I had come very close to achieving the self that is based on the risking of everything,
going where others would not go, giving what they would not give.
—James Salter1
The rate of progress is proportional to the risk encountered… but to
limit the progress in the name of eliminating risk is no virtue.
—Neil Armstrong
The object of taking a risk, of being audacious, is to gain, to advance, to progress. Gus Grissom risked everything and lost. Humankind benefited immeasurably. Grissom’s family and the families of his crew were left to deal with the consequences.
Failure in a risky endeavor exacts a steep price. Through the sacrifice of Grissom, White, and Chaffee, we all gained. Humans reached another world, an inevitable step in human history though not necessary for our survival. It was there, so we went. What mattered in the end was that human beings gazed out the windows of their small spacecraft, awed by what they saw. Then, they aimed their cameras back at Earth to show humanity for the first time what our precious home looked like suspended in the firmament. It was America’s greatest technological achievement. It would not have happened without the sacrifice of Virgil Ivan Grissom and his crewmates.
The reward for Grissom’s calculated risk was a gift to humanity like no other in our history: the chance to see the whole circle of the earth, to at last appreciate all that we have here on the third planet from the sun.
Risks can be great or small. When Americans became the first from our planet to step foot on the lunar surface, the meticulous and supremely competent commander of Apollo 11 decided then and there—238,000 miles from home—to depart from his detailed mission checklist to inspect a nearby crater. He recognized there was indeed “new knowledge to be gained,” just as a young president had said seven years earlier.2 “I candidly admit that I knowingly and deliberately left the planned working area out of TV coverage to examine and photograph the interior crater walls for possible bedrock exposure or other useful information. I felt the potential gain was worth the risk.”3
Neil Armstrong, the utterly conservative midwestern engineer trained at the most traditional of engineering schools, Purdue University, fully appreciated the risks of walking on the lunar surface enclosed in an untried spacesuit in the vacuum of space. Nearing the end of mankind’s first exploration of the lunar surface, the explorer remembered spotting Little West Crater during the final, hair-raising moments of the Apollo 11 lunar descent, a landing perhaps only he could have pulled off. Standing on the ancient lava flows of the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong decided that the crater beyond the view of mission controllers was undoubtedly worth examining.
Armstrong sauntered over for a look, snapped some pictures to document the area around the eighty-foot-diameter crater, and then retrieved a bit of the regolith, the lunar soil for which he and Aldrin had come. With the pressure of the mission checklist unrelenting, he hustled back to his lander. It was said later that Armstrong had brought back one of the most scientifically valuable collections of lunar material of any of the moonwalkers.
Armstrong’s excursion to a small impact crater in the moon’s surface seems trivial today. Not so at the time. The considerable risks embraced during the previous eight years, including the deaths of twelve astronauts and cosmonauts, had delivered Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Sea of Tranquility in that magical summer of 1969. Armstrong, finding himself at what today we call the “network edge,” independently decided to mosey over to the biggest crater near his landing site, an area about the size of a city block, to discover what geological secrets it held. It was the same impulse that sends a youngster deeper into the woods to find out what’s over the next hill. The difference was that the explorer was walking on another world.
Armstrong understood at that instant of command prerogative and minor rebellion that examining Little West Crater about two hundred feet east of the Apollo 11 lunar lander Eagle was the reason he had risked his neck to come all that way, unsure whether the machine that delivered him would also return him to Earth. Calculation made, he reckoned the brief excursion in the near perfect and deadly vacuum of the lunar surface, with its temperature swings of two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, was unquestionably worth the gamble.
Eighteen months later, during the third successful lunar landing, Gus Grissom’s Mercury rival and buddy Alan Shepard would be hitting golf balls in the Fra Mauro highlands west of Tranquility Base. Walking on the moon had become routine despite the incalculable dangers.
The approach of the American space program in the 1960s to risk and reward is scarce today. It has become far easier to play it safe. The brokers on Wall Street tend only to take risks with other peoples’ money. This aversion to risk has stifled innovation, and with it, human progress.
Apollo was a “time when we made bold moves,” two-time lunar explorer Jim Lovell has noted. Astronaut Lovell was referring to the decision a year and a half after the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew to circumnavigate the moon aboard a gigantic rocket no human had yet flown. In many ways, the flight of Apollo 8 was a stunt, albeit an extremely risky one. It nevertheless provided humanity with its first Kodachrome view of what our home really looked like hanging by a thread in the blackness of space.
The images captured by Lovell and his crewmates forever changed our perspective on Earth’s place in the universe. The explorers had for the first time in human history left the Earth. Leaving was what Apollo was about. The blue marble called Earth was alone in an unimaginably vast, blacker-than-black universe. Lovell’s crewmate Bill Anders realized as he gazed out his spacecraft window that he was looking at roughly half the known universe, and there was no frame around what he was trying to take in.4 It was Anders who snapped the iconic earthrise picture that became the “whole earth” metaphor for human space exploration.
The Apollo explorers stood on the shoulders of the early astronauts and cosmonauts who summoned the courage to climb atop unpredictable rockets and ride them into space. Approaching the eighty-three-foot-high Redstone rocket, complete with a Mercury spacecraft erected in front of the Kennedy Space Center press center at Cape Canaveral, one cannot help but realize that climbing on top of the hissing machine took guts.
The Mercury Seven astronauts had taken their cue from President John F. Kennedy. The president’s declaration shortly after Alan Shepard’s successful suborbital flight to send men to the moon and return them safely to Earth by the end of the decade represented one of the great political risks of the twentieth century. In his special message to a Joint Session of Congress on May 25, 1961, twenty days after Shepard’s fifteen-minute suborbital hop, Kennedy acknowledged the stakes: “We take an additional risk by making [spaceflights] in full view of the world, but as shown by the feat of Astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful.”
JFK was legendary for his risky personal behavior, but his willingness to roll the dice extended well beyond his public life to include confronting and managing his own fragile health. Against the stern advice of his father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy decided in 1954 to undergo extremely risky spinal fusion surgery to relieve unrelenting chronic back pain caused by collapsed vertebrae. The procedure was deemed all the more risky because Kennedy was suffering from Addison’s disease. Combined with the long-term effects of corticosteroid treatments that were effectively collapsing his back through osteoporosis, JFK’s immune system was suppressed. That left him prone to infection after the delicate surgery. Faced with the prospect of a life in extreme pain and the certainty that he would eventually become incapacitated, Kennedy resisted the advice of his iron-willed father and went ahead with the spinal fusion surgery.
Despite expected complications like severe infections and an adverse reaction to a transfusion that laid him up for months, the surgery enabled Kennedy to continue his career in the Senate, run a nonstop presidential campaign in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and maintain an unrelenting presidential schedule through the darkest days of the Cold War.
A key battleground of that “long twilight struggle” was the contest to conquer space. “Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward,” JFK told the spellbound crowd at Rice University Stadium on a sweltering September morning in 1962, enumerating in stirring imagery how and why humans should go to the moon.
JFK’s character traits, among them fierce independence, stoic suffering, supreme self-confidence, and a willingness to take personal and political risks, were not lost on the new astronauts. Nor were the consequences, which culminated in Kennedy’s assassination while riding in an open car through an American city that was clearly hostile to the president of the United States.
The American space program and a race to the moon also fit nicely with Kennedy’s passion for manly pursuits and risk taking. The president was said to be fascinated with counterinsurgency and the Green Berets. He also appeared during his brief presidency to have been intensely interested in the progress of Wernher von Braun’s rocketeers working first at Huntsville, Alabama, and later at Cape Canaveral. Kennedy was keenly aware that the Soviets possessed powerful rockets and that the United States would remain behind in the space race unless and until von Braun’s team could build, test, and launch something bigger than the Atlas rockets used in the Mercury program.
Unlike today, taking risks at the dawn of the 1960s was widely seen as the best way to move the nation forward into what Kennedy called the “New Frontier.” A critical component of this preassassination vision of the future was “the uncharted areas of science and space.” This was to become the underlying narrative of the American space program.
JFK was a risk taker, often reckless, and he was endlessly fascinated with the seven charismatic astronauts who embodied his approach to life: pushing the envelope, and then bringing your ship back in one piece.
A photograph of JFK, Gus Grissom, and Gordon Cooper at Cape Canaveral a week before the assassination in Dallas illustrated how the lives of the astronauts were intertwined with the president who had elevated them to the status of national heroes. Indeed, Grissom and the president were linked in the sense that death was stalking both men. Just over three years after Kennedy was killed, Grissom and his crewmates would die in the Apollo 1 fire. Like Kennedy, the astronauts had weighed the odds, decided they could beat them, but lost.
A few days after the launchpad fire, the bugler would again play “Taps” at Arlington National Cemetery as the “missing man” formation of jets roared overhead. Like JFK, Gus Grissom would be martyred.
Of the original Mercury astronauts, the future US Senator John Glenn was closest to the Kennedy clan. Glenn, who was portrayed in a March 1961 Life magazine article as “an unswerving and self-denying man,” articulated his reasons for risking “hat, tail and gas mask on something like this.”
“With risks you gain,” Life writer Loudon Wainwright quoted Glenn as saying. “I’ve got a theory about this. People are afraid of the future, of the unknown. If a man faces up to it and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control over his destiny. That’s an exciting idea to me, better than waiting with everybody else to see what’s going to happen.”5
The Life article also tagged Glenn, Shepard, and Grissom as the “Astronaut First Team,” the New Frontiersmen anointed to lead the US comeback in space against the Soviets. The magazine’s editors did not yet know in late winter of 1961 that Shepard had already been selected to fly the first Mercury mission. A month before the stunning, historic flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Shepard’s mission remained a good bet to be the first time a human would fly in space.
It was Grissom, of course, who was inextricably linked with the notion that the benefits of manned space exploration were “worth the risk.” Grissom’s high school and college buddy Bill Head paused years later to remember the Apollo 1 fire, sighed, and concluded, “It was a shock in one sense. And in another sense, he knew the risk. He knew it.”6 Indeed, Grissom was keenly aware that the longer he remained on the “flight line,” the greater the odds he would “buy the farm.” This was especially true for a Korean War veteran, Air Force flight instructor, and test pilot who would become the first man to fly twice in space.
In his 1956 Korean War novel, The Hunters, novelist and former Air Force fighter pilot James Salter’s alter ego, Captain Cleve Connell, recalls a member of his squadron shot down in a dog fight with Soviet MiGs, and then contemplates the nearness of violent death: “Death could be slighted or even ignored close by; but when the time came to meet it unexpectedly, no man could find it in himself not to cry silently or aloud for just one more reprieve to keep the world from ending.”7 The desperate cries of the doomed Apollo 1 astronauts yelling “Fire!” and “We’re burning up!” on the evening of January 27, 1967, lend credence to Salter’s grim observation.
The years of nonstop training were meant to reduce risk, “to keep the world from ending.” To narrow the chances of an accident, test pilots seek to limit the number of things that could go wrong, to gain some sort of advantage in an inherently dicey enterprise, to manage risk. These traits were identified and highlighted by those who selected the Mercury astronauts in 1959. “Danger is admitted, but de-emphasized—most feel nothing will happen to them,” Air Force doctors concluded in their final report to the new space agency on the Mercury candidates. “But this seems to be less a wishful fantasy than a conviction that accidents can be avoided by knowledge and caution. They believe that risks are minimized [through] thorough planning and conservatism. Very few fit the popular concept of the daredevil test pilot.”8
Recalling what it felt like sitting on top of the Saturn V moon rocket loaded with 5.6 million pounds of highly explosive propellant (or 960,000 gallons), Apollo 12 command module pilot Richard Gordon emphasized: “Here we are, we spend all our lives in a risk environment. You acknowledge that fact going in and you don’t dwell on it, you don’t let it bother you. If the damned thing blows up you’re gonna be dead. That’s the least of the consequences, I’d rather do that than get smashed up and spend the rest of my life as an invalid.”9 Gordon’s crewmate, Alan Bean, added: “If you are not willing to take some risks as an astronaut, you’re in the wrong business.”
During the Gemini program, Grissom had been intimately involved in nearly every aspect of spacecraft design and testing. Equally important, he had the ear of prime contractor McDonnell Aircraft’s senior management, including “Mr. Mac,” company founder James S. McDonnell. “On Mercury or Gemini, if there was a problem, he’d go right to Mr. Mac and it got fixed,” recalled Lowell Grissom, who worked at McDonnell Aircraft as a junior systems analyst—“way down on the totem pole.” At the beginning of the Apollo program, Lowell noted: “There wasn’t that kind of a relationship at [spacecraft prime contractor] North American. It was so fragmented, so many people thought they were in charge, I guess, and there was nobody to go to. There were a lot of problems.”10
By 1966, Gus Grissom found himself in unfamiliar territory in his career-long duel with risk. With the entire Apollo program now firmly in the grip of “Go Fever” even as the list of problems with his spacecraft grew longer by the day, Grissom was being forced to accept far more uncertainty than at any time as a fighter pilot, an experimental test pilot, or as an astronaut. He nevertheless tried in television network interviews before the scheduled flight of Apollo 1 in February 1967 to downplay those risks, telling ABC science reporter Jules Bergman:
Oh, I doubt that I have any philosophy towards the danger. I recognize that, that there is some risk, but, uh, we just try to take as much out as we can during the pre-testing to make sure the systems are good. We recognize that there are unknowns, and things can happen that we haven’t planned for. But I try to take care of this by leaving an open mind and trying not to let the fellas [White and Chaffee] get stereotyped in malfunction procedures and the way we do things, and make sure that, at least try to make sure, that they don’t do anything impulsively. If we get a noise or something happens, why, “Take a check,” take time to see what we’re doing and make sure that every time they move a switch or push a button that they look, they have the right one, you know, that there is none of this blindfold cockpit business.11
Many of the beat reporters at the Cape understood that Grissom was deeply concerned about the condition of his Apollo spacecraft, among the first off the production line at North American Aviation. When asked again about the dangers associated with the upcoming Apollo mission, Grissom told Nelson Benton of CBS: “You sort of have to put that out of your mind. There’s always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course; this can happen on any flight; it can happen on the last one as well as the first one. So, you just plan as best you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get a well-trained crew and you go fly.”12
Among the reasons for what was increasingly sounding like resignation on the part of the Apollo crew was the fact that many key design decisions for the Apollo spacecraft, most notably the inward-opening hatch and the use of a pure oxygen atmosphere in the cabin, were made long before Grissom was assigned in March 1966 to command the first Apollo flight. For the first Apollo crew, the order-of-magnitude increase in technological complexity and inherent risks associated with the original, or Block I, Apollo spacecraft turned out to be much greater than anything Grissom had encountered during his air force test pilot days. Those risks, and the unrelenting pace of the Apollo schedule, would ultimately prove deadly. They would also confirm Grissom’s grim prediction about what could happen to an astronaut who rolled the dice once too often. After all, recalled Bean, some astronauts simply quit, not wanting to push their luck. (Bean’s Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad argued you couldn’t quit until surviving your second flight to avoid the second guessers: “If you quit after the first one, they’ll say it scared you to death, and you didn’t want to go back. So you have to make a second flight.”13)
“We were willing to risk our lives to do that,” the astronaut-turned-artist Bean explained during a 2009 exhibit of his Apollo paintings at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. During the opening of the exhibit, Bean turned and looked up at a self-portrait on the lunar surface as he recalled his walk on the moon. “We knew if the little old ladies who sewed that suit up, and I met them up in Delaware at the suit place, if they didn’t sew those suits right and glue ’em, we were dead,” pointing toward the sky. “So everybody that went out in space in that little spaceship, 240,000 miles away, knew our neck was out a long way. But we thought the game was worth the risk.”14
In the late 1950s when NASA summoned 110 American test pilots to the Pentagon to discuss something called Project Mercury, most of the candidates and certainly the seven men ultimately selected understood the dangers. For them, the risk wasn’t necessarily a rocket blowing up. Advanced fighter jets could be just as lethal as riding a rocket into space. All the candidates were used to that kind of danger and most embraced it. Rather, the risk perceived by the astronaut candidates standing at the threshold of the Space Age was whether it was worth endangering military careers to pursue some ill-defined scheme to send Americans into Earth orbit and beyond. Alan Shepard was on the fast track to becoming an admiral. Grissom, Schirra, and other candidates were hotshot test pilots climbing to the top of the “Right Stuff” pyramid. The naval aviators among the candidates gathered in a hotel room after the secret NASA briefing to consider the risks to their military careers. It took only a few hours and a couple of stiff drinks for all of them to decide they wanted to be part of Project Mercury.
In the earliest days of the Space Race, the Mercury program managers struggled to come up with a meaningful assessment of the risks associated with flying in space. They had little to nothing on which to base their judgments. Robert Gilruth, the head of the new Space Task Group, had a saying, according to his deputy Charles Donlan: “‘We try and plan for the unknowns. It’s the unknown unknowns that you have concerns about.’ And that’s what you’re talking about, when you’re talking about risk assessment.”15
Grissom claimed later that he knew instantly that the Mercury program “was for [him]” and that space represented the future of test piloting.16 But he had earlier acknowledged skepticism about the program. “A lot of people—including me—thought the project sounded a little too much like a stunt instead of a serious research program.” If Mercury did not pan out as planned, the up-and-coming test pilot worried that he might return to the Air Force a few years later as a “green hand,” back at the end of the line.17
Grissom later came around to the view that “the best way to face an unknown is to find out all you can about it in advance.”18 Those words appeared under Grissom’s byline in an admiring 1961 book copublished by Life magazine. The statement was surely wordsmithed by Life ghostwriter Loudon Wainwright, who had unparalleled access to the Mercury astronauts thanks to the magazine’s exclusive publishing deal with NASA. As we shall see, other remarks attributed to Grissom after his death—particularly lofty statements about the nature of risk—may also have been embellished.
Still, that single sentence describing the rationale behind the Space Race also distilled Grissom’s approach to human frailty, risk, and confronting the unknown. More than any of the Mercury astronauts, Grissom candidly discussed his fears and those of his Mercury teammates. After the loss of Liberty Bell 7, Grissom paid a steep price for his candor. That lesson shaped his relationship with the media and the public for the rest of his short life.
Having staked out his position on facing the unknown, Grissom continued: “That’s what we’re doing for the flights in space—studying, perfecting our equipment, learning all we possibly can about the [Mercury] mission before we embark on it.”
General Chuck Yeager, the war hero and legendary test pilot who broke the sound barrier in 1947, had many opportunities to contemplate the consequences of risk. Yeager had preceded Grissom at Wright Field just after World War II. There, the fighter ace proved himself time and again to be not only a first-rate test pilot but an aircraft maintenance expert. Yeager instinctively understood how flying machines worked, and that test pilots could never “wing it.” “All pilots take chances from time to time,” he wrote in his 1985 autobiography, “but knowing—not guessing—about what you can risk is often the difference between getting away with it or drilling a fifty-foot hole in mother earth.”19
In the earliest days of supersonic flight, there was another consideration. Preparing to fly the Bell X-1 rocket plane beyond the mythical speed of sound, Yeager was confronted by his commanding officer about an additional hazard in selecting a test pilot with a family. The young captain rolled the dice and challenged the formidable Air Force commander Colonel Albert Boyd, himself a first-rate test pilot.
“Don’t you agree that the selection of a pilot who has a wife and children would be simply adding to the risk?” inquired Colonel Boyd, probing to gauge how Yeager would respond. Sitting across Boyd’s desk with the colonel’s deputy present, Yeager screwed up his courage and replied, “No, sir, I do not agree with that.” Challenged again, Yeager fumbled for a response as he sought a way to hang onto his plum assignment flying the fastest aircraft in the sky. The impatient Colonel Boyd continued, “Why don’t you agree that your having a family, Yeager, would add to this project’s already considerable risk?”
Cornered, the West Virginia country boy somehow found a way to make his commander understand why the risk was acceptable: “My being married and having responsibility should be in my favor, sir,” Yeager countered as if engaged in the verbal equivalent of aerial combat. “Having a wife and children has made me more careful as a pilot and not less.”
Boyd shot a knowing look at his assistant. “There is an argument I hadn’t thought of.” Both were again reminded during the grilling that Yeager was the most qualified test pilot on Earth to fly the rocket plane beyond the sound barrier. Pushed to the brink, Yeager had managed to assure his superiors he understood the extreme risks involved.20 It was the same brand of fighter pilot moxie Grissom displayed a decade later when the NASA flight surgeons diagnosed his hay fever. “There won’t be any ragweed pollen in space,” he informed the doctors, who quickly dropped their concerns.
On the morning of October 14, 1947, while Grissom had his nose in an engineering textbook at Purdue, Yeager took off on a B-29 bomber carrying his rocket plane. He climbed down into the rocket plane, released it from the bomb bay at 23,000 feet, switched on its four-chamber engine, and at last broke through the storied sound barrier. Bell XS-1 rocket plane Number 1 was named for his wife, “Glamorous Glennis.” Yeager was surprised to discover that “punching a hole in the sky” was as “smooth as a baby’s bottom.”21
Yeager recalled decades later that at 10:23 a.m. local time, flying at more than 35,000 feet: “I thought I had broken the Machmeter as it was all screwy going off the scale, which only went to 1.05. I don’t think they had a helluva lot of confidence in us. Instead, I broke the sound barrier. Flew past Mach One.” His official speed was Mach 1.07, or seven hundred miles per hour.
Yeager had done the hard work, listened, asked questions, and turned the answers over in his head. He understood. He had tamed a beast of an aircraft and in so doing corralled the risk, thereby accomplishing what some believed impossible. It turned out he was also at the right place at the right time. The sonic boom from Yeager’s rocket plane reverberated as a shock wave tore across the windy California desert, heralding the beginning of the Space Age. Time and space would never be the same.
Those who followed in Yeager’s considerable wake, including the Apollo moonwalkers, agreed with Grissom that they had overcome fear of the unknown through unrelenting training. “The more you train for something and the more you know about it, the more comfortable you are doing it,” observed the Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden.
But training, testing, and actually digesting test results was wholly inadequate by the mid-1960s. By then, everyone in the American space agency was in a hurry, focused solely on beating the Soviets to the moon. Walt Cunningham, a member of the backup crew for the first Apollo flight, noted that no one in the Astronaut Office, NASA management, or North America Aviation was willing to be “caught holding the umbrella of delay.”22
In the midst of training at Cape Canaveral, Grissom was regularly chewing out the engineer in charge of his spacecraft simulator, Riley McCafferty, who was losing the battle of keeping the machine up to date. The simulator, an absolutely vital training tool for a successful flight, frequently had more than one hundred modifications outstanding at any given time. McCafferty had fallen hopelessly behind, prompting Grissom to “tear [his] heart out,” the engineer remembered, because he could not keep up with the constant changes to the early Apollo spacecraft.23
Reality and the mounting risks were beginning to sink in for the commander of the first Apollo flight. Departing for Cape Canaveral the last week of his life, the embittered, fatalistic Grissom grabbed a lemon off a tree in his yard in Timber Cove, later hanging it on the balky Apollo training simulator in the days before the Apollo 1 fire. “Leave it there!” he ordered McCafferty.24 Like the simulator, Grissom’s spacecraft, according to Cunningham, was a “piece of junk.” But the Apollo 1 crew’s “attitude—and we all shared it—could be characterized as, ‘Blow the bolts and we’ll do whatever the hell is necessary to make [the mission] a success after we get in the air.’”25
Despite the bravado and growing technological arrogance, there were aspects of space flight like the use of pure oxygen in the sealed spacecraft that continually made the astronauts nervous. John Young recalled sitting on Pad 19 on the morning of March 23, 1965, waiting along with Grissom for Gemini 3 to lift off: “The cabin purge replacing air with pure O2 made a loud flow noise. My knees started shaking: the use of pure oxygen always worried me,” Young said.26
Moving in parallel with risk and reward, of course, are statistical probability, fate, chance, and—if it exists—dumb luck. Flight training designed to mitigate risk taught the astronauts not to rely on luck, or, as some call it, the intersection of preparation and opportunity. As he prepared for the April 1981 maiden flight of the space shuttle Columbia, a machine that had never been tested in powered flight before its first manned mission, copilot and space rookie Robert Crippen responded to a “good luck” wish for his upcoming flight with Young this way: “Luck has nothing to do with it!”27
Was it, as Grissom believed, “worth the risk?” It depends on whom you ask. For those who flew to the moon, undoubtedly it was. Even for the three astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 death trap, the thought may have crossed their minds in the last few seconds of life that they had had a great ride, but the odds had finally caught up with them in a way they had never expected: a dress rehearsal spacecraft test on the launchpad that was considered routine.
Later, back in Indiana, the stoic Dennis and Cecile Grissom struggled to understand the seemingly unyielding forces that had propelled their eldest child into space yet killed him on, of all places, the launchpad. “My son had to give his life to make [the Apollo spacecraft] better,” Cecile told an interviewer after two Apollo crews had landed on the moon and returned to Earth at the end of 1969. The interviewer, veteran war correspondent Robert Sherrod, sensed a “trace of bitterness” in Cecile’s response. Summing up the New Year’s Eve conversation with Gus’s mother, Sherrod noted for the record: “She seemed to be totally mystified about the whole idea of my calling her, and didn’t understand the purpose. I think I finally put over an explanation.”28 Perhaps, but the explanation did not change the fact that Cecile and Dennis Grissom had outlived their eldest son.29
NASA’s attitude toward risk has evolved over more than half a century of human spaceflight. The fire that killed Grissom and his crew transformed the space agency and its contractors in ways they never expected, paradoxically paving the way for the first moon landings in the late 1960s. The exploding oxygen tank that almost doomed the crew of Apollo 13 in 1970 forced another risk reassessment that, along with budget cuts, led to the cancellation of at least three lunar landing missions. NASA senior managers concluded that the space agency would be pushing its luck by continuing beyond the final lunar landing, Apollo 17, in December 1972.
A similar process took place after the space shuttle accidents in January 1986 and February 2003. Each accident was a stark reminder that sending humans into space is a dangerous, accident-prone endeavor.
The same calculations are being made today as NASA launches probes packed with scientific instruments costing billions of dollars. In February 2009, NASA attempted to launch a payload called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. The satellite was lost when a payload fairing, the clamshell-shaped cover that protected delicate scientific instruments during launch, failed to separate. The mission was a failure, but out of that failure came an opportunity to reassess what had gone wrong and begin the painstaking process of mitigating the risks. Though no one died, the loss of the climate satellite was “heartbreaking,” said Ralph Basilio, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s program manager for the mission. “I’m an engineer. I was trained to solve problems and we walked away with nothing to solve.”
Thirteen months later, Basilio’s team was back in business, and they began the process of managing the risks of a new mission dubbed Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. OCO-2 now circles the earth in a polar orbit, measuring carbon in the planet’s fragile atmosphere. “If you don’t take a risk, you will not reap the rewards,” Basilio said. “You may as well stay on the ground and not explore.”30
That attitude is reminiscent of the thousands of engineers and technicians who helped explorers like Grissom get off the ground, men like Guenter Wendt, the legendary launchpad leader from the glory days of the Mercury program and the historic spaceflights that followed. Wendt, a former Luftwaffe technician hired after the war by McDonnell Aircraft, eventually oversaw all American spacecraft preparations on the launchpad. The pad leader is the last person to shake the astronauts’ hands before sealing the spacecraft hatch. Then they are on their own.
A mechanical engineer by training—“I knew how things were put together”—Wendt moved steadily through the ranks at McDonnell Aircraft while taking night classes on rocketry and management. He was soon assigned to early rocket testing and eventually launchpad closeout activities at Cape Canaveral. Wendt understood better than most the risks involved in riding rockets. He brooked no interference in his launchpad domain, running a ship so tight that the World War II veteran John Glenn dubbed him “Pad Fuehrer.” Wendt took a different view, in essence: “If you follow my rules to the letter, there will be no problems with your launch or your flight.”
Remembering the early days of the American program, punctuated by frequent launch disasters, Wendt stressed: “You had to realize you’re playing with things that can go wrong in a hurry. I spent many, many nights on the [Banana River] on my boat playing the ‘what if’ game because there were many, many things we didn’t know, and we did dumb things.”31 The only way to reduce the risks was to test the machines, sift through the pieces after an accident, and fix the faulty systems before loading the spacecraft with Gilruth’s “precious human cargo.”
Before the flight of Friendship 7, Annie Glenn asked Wendt whether he could guarantee her husband’s safe return: “Annie, anybody that would guarantee that is a liar because there are so many unknowns that nobody can really guarantee a safe return. The only guarantee I can give you is that at the time when I say it is ‘Go’ there is nothing that I know that could be detrimental to a safe return. Beyond that, I cannot give you any other guarantee.”32
The contract to build the Apollo spacecraft was awarded to North American Aviation in December 1961, meaning Wendt’s duties as McDonnell’s pad leader at Cape Canaveral would end with the completion of the Gemini program in November 1966. After the Apollo 1 fire, Deke Slayton moved immediately to bring back Wendt as a first step toward steadying the reeling space agency. Wendt told an interviewer in 1999: “The fire hit me very hard because when you know the individuals, you know you have horsed around with them, they are your friends.” Slayton made sure that North American gave Wendt everything he needed while the Apollo spacecraft was being overhauled. Wendt later came to believe he had been “spared” the torment felt by others over the deaths of his friends, Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
In retirement, Wendt refused to answer the frequently asked question whether he could have prevented the Apollo 1 disaster. The honest answer, which Wendt undoubtedly understood, was that the fire was perhaps inevitable given the engineering trade-offs about pure oxygen made years earlier. Everyone understood there would be risks, but no one expected a fire to erupt in Wendt’s domain: on the launchpad. That they had unknowingly accepted such risks haunted Grissom’s friends for the rest of their lives.
Wendt had learned in the earliest days of the Space Race the inherent risks of pure oxygen under pressure, warning his launchpad technicians during tests: “Hey, anybody on the pad, don’t smoke for the next four hours because the oxygen saturates your clothes and polyester clothing goes up in flames.”
Without the help of careful, meticulous men like Wendt, it was largely up to Grissom to look out for his crew, to enforce a modicum of crew safety, to do all he possibly could to mitigate the risks on his next mission. He tried. He tried his damnedest. In this, Grissom had become a sort of lone wolf. He could not avoid the consequences of bad design decisions made years before. The commander decided to play the hand he had been dealt. Grissom complained loudly about the shoddy Apollo flight simulator but privately told John Young he could do nothing about the spacecraft’s miles of faulty wiring, the likely ignition source of the fire that killed him and his crewmates.
The senior American astronaut with visions of being the first man on the moon weighed the risks and decided to fly his deathtrap of a spacecraft. If, as the Apollo flight controller Gene Kranz famously asserted, failure was not an option, neither in early 1967 was delay. The fatalist resolved to make lemonade out of the lemon that was his ship.
Weighing the risks as well as the rewards, Gus Grissom chose to continue. He was backed into a corner. It proved to be the worst decision of his brief life.