Falling to Earth Page 12

  I was at Downey one Friday in late January 1967. Only a few hours remained until I could fly home for the weekend, and I was looking forward to the break. I’d worked all day with the Apollo crew of Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan, who were training in a Block I command module. At the same time, the crew of the first planned Apollo flight, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, was running some tests inside their Block I spacecraft, which sat on top of an unfueled rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. Liftoff was planned for the following month.

  I was in the astronaut offices at the plant when I received an urgent phone call from Deke Slayton. There had been a fire inside the spacecraft at the Cape, he told me, and all of the crewmembers were dead. Stafford, Young, and Cernan needed to get out of the near-identical spacecraft at Downey, and all further testing was canceled. Deke was terse and businesslike: there would be a lot of work to do and funerals to attend, so the four of us needed to get back to Houston as soon as possible.

  Racing to the control room, I called down to the spacecraft test area, where a technician put Stafford, the crew commander, on the phone with me. He didn’t want to believe that our three colleagues in Florida were dead. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to either. Once the news sank in, Stafford hurriedly told Cernan and Young. Then the four of us met in an office where I shared what else I had been told.

  I explained to my stunned colleagues that Gus was inside the spacecraft with his crew when a fire had broken out. Despite heroic attempts, the spacecraft hatch had not been opened in time to save them. I’d been an astronaut for less than a year, and other than racing cars with Gus, I had not had time to get to know any of the three men. Nevertheless, as we prepared to hustle back to Houston, I found myself imagining the screams of the trapped crew as they died.

  After racing back to the airport, John Young and I sped back to Houston in one T-38, while Tom and Gene flew another. We arrived around midnight.

  Pam was at home when I unlocked the door. She had heard the news, of course. Days like this were what she always feared. My career dreams had brought me close to danger and death many times, and it could easily have been me in that fire. On this night, was Pam scared or angry, or both? I am sorry to say I don’t know; we didn’t discuss it. My mind was somewhere else entirely. I was more concerned that the program might die, and with it all the work that I had done.

  Thinking about it now, with regret, I can see that Pam and I had no place left to comfort each other. We were both shaken up, but for completely different reasons. And without the ability to help each other on those darkest of days, our marriage was doomed.

  Instead of talking, I busied myself for work the next morning, knowing it would be an extremely tough day. In fact, for all I knew, it might have been the beginning of the end for NASA. Politicians and administrators respond to death in a different way than pilots. As I went to sleep, I wondered if the loss of Gus and his crew might lead to the cancellation of the entire Apollo program.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE FIRE

  The morning after the fire, most people I talked to were still in shock. Many of my colleagues knew those three guys well and found it tough to believe that they were gone. The astronaut corps, however, felt a particular kind of angry frustration. For civilians and taxpayers, the astronaut deaths were distressing and unexpected. But military pilots were familiar with death, and we also felt angry. Even though many aviators die in flying accidents, Gus, Ed, and Roger died conducting tedious tests in a spacecraft that never left the ground. To perish this way seemed doubly wrong. But we all needed to put our emotions to one side, regroup, and try to find the cause of the fire and the reason our colleagues could not get out in time to save their lives.

  It turned out that there were multiple reasons, and everyone involved with that spacecraft shared the blame. The fatal test was performed using pure oxygen under high pressure, which meant a fire could spread quite easily. NASA management, the spacecraft manufacturers, and the astronaut corps all allowed materials to be used in the spacecraft that could catch fire without much difficulty. In addition, loose wiring inside the spacecraft was vulnerable to kicking and chafing.

  But it quickly became evident that the spacecraft hatch was the major cause of my colleagues’ deaths. Had just one of them been able to open it up, they would have survived. The hatch design was a disaster: it sealed from the inside, so the greater the interior pressure, the tighter the seal. For keeping a spacecraft airtight in space that design made sense, but it was lethal during a pressurized test on the ground. It was an example of a system designed by nonpilots; safety was not the most important factor.

  North American Aviation built the spacecraft and naturally shouldered much of the blame. But the accident was more complicated than that. I believe there were too many people involved for one specific group to be responsible. Others blamed the tragedy on the intense pressure to fly Apollo to the moon before the end of the decade. Yes, there was pressure, but personally I don’t think it directly led to any oversights. The cause of the fire was tougher to swallow. The fault belonged to all of us: how can you blame any one person or group for something that everyone had overlooked?

  No one had taken the time to consider that an electrical spark in the spacecraft, while unlikely, would be disastrous. For three dangerous ingredients to come together like this—flammable material, sparking wires, and pressurized pure oxygen—a lot of details must have been overlooked by a lot of people, and not just those at North American. These details were probably missed because, until January of 1967, everything had worked fine, so we were overconfident. No one wanted to stop and think about potential problems. In this instance, it killed three men.

  I later heard talk about shoddy workmanship on the Apollo spacecraft by North American and accusations that this problem may have contributed to the fire. But in the months before the fire, I saw just the opposite. North American’s engineers were very particular, detailed, thorough, and determined to do a good job. I was especially impressed with how well they kept records. Initially, I thought the amount of paperwork they required was too much. But one night we were checking a spacecraft and found that one particular wire inside a large bundle did not work—it had chafed and exposed raw wiring. The company went back to their records and diagrams, and within days had replaced not only that particular wire, but every piece of that faulty batch of wire in every part of every spacecraft it had assembled. Damn impressive.

  Not long after the fire, I was assigned back to Downey to resume work on the Block II spacecraft. This time, my job was to improve everything we could, based on the lessons of the fire. Jack Swigert, who would later fly on the Apollo 13 mission, joined me in this important duty. Because of his work improving the command module, Jack probably saved his own life years later when Apollo 13’s service module failed and he helped to bring the crippled spacecraft home.

  A lifelong bachelor, Jack had a party at his house every weekend and dated every woman in sight. He was a real skirt chaser and a playboy. He spent a lot of time in Miami, where Eastern Airlines had a flight attendant school. I guess the odds of dating were much better around all of those young women. He was also notoriously tight with money, asking a girl out on a date only to have her pay. There was one story going around about a girl he dated in Washington, D.C. He not only asked her to pay for dinner, but also to fill his car up with gas, telling her that he had forgotten to bring any money. He was apparently upset when this girl did not invite him back to her place—but no one could blame her.

  All of this behavior was generally considered okay; no one cared about Jack’s private life as long as he did his job as well. Thankfully, he was very good at what he did. He’d been a fighter pilot and a great test pilot before joining NASA and was well regarded in the flying fraternity.

  I was confident that the Block II spacecraft we worked on before the fire was already a fine vehicle. Still, to make it even safer, Jack and I worked with the North Amer
ican and NASA engineers to help redesign the equipment inside, replacing anything flammable with fire-resistant materials such as Beta cloth. It took us months to figure out everything that needed to be done. Because of the work carried out by everyone involved with the spacecraft in those first crucial months, we pulled the Apollo program back from the brink and removed any fears of cancellation. NASA had to earn confidence in its abilities all over again, and it did. We did.

  I felt no apprehension at all getting back into an Apollo spacecraft right after the fire. I knew that we were going to make the upgraded command module the safest space vehicle ever built. My engineering background, I think, was the major reason I was assigned to this task. I spent months inside the spacecraft, helping to develop and test new malfunction procedures, getting familiar with the systems and then redesigning them. While Jack Swigert and I worked on our procedures, the spacecraft hatch was also redesigned. The Apollo command module soon had an outward-opening hatch with a quick-action lever, and it worked excellently.

  Jack and I spent countless hours going over every single system, working on elaborate diagrams to show what would happen if multitudes of different actions were taken. The spacecraft engineers had created procedures to describe what a crew should do if something went wrong with the spacecraft, and the flight controllers in Houston then modified them. Until tested in a real spacecraft, however, we had no idea if the procedures would really work. Jack and I needed to make sure. We soon found that the procedures, based on spacecraft blueprints, did not always match the reality. So we went through every detail of every imaginable flight moment with each spacecraft part, and did a great deal of rewriting to perfect the procedures. The collaboration produced an enormous malfunction procedures manual that every Apollo crew consulted diligently in their training.

  I was in California every week for at least a year and a half doing this crucial work. I would leave Houston on Sunday night and was back by Friday night unless a test overran into the weekend. For the amount of time I spent there, I may as well have bought a house in Downey. I got to know hotel rooms far better than my own home. We were determined to get back into space again, and all other considerations—including our family lives—were sidelined until we achieved this goal.

  If I thought the tragedies of 1967 were over after the fire, I was wrong. In June, Ed Givens, an astronaut in my selection group, died in a car crash close to the space center in Houston. Only a few months later, in October, we lost another astronaut. This time, it was someone I knew well. C.C. Williams had just learned that he and his wife, Beth, were going to have a second child. He was flying a T-38 when something went wrong. Somehow one of the aileron controls on his wing became stuck, causing the aircraft to roll and then nose down. C.C. tried to get the airplane under control, but it was impossible, and by the time he gave up and bailed out there was no time for his parachute to open. NASA lost one of the nicest, most humble guys I had ever met.

  C.C. perished a month before Mike Adams, another pilot I had met at Edwards. Selected as an astronaut for MOL before transferring to the X-15 rocket plane program, Mike died while flying an X-15 back from a suborbital spaceflight. It was a horrific year for the American space program, worsened when MOL astronaut Bob Lawrence was killed in December in yet another airplane crash.

  America had just lost seven astronauts in one year. Not surprisingly, the deaths of my colleagues did my marriage little good. In retrospect, telling Pam that I was joining the astronaut corps the year before had been a nail in the coffin when it came to our relationship, and I can only guess that the Apollo 1 fire was privately very traumatic for her, too. After all, I was training to do the same things as my now-dead colleagues.

  In hindsight, the Apollo 1 fire was much tougher on Pam than it was on me. To my dismay, I began to understand that she would rather be divorced from me than constantly dreading the day when someone would inform her I had died in an airplane or spacecraft accident.

  At the time, I really couldn’t understand her point of view. I didn’t see what difference it would make. If you lose a person, I reasoned, you lose them, and it does not matter how. Perhaps Pam wished to keep her own initiative and choices, rather than leaving it to fate. For now, however, although we were essentially living separate lives, we officially stayed married. I was working so hard in California that year that I was hardly ever home anyway, even if she had wanted me to be.

  It was also a terrible year to become an astronaut. When I was selected the year before, NASA also began to recruit a new group of scientists into the astronaut corps in the belief that, although none were jet pilots, they could be trained to fly with us in space. There would be missions to a number of space stations then in the planning stages, they were told. However, by the time eleven had been selected in August of 1967, our budget had been severely cut. The number of missions shrank, along with the need for these extra astronauts. On their first day in Houston, Deke Slayton told them bluntly and honestly that they were not needed any more. Over the next couple of years many of them quit and returned to their scientific careers; the others endured a long wait of more than a decade before finally flying on the space shuttle. Some of those guys became great pilots and good friends of mine. But the writing was on the wall from the outset. They would not fly Apollo missions, and it was beginning to feel like not all of my group would get the chance either.

  So 1967 was a gloomy and difficult time. At the end of the year, however, I received some good news. Ed Mitchell, Fred Haise, and I were reconfirmed as the support crew for a new version of the planned second manned Apollo flight. Despite losing colleagues, ominous budget cuts, and the gradual disintegration of my marriage, I kept some modest pride knowing that my hard work was paying off.

  Our support crew didn’t stay the same for long: Jack Lousma soon replaced Fred Haise, who was pulled away to other duties. The planned mission was a prestigious one: the first test flight of the lunar module. Our roles, however, were anything but glamorous. We did the dog work, helping the crew with planning, meetings, and any other little details they needed to clear up. We even brought them coffee if they asked for it.

  This would be the first mission where two American manned spacecraft would link together, and so the docking system was a vital new piece of engineering that could not fail. I was asked to focus on this key element of the mission. While Ed Mitchell was out on the East Coast working on the lunar module, I was back at Downey and at the Cape, working on this docking system. I was basically out there on my own, which I took to be a good indicator of how much Deke trusted me.

  Did the support role mean I might soon be on a backup crew? I didn’t know. I simply tried to do the best job I could. I was grateful to be working for one of the best prime crews that NASA had ever assembled. Jim McDivitt was mission commander. He knew not only what he wanted to do, but also how to do it: the sign of a good commander. He was very decisive, but also very nice about it.

  Jim was a ball of fire. Slightly built and with a sunny disposition, he laughed a lot and made things easier for the crew. He was good at taking suggestions and making decisions. While training with him, I discovered that his parents had moved to Jackson, Michigan, when he was in college, and they now lived only two blocks away from my parents.

  As I got to know him and his wife, Pat, we soon became like family. Through Jim’s parents, the two of them even uncovered the nickname my mother had used for me when I was young. Jim began to call me “Sonny” on every possible occasion. Four decades later, I have almost forgiven him.

  At the time, I didn’t get to know the other two prime crewmembers well. Rusty Schweickart was the lunar module pilot, which meant that, like Ed, he spent most of his time on the East Coast with the lunar module, so I rarely worked with him. The other crewmember, command module pilot Dave Scott, was someone I only saw during the major tests and checks on the command module at Downey.

  I remembered Dave Scott from West Point, and it was no surprise to me that his star
had continued to rise. Like me, he’d spent some time at the University of Michigan and as an Edwards test pilot, although in different years. But he’d also managed to squeeze in graduate work at MIT, served in a fighter squadron overseas, and was selected by NASA as an astronaut a full three years ahead of me. He was four months younger than me, yet had outpaced me on all career fronts. The guy was damn impressive, and NASA’s golden boy. I think everyone in Houston believed one day Dave would be the chief of staff of the air force. He just seemed destined for greatness.

  My good opinion of Dave grew as I got to know him better. He was at the very least the equal of anyone in the astronaut office—and I suspected he was better than all of them. When he came to check out the spacecraft, he took meticulous notes, then gradually checked off each item to ensure that everything was resolved to his satisfaction. Absolutely no detail, however small, got past him. He’d flown in space once before, on the Gemini 8 mission in 1966 with Neil Armstrong, bedeviled by a stuck thruster which spun the spacecraft out of control. Dave and Neil nearly passed out, but kept their cool and saved the spacecraft and their lives by regaining control and returning from orbit. They impressed their NASA colleagues, especially their fellow pilots. They had taken care of the problem and made it home. Less-skilled pilots would have died up there.

  During my year preparing and checking the mission’s command module in Downey, I came to know every mechanic, test conductor, and technician who worked on the spacecraft. Every day I was sure to ask them if there were any problems. If something is wrong, I said, please share it with me. I assured them I would get the problem resolved. It was a lesson I’d learned when running the armaments shop back in my fighter squadron days. The spacecraft was the most important thing in the world to me; it had to be flawless. I told the team of technicians that if a problem arose with the command module, I would keep it within our small group while we fixed it. But I also promised there would be hell to pay if something was wrong with the space vehicle and they didn’t tell me about it.