Apollo: The Race to the Moon (29 page)

He pulled on his cigarette, trying to decide how to explain it to an outsider, then took out a pen and sketched the floor plan of the Apollo spacecraft on a napkin. “The commander was on the left,” he began. “On the pad he would be lying on his back. And right here”—the pen etched a delicate ´ —“in the side of the spacecraft beside him was a compartment for lithium hydroxide, which takes out the CO2 so the crew can rebreathe the oxygen. It had a metal door with a sharp edge … .”

The door opened into the Environmental Control Unit (E.C.U.). Just underneath it was a cable, part of the E.C.U.’s instrumentation harness. The cable was wedged against the bottom of the door by other bundles of wires beneath it. Each time the door was pushed shut, the edge of the metal door scraped against the cable. The slight but repeated abrasion had exposed two tiny sections of wire in the cable. Something—maybe Grissom opened the door—caused a brief electrical arc between the exposed portions of wire.

Even with the pure oxygen environment, the spark from the short would not have caused a conflagration. But it also happened that, just below the two scuffs in the cable, a length of aluminum tubing took a ninety-degree turn. This particular ninety-degree corner joint, one of hundreds in the tubing that interlaced the spacecraft, probably had sprung a leak. The joint had passed redundant inspections, but it had been subject to “creep” from stress at remote points in the system—the spacecraft was constantly being worked on, and things got bumped around. Certainly even a small leak would help explain what happened, because the tubing carried a glycol cooling fluid which, when exposed to air, turned into fumes. The liquid was not flammable, but the fumes were.

The scuffed cable wedged against the bottom of the door was not originally intended to cross the tubing at the joint nor was it originally intended to lie quite as close to the tubing as it did. But there had been thousands of changes in the Block I spacecraft since the plans had been drawn, and the changes had put many cables, this one among them, in different positions from the ones that had originally been thought out at the design tables.

There was also some Raschel netting near the scuffed cable, closer than it should have been—ASPO’s directive about enforcing the fire rules had not yet been acted upon. Besides, astronauts had been customizing their spacecraft ever since the first Mercury flight. And there were so many rules. And this was just a practice countdown, not a real flight. And no one had focused on how highly flammable the netting was in a pure-oxygen environment.

Simpkinson surmised that the hot spot in the netting moved horizontally at first. Or it could have just hung there, slowly growing larger. Possibly it created an acrid smell. For about thirty seconds just before the crisis the crew wasn’t saying anything but White and Grissom were moving around, doing something. One explanation is that they were trying to determine where the smell was coming from.

Heat rises. The glowing spot reached a vertical strand of the netting and began to climb, rising in temperature as it fed upon itself, finally bursting into an open flame. It was at this moment, 6:31:04 P.M. (as later determined by the Medical Analysis Panel), that the sensors attached to Ed White registered “a marked change in the senior pilot’s respiratory and heart rates.” A second later, the first message came over Black 3, the crew’s radio channel: “Fire,” Grissom said, or perhaps it was “Hey.” Two seconds later, Chaffee said clearly, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.” His tone was businesslike.

One hundred and eighty-two feet below, R.C.A. technician Gary Propst was seated before a bank of television monitors. He was trying to adjust the brightness on Camera 29, one of the dozens of cameras that recorded continuously during any simulation or launch. Some of the cameras were focused on critical components of the launch process—the swing arms on the mobile launch tower, the umbilical connections on the Saturn. Others covered the exterior of the entire vehicle, not because anything particularly interesting was expected to occur, but for the same reason that cameras record every public appearance of a President of the United States—just in case. There was no camera inside the cabin.

The monitor immediately above and to the left of the one that Propst was working with was fed by Camera 24, located in the White Room—the enclosed end of the swing arm, immediately adjoining the spacecraft—on Level A8 of the tower. Operated by remote control, it showed activity in the White Room; or, if zoomed in on the porthole in the hatch, it could provide a partial, shadowy view of the interior of the spacecraft as it looked from behind and above the center couch—in effect, showing the view over Ed White’s shoulder. Propst’s primary communications loop was Black 7, but he also monitored Black 3 to keep in touch with events in the spacecraft. He heard the call of “fire in the cockpit” and shifted his attention to the monitor for Camera 24.

At first, all Propst could see was a bright glow within the normally dim spacecraft. Then he could see flame flickering across the porthole and Ed White’s hands reaching above his head toward the bolts that secured the hatch. There was a lot of motion, Propst observed, as White seemed to fumble with something and then quickly pull his arms back, then reach out again. Another pair of arms came into view from the left—those would have been Grissom’s—as the flames spread from the far left-hand corner of the spacecraft toward the porthole.

It seemed to Gary Propst that the crew’s agony was endless. Four days later, testifying before the Review Board, he would estimate that he watched movement within the spacecraft for about two minutes before the spreading flames blocked the view. Bitterly angry, he wondered why no one was getting them out.

Up on Level A8, Don Babbitt, North American Aviation’s pad leader on the second shift, was standing at the pad leader’s desk when he heard Grissom’s first message over the comm box. The spacecraft’s hatch was only twelve feet away, across a swing arm and through the White Room. For Babbitt, time felt speeded up. He couldn’t make out the whole message, but he registered the word “fire.” He told Jim Gleaves, his lead technician, to get the hatch off and then turned from the desk toward the comm box to call George Page down in the blockhouse. As he turned, there was a venting sound, a sort of WHOOOOSH!, followed by what seemed to Babbitt to be a sheet of flame shooting from the spacecraft and arching over his head, charring the papers on the desk.

Gleaves was already moving toward the White Room when he heard the noise. To Gleaves, it sounded as if Grissom had dumped the cabin pressure. Then there was a flash, indicating to Gleaves that “something was fixing to happen,” and he turned away to run just as the heat shield ruptured, spattering him with fire and debris. “It was like when you were a kid and you put a firecracker in a tin can,” Gleaves said in his testimony to the Review Board, “and it blew the whole side out of the tin can with the flames shooting out.” The force of the blast knocked Gleaves up against the room’s orange door (“which,” he would pointedly tell the Review Board, “I might say opens the wrong direction”).

Gary Propst’s recollection notwithstanding, the rending of the spacecraft took place with merciful speed. From the first call of fire to the final scream on the communication tape, from the sudden rise in the senior pilot’s pulse to the explosion that slammed Jim Gleaves up against the orange door, just eighteen seconds had passed.

A plugs-out test was a major event in the preparation for a manned launch and as such it required the combined ministrations of three widely separated control centers. One was Mission Control in Houston, which oversaw the simulated post-ignition phase from the time the vehicle cleared the top of the launch tower until insertion into orbit, when the simulation ended. But the main purpose of a plugs-out test was to demonstrate that the systems of the launch vehicle and the spacecraft worked—that a given switch turned from Off to On produced the desired consequences in the innards of the machines. So for a plugs-out test, the two control centers at the Cape had most of the action. Their duties were split at the joint that divided the people at the Cape into one of two primary groups, the yin and yang of manned spaceflight—the world of the launch vehicle and the world of the spacecraft.

The checkout of the launch vehicle, ensuring that the hundreds of valves and pumps and tons of propellants would produce a controlled explosion of precisely the required magnitude and characteristics at precisely the right moment, was entrusted to the Firing Room. In 1967, at Pad 34, the Firing Room was in a concrete blockhouse located only a few hundred yards from the launch tower. Meanwhile, the tests of the spacecraft’s systems were conducted by the Automatic Checkout Equipment (ACE) Control Room, located in the Operations and Checkout (O&C) Building a few miles from the launch complex.

Only one person in each control room was authorized to talk directly to the astronauts. In the ACE Control Room, that person was Skip Chauvin, the spacecraft test conductor. At 6:31:04, the test was in a scheduled hold at T–10 minutes and Chauvin was examining the current page in the test protocol, thinking about what came next, his pen poised to make another note. Like Babbitt up on the tower, he didn’t really catch the first message, just something about a fire. The voice was calm and matter-of-fact. Chauvin looked up at the TV monitor, but the picture wasn’t much help—something was burning, Chauvin could tell, but his first thought was that the fire was outside the spacecraft.

John Tribe, North American’s lead engineer on the C.S.M.’s reaction and control system, was sitting at a console a few rows in front of Chauvin. He was taking advantage of the hold to scribble out a procedure he wanted to run the next day when he too heard the word “fire” on his loop. Tribe wasn’t sure that he had heard right. “Did he say ‘fire’?” he asked the man next to him. Yes, that’s what he had heard too. “What the hell are they talking about?” Tribe wondered.

Then Chaffee’s voice again, agitated now. “We’ve got a bad fire … Let’s get out … We’re burning up!” There was a short scream, then silence.

Chauvin was calling to the crew on Black 3, getting no response. He shouted across the room to the people at the electrical power consoles to power down the spacecraft—startling many, for the composed Chauvin never shouted. To Chauvin, as to Propst, everything during those moments seemed to take forever. Unlike Propst, he recognized how illusory his reactions had been—when he testified before the Review Board a week later, he would refuse to make time estimates for specific events, understanding that he was trying to remember a nightmare.

At the time, the significance of what they had seen and heard took a while to sink in. Mostly, people were bewildered. Only a few had been watching the television monitor—Tribe couldn’t even see it from his console—and those who were in a position to see couldn’t make out much. After a few minutes, Tribe was sure at least that he was going to be working late that night. He took off his headset and went to phone his wife, telling her he wouldn’t be home for a while. She wasn’t to worry if she heard about some flap out at the Cape. No, he couldn’t say any more, but she shouldn’t worry, he was okay. After he hung up, one of Tribe’s friends came over and picked up the telephone. “Hey,” he asked, “what’s the matter with this phone?” Nothing, Tribe replied, he had just used it. The man shook his head. “It’s dead.” Tribe turned around and saw a guard at the door of the ACE Control Room. Rocco Petrone, watching the test from the blockhouse, had already moved to seal off Kennedy Space Center.

Petrone was over in the blockhouse beside the pad, sitting beside Deke Slayton, one of the original seven astronauts chosen for Mercury, now the director of Flight Crew Operations. Nearby was Stu Roosa, acting as Stony, the person in the blockhouse who communicated with the crew (the position called CapCom in Mission Control).

Petrone and Slayton had been talking idly about the erratic communications when they heard a muffled comment from the crew. Petrone, looking at one of the three television monitors at his console, saw what looked like a shadow moving in the spacecraft. Then, to his puzzlement, he noticed that another monitor, focused on the service module beneath the spacecraft, showed that the cables attached to the service module were swaying.

Slayton saw flames around the hatch area, but it was hard to make out what was going on. The television picture added to the confusion—it changed quickly from flames into a blinding white glare, then subsided into flames and smoke again. When Slayton heard the frantic “We’re burning up,” his first impression was that the pad leader was crying for help, that a fire had broken out on Level A8 in the White Room.

“And then things just went crazy,” recalled Ed Fannin, sitting at one of the Environmental Control Unit’s consoles. One of the spacecraft people called him on the loop asking for him to increase the flow of air into the service module. Fannin didn’t think it was a good idea, since they didn’t know yet what was going on up there, but he did what they asked. It was pretty quiet in the blockhouse after that, he remembered, “except for the communications going over the loop. You could hear guys out there saying ‘It’s too hot, it’s too hot, you can’t touch it, it’s too hot.’”

As they listened to Skip Chauvin calling helplessly to the crew and saw the image on the monitor cloud over with greasy smoke, Slayton thought he knew what they were likely to find when they opened the hatch. He arranged for the medics to get up the tower, then picked up the phone to get things cranked up back in Houston in case this was as bad as he feared.

Up on Level A8, the situation was slowly stabilizing. When spacecraft 012 ruptured and flame and debris spewed into the White Room, Babbitt and the men with him scrambled across the swing arm into the main tower where a crew was standing by the elevator, waiting to participate in the final stage of the plugs-out test. Babbitt shouted to the elevator technician to tell the blockhouse that the spacecraft was on fire, and to get some help. Meanwhile, they looked for gas masks so they could get back to the spacecraft.