Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Chapter Ten

  Recovery

  We were given the gift of time. We didn’t want that gift.

  Neil Armstrong

  On a cold, gusty Tuesday four days after the Apollo 204 fire, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were buried with full military honors.

  Grissom and Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Against a background of bare trees and a hazy blue sky, Grissom was the first to be laid to rest. On hand to pay their respects were the remaining members of the Mercury Seven, along with Bob Gilruth, Chris Kraft, and other NASA people, most of them dressed in dark wool winter coats. President Johnson, clearly grief-stricken, was there as well, doing his best to comfort Grissom’s widow, children, and parents. After a rifle volley and Taps played by a lone bugler, four air force fighters soared low overhead, and then one pulled up and away, leaving an empty slot—the missing-man formation. A few hours later, at one p.m., a similar ceremony for Chaffee commenced. The two crewmates were buried next to each other. Joining the president were members of the Fourteen, the 1963 group of astronauts.

  The third astronaut, Ed White, was laid to rest at West Point, his alma mater, on a wooded bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The remaining members of the 1962 astronaut class, the New Nine, were present for White’s service, as were Lady Bird Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. In the chapel before the service, Ed’s widow, Pat, had given Chuck Friedlander an envelope and pointed to the closed door behind which her husband’s casket lay. Friedlander went in, opened the casket, and placed the letter on White’s bandaged remains, over his heart. He left the room and nodded to her. That day would have been the Whites’ fourteenth wedding anniversary.

  After Grissom’s burial, Alan Shepard and a few others had a drink at the bar of their hotel, the Georgetown Inn. With tears in his eyes, Shepard said, “I hate those empty-slot flyovers.”

  In President Johnson’s official statement following the fire, he had reaffirmed the nation’s commitment to his predecessor’s lunar challenge. But NASA officials were knocked for a loop. The end-of-the-decade target was now “a reasonable possibility” and “no longer a sure thing,” said one. On February 3, 1967, the agency announced it had suspended all manned spaceflights until the cause of the fire was known. That included the three manned Apollo missions scheduled that year.

  Regardless, the bloom was off the rose of the U.S. space program. Criticism of spaceflight—particularly the manned kind—had increased over the past few years, and support in Congress and among the public had cooled. Almost a decade after Sputnik and the panic it engendered, open hostilities between the two superpowers appeared far less likely, making the political-prestige argument less vital. In one poll, nine out of ten Americans said that it wouldn’t matter who got to the moon first. Billions were being spent on an unnecessary space stunt and its artificial deadline. Was it worth the exorbitant cost and, now, the loss of life? There was the perception that the billions granted NASA were being shot straight into space. In reality, at the program’s peak, they were funding regular paychecks for 420,000 Americans, and the much-ballyhooed benefits from it were rarely tangible things that one could point to as being valuable. To many, manned spaceflight seemed a gargantuan waste of money that could be put to far better use domestically; there were pressing problems on Earth to deal with, such as poverty, crime, disease, pollution, unemployment, and more. Technology, which NASA embodied, didn’t inspire the same gee-whiz admiration it had a decade ago. Prominent members of the scientific community were also calling for the cancellation of manned spaceflight, since they believed unmanned efforts would be cheaper, safer, and more productive. A burgeoning distrust of the technology that had produced nuclear bombs and deadly chemicals such as DDT and thalidomide further drained the enthusiasm for manned space exploration.

  The command-module fire increased the criticism, and Apollo’s cancellation became a distinct possibility. NASA’s response to the tragedy and its handling of the investigation would be crucial to its survival.

  Many in NASA—particularly the higher-ups—engaged in self-examination: Could they have said or done anything to prevent the tragedy? Gene Kranz, deputy director of Flight Control under John Hodge, went beyond introspection. After Friday night’s unofficial wake at the Singing Wheel and a weekend spent looking for answers and soul-searching, Kranz decided something more needed to be done.

  He called a meeting on Monday of everyone in flight operations as well as all the spacecraft contractors they worked with in Houston. A few outsiders, like Max Faget and Frank Borman, attended. After Hodge opened the session with a summary of the fire and the response to it, Kranz walked onto the auditorium stage and took the microphone.

  It was up to the people in that room, he said, to make sure that Grissom and his crew had not died in vain. He placed the blame for the accident squarely on himself—and everyone else there. They had all known there were problems, he pointed out. “Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’” he said.

  “We did not do our job,” he continued.

  No one in the audience said a word.

  “From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough and Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.

  “Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.”

  He ordered them to go to their offices and write Tough and Competent on their blackboards—and never erase it. “These words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

  Not all flight controllers obeyed that order, even if they agreed with Kranz’s evaluation. Some felt it unnecessary to adopt a public relations campaign to show they could do better. “If you are really tough and competent, you don’t need to advertise it,” Cliff Charlesworth, another flight director, said on the way out of the auditorium. But Kranz’s speech, both critical and inspiring, helped transform the culture of Mission Control, and its tenets were embraced by NASA as a whole. Psychologically, it provided a way forward, channeling the anger, grief, and guilt into a higher level of accountability and excellence.

  The day after the fire, Jim Webb met with the president at the White House and persuaded him to allow NASA to handle the investigation. He didn’t tell him the agency had already begun that process the night before, forming a review board and picking members.

  The Apollo 204 Review Board’s investigation was thorough. An uncannily perfect reenactment of the fire was conducted with the remaining Block I command module, virtually identical to Grissom’s. Twenty-one panels were set up to cover various systems and subsystems, and fifteen hundred technicians and experts in those areas and others tore apart both modules piece by piece, wire by wire. For the first few weeks, the investigators worked literally around the clock.

  Some in the press doubted that an in-depth, impartial investigation and analysis could be made by the committee, since most members were NASA employees. But they underestimated the investigators’ scientific desire, compounded by their grief and guilt, to find out what was wrong and figure out how to fix it. The board’s members felt strongly that they were the only ones who could effectively investigate the disaster.

  A Soviet newspaper—Trud, the official publication of Soviet trade unions—blamed the Apollo 204 deaths on the “careless haste” of U.S. space officials in the race to beat the USSR to the moon. There was no mention in Trud or any other Soviet news source of a similar misfortune their own space program had experienced.

  What no one in the West would know until it was revealed in the Russian newspaper Izvestia fifteen years after it happened was that a deadly fire had occurred just a few weeks before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in sp
ace. On March 23, 1961, cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko, at twenty-four the youngest cosmonaut trainee, was on the tenth day of his fifteen-day isolation-chamber test. He tossed a cotton pad soaked with rubbing alcohol toward a garbage pail but missed, and it landed on a hot plate that had been left on. The pad ignited in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, and when Bondarenko tried to put out the flames with the sleeve of his woolen coveralls, his clothing caught fire and burned quickly, spreading to his skin and hair. By the time technicians got the chamber open, he was burned over 90 percent of his body and barely alive. Eight hours later, after whispering a few words of apology, he died.

  Had the news of that tragedy been released at the time, would it have prodded NASA to reexamine its use of a 100 percent oxygen system? Maybe—but it’s unlikely. There had been four oxygen fires involving military American personnel in the five years before the Apollo tragedy, none of which had resulted in changes at NASA.

  The grief and shock felt throughout NASA—particularly in Houston, where so many knew the three men personally—were palpable. For their part, the astronauts knew they had to put the tragedy behind them and get on with it; the test pilots, especially, were accustomed to death. They had lost friends before and knew there was nothing to do but continue the job.

  But the nature of the catastrophe and its primary cause—an oversight that was not the fault of one person but of many—meant that getting past it was very difficult for some people, especially the engineers and managers associated with the command-module design, testing, and checkout. During a briefing in Bob Gilruth’s office, one blank-faced engineer walked over to a blackboard, drew a large box with lines leading to smaller boxes below it, and announced it was an organizational chart of heaven. “At the top is God, whom we’ll call Big Daddy,” he began, then lapsed into incoherency. He was flown home in a straitjacket, although he eventually recovered with the help of psychotherapy and electroshock treatment. A McDonnell adviser to the review board descended into severe depression and spent three weeks in a mental institution. Another engineer, one of NASA’s, also went off the deep end, exhibiting outlandish behavior, but he never received treatment and left soon after.

  Joe Shea, the brilliant, youthful, high-energy director of the Apollo program, counted several of the astronauts as good friends—he often played handball with them and would get in punning duels with Wally Schirra. Shea had been warned about the dangers of 100 percent oxygen, but he eventually concluded that the safer two-gas setup would be too complicated and only worsen the ongoing weight problem. He blamed himself for the fire and began drinking heavily—a habit quite a few at NASA took up. He became so despondent, he was almost unable to function, especially when it became apparent to everyone that he had been, in Frank Borman’s words, “a poor administrator who had simply let North American’s design mistakes pile up like unnoticed garbage.”

  Hearings in both houses of Congress began a week after the fire and continued through May. Webb, some of NASA’s top administrators and managers, and several astronauts were grilled at length in the government’s efforts to ascertain the exact reason for the accident. Webb told a committee that the agency had taken technical risks because of an “austere budget,” which didn’t go over well. More than anything, the congressmen appeared determined to fix blame somewhere—and Webb was just as determined to protect his agency. He told his subordinates that he planned to take the brunt of the criticism, and he did so, especially after a year-old internal NASA report criticizing the work of North American and some of its subcontractors came to light; few of the recommendations in it had been carried out. Webb knew nothing about the report and had to admit that fact, which didn’t help; if he truly hadn’t known about it, he should have, went the reasoning. He clammed up after that and was criticized for being evasive and trying to control the information flow from his agency. The hearings became so harsh and the potential fallout so devastating that one respected astronaut, Tom Stafford, sent a private message to Webb through a mutual friend. “Tell him,” said Stafford, “that if something is not done to straighten out the problems down here, several of us will pull out of the program. I want you to get Webb to do something.” The message emphasized that it wasn’t just external forces Webb had to satisfy but his own people. In addition to defending NASA before Congress, he had to make serious changes in the Apollo program, and fast.

  The review board’s thirty-three-hundred-page report, delivered to Congress on April 5 and made public a month later, was an impressively impartial analysis of the fire and a scathing criticism of NASA and North American Aviation methods. It revealed a litany of mistakes, rampant carelessness, and the administrators’ appalling inability to recognize the dangers inherent in an overpressurized, full-oxygen spacecraft loaded with flammable materials. (There were five thousand square inches of Velcro in the command module’s cabin, ten times what should have been there.) Under the conditions of the plugs-out test, the spacecraft had been a death trap. Many observers had predicted that the report would be a whitewash. The harsh self-criticism made clear that it wasn’t.

  Yes, some of North American Aviation’s work was sloppy and hurried—the report cited the “ignorance, sloth, and carelessness” of the contractor. But that had been a response to pressure from NASA and its rigorous, unforgiving timetable. Besides, the agency was supposed to be overseeing and approving every step, and it had relaxed its standards on quality control, particularly in final inspections, in its zeal to keep to its schedule.

  The review board’s extensive recommendations included the near-complete replacement of combustibles, a quick-opening hatch, improved pad-emergency procedures, and a safer gas atmosphere. The exact cause of the fire was never ascertained, though the likely culprit was a bare wire under Grissom’s couch that had rubbed against something and sparked.

  Borman and four other astronauts testified before the House committee in April and expressed confidence in NASA management, which swayed some of the congressmen who had been ready to call for a delay in the Apollo program, as much as five years. After several months, the congressional hearings finally petered out; they hadn’t gotten any further in fixing blame than the review board had. The Senate space committee wouldn’t release its report until January 31, 1968, more than a year after the fire. It contained plenty of criticism and called for further discussion of NASA’s ability to make the end-of-the-decade deadline.

  Webb had gradually lost tight control of the program as he had entrusted his administrators with more responsibilities. They had not done their jobs well enough. He regained control with a sweeping series of high-level personnel changes announced in early April. Shea was shunted to a different job at the agency’s Washington, DC, headquarters and replaced by George Low, a longtime NACA and NASA project manager who was smart, dependable, and soft-spoken. Until then, he had been deputy director of MSC—the number-two man at Houston—and this would be a demotion, running a program office, but he took the job for the sake of the agency. After a couple of months in his new job, Shea would resign. North American Aviation also underwent a management shakeup at the highest level and incurred heavy financial penalties; the company spent millions of dollars to fix the issues that had resulted in the accident. They promised to bend over backward to fix and improve the Apollo command-service module and make it the best spacecraft ever built.

  The fire provided NASA with the time and the determination to build a safer, more reliable ship and implement improved safety practices and higher levels of quality control. NASA investigators compiled a list of 8,000 potential problems that needed to be resolved, and 1,697 changes were recommended. The NASA configuration control board approved 1,341 alterations. The command module eventually underwent 1,300 changes. Among other improvements, the hatch was redesigned so that it opened outward, easily and in three seconds, flammable materials were replaced with fireproof Beta cloth, and the twenty miles of wiring were consolidated and insulated with Teflon. Further, while the spacecraft was on the ground
, its cockpit atmosphere would be a much safer mix of 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen; at liftoff, that would gradually change to 100 percent oxygen. Even the astronaut spacesuits would be made from fire-resistant materials.

  Webb was quoted as saying he didn’t think NASA would fully recover “until we make a couple of these birds fly.” Everyone in the organization and every contractor associated with the Apollo spacecraft was more committed than ever to that goal. The fire had made it personal, and now they had an emotional investment in this endeavor.

  On April 8, 1967, three days after the Apollo 204 Review Board’s report was released, Slayton gathered eighteen astronauts in a small conference room at MSC. Only one Mercury Seven astronaut, Wally Schirra, was there; the others were the remaining seven of the 1962 group and ten of the 1963 class. NASA had added two more groups since then—six scientists in 1965, for whom the pilot requirement was waived, and nineteen more engineering pilots in 1966—for a total of fifty men in the astronaut corps.

  After a few brief comments—“Gentlemen, we won’t make the same mistake twice”—Deke got straight to the point. “The guys who are going to make the first lunar landing are here in this room.” As heart rates accelerated and men looked around at their comrades, Slayton told them who would fly the next few missions and who would back those pilots up. Apollo 7, the first manned flight, would be crewed by Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele (backed up by Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan). Apollo 8, the first test of the LM, would be crewed by Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart (backed up by Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and C. C. Williams). And the crew for the Apollo 9, the first test of the entire package in a high Earth orbit, would be Frank Borman, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders (backed up by Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin).