Apollo: The Race to the Moon (33 page)

“We can’t take out any instrument panels,” he remembered Petrone saying. “You take them down, and you’ve got to redo all the tests. Do you know what you’re asking?”

“Yeah, but we gotta take ’em down,” Bobik said. “Just too many problems. Can’t fly that way.”

Rocco Petrone came down to the White Room in the O&C to see the vehicle. He looked, and shook his head, and swore. The more Joe Bobik thought about it, the more he began to think that even taking down the instrument panels wasn’t enough. He had been bothered for some time by the evidence of people “pushing too hard” out at Downey—skinned wires, sloppy work. “Send it back,” he told Petrone. “Send the damn thing back to the factory. It’s that bad.”

Petrone couldn’t do that. This was late February, only weeks after the fire, and for NASA to let it be known that the next spacecraft was being sent back to the factory was tantamount to killing the North American contract—Congress, gearing up for its own investigation, was unlikely to accept anything less. While few at NASA would grieve for North American, to switch the spacecraft contract to a new company would mean a long delay in the moon landing—two years at least, probably more, pushing it into the 1970s. More than that, the program itself would be in jeopardy.

A flurry of visits to spacecraft 017 followed. Shea came over from the disassembly area to examine it. Bobik would remember seeing tears in Shea’s eyes as he left. Gilruth flew in from Houston. North American people flew in from Downey. And finally, Sam Phillips, chief of the Apollo Program Office at NASA headquarters, flew in from Washington. “I took him in the spacecraft, I started showin’ him all this stuff,” Bobik said. “He didn’t know what to say. Very quiet. Came out, didn’t say anything. Not one word or nothin’. I knew he didn’t like it, but I couldn’t figure out what he was going to do or say.”

On March 2, ASPO told headquarters that because of many wiring discrepancies found in Apollo spacecraft 017, “a more thorough inspection was required,” and all twelve main display control panels were to be removed. The “more thorough inspection” eventually revealed 1,407 errors.

The collective grief that had stricken the Apollo Program on the night of the fire hung on for weeks. “The more we probed for answers, the more depressed [the people in the investigation] got,” Frank Borman wrote later. “They’d take downers to ease the pain of guilt and uppers so they could face the next day.” The depression affected the men like Cioffoletti down near the bottom of the system and it affected those at the top. One of the NASA public-relations men remembered joining a gathering of senior people in a Cocoa Beach bar less than two weeks after the fire. People who hardly ever drank were drinking martinis, steadily. To Frank Borman, one of the straightest arrows of the astronauts, “getting drunk seemed like a good idea.” Max Faget, abstemious by temperament and usually too wrapped up in his latest idea to have time for a drink anyway, ended up doing a handstand on a chair as a stripper continued her act a few feet away. They ended the evening throwing glasses against the wall—it reminded Borman of an old war movie.

It was the gaiety of a wake, and lasted only as long as the party. Later that night, Shea (who had also been part of the group) went back to Borman’s room at the Holiday Inn, where they talked somberly until 3:30 in the morning. Shea was up again at 7:30.

That was his schedule during the first three weeks—work for sixteen hours or so, sleep for four or five, and use the rest to play handball or go out with friends, using physical depletion as a drug. Even exhaustion wasn’t always enough, and Shea too found himself using Seconals and Scotch to help out. When he still couldn’t sleep, he would sometimes take his car onto Merritt Island’s narrow roads, driving at racing speeds.

But the long hours paid off in progress. Four weeks after the fire, Shea moved back to Houston to pick up his work at ASPO, confident that the investigation had gotten on top of the situation at the Cape. To some of the others in NASA, Shea seemed to be fraying at the edges—he was too exhausted, too driven. Shea himself didn’t feel exhausted at all; if anything, he felt as if he had almost too much energy.

His colleagues’ worries were compounded when without warning a senior executive for one of the contractors, a man greatly admired within NASA, suffered a nervous breakdown in Shea’s office during the middle of a briefing. Shea accompanied the executive home on his company’s plane.

Shea’s relationship with Gilruth, which had been cordial but never close, was deteriorating. Just a few days after the contractor had broken down in Shea’s office, Gilruth asked Shea why a certain set of data wasn’t ready yet. Shea snapped that it wasn’t ready because (a) he wanted it really right, and (b) he took an extra hour’s sleep one night. Gilruth was disturbed. As the investigation continued, Gilruth decided that Shea hadn’t kept him informed about what was going on before the fire, and began to wonder whether Shea himself was heading for a breakdown.

In mid-March, Shea was scheduled to deliver the annual Goddard Lecture, part of a prestigious two-day event within the space fraternity, in Washington. Webb and Seamans saw a copy of his draft and were dismayed. Shea had entitled the lecture “The Crucible of Development”—“crucible,” with its connotations of fire and molten metal. It had been a deliberate choice of words. Shea had been thinking about the speech for weeks, ever since the accident, jotting down phrases and topics, and the metaphor of a crucible had been one of the first to occur to him. Indeed, it was precisely because of its connotations that he had chosen it. Webb and Gilruth had forbidden him to talk about Apollo (the investigation was still ongoing), so Shea had tried to build a talk using historical analogies for what he wanted to say: that technological development is “a severe, searching test”—a dictionary definition of crucible—and the fire had been just such a test. Webb called Shea to his office and persuaded him to change the title to “Research and Development in Perspective.” Shea consented, reluctantly. He in his turn was frustrated with Webb and Gilruth and the rest—in his view, he at least was trying to confront the larger truths of what had happened. The others were trying to back away from them.

Read in cold print, Shea’s speech is a densely textured discussion of the ways in which human beings go about advancing technology, interspersed with quotations from Montaigne and Milton, with historical references to Galileo’s The Starry Messenger and to the anthropological discoveries of Louis Leakey. On top of everything else, Shea added some puns to the speech, trying for humor. He concluded with a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. It was not a run-of-the-mill engineering lecture.

Listening to it that evening in Washington, some of Shea’s colleagues stirred uneasily in their seats. The puns didn’t work, not now. The delivery, by a driven man, had an unnerving edge to it. This was not the Joe Shea they knew.

Webb played a fatherly role with Shea during February and March. When Shea came to Washington for the Goddard Lecture, Webb personally picked him up at the airport and persuaded Shea to stay at his home. Shea had come without his topcoat and it was still cold in Washington. Webb insisted that he take an old topcoat from Webb’s State Department days, an elegant black one. Shea was touched, and he wore it for the next month, thinking of it as a symbol of Webb’s caring and protection.

Webb’s sympathy was authentic, but he also had a tough problem facing him: Both houses of Congress were about to convene hearings on the fire, and the fate of the Apollo Program hung on their outcome. Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who had become a prominent critic of NASA, had already let it be known what the hearings would be like, charging that NASA’s engineers—presumably meaning chiefly Shea—were guilty of “criminal negligence.” In Webb’s opinion, Shea was under too much stress to testify. Webb and Berry, the physician, insisted that Shea take a vacation. Shortly after the Goddard Lecture, Shea took his wife and children to a retreat in central Texas, planning to stay for two weeks.

After only a week, Berry came up to visit Shea at his vacation retreat. The news he brought was that Seamans had flown down to Houston from Washington and had sent Berry to tell Shea that they wanted him to take an extended leave. An announcement to that effect would be released tomorrow morning. Shea told him that in that case they could announce his resignation instead. “You’ve been working on half-truths and rumors and things you don’t understand,” he said. He and his guys down at Houston were doing fine. They were responding to the crisis, coming up with fixes, and weren’t going into a state of shock. It was the people above them who were in shock, not the troops. However, Shea told Berry, he would abide by the decision of any competent psychiatrist. “If he thinks I need an R&R, then we’ll discuss it. But I don’t like amateurs judging my psyche.”

They set up a session for that very evening at the Houston Medical Center, with two Houston psychiatrists chosen by NASA doing the evaluation. Shea spent two and a half hours with them. Their conclusion was that Shea was under strain, yes, but without a psychosis. In fact, the psychiatrists told Shea, he had so thoroughly analyzed the experience for himself that he was probably psychologically stronger than before the accident. Gilruth had been worried that Shea would come apart if another crisis occurred, but the psychiatrists disagreed. Shea did react strongly to such events, leading to a purely physiological problem of high blood pressure, but that could easily be treated with medication if another such crisis occurred. These findings were fed back to the waiting NASA officials. Shea declined to take extended leave and the press release was canceled. He thought “the thing was absolutely put to bed.”

A week or so later, George Mueller called. He wanted Joe to move up to Washington and be his deputy. He made it sound enticing. Seamans called Shea, and told him how much he wanted him to accept—Seamans and Mueller had been drawing apart, Seamans said, and they needed Joe to serve as a bridge. Jim Webb joined the chorus. Joe had spent enough time on the detail level, Webb told him. It was time for him to be working at the policy level. When Webb and Shea happened to be on the same plane with agriculture secretary Orville Freeman, Webb introduced Shea to Freeman by saying that he wanted Shea to interact “with all you cabinet people.” Webb knew how to take people up on the mountaintop, Shea decided later, after he had already accepted the job in Washington.

The reality was that the top management of NASA had determined to get Shea out of ASPO and out of the line of fire. Seamans’s earlier trip to Houston, when Shea had been examined by the psychiatrists, had been undertaken with two purposes in mind, one open and one covert. The open one was to announce Shea’s extended leave of absence. That plan had to be scrapped when Shea balked, and then the results of the psychiatric examination thwarted them. The covert purpose was to come to an agreement with Gilruth and George Low, now the deputy director at Houston, that Shea would have to be replaced. The covert purpose was accomplished. Perhaps the psychiatrists were right that Shea had no psychosis. But the question for Seamans and Gilruth and Low wasn’t whether Shea was sane; it was whether he should continue to run ASPO. They saw it as a judgment that the psychiatrists weren’t competent to make. For that matter, some of the people who knew Shea had a feeling that the psychiatrists hadn’t quite realized what they were taking on when they interviewed him. One of Shea’s friends talked to the psychiatrists just after they had finished the examination. He would laugh ruefully when he recounted the story later. “The psychiatrists came back saying, ‘He’s so smart! He’s so intelligent!’ Here Joe was, ready to kill himself, but he could still outsmart the psychiatrists.”

Shea felt he had passed that stage weeks earlier. Then and in later years, Shea’s own assessment was that the psychiatrists were right. He had been deeply saddened by the fire, he acknowledged, but he believed that after a difficult beginning he had come to terms with it. To Shea, another factor was at issue. Shea felt strongly, and was saying so at the time, that it would be a mistake to go back into the Apollo spacecraft and make sweeping changes. The appropriate fixes were straightforward and limited; do more than that, and the program risked coming out of the process with a less mature spacecraft in which new problems might be hiding.

Shea had few allies. The prevailing view was that a sweeping review of the entire spacecraft was in order, and that fixes should not be limited in the way Shea wanted. These diametrically opposed views of the appropriate strategy made keeping Shea in ASPO complicated for a variety of reasons. At the same time, Shea’s senior colleagues in NASA were convinced that Shea had been too deeply affected by the fire to manage its aftermath, and believed that it would be best for all—including Shea—if he left ASPO. Even as Shea was assuming that the problem had been put to bed, the others were deciding on the man to replace him.

On Monday, April 7, 1967, a House space subcommittee opened hearings into the causes and impact of the Apollo fire. On the same day, Shea left ASPO to become deputy associate administrator for Manned Space Flight at NASA headquarters, three years and five months after he had gone to Houston.

The next day, the lead editorial in the New York Times was devoted to a commentary on the report of the Apollo Review Board that had been released a few days earlier. The Times was appalled at “the incredible complacency” of the NASA engineers. “Even a high school chemistry student” should have known not to use a pure-oxygen environment. The editors’ judgment was austere and unrelenting: “The dry technical prose of the report convicts those in charge of Project Appollo [sic] of incompetence and negligence.”

During his first few days in Washington, Shea was excited about his new job, eager to work as Mueller’s deputy. But then Mueller told Shea that of course Shea must realize that Sam Phillips, head of the Apollo Program at O.M.S.F., would not be reporting to Shea, and Shea decided he’d been had: Mueller’s office was a good place to keep him tucked away during the congressional postmortems on Apollo.