Use me forever,
Use me for rocket fuel;
I’ll be air,
I’ll be fire.
—“Engines,” lyrics by Arjen Lucassen
The astronaut and memoirist Walter Cunningham provided a cogent insight into Gus Grissom’s work ethic and outlook on life. As the new Apollo spacecraft was being built in the mid-1960s at prime contractor North American Aviation’s plant in Downey, California, the veteran and rookie astronauts alike would spend entire weeks on the factory floor monitoring the installation of equipment, often arguing with the engineers over changes they wanted. Cunningham and the other crew members, he recalled, were “engineers and managers without portfolio.”1 The hours were long, the work often monotonous.
Two rookie astronauts, the naval aviator Roger B. Chaffee and air force test pilot Donn F. Eisele, had originally been selected for Grissom’s Apollo crew. (The Gemini veteran Edward H. White Jr. would replace Eisele after the rookie was injured in a training accident.) Grissom drove his crew hard but led by example. He was the meticulous engineering test pilot who again had been tapped to command the maiden flight of a new ship. Grissom’s place at the top of the astronaut pecking order was not lost on the rest of the astronaut corps.
“You learn a good deal about the thresholds of men in tedious, demanding situations,” observed Cunningham, who worked closely with Grissom as a member of what became his Apollo backup crew. Grissom “took his regular turn at both the good and the bad right along with everyone else. He was a hard liver and loved to party, but if Roger Chaffee, the youngest astronaut in the program, was pulling some notably boring duty, you were likely to find Gus sharing it with him.”2
There had never been a spaceship as complex as Apollo nor one capable of so much. It was Grissom’s job to find out if it could fly and bring its crew home. Hence, he seldom let the ship out of his sight. Similarly, Chaffee was known to confront the North American Aviation engineers on the California factory floor with design sketches for fixing a faulty system. Some, like Cunningham, thought these back-of-the-envelope solutions gave the contractor an out if the fix did not solve Chaffee’s problem.3
It quickly dawned on Grissom that the Apollo prime contractor operated far differently from McDonnell Aircraft, where he could push through design changes by going all the way to the top. The chain of command was clear at McDonnell, which built the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft; at North American Aviation, everything was, according to Lowell Grissom, “fragmented.” Lowell’s assessment of company management certainly was colored by understandable loyalty to his former employer of twenty-five years, but his judgment also is supported by others as well as by the chain of events that eventually claimed his brother’s life.
Gus “did say quite a bit [about the condition of his spacecraft but] North American, they’re responsibilities were so fragmented, they just couldn’t get things done. You know, there was no ‘Mr. Mac’ to go to.”4
North American Aviation won the prime contract to design and manufacture the Apollo command and service modules back in 1961. The service module was a kind of space trailer that carried the propulsion systems and most of the consumables needed to get three astronauts to and from the moon. North American Aviation won the Apollo contract largely on the strength of its highly successful design for the X-15 rocket plane. Though competitors like McDonnell Aircraft and the Martin Company had more experience building spacecraft and rockets, the top brass at NASA were impressed with the legendary X-15, which had carried test pilots to the edge of space. North American Aviation also had excellent political connections in Washington, a fact that played a key role in its selection as Apollo prime contractor.5
After Eisele was bumped, the new prime crew for the first Apollo flight was introduced in Houston on March 21, 1966. Commander Gus Grissom’s crew now included America’s first spacewalker Ed White, who was designated as senior pilot, and rookie Roger Chaffee as pilot. (The astronaut corps frowned on the designation “copilot.”) The backup crew assignment for the first Apollo flight was shuffled in December after Wally Schirra convinced his bosses that a repeat of Grissom’s shakedown mission was a waste of his time. Schirra’s backup crew consisted of Cunningham and Eisele.
Internally, the first flight was designated by NASA as AS-204, as in Apollo-Saturn 204, an Apollo spacecraft launched by an early Saturn rocket dubbed Saturn 1B, not the big moon rocket that was still being built. Grissom fully intended to ride the Saturn V rocket by the end of the decade. The contractor designated Grissom’s ship, the first-generation (or Block I) Apollo command module, as Spacecraft 012. The new ship had a truncated cone shape that came to a distinctive point. (A mockup of the spacecraft is on display at the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering on the Purdue University campus.) This deeply flawed early version of the Apollo spacecraft would never make it off the ground.
The fundamental difference between the first version and the completely revamped spacecraft that emerged from the Apollo 1 fire was a heavy, inward-opening hatch the astronauts hated, both because it was hard to crank open and because it eliminated any possibility of spacewalks.6 A hinged-hatch design was in the works and would be incorporated into a later version of the Apollo command module. The Block I spacecraft was intended primarily to show the ship was flightworthy during long-duration shakedown missions in Earth orbit.
Later flights in a more advanced version of the Apollo spacecraft would be able to dock with a lunar lander, first in Earth orbital test flights and later in lunar orbit. The modular configuration was dictated by a 1962 decision, preceded by a contentious debate, to adopt a risky concept called lunar orbit rendezvous, or LOR, as the flight mode astronauts would use to reach the moon, land, and return home. Risky and controversial, the concept eventually won on the merits: LOR required astronauts to meet up and dock in lunar orbit, a capability NASA had yet to demonstrate, but it also saved money, time, and—most important of all—weight. The alternative to LOR was gigantic, budget-busting rockets. There would have been no moon landings without the modular concept.
These attributes were the currency of the early Apollo program that was moving at an increasingly rapid pace. The lunar rendezvous concept required a combined Apollo command and service modules to extract a lunar module from the Saturn V’s third stage en route to the moon. The ships would then fly linked together to lunar orbit. After a moon landing, the lunar and service module would be jettisoned with only the command module carrying the crew back to Earth.
In the early 1960s, no one really knew how to get to the moon and back. Lunar orbit rendezvous was among the riskiest but most ingenious ideas in the history of manned spaceflight, a bold engineering gambit that eventually ensured that the Americans reached the moon by the end of the decade. The mighty Saturn V rocket was huge—363 feet high, as tall as a thirty-six-story building—but without LOR, it would have been much larger, more expensive, and impractical. John Houbolt, the aerospace engineer credited with conceiving the concept, was initially considered a crackpot. When Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon in July 1969, Wernher von Braun turned to Houbolt in Houston Mission Control and confessed that the United States would not have reached the moon without the audacious idea.
Deke Slayton, head of the Astronaut Office, and his boss, Robert Gilruth, agreed that a Mercury astronaut would have the first crack at a moon landing. In 1966, that remained wishful thinking: NASA had yet to demonstrate a long list of new capabilities required to get Apollo off the ground, into orbit, and headed to the moon. Grissom was among the early favorites to reach the moon, but many things would have to fall into place before he was in line for a lunar landing, much less the first. The first human to fly twice in space believed there was a chance—however slim—he could be first. This possibility drove his efforts for the remainder of his life.
The Apollo crew assignments were revealed within the Astronaut Office in January 1966. Commanding a crew was about seniority, and Gus Grissom was now the most experienced of the American astronauts. For test pilots, gaining the rare first flight of a new ship was a milestone. Apollo would be Grissom’s second in two years. A month later, he was named chief of the Apollo Branch Office. He and his crew immediately began training for the mission that was logged into the flight manifest for the first quarter of 1967.7 Given the complexity of the new Apollo spacecraft, the flight schedule was extremely demanding—certainly unrealistic. But everyone, including the Apollo commander, was in a hurry.
Grissom was working more closely with rookie Apollo astronauts and was proving easier to get along with than some of the other Mercury and Gemini veterans. Cunningham was pleasantly surprised to find that the Apollo commander was “a decisive guy, a team leader and an independent thinker” who encouraged the younger guys to speak up if they had an idea. However, the long hours and ongoing problems with his Apollo spacecraft and its faulty training simulator were making Grissom increasingly “cranky,” Cunningham observed. Even so, the new guys were attracted to his work ethic, his intensity, and his ability to play as hard as he worked. They also noticed, Cunningham recalled, that Grissom “could sit at a bar for hours, and never failed to notice a pretty girl in the room.” Grissom “went his own way. He wasn’t a hanger-on,” deduced Cunningham, who among the Apollo astronauts spent as much time working under Grissom as any of the rookies.8 Among the newcomers was the US Navy lieutenant commander Roger Chaffee, holder of a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University, class of 1957. Chaffee earned his pilot’s license that same year as a naval ROTC air cadet. “It took me four years to learn how little I knew,” he recalled after graduation, vowing that he would seize “every opportunity that comes along” to gain experience.9 Chaffee would learn plenty working with the relentless Grissom.
Initially, his fellow astronauts tended to underestimate the unassuming Chaffee. That quickly changed when they saw him dive headfirst into engineering challenges, pressing the Apollo engineers to fix the communications and other systems he would be responsible for on the craft’s maiden flight.
Chaffee and Grissom had much in common. Chaffee was from neighboring Michigan. Both had come from modest, middle-class backgrounds, grown up in small towns, and loved the outdoors and airplanes. Roger’s father, Donald, was a barnstorming pilot in the 1930s. Father and son would spend “hours together at the dining room table building model planes and making sure they got each piece just right,” Roger’s sister, Donna, told an interviewer after Donald’s death. “They were always talking aviation.”10
After graduating from Purdue and flying navy reconnaissance aircraft, Chaffee followed Grissom to the Air Force Institute for Technology at Wright-Patterson to train as a test pilot. Both had two children, and like their crewmate, Ed White, Grissom and Chaffee were ambitious. Chaffee too had his eye on a lunar landing mission.
As he had with John Young during the Gemini program, Grissom would take Chaffee under his wing. The commander would be the first astronaut responsible for the lives of two other crew members. Chaffee had served as one of the capsule communicators during Grissom’s Gemini flight. Hence, the Apollo commander knew something of Chaffee’s capabilities.
Chaffee worked briefly at Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles after graduating from Purdue before completing his naval training. In August 1957, the new navy ensign married the Purdue homecoming queen, Martha Horn of Oklahoma. The bride was nineteen, the groom was twenty-two. They had met two years earlier on a blind date. Chaffee characteristically wasted little time in proposing marriage. The new couple lived together briefly in Norfolk, Virginia, before Roger shipped out for flight training. A daughter, Sheryl, was born in November 1958; a son, Stephen, arrived in July 1961.
In 1960, Roger Chaffee was assigned to a photo reconnaissance squadron designated VAP-62. He was soon flying reconnaissance missions over Europe and the Mediterranean in the summer of 1961. During one flight, his aircraft engine began leaking hydraulic fluid. Spraying fluid ignited, but Chaffee was able to isolate the damage and bring his plane back. The aircraft was eventually repaired and returned to service. The aviator’s number had come up, and he had walked away in one piece. Chaffee was well liked in his unit, taking some ribbing for his ambition. A unit history described him as “the Beaver,” as in eager. He would soon be flying missions at the height of the Cold War. Returning stateside, the squadron’s early assignments included aerial photography along the Florida coast from the squadron’s base in Jacksonville south to the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During one mission, Chaffee was assigned to fly along the Florida coast to make an aerial photo survey of Cape Canaveral. Chaffee’s photography was eventually used to help lay out the launchpads used for the American moon landings, as well as Launch Complex 34, the place where Chaffee would be killed less than seven years later.11
After flying high-performance aircraft for several years, Roger and Martha began to appreciate the risks involved. “There’s only room for one mistake,” Donald Chaffee remembered his son saying. “You can buy the farm only once.”12
The stakes grew more serious as Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev sparred over Berlin and, by the fall of 1962, Cuba. With the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, Chaffee’s squadron was assigned to fly daily reconnaissance missions over Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Chaffee was credited with bringing back photographic evidence documenting suspected Soviet nuclear missile installations on the island just ninety miles from Florida.
Like most flyers, Chaffee had been closely monitoring the successes of the Mercury astronauts. Spaceflight was no longer a stunt, and he understood that the future of flight was in orbit and, ultimately, the moon. When asked at the end of each year about his career plans, Chaffee said he wished to train as a test pilot to qualify for astronaut status. At the end of 1962, he accepted an invitation to pursue a master’s degree in engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the same school Gus Grissom had attended seven years earlier. The Chaffees moved to Dayton, and Roger became a candidate for astronaut testing. He survived an updated version of the humiliating medical tests the Mercury astronauts endured along with batteries of psychological testing. Outside of a relatively small lung capacity, he came through the testing with flying colors, and then sweated out the final selection process.
While on a brief hunting trip in Michigan, the call came from NASA. On October 18, 1963, Chaffee and thirteen other pilots were named to the third class of astronauts. “The Fourteen” were an outstanding if star-crossed group. Seven would fly to the moon, four would walk on it, and four would be killed in accidents.
Cunningham assessed Chaffee this way: “In the early days, some tended to underestimate Roger, perhaps because of his small stature. But he had the capacity to fill a room—any room. It was impossible to attend a meeting with Roger and not be aware of his presence. He had a fighter pilot attitude, even though [his] brief career was in multi-engine photoreconnaissance aircraft.”13
When confronted with a problem, Cunningham continued, “Roger would bore right in—even if it was totally outside his expertise. One of the youngest of the third group, he was fearless, confident, bright, with the all-American-boy look and a beautiful wife to boot.” Within the NASA hierarchy and the test pilot fraternity, Chaffee was considered a first-rate flyer and among the best in terms of flight preparation. He also possessed a reputation Grissom appreciated: Chaffee “was a real hard-ass,” one former NASA flight controller recalled.
Martha Chaffee acknowledged the risk at the time her husband was selected to be an astronaut. “What’s familiar doesn’t frighten you, but it’s only natural to be afraid of the unknown,” she told a reporter.14
As with everything he undertook, Chaffee dove headfirst into his astronaut career, serving as capsule communicator in Texas during Grissom’s Gemini flight. Chaffee and Grissom worked together on the next mission, Ed White’s, in June 1965. Chaffee would be passed over during the Gemini program, prompting the Purdue alumnus Eugene Cernan, another member of the third astronaut class, to tag Chaffee as a “nugget,” a rookie, who nevertheless “had so impressed our bosses that they assigned him a coveted spot on the first Apollo” mission.15 While others in his astronaut class had flown on Gemini and walked in space, Chaffee was now in the flight rotation at a spot that could eventually place him on a lunar landing crew. All along, this is what Chaffee had his sights set on. Flying with Grissom could only increase his chances.
The crew selection process was widely considered a mystery to most of the astronauts. Several attempted to parse it in their memoirs. Some, like Gordon Cooper, who had an ax to grind against Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton, insisted that Apollo crews were selected based purely on astronaut office politics. (Shepard gave himself a lunar flight. “Devious Deke,” as Cernan called him, was part of the last crew to fly on Apollo. Cooper got nothing but backup commander assignments after his 120-orbit Gemini 5 flight in August 1965. He quit NASA and retired from the air force in 1970.)
Grissom understood he had leverage with his air force buddy and hunting companion Slayton, who effectively had the final say on crew assignments. Grissom did not hesitate to use this leverage, just as he had unceremoniously dumped Frank Borman from his Gemini flight in favor of John Young.
With the possible exception of Schirra, who would be the only American astronaut to fly in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, all of the astronauts had their eye on a flight to the moon. “You’ll be flying along some nights with a full moon,” Chaffee told a reporter while training for his Apollo flight. “You’re up at 45,000 feet. Up there you can see it like you can’t see it down here. It’s just the big, bright, clear moon. You look up there and just say to yourself: ‘I’ve got to get up there. I’ve just got to get one of those flights.’”16
A 1966 photo shows Roger Chaffee surrounded by workers at the Grumman Corporation plant on Long Island, where the lunar module was being built. The astronaut asked the assistant plant manager to introduce him to every Grumman employee working to build the ship.
Despite his outward enthusiasm, Chaffee was profoundly aware of the risks inherent in the first flight of a spaceship of unprecedented complexity. During a family visit to the Cape in August 1966, Chaffee confided to his father his growing doubts. Donald Chaffee recalled: “We were walking on the beach, kicking sand, you might say, and Rog said, ‘Dad, if anything happens and I buy the farm, I don’t want you to be bitter. I want you to do what you can for the space program.’” Taken aback, Donald replied: “Hell Rog, things will go fine,” gripping his son on the shoulder. “Everything will be all right; you’re going to make it.” “No dad,” replied the son in earnest, “I’m serious. I want you to do what you can for the space program. I want your word on it.” Donald remembered his surprise as Roger grabbed his arm, turned him around, and shook on the pledge. “That was it,” the elder Chaffee recalled. “And I kept that promise. But at the time I thought, like everybody else, it was going to be okay.”17
Ed White landed on Grissom’s crew after Donn Eisele underwent surgery for a dislocated shoulder suffered during weightlessness training aboard a NASA KC-135 aircraft affectionately known as the “Vomit Comet.” White expressed nothing but enthusiasm for the upcoming flight, telling ABC News science correspondent Jules Bergman in the weeks before the scheduled launch: “I always look forward to flying, and I look forward to test flying.” He told the New York Times that he felt a “deal of great pride” in making the first Apollo flight.
The preflight interview was intended for broadcast while the crew was in orbit. Instead, the interviews with ABC News and the other broadcast networks would serve as remembrances of the dead crew. Bergman introduced White as “afraid of no man … our first space walker, who believed so strongly you could feel it in his words.”18
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the bonds of affection that tied Edward Higgins White II to his family, friends, fellow pilots, and astronauts. The first American to walk in space and the astronaut in the center couch of the Apollo 1 spacecraft was beloved by all who knew him. “No question, Ed White was as capable as they came,” observed fellow astronaut John Young.19
The American novelist James Salter held the distinction of having flown with both Gus Grissom in Korea and Ed White in Germany after the Korean War.20 “Ed White I knew better,” Salter said.
He was in the 22nd Fighter Squadron at Bitburg, Germany, with me, 1954 to 1957. I was operations officer and my job was to know him, it was my responsibility to. We had an affinity because of West Point, and I liked his character. I liked him. He had some weaknesses as a pilot when he began in the squadron, but he was the kind of man who corrects them—he was weak in instrument flying, probably because of lack of experience, and there was a lot of bad weather in Germany during the winter especially. As I say, he completely overcame it. He was that very desirable thing, a man who could be relied upon—in every way. [White possessed] high standards and even temperament. They used to say, straight arrow.21
Several months after the Apollo 1 disaster, Salter wrote the widow, Patricia Finnegan White, confiding that he had “dreamed of [Ed] many times,” continuing, “he was precious to me. I believed in him. In him I saw myself, what I might have been.”
Having known White made Salter “intimate with greatness,” he told Pat. “We were convinced he was going to make his mark in history, not the history of his country or even of flight, but the history of mankind.”22
White was the son of an aeronautics pioneer, US Air Force Major General Edward H. White of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The son followed his father to West Point, where he excelled in engineering and athletics. Ed White barely missed qualifying for the 1952 US Olympic track team.
Selected to the second group of astronauts in September 1962, White quickly became a household name after pushing himself out the narrow hatch of Gemini 4 on June 3, 1965, three months after the flight of Grissom and Young. Thoroughly enjoying the view, White floated through space while traveling at 17,500 miles per hour. He was fearless, joyful, and extremely reluctant to return to the spacecraft as it passed into the planet’s pitch-black shadow. The country was emerging from the horror of President Kennedy’s assassination, and the renewed Space Race allowed Americans to again cheer for something. Star-spangled Ed White, floating in the blackness of space, helped his countrymen forget the sorrow of Dallas.
“I feel like a million dollars!” White declared as he floated above the earth, his gold-coated faceplate reflecting the stunning sunlight. White’s twenty-one-minute walk was a tour de force, one of the highlights of manned spaceflight. It seemed White was born for this, that for Americans he could be the next John Glenn.
After splashing down, the Gemini explorers were plucked from the sea and delivered safely to the rusting recovery ship, the USS Kearsage. White and commander James McDivitt were steaming back to Cape Kennedy at “flank speed.” Onboard, NASA flight surgeon Robert Moser couldn’t hear a thing aboard the old ship and was having trouble taking blood samples from astronauts. Moser demanded that the ship’s captain slow down for five minutes, eliciting looks of disbelief from crewmen. White intervened: “Give the Doc a break, he needs to do his stuff.” Moser recalled: “Magically, the giant bucket of bolts stopped rattling,” prompting Moser to conclude that White possessed a rare quality: “Hero power.”23
In the weeks before the Apollo fire, White told an interviewer: “People might look at our work as being perhaps dangerous, or risky of sorts, but I think we train in it and work in it so much and understand it well enough that we don’t look at it from this viewpoint.” Echoing Grissom, he continued: “We accept the risks, if there are, what risks there are, and the people we work with do everything that’s humanly possible to reduce these risks to as small as possible. I believe very deeply in the people we work with and the crew, I certainly do.”24 There was little doubt that Ed White believed every word.
Of Grissom and White, James Salter observed: “To be killed flying had always been a possibility, but the two of them had somehow moved beyond that. They were already visible in the great photograph of our time, the one called celebrity. Still youthful and so far as I knew, unspoiled, they were like jockeys moving to the post for an event that would mark the century, the race to the moon.”25
As a fighter pilot who had peered over the abyss and survived, Salter concluded: “The absolutely unforeseen had destroyed them.” Grissom called his senior pilot “a real hard driver,” adding: “I don’t care what kind of job you give Ed, he’s going to get it done; he’s going to get it finished.”26
Still, in the weeks before the scheduled launch there was friction between Grissom and his crew as the list of problems with the spacecraft grew ever longer. NASA investigators would acknowledge later that inattention to “mundane but equally vital questions of crew safety” was a root cause of the accident.27 Indeed, the commander worried incessantly that these “mundane” details were being overlooked, that the crew and the spacecraft technicians were distracted and in too much of a hurry. He downplayed many of these concerns in network interviews, daring not to vent his frustrations in public since the network broadcasts were seen as critical to building public support for the space program. Grissom had long ago figured out how the public relations game was played, and he approached it on his own terms.
In the months before the Apollo fire, it was increasingly apparent to Grissom and other astronauts that many of the North American Aviation engineers and technicians seemed more interested in weekend camping trips in the mountains than making sure wire bundles were properly installed and insulated. Unlike Apollo contractors such as lunar module manufacturer Grumman Corporation, which installed wire bundles by hand, North American Aviation was machine bundling miles of spacecraft wiring in the Block I spacecraft. Machine bundling would save time and money, but those who understood the importance of spacecraft electrical systems could see its approach was slipshod and dangerous.28
John Young had learned plenty about aircraft electrical systems as a navy test pilot. He appreciated how carefully McDonnell Aircraft had been installing wiring in a Gemini spacecraft that would be filled just before liftoff with pure oxygen. “If anything set off even a tiny spark, the results would be fatal,” Young understood.29 He was justifiably worried about pure oxygen under pressure, so much so that the otherwise fearless astronaut admitted that the combination of live, hot spacecraft wiring and pure oxygen made his knees shake.
The Block I Apollo spacecraft contained an estimated twenty miles of wiring and no less than 640 switches, circuit breakers, event indicators, and computer controls. According to Young, their arrangement was “pretty darned arbitrary.” During test runs in Downey on another Apollo command module, the crew had seen ethyl glycol coolant dripping into a puddle on the floor. Indeed, the Block I environment control system was a mess. The day before the Apollo fire, as another Apollo crew trained in the Downey spacecraft, crew member David Scott received a “pretty strong electrical shock” while wearing a suit pressurized with pure oxygen. Scott was “very lucky he didn’t get electrocuted, burnt to death,” Young noted.
Young and others had reached the same conclusion: the Apollo Block I spacecraft that would be pressurized with pure oxygen on the launchpad contained literally miles of potential short circuits. “I knew it when I saw it, and I saw it in spades in the Block I command module,” Young revealed in his 2012 memoir. He observed big wire bundles resting up against aluminum stringers with no support. Despite the use of machine bundling, Young considered the Apollo wire bundles far larger than they should have been, and wiring insulation was often frayed.
Young has on numerous occasions recounted how he asked Gus Grissom in the weeks before the accident why he did not complain about the bad wiring, which was clearly deficient when compared to their Gemini spacecraft. “If I say anything about it, they’ll fire me,” Young claims Grissom replied. “That’s what he told me,” Young continued. “I couldn’t believe it.”30
In describing the conversation, Young has never fully explained precisely what he thought Grissom was driving at. Would Grissom, if he complained about the bad wiring, have lost his Apollo command and with it his shot at a lunar landing? Was it the macho test pilot code about remaining stoic in the face of adversity? Others suspected as much; Young did not elaborate on this critical point. Nevertheless, Grissom and his Apollo crew should never have been placed in such a dangerous position. Crew safety had been compromised.
While Grissom complained loud and long behind the scenes about many of the problems with his spacecraft, he likely tolerated the bad wiring because he, NASA, and its contractors were at that time firmly in the grip of a deadly malady called “Go Fever.” “There was a lot of pressure within NASA to get off on time,” backup crew member Cunningham recalled. Congress was increasingly in the mood to cut the space agency’s budget, hence “time was money.”31 Grissom and his crew were gambling that the growing list of problems with the spacecraft would somehow be fixed in time for the February launch. That gamble would prove to be a fatal miscalculation.
Struggling to stay on schedule, NASA accepted Spacecraft 012 and allowed North American Aviation to ship it to Cape Kennedy in August 1966. The next five months would be spent fixing and reinstalling critical systems. The spacecraft simulator, a critical training tool for the shakedown mission, was falling hopelessly behind as the number of design changes mounted.
The Apollo cabin would be pressurized with pure oxygen at 16.7 pounds per square inch on the launchpad and five pounds per square inch in space. The overpressure would ensure that a heavy, inward-opening hatch would seal like a cork. This was necessary in part because Apollo planners had specified a shirtsleeve environment in the cabin so the crew could get out of their pressure suits and eventually fly the complex machine to the moon and back.
The Apollo hatch consisted of three parts, or what astronaut Jim Lovell described as a “three-layer sandwich”:32 the outermost or boost protective cover, which shielded the command module during launch before being jettisoned along with the Apollo escape system; a middle, or ablative, hatch, which became the outer hatch when the boost protective cover was jettisoned, providing thermal protection during reentry; and an inner hatch, which sealed the cabin’s pressure vessel wall.
The inner hatch, variously described as “a monster,” “pretty damned heavy,” and “a brute of a thing,”33 was held in place by multiple dog bolts that had to be hand-cranked to open. It also was awkwardly placed behind the center couch, where White would be sitting. Commander Grissom, in the left-hand seat, would have to help White open the hatch. A ratchet handle would be used to crank the hatch open in six different places. Then, it would have to be pulled inside the spacecraft. Under the best of circumstances, at least ninety seconds would be required to remove the inner hatch. Removal could not commence until the cabin pressure was equalized with outside pressure, so the seal could be broken. The ablative hatch was also opened from the inside, but its release was less complicated. The Block I hatch design was effectively a kluge, and nearly all the Apollo astronauts hated it.
Explosive bolts or an outward-opening hatch had been considered for the early Apollo design. Most accounts of how the Apollo command module hatch was designed note that Grissom opposed such a hatch in reaction to his ordeal on Liberty Bell 7. This was false. These accounts fail to note that Grissom harbored no such concerns in helping to design an outward-opening hatch for the Gemini spacecraft. Moreover, it is unclear whether he or other astronauts actually approved the hatch design that would be used on the first version of the Apollo command module. Grissom had bigger problems than the hatch design by the time he was named Apollo 1 commander.
One former NASA official recalls that it was likely astronauts Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad, not Grissom, who actually signed off on the early Apollo hatch design on behalf of the Astronaut Office, despite internal opposition.34 “One of the things that we complained very bitterly about was the hatch,” Apollo 12 command module pilot Richard Gordon told an interviewer. “It was very difficult to open. It was dogged down from the inside. Took a long time to get it open. And it was not like the Gemini hatch, which opened outward very rapidly and very, very quickly.”35
Once the hatch was sealed, the suited astronauts would be breathing pure oxygen. Oxygen under pressure combined with an ignition source and flammable material is deadly. At the time of the Apollo 1 fire, NASA had logged more than twenty thousand hours of experience with pure oxygen in flight and in altitude chambers. By 1966, however, the space agency was pressing its luck.
From a physiological standpoint, there was little doubt that pure oxygen was preferable since it eliminated the possibility of “the bends” should there be a loss of cabin pressure in space. Then, there was the badly needed weight savings a single-gas system would provide over the extra plumbing, sensors, and controls required for an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. But simpler and lighter did not mean safer. As the engineering trade-offs were made during Apollo development, these additional risks were often overlooked in the race to get Apollo into orbit.
The dangers associated with pure oxygen under pressure were understood. A string of fires had broken out in test chambers filled with pure oxygen earlier in the decade. Several American test subjects had been killed largely because of pure oxygen, including two men in a spacecraft simulator at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas just four days after the Apollo fire.36
Of greatest concern to the Apollo managers in the months before the fire were recurring problems with the spacecraft’s environmental control system that supplied oxygen, cooling, and air handling in the command module. The system, designed by a North American Aviation subcontractor, the AiResearch division of the Garrett Corporation, initially failed during an unmanned test in July 1964 when the insulation around a heater coil failed, causing an explosion in the test chamber.
Things went from bad to worse after the system was installed in the Block I spacecraft. A fire broke out nearly a day into another qualification test in April 1966 using pure oxygen at five pounds per square inch of pressure, the same atmosphere that would be used in space. The probable cause was traced to insulation used in a failed commercial heater.
Months before the Apollo fire, an accident board examining the cause of the April 1966 accident recommended eliminating all nonmetallic material in the spacecraft that could come in contact with wire bundles, indicating that investigators understood those wires were potential ignition sources. Spacecraft 012 was full of ignition sources.
Dr. Fred Kelly, an astronaut candidate, naval aviator, and NASA flight surgeon, oversaw the medical panel that investigated the Apollo fire. On the question of whether the fire could have been prevented, Kelly was unequivocal: “With 20/20 hindsight anyone off the street should see that a spacecraft with 72.5 pounds of flammable material, miles of unprotected wiring and 47 possible ignition points in an atmosphere of 100 percent oxygen at 16.7 psi was an accident waiting to happen.”37 Kelly noted that any atmosphere that supports life could fuel a fire. Still, as a member of the medical requirements office that was formed as Apollo was ramping up, Kelly coauthored a paper detailing the fire hazards of pure oxygen under partial pressure. Those warnings and others from North American Aviation went unheeded, and the Apollo cabin’s pure oxygen atmosphere remained.38
By October 1966, senior Apollo managers had concluded that the AiResearch environmental control unit was in “serious trouble,” threatening a “major delay in the first flight of Apollo.” Samuel C. Phillips, the Apollo program director, warned Garrett executives that the “current difficulty is the latest in a long string of failures and problems associated with the AiResearch equipment.” Phillips cited inadequate development testing and “poor workmanship.”39
With the launch of Grissom’s Apollo flight now scheduled for February 21, 1967, Phillips leaned on Garrett to fix the system, the sooner the better. Spacecraft 012’s environmental control system had again been replaced when the ship was delivered to the Cape in August 1966, delaying testing of the spacecraft in a vacuum chamber. AiResearch shipped a new system from its West Coast plant to Cape Kennedy in November for installation and testing. That unit was again returned to California for further repairs. It was finally reinstalled in the spacecraft in mid-December.40 By then, NASA was allowing for virtually no margin of error.
The environmental control unit and a system installed in another Block I command module in Downey continued to leak ethylene glycol up until the night of the Apollo fire. (The Apollo Block I command module used a coolant designated RS-89, a mixture of 62.5 percent ethylene glycol, 35.7 percent water, and 1.8 percent stabilizer and corrosion inhibitor.) Fluid leaks were acknowledged by the Apollo 204 Review Board to be “considerable fire hazards.” Moreover, the inhibitor contained combustible salts that did not evaporate. The residue from spilled coolant could conduct electricity if it came in contact with wire that was not properly insulated.41
The list of serious problems with Grissom’s spacecraft seemed insurmountable prior to the launchpad test of the command module internal power system, the plugs-out rehearsal consisting of a simulated launch countdown with the crew sealed in the cabin on top of an unfueled rocket. Weeks before, the spacecraft’s service module, which included thrusters and its main engine, was damaged after being inserted into a vacuum chamber for testing. A light shattered and falling debris damaged several maneuvering thrusters. In October 1966, a separate service module at the North American Aviation plant that would be mated to another Block I spacecraft was damaged during routine pressure tests when the propellant tanks exploded.42 It was increasingly apparent to anyone paying attention that Grissom had a lemon of a spacecraft on his hands. By December, he was telling reporters that a successful flight would be one in which he and his crew made it back alive. The reporters thought Grissom was joking. Indeed, he was dead serious and increasingly pessimistic that his ship could be made to fly. Grissom’s intuition about the dangers of being the first to fly a new machine and remaining too long on the flight line were becoming his new reality as launch day drew closer. He grew more irritable by the day.
The combination of the Apollo designers’ insistence on a pure oxygen cabin atmosphere and the inward-opening hatch posed a grave threat that no one, including Grissom, fully appreciated. These hazards were obvious in hindsight, but the level of risk being tolerated by program managers was arguably unprecedented in the history of the American space program.
Launch preparations continued even as the planned February launch date grew more unrealistic. Following a year-end round of press interviews in which Grissom was repeatedly asked about the dangers associated with the first Apollo flight, he, Betty, and Purdue’s growing list of astronaut alumni traveled to Pasadena, California, to attend the Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl football game. The Boilermakers were representing the Big Ten Conference against the University of Southern California. Purdue quarterback Bob Griese, an All-American and future National Football League Hall of Famer, led the Boilermakers to a 14-13 victory. Purdue graduate and future spacewalker Jerry Ross helped tear down the goal posts.
The Rose Bowl victory lifted the Grissom family’s spirits and perhaps steeled Gus for the difficult days ahead. American football, a game Grissom had been too slight to play, provided a brief respite from the unrelenting pressures of his upcoming mission and all the hazards it entailed. The trip also marked the last time Betty and Gus would relax together and, if only for a day, forget about the risky business of spaceflight.
Back in Timber Cove, Grissom was mostly absent, constantly shuttling between California, Florida, and Houston. (Ever the hotshot pilot and competitor, he had mastered a technique called “hot refueling”—connecting the hose and refueling the astronauts’ T-38 aircraft while the engines were still running. Walt Cunningham claimed Grissom held the record for the fastest turnaround using the frowned-upon technique: “a flat five minutes.”43) Mark Grissom calculated his father was home about six weeks in 1966. On the rare occasions when he was, the phone would ring off the hook, calls from the Cape or California about some new problem with the spacecraft. “They would be fussing about something,” Betty remembered. This was not like Gus. He did not bring work home with him. “He would rather be messing around with the kids. But now he was uptight about it.”44
The absentee father nevertheless cared deeply about his family and did not want his problems to become theirs. But the pressure was unceasing, and the commander was reluctantly playing the hand he had been dealt. The last weeks of Grissom’s life were more than most humans could endure. There were “too many bosses” at North American Aviation. Committees were making decisions about what spacecraft fixes to make and when. The old, reliable way of doing things, the way McDonnell Aircraft had managed Mercury and Gemini, was no longer available. Apollo program managers were fixated on sticking to an impossible schedule. The careful test pilot who worked every day to mitigate risk was being painted into a corner.
Along with the Rose Bowl, a lemon tree in the Grissom’s backyard would provide some inspiration and momentary relief from the unending pressure. The Apollo crew had been in California during late January. They were due back at the Cape on Monday, January 23. Gus, Ed, and Roger arrived home on Sunday to spend time with their families and catch up on mail before flying back to the Cape the next day. A critical launch countdown simulation of the spacecraft’s internal power systems was scheduled for the end of the week. If successful, Apollo 1 might actually get off the ground in February. Then the pressure would be off until the next flight.
Gus packed his bag that Monday morning and prepared to leave. Before departing, he sliced a hunk of cheese from a large block, a Christmas gift from a friend, and then stuffed the cheese in his bag. Before leaving, he suddenly turned, walked out into the courtyard, and pulled a Texas lemon as big as a grapefruit from the tree. Gus decided there and then to hang the lemon on the nearly useless Apollo simulator at the Cape, a final act of defiance that expressed his months of frustration and, for the first time in his astronaut career, his doubts about the upcoming flight of Apollo 1.
The husband briefly explained the lemon’s purpose, kissed his wife of twenty-one years good-bye, and left. The years of struggle and sacrifice were about to end. Betty would never see Gus again.