Lovell says:

From his superb walk in space on his Gemini mission, Aldrin went on to be backup for Apollo 8, which paved the way for Apollo 11.

The Gemini project closed in November 1966. It had accumulated 80 man-days in space over ten missions. It had performed orbit changes, spacewalks, rendezvous and re-boosts. It had seen adversity overcome in orbit. The way to the Moon was open. But 1967 was to be a very bad year for everyone.

Despite what they said later the Russians were desperate to beat the Americans to the Moon. They had three manned programs on the go. The first was a manned flight around the Moon called the L1 project. The second – the L3 project – was a manned landing that required a lunar lander and a giant booster called the N1. The third was their orbital missions. For all three the Soyuz spacecraft was the centrepiece.

Its first mission was a planned spectacular, the docking of two Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit, followed by the transfer of two crew members from one vehicle to the other via a spacewalk. Soviet space leaders believed that this one mission would overshadow the achievements of Gemini. Since September 1965, four Air Force cosmonauts had been training for the commander’s spot on the two Soyuz spacecraft: veterans Bykovsky, Gagarin, Komarov, and Nikolayev. Vladimir Komarov was the leading contender for the commander of the ‘active’ Soyuz that would be carrying out most of the manoeuvres.

The Russians could only watch as on 25 May 1966 Apollo-Saturn 500-F – a test vehicle built by Marshall Space Flight Center that duplicated everything except engines and spacecraft, of which it had none – rolled out of the VAB on the crawler and moved at glacial speed to Pad A, gleaming in the brilliant sunshine. It was the biggest rocket ever built by man, dummy though it was, and up there, safely on the pad, it was something to behold. It was five years to the day since President Kennedy had proposed landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.

Engineers began the ground testing of the first flight model of the Soyuz spacecraft on 12 May 1966. There were many problems: over 200 known faults. Instead of the anticipated 30 days, it took four months to debug the ship and even then the cosmonauts had no confidence in it. There were severe problems with the Soyuz’s parachute system. Two of the seven drop tests from an aircraft failed. Kamanin wrote in his diaries:

One has to admit that the Soyuz parachute system is worse than the parachute system of the Vostoks and the spacecraft isn’t much to look at in general: the hatch is small. The communications equipment is out-dated, the emergency rescue system is primitive and so on. If the automatic docking device turns out to be unreliable (which cannot be ruled out) our space program will be headed for an ignominious failure.

The first Soyuz test spacecraft lifted off successfully from Baikonur on 28 November 1966, but entered a lower orbit than expected. The Soviet news agency TASS designated the spacecraft Kosmos-133 and did not indicate that the flight had any connection with the manned space program. The mission ran into problems straight away, making the spacecraft unusable. The second test Soyuz with which it was to have automatically docked was scrubbed.

Two weeks later they tried again. As the rocket ignited they noticed that it didn’t seem to be working properly. It shut down and remained on the pad. Steam filled the area as thousands of gallons of water poured onto the launch mount. About 27 minutes after the abort, the launch escape system suddenly ignited. Within seconds the rocket’s third stage had caught fire. Kamanin described the scene:

I ran to the cosmonauts’ house and ordered everyone who was there to quickly go from the rooms into the corridors. It proved to be a timely measure: within seconds a series of deafening explosions rocked the walls of the building which was located 700 meters from the pad. Stucco fell down and all the windows were smashed. The rooms were littered with broken glass and pieces of stucco. Fragments of glass hit the walls like bullets. Clearly, if we had remained in the rooms a few seconds longer we would all have been mowed down by broken glass. Looking out through the window openings I saw huge pillars of black smoke and the frame of the rocket devoured by fire.

Komarov had been selected for the flight but he knew all too well the problems with the Soyuz. He confided to a colleague, ‘I’m not going to make it back from this flight. If I don’t make this flight, they will send the back-up pilot instead. That’s Yuri, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.’ There are some reports that Gagarin tried to get Komarov removed from the flight knowing that it would then have to be cancelled because they would not risk him on such a mission.

Gus Grissom, Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee had been chosen for the first manned Apollo flight and on 27 January 1967, at Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy, all three were performing a so-called ‘plugs-out’ test of the newly designed Apollo capsule, which was positioned above a Saturn 1B rocket. They were on their horizontal couches, sealed inside the capsule, breathing a high-pressure 100 per cent oxygen atmosphere.

The Command Module, dubbed Spacecraft 12 by its manufacturers, had a history of problems and had arrived late at the Cape. It was four weeks to the launch. The test was long and full of problems. Engineer John Moore said they were performing lots of tests and not really looking at the results. They were working very fast. As the astronauts were being suited up for the test, their secretary, Lola Morrow, sensed a tension and a weariness. They didn’t want to do it. Their attitude was 180 degrees off what it was usually, she said.

Visors down, they reached T-10 minutes in the simulated countdown. They were running through a checklist when a voltage spike was recorded at 18.30.54. Ten seconds later Chaffee said ‘Hey’ and scuffling sounds were heard. Grissom shouted ‘Fire’, followed by Chaffee, ‘We’ve got a fire in the cockpit’, and then White repeated, ‘Fire in the cockpit’. Seconds later Chaffee yelled, ‘We’ve got a bad fire! Let’s get out! We’re burning up! We’re on fire! Get us out of here!’

Technician Gary Propst could see Ed White on his monitor. He was trying to open the CM’s heavy, two-piece hatch. White had to use a ratchet to release six bolts. He barely had chance to begin loosening the first bolt. In normal circumstances it would have taken about 90 seconds. But with the heat, the fire and the noxious gases accumulating rapidly it was just impossible.

Only 21 seconds after the first indications of fire the transmission ended with a scream. Within seconds the pressure inside exceeded Apollo 1’s tolerance and the capsule ruptured. The surrounding area filled with thick smoke. Pad leader Don Babbitt leapt from his desk, shouting at lead technician Jim Greaves to get them out, not realising they were already dead. ‘The smoke was extremely heavy,’ Babbitt said, ‘heavy thick grey smoke, very billowing, but very thick.’ None of the pad crew could see more than an arm’s length in front of them. Later, 27 technicians were treated for the effects of inhalation. Fire-fighters eventually opened the hatch.

Then, almost as quickly as it started, the fire was out.

Deke Slayton and flight surgeon Fred Kelly arrived at Pad 34 within minutes. There was an additional problem. The heat might trigger the Saturn rocket’s escape tower. With the capsule still hot, the pad was cleared. It was six hours before the bodies were removed. Their flight suits were almost intact, not even blackened. They had all died from asphyxia when their oxygen hoses burned and their suits filled with poisonous smoke. Deke Slayton later described it as the ‘worst day’ of his career.

Investigators discovered that the fire began under Gus Grissom’s seat, on the left side of the cabin, somewhere in the 30 miles of wiring. To this day no one knows what caused the initial spark. The inquiry found that the documentation was so poor that no one was even sure what was within the spacecraft at the time of the accident.

Frank Borman will never forget that night:

We were having dinner with some friends on a lake in Huntsville, Texas; and a highway patrolman knocked on the door and said that I was supposed to call Houston right away. Susan and I left and drove back to Houston and went over to Ed White’s house, because Susan was close to Pat White.

Neil Armstrong was in Washington where the President was signing the Outer Space Treaty with other nations that kept the Moon as the property of all people. He said later:

I’d known Gus Grissom for a long time. Ed White and I bought some property together and split it. I built my house on one-half of it, and he built his house on the other. We were good friends, neighbors. I suppose you’re much more likely to accept loss of a friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose them in a ground test. That was an indictment of ourselves. I mean, it happened because we didn’t do the right thing somehow.

Walter Cunningham, of the third astronaut intake, called ‘the 14’, was in training for a forthcoming Apollo flight:

We knew that there were a lot of problems on the test. We’d run the test the night before without closing the hatch. With any new vehicle and particularly with a new spacecraft there are lots of birthing pains on getting the systems to work. Not just the spacecraft, but getting the means to check out the spacecraft. So, we were waiting. It was a Friday night, and we were all going to come back home for the weekend because we’d been spending a whole lot of time – they [NASA] actually thought that it was within a month of launch. We never actually believed that at all. There were just too many things wrong. But we were going through the fiction of having a scheduled late February launching for Apollo 1.

When Gene Kranz came off Gemini and turned his attention towards Apollo he was in for a big surprise:

I was really shocked by how far we had yet to go before we could pull together a coherent Apollo operation with the same quality that we were now experiencing in the Gemini operation. And this was particularly true in our relationships with North American Rockwell who made the Apollo Command Module. Rockwell is a very good contractor, but they hadn’t been flying in space before. All of our experience had been with McDonnell. And Rockwell was used to building fighter airplanes, rolling them out of the factories, etc., and they weren’t about to listen to anybody that wasn’t a test pilot. This friction in January, I think, led to the disaster that we had with the pad fire. The fact is that we really weren’t ready to do the job, and yet we were moving on. We were sitting there that day, running the test. I had done the shift prior to the fire, and things weren’t right that day, and I knew they weren’t right. And yet I continued on. I think everybody that was working that test knew things weren’t right. We weren’t ready! But nobody stood up and assumed the accountability and said, ‘We’re not ready. It’s time to regroup.’ And I think this was one of the very tough lessons that came out of Apollo 1, that we said, ‘From now on, we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do.’

We did have an on board tape that was probably running. It was probably burnt up. But, where they had the air-to-ground, which was from the spacecraft to the blockhouse, and in the 21 seconds from the time you first heard the noise to the time it was over, no one was exactly sure what they said. So, I remember the very next day (I think it was the next day) I was down at the Cape. We flew back either […] Saturday or Sunday. I flew back once, I think, to take Gus’s uniform down there for the burial. And then I flew back and we stayed there – Donn and I stayed there – and we sat down with the tapes. We had to – I think Frank Borman and Donn Eisele and I, because we knew the guys, we knew their voices, we sat down and went through this. And even then, we couldn’t agree exactly on what went on. And they wanted to get it down to timing. So, I ended up taking those tapes up to Bell Labs up in New Jersey, where they broke it down, did all the magic things they do with it. You know, today it would’ve been easy with digitizing, but it was tough in those days and they still had some controversy afterwards.

Cunningham says:

It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck as I think about it now because, you know, […] it’s screaming, ‘Get us out of here! […] We’ve got a fire! […] We’re burning up! We’re burning up!’ And aviators […] mostly anticipate that they’re going to go either in a big crash, where there’s nothing, or that they crash in a fire and they burn. So, fire is really one of the kind of horrors in an aviator’s life. He doesn’t mind going fast, but he really doesn’t want to suffer.

McDivitt says:

We were doing those same things in Gemini and Mercury. We could’ve had exactly the same problem with Gemini and Mercury. We were pressurizing the spacecraft at five psi over atmospheric, which was 20 psi. We had a 100 per cent oxygen environment. I did the same test on top of the Gemini that they were doing at the time that the fire occurred. And we did it on every Gemini spacecraft. I think we did it on every Mercury spacecraft, too. To this day, nobody knows how the fire started. But we just had a lot of bad circumstances come together. And some of the North American people maintain to this day that they were never told that the spacecraft would ever be tested in this configuration. If they didn’t know it, they were the only people in the whole world that didn’t know it. But, you know, everybody had their own idea how this was going to work, I guess. But it was one of those circumstances. You had all this flammable material in there and a 100 per cent oxygen environment at 20 psi. That’s seven times more oxygen than we have in this room right now.

Schirra says:

I was annoyed at the way what became Apollo 1 came out of the plant at North American Aviation’s plant in Downey, California. It was not finished. It was what they called a lot of uncompleted work or incomplete tests and work done on it. So it was shipped to the Cape with a bunch of spare parts and things to finish it out. And that, of course, caused this whole atmosphere of developing where I would almost call it a first case of bad ‘go’ fever. ‘Go’ fever meaning that we’ve got to keep going, got to keep going, got to keep going! When my crew did the test that was followed by Gus and his guys, we were in sea-level atmosphere; no pure oxygen. We were in shirtsleeves. And there were things going on I didn’t like at all. I was no longer annoyed; I was really pretty goddamn mad! There were glitches, electronic things that just didn’t come out right. That evening I debriefed with Apollo Spacecraft Program Office Manager Joe Shea and Gus. And I said, ‘If there are any things that go wrong, like a glitch in the electronic circuits and bad sounds, scrub!’ Because Gus and his guys were going to do it in pure oxygen and in an environment that’s not very forgiving. We didn’t realize how unforgiving it was at that point. We’d gone through the same environment with Mercury and Gemini and made it through. Not that I think of it in that way, but that’s how I look at it in retrospect. Gus, I can recall saying, ‘If I can’t talk to the blockhouse, how the hell are we going to go to the Moon with this damn thing?’ That’s how bad the communications were. He should have scrubbed. He didn’t. He was himself involved in ‘go’ fever.

Cunningham says:

At the time, everybody was being abused by the schedule. President Kennedy had said, ‘We’ll land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth in this decade. And here it was, it was […] 1967. Time was getting short and schedule was considered God. So, anything that would slow things down, it was really tough to get through. They didn’t ignore it, but it just didn’t have the same weight as it did before. The managers had ‘go’ fever. I think that the Apollo 1 fire was really the key to the successes now we had downstream, because it created not only a different working environment; it developed a firmness of mind that I think was essential to making the right decisions.

We fixed a lot of operational things that had been just rejected out of hand. But now they had the time and the money, and all of a sudden the public and Congress was concerned, real concerned about astronaut safety again. So, we fixed a lot of things and were able to fly a much better spacecraft. The one that we actually flew – you’ve heard me describe Apollo 1 spacecraft as ‘a piece of junk’; and it really was as spacecraft go. The one that we flew was almost perfect! I mean, it was just – you couldn’t have asked for a better piece of hardware for the first time. So, that happened, and it enabled us to build one success on another and to make it with six months to spare. And most of us believe that if there had not been that Apollo 1 fire, we would’ve lost some people in orbit and maybe – who knows what would’ve happened?

NASA Administrator James Webb was under a great deal of stress. Every day the press contacted him to respond to more and more rumours about Apollo 1. Was he hiding something? George Mueller tried to take some of the pressure off him, Gilruth and von Braun. But the strain was showing on all. Gilruth had difficulty in moving on. Many believe Webb was never quite the same after the accident. He was aware that a new Deputy Administrator, Thomas Paine, appointed by Johnson in January 1968 to sort out Apollo, was probably going to succeed him. He argued with Senator Walter Mondale who had obtained information that there was in existence a 1965 document by the Apollo program director Sam Phillips detailing Apollo’s many problems. Testifying before a Congressional committee, Webb said he had never seen it. The controversy spread to both houses of Congress. Finally they concluded that the report should have been shown to Congress but that it hadn’t played a role in the Apollo accident. Mondale wrote a minority opinion report accusing NASA, and hence Webb, of being evasive and displaying a lack of candour and a refusal to respond to legitimate Congressional enquiries. Webb was wounded, politically and personally. He was also losing confidence in NASA’s senior management team.

After the accident Frank Borman was asked if he thought that NASA would be unable to recover from the disaster. He replied, ‘Never, not for one instant.’ Neil Armstrong said, ‘We were given the gift of time. We didn’t want it.’