If I wasn’t in the clean room, I was in another manufacturing area, busy creating procedures for a crew to follow if their spacecraft malfunctioned in flight. One astronaut perk was access to the “Golden Trough,” as the executive dining area was nicknamed. Getting to know all of the senior managers at North American, as well as working with all of the engineers, was very useful. We astronauts had someone to talk to at every level of the company if we had problems or concerns, from Ruby all the way up to the company president. I spent most of my time, however, with the technicians, because I was busy working in a spacecraft as it was built and tested.
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.