Apollo: The Race to the Moon (31 page)

Storms said abruptly that there had been a bad fire at the Cape. The spacecraft had burned. Atwood’s first thought was that the whole notion was incredible—how could a spacecraft burn? But even as he turned to hand the phone to Gilruth, the waiter was paging Gilruth for another call, this one from Kraft. Atwood felt someone grabbing his arm. It was Webb, who wanted to introduce Atwood to one of the senators. Atwood told him the news. Webb left to call the White House.

The word spread slowly among the rest of the guests. Lew Evans of Grumman knew that something awful had happened—just watching Bob Gilruth’s and Lee Atwood’s faces told him that. But the rumors were confused—a fire in the stack, that’s all that they knew for sure. Webb finally called for quiet and broke the news officially. After that, Evans recalled, “all the conversation was deep from the heart.” The contractors who didn’t have hardware that was involved remained at the International Club. The others hurriedly left to find airplanes to take them to the Cape. Gilruth, Mueller, and Phillips caught a ride with Debus.

It had taken an hour for NASA to put out the first bulletins, until 7:40 in the evening Eastern Time, 4:40 in the afternoon in Downey. Scott Simpkinson was sitting in his room at the Tahitian Village, a gaudy motel with a go-go club decorated in a South Sea island motif. It was a great favorite of the NASA engineers working at the North American plant.

In the years since Simpkinson had led the pioneer team of Space Task Group engineers down to Hangar S at the Cape, he had become a troubleshooter for the manned space program. During Gemini, Simpkinson had managed the Office of Test Operations, a job that required him to prepare the post-flight technical report for each mission. Gemini’s last flight had been two months earlier, and Simpkinson had finished the report just the week before. Upon his transfer to ASPO, Shea had sent him directly to Downey to assess the production situation for the Block I command modules.

At 4:40, Simpkinson and Andy Hoboken were going over the memo they had prepared for Shea. It was Friday, they figured they could get the final version of the memo in the mail that night, and they were talking about renting a car and driving up to the ski resort at Big Bear Lake for the weekend.

The television was on in the background as the two chatted; it took a moment before “fire” and “spacecraft” registered when the first bulletin was read. They looked at each other, wondering if they had heard right. Then Hoboken ran to the TV to turn up the volume, but the bulletin was over. He started switching channels while Simpkinson turned on the radio and scanned the dial until finally he found another newscaster quoting the first bulletin. It was unspecific, almost cryptic: “There has been an accidental fire at Launch Complex 34. There is fatality. More will be announced after next-of-kin are notified. The prime crew was in the spacecraft.” There was no other information.

Simpkinson picked up the phone to dial a closely held number that would connect him directly with Mission Control in Houston. But it was as if the phone had gone dead—there was no operator, not even a dial tone. Finally Simpkinson said hello into the silent receiver and found that Robert Gilruth was on the other end—he had rung Simpkinson’s motel room at the precise moment when Simpkinson had picked up the receiver to call Mission Control. Years earlier at Lewis, Simpkinson had studied the ways in which airplane fires propagate after a crash. Now they had urgent need of his expertise. Gilruth told him to get to the Cape as soon as possible.

And so the word spread, and NASA changed forever. It was not only three astronauts who died on that evening in January 1967. Some of the space program’s lightheartedness and exuberance died too. Things had been changing all along, of course, as Apollo swelled to thousands, then tens of thousands of workers. Things had had to change. Already it had been a long time since Abe Silverstein could name Apollo as he would name his baby, a long time since Max Faget had thrown paper plates from a balcony at Langley or Jack Kinzler had lashed a spacecraft onto the back of a flatbed truck.

But the fire was a demarcation of the loss of innocence. Never again would individuals be allowed to take so much responsibility onto themselves, to place so much faith in their own experience and judgment. By the time of the fire, there were already many books of rules to go by, and thenceforth the people who had written the rules would themselves have to be governed by them. Before the fire, there had been a sense in which Marshall was still Wernher von Braun’s little band of Germans grown larger, the Cape still Kurt Debus’s launch team grown larger, Houston still Bob Gilruth’s Space Task Group grown larger. No more.

For many of the Apollo people, the night of the fire was also when they stopped believing in their invulnerability. “With a young guy, you don’t realize sometimes you can’t do something, so you go ahead and do it,” said one Cape engineer. “As you get older, you get more cautious, and you have a fear of how you would look if you failed.” The night of the fire, the young men of the space program suddenly became much older. After that night, there would always be a heightened sense not just that things could go wrong (they had always known that), but that things might actually go wrong, something that had been hard for the young ones to recognize.

But these were changes to be discovered in retrospect. That night the people of Apollo grieved. It made no difference how many thousands of people were in the program, it made no difference that only a few of them had known the astronauts personally. That night, the astronauts were mourned as family.

At the Cape, it was the numbed grief of people who have to carry on—hardly anyone on the vast Merritt Island reservation got home before the early hours of Saturday morning, and many didn’t get home for days. The reaction was most intense among the North American people: It was their spacecraft and they were the people who had certified that it was ready to fly. Marty Cioffoletti was by now working on the reaction and control system for the command module. He and a half dozen of the other North American engineers, people who had been working together for years, close friends, gathered in one of the North American offices. “People started saying, ‘It had to be your system, because I know my system was clean,’” Cioffoletti recalled. “Those guys knew each other, and they would have staked their lives that the other guy would do the right thing in an emergency, and here they were, almost coming to a fistfight that night over whose system was to blame. And nobody knew whose system was to blame—Jesus, it was only an hour after the thing happened!”

At Houston, far from the scene, with nothing for most of them to do, the grief was more uncomplicated. When Jerry Bostick drove into the parking lot outside the Control Center—he knew only that “something pretty bad had happened”—the first thing he saw was his friend Dutch von Ehrenfried crying uncontrollably in the parking lot, saying over and over, “It’s horrible! It’s horrible!” Bostick was mystified. He wondered whether Dutch had experienced some strange kind of breakdown. John Aaron, who would be so dispassionately in control during moments of crisis in Apollo 12 and 13, was so shaken that Rod Loe went to the Control Center to drive him home. Rod and Tina Loe would have no celebratory poker party that night.

Some of the other controllers who had been on shift in the Control Center went to the Singing Wheel, a nearby roadhouse that was a favorite hangout. They usually went there to wind down after simulations or to celebrate splashdowns. But they discovered that night that the Singing Wheel was also a good place for a wake. They sat at the bar, drinking and talking quietly until the small hours of the morning.

Chapter 15. The Crucible

The first of the small planes touched down at the K.S.C. airstrip shortly before midnight after the two-hour flight from Washington. Gilruth, Mueller, Debus, Phillips, and Atwood were aboard. The plane from Houston carrying Faget, Shea, and a half dozen of the key technical people in ASPO arrived an hour later.

They gathered first in the ACE Control Room, listening on headsets as the ACE controllers talked to the men on the tower who were removing the astronauts’ bodies. For some of them, it was a time of belated revelation. Lee Atwood, president of North American, found himself “staggered” when he found out what the test conditions were—“locking those men in a spacecraft, pumping sixteen pounds of oxygen on them, and telling them to operate complicated electrical equipment.” It all seemed so obviously wrong to him—now. And yet they had been doing countdown tests in pure-oxygen environments since Mercury. They had sealed astronauts into spacecraft for pure-oxygen ground tests throughout Gemini. The designers of the Apollo spacecraft had weighed the pros and cons of changing to a two-gas system. There seemed to be too many cons, and finally they decided to leave it as it was.*

[* As in many aspects of Apollo, all of the alternatives had dangers associated with them. Pure oxygen was essential in orbit (and accordingly was retained in orbit even after the fire) because cabin pressure in orbit was only about one-third the pressure at sea level. Normal air at that pressure doesn’t have enough oxygen to sustain life. For sea-level operations, the original Mercury capsule had pure oxygen in the suit loop and normal sea-level atmosphere in the cabin. But a test pilot for McDonnell (and brother of Warren North, who was in charge of astronaut training at Houston) almost died during a test involving the Mercury capsule precisely because (for a complicated chain of technical reasons) the cabin was not flooded with pure oxygen. This led to the initial decision to keep the cabin at pure oxygen on the ground as well as in space. That history, plus weight and reliability disadvantages of a two-gas system, affected subsequent design decisions during Gemini and Apollo. A similar balancing of dangers had to attend the decision after the fire to convert the hatch into an outward-opening one. The new design was safer than an inward-opening hatch while the astronauts were on the ground. It was less safe when the astronauts were in space, and enough heavier that it required a redesign of the parachute system, which in turn involved a host of competing considerations to be weighed and balanced.]

Shea decided later that night to move into the astronauts’ quarters on the third floor of the Operations and Checkout (O&C) Building. He later explained it as part of a shift into the mode he had used to resolve prior technical crises: Move onto the site, work all three shifts, understand what has gone wrong, fix it. But Shea was doing something more than that, for the astronauts’ quarters were exceedingly private—“a sacristy usually inviolate,” in Shea’s own curious choice of words. There were other places just as close to the investigation where he could have stayed, but Shea had to choose the very rooms where the dead astronauts had slept. It would not be the last time that Joe Shea made sure that he could not turn away even for a moment.

Shea then went down to a meeting with Gilruth and Mueller and Low. First they decided who was going to be on the investigative panel. They moved quickly through most of the names, but got into an argument when it came to choosing an astronaut for the panel. Gilruth wanted Wally Schirra, Grissom’s backup for Apollo 1. Shea was opposed—Schirra was a good astronaut, Shea said, but he was not as immersed in the details of the spacecraft’s design as were Jim McDivitt and Frank Borman, the prime candidates for the first lunar landing. The way Deke Slayton’s rotation system was set up, it looked as if McDivitt might now be tied up preparing for the first Apollo flight. That left Borman. The rest were persuaded, and Borman was put on the panel. Shea finally got to sleep at 4 A.M.

Scott Simpkinson caught a red-eye from Los Angeles and arrived in the predawn darkness at Melbourne airport south of the Cape. He rented a car and drove to K.S.C. and the large, hangar-like area in the O&C Building where the spacecraft were checked out. He arrived at about 8:00 to find a collection of people beginning to set up the investigation.

Nobody was really running the meeting. Tommy Thompson, center director at Langley, had already been named as head of the Review Board, but he was still on his way down from Virginia. Shea was there, awake again after a few hours of restless sleep. Faget was there, and the others who had come in from Houston. The assignment of tasks could be roughed out without waiting for those who hadn’t arrived. They told Simpkinson that he would be in charge of disassembling the spacecraft, and that he was to take it apart in such a way that every component of every system could be exonerated or implicated as a cause. It was the kind of meticulous job Simpkinson had made his reputation on, but this morning, with the world watching over their shoulders, everyone was on edge. They kept emphasizing to Simpkinson that he must find a way to disassemble 012 without destroying even a fragment of potential evidence. Simpkinson had never liked people telling him his job, and after putting up with this for a while, getting more and more irritated, Simpkinson left for Pad 34.

By the Saturday morning after the fire, a thick blanket of security had already been pulled over the Cape. Entry into the Merritt Island reservation was open only to people with high-priority official business. Launch Complex 34 was off-limits to anyone who was not directly involved in the investigation. Nobody got to Level A8 of the umbilical tower except someone like Simpkinson. He was alone as he took his first look at 012.

He touched nothing, of course. No one had touched anything, except for the medical team who had removed the bodies of the astronauts in the early hours of the morning (a grisly job made worse because the heat had melted the material in the suits and fused it to the couches and the cabin floor). Even looking into the spacecraft from outside the hatch, however, revealed the problem he faced. Everything had to be examined first without being touched. But the interior of the spacecraft had been baked into a friable crust. Simpkinson’s dilemma was that he couldn’t get into the spacecraft without messing it up; and he couldn’t examine it without getting into it. Simpkinson shivered in the chill January morning, waiting for an idea. Finally he got back into the elevator and went looking for Sam Beddingfield.