Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Assignments for the flights to the moon—there would be at least three—would come later. Slayton finished with, “Be flexible. This stuff will change.”

  After the fire, many had predicted that the USSR would overtake the United States in the space race. In the midst of the congressional hearings, on April 23, 1967, the Soviets launched their first manned mission, Soyuz 1, in twenty-five months. Vladimir Komarov, the handsome commander of the three-man sardine can called Voskhod 1, was the cosmonaut chosen to test a new, larger spacecraft model, the Soyuz, in Earth orbit—Korolev had been working on it before his death. Like Gemini, it had a rocket engine that enabled the pilot to maneuver it in space.

  For several months leading up to the flight, rumors had been leaking from the USSR of a major new mission in the works. Soviet officials couldn’t resist bragging about the impending spectacle, though one general issued a word of caution: “We do not intend to speed up our program,” he said. “Excessive haste leads to fatal accidents, as in the case of the three American astronauts last January.” The day before the launch, the Associated Press reported that the mission would “include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history—an attempted in-flight hookup between the two ships and a transfer of crews.”

  The flight was part of a plan to vault the Soviet space program past the Americans’ in one ambitious mission. Soyuz 2, carrying three cosmonauts, would launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome, then dock with its sister ship the next day. Two of the crew members would EVA to Soyuz 1 and return to Earth with Komarov—an entire Gemini program plus the first crew transfer between spacecraft all in one.

  The Soyuz 1 launch went well, as did the first day in space. On the second, complications started; solar panels would not unfold, and stability problems led to the pilot using too much fuel to get his craft under control. During the craft’s seventeenth revolution, ground control attempted to land it, but retrofire did not achieve the proper orientation. On the next orbit, Komarov managed to make a precisely timed manual retrofire and survived reentry through the atmosphere. But his parachute lines became entangled, and Soyuz 1 hit the ground near the edge of the Ural Mountains on the Kazakhstan border. Komarov died on impact, and the retro-rockets blew up, leaving his body a small, black, molten mass. Soyuz 2 was canceled, and the tragedy caused the Soviet program to pause and undergo its own reassessment. Jim Webb suggested that “full cooperation” between the United States and the Soviet Union might have helped save some or all of the two countries’ lost spacefarers. Komarov’s remains were displayed in an open-casket funeral—he had requested it before the flight and had told others the spacecraft wasn’t ready—then interred in the Kremlin Wall, close to Korolev. NASA sent condolences, but privately, many in the agency were relieved. The war might have been a cold one, but it was still a war.

  Despite this setback, it was known that Soviet spacemen had been training on helicopters for at least a year; a Russian cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, had let that out in May 1967 during a vodka-filled private meeting with astronauts Mike Collins and Dave Scott at the Paris Air Show. The only reason for helicopter work was to prepare for a lunar landing in a craft similar to the Americans’ lunar module. Belyayev had also revealed that he expected to make a circumlunar flight in the near future.

  There were other clues to their moon plans; statements over the previous few years, inadvertent or deliberate, truth or propaganda, made by cosmonauts and academicians had mentioned either orbiting the moon or landing on it. Details were scarce, as usual. But there was no question that there was a Soviet lunar program and that they hoped to beat the Americans to some of the firsts involved.

  And there were those rumors of a massive rocket. In July, during the Senate Appropriations Committee hearings, Jim Webb mentioned a giant booster that the Soviets were working on, one that was larger than the Saturn V. News sources began calling it “Webb’s Giant” and referring to it as if it were a mythical creature.

  Although its name was unknown to the West, the huge rocket was Korolev’s pet project—the N1. The development of the three-stage behemoth had started in 1964, with thirty clustered engines powering the first stage alone, and it had finally begun to take shape. Recent American spy-satellite photos had revealed evidence—massive launchpads, a larger erector/transporter, and construction facilities—indicating that its thrust might be eight to sixteen million pounds, possibly twice as powerful as the Saturn V. A moon rocket, unquestionably.

  Several months after the fire, Marge Slayton, the de facto leader of what had been dubbed the Astronaut Wives Club, concluded that a party was needed to cheer up the troops. She and the rest of the wives organized a dinner fete for astronauts and their spouses only. Marge and Joan Aldrin and Pat Collins, the finance committee, decided there would be an open bar after dinner. The party was held at an upscale restaurant called the King’s Tavern, and everyone had a fine time—until the end of the night, when the bar bill came. It was more than two hundred dollars, much higher than the women had estimated and more than they had collected; the wives had grossly underestimated the number of drinks a large group of astronauts could down. Deke Slayton, who had consumed his share, wrote a check for the difference.

  For NASA, there were more tragedies to come. In June 1967, just when the agency was beginning to regain its confidence, it suffered another blow. Shortly after midnight on June 6, near the town of Pearland, south of Houston, astronaut Ed Givens, of the nineteen-man astronaut class of 1966, missed a turn and drove into an embankment. He was killed; two other men in his Volkswagen, also USAF officers, survived. They had been at a party given by an exclusive fliers’ fraternal organization. Four months later, on October 5, Astronaut Clifton “C.C.” Williams, a member of the 1963 Final Fourteen group and on the backup crew for Apollo 9, was flying a brand-new T-38 near Tallahassee, Florida, when one of his aileron controls became stuck. The plane slammed into a dirt road and disintegrated. Williams ejected but at too low an altitude to survive. As the lunar-module pilot for Apollo 12, he would probably have walked on the moon alongside command pilot Pete Conrad. That brought the total number of spacemen killed in one year to six, five Americans and a Russian.

  Grissom’s mission was retroactively named Apollo 1; the first manned Apollo mission was designated Apollo 7 (the intervening numbers represented unmanned test flights), and on May 9, 1967, Jim Webb announced its crew: Schirra, Cunningham, and Eisele. They would man a Block II command module that would be placed atop a Saturn IB booster—it had enough thrust to reach orbit but not enough to attain the escape velocity of about 25,000 miles per hour necessary to leave Earth’s gravity and journey to the moon. The LM wasn’t ready yet, so it wouldn’t be aboard, but the crew would remain in orbit at least ten days on a straight shakedown cruise. Jim McDivitt’s crew had been next in line, but NASA brass decided that they were better suited for what became the more complex Apollo 9 mission than Schirra, whose training habits had become lax.

  But first, there was plenty of work to do. The command module needed to be made shipshape, and Schirra took it upon himself to ensure it was done right. Gus, his good friend and next-door neighbor on Timber Cove’s Pine Shadows Drive, had been killed in the Block I version, and he was taking this challenge personally.

  Schirra had originally been named commander of the second Apollo manned mission, which was slated to go after Gus Grissom’s and planned to be a carbon copy of that one but with lots of science experiments. Schirra hated experiments. Like Grissom, he preferred a straight engineering test flight, unencumbered by what he called “junk.” He had agreed to the mission only because Deke Slayton, still grounded due to his atrial fibrillation, hoped to be cleared for a flight and take it on himself—Wally was just a “caretaker” commander.

  But when Slayton’s request to fly was turned down in October 1966, Schirra was left holding the bag—and the mission. He began a steady barrage of complaints about its redundancy and criticisms of the many experiments planned for it, even going so
far as to send a two-page list of ultimatums to the Apollo program office. Once again, Wally was determined to show that he was a naval commander and captain of his ship. His crewmates on the mission, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, went along with him; they were both ex-military, after all. And if they had done otherwise, Schirra might have accused them of mutiny, like a spacefaring Captain Bligh, and possibly booted them from his crew.

  His bluster backfired. The powers that be at NASA, including Slayton, were unamused. The crew learned indirectly, from a press release, that the mission was canceled. The next manned flight, scheduled for early 1967, would involve the first Apollo rendezvous between the LM and the command-service module—the kind of engineering shakedown flight Schirra lived for.

  Only it wouldn’t be Wally’s. The reliable Jim McDivitt would command that one. Schirra and his crew were made backups to Grissom and company. It was humiliating, especially for Schirra—during both Mercury and Gemini, he had initially been a backup, and now it was the same on Apollo. By this time, it was mid-November. Schirra at first refused. Only after Slayton and Grissom practically got on their knees and begged him to take the job did he agree to accept this lesser position.

  But following the death of his comrade and the subsequent decision to replace Grissom’s crew with his own, Schirra was no longer the lighthearted Jolly Wally of the endless puns and elaborate gotchas but the Carry Nation of the command module, stalking the halls of North American Aviation’s Downey, California, factory, ordering changes left and right, large and small, some of them necessary, some of them definitely not. This mission, scheduled for late 1968, would be his last, he decided—he would make that announcement a few weeks prior to the launch—but before he left, he would by God make sure that this one would be done right. Apollo 7 became “Wally’s mission.” And Wally’s mission, as he saw it, was to save the space program. Everyone knew he was deadly serious about it because he quit smoking in January 1968.

  “We labored day and night getting the first spacecraft ready,” Schirra remembered. He and his crew, and the backup crew, and the support crew (a recent addition—three astronaut trainees who did anything the other two crews couldn’t get to) practically lived at North American Aviation (which merged with Rockwell in September 1967, becoming North American Rockwell) until their Block II command module was ready.

  But an astronaut was already in charge of the command-module redesign. After his exemplary work on the Thompson Committee investigating the Apollo 1 fire, the no-nonsense Borman had been assigned by Bob Gilruth to be the official NASA overseer of North American Aviation’s changes. After a few clashes with Schirra, Borman got Gilruth to rein him in and forbade any astronaut to visit North American Aviation without his approval.

  North American Aviation had never been as open as Grumman to the astronauts’ requested changes. Even after the fire, there was still a lack of cooperation. One day, Borman climbed into the command-module simulator to try out the controls. When he found that the stick worked exactly the opposite of how it did in an airplane—when he pulled back on it, the nose went down instead of up; when he pushed it forward, the nose went up instead of down—he asked to see the engineer in charge.

  “You’ve got the polarity reversed,” Borman said.

  “It’s not reversed, Colonel. It’s the way it should be.”

  Borman said, “Reverse it so I can fly the damned thing.”

  “But this is the way Apollo is going to fly,” the engineer said.

  “Not with me or any other astronaut in it,” Borman said. “Fix the goddamned thing or nobody’ll fly it.”

  The controls were reversed to conform with the training every astronaut had received since flight school.

  Schirra was adamant about one other matter: he wanted the return of pad leader Guenter Wendt. A former Luftwaffe flight engineer during World War II, Wendt had been a McDonnell engineer in charge of supervising final launchpad preparations and closeout procedures during the Mercury and Gemini programs, both of which involved McDonnell spacecraft. He had insisted on complete control before taking the job, and his passion for safety—and his willingness to stand up to anyone who threatened it—was legendary. One day, for instance, Jim McDonnell, aka “Mr. Mac,” the owner-founder of McDonnell, decided to drop by the White Room. When his extended visit began disrupting work, Wendt strongly suggested he get on the gantry elevator. He did.

  Wendt kept a two-inch-thick metal pipe at hand, just in case there was an emergency and he had to clobber someone blocking the emergency exit. The slight, bespectacled man in the white cap and coat and black bow tie holding a clipboard had become a good-luck charm to the astronauts, and his presence overseeing the White Room team was reassuring. Wendt was obsessed with the safety of the mission’s crew and his own; even nights when he relaxed on his fishing boat on the Banana River, Wendt would play the what-if game, running through every problem scenario he could think of. John Glenn had nicknamed him “der Führer of der Launchpad” for his strict style and German accent. It was a moniker of affection and appreciation.

  But North American Aviation, not McDonnell, was the Apollo command-service module contractor, so Wendt hadn’t been present for the Apollo 204 tests. Now Schirra insisted that Wendt come back, and he lobbied Deke Slayton and North American Aviation’s vice president for his return. When North American Aviation agreed to hire him, Slayton called Wendt personally to ask if he’d do it. Wendt agreed. The Pad Führer was back, to everyone’s relief.

  The Atlas rocket that launched John Glenn into orbit had already undergone ninety-one unmanned flights; Gemini’s Titan II, thirty-four. The Saturn V, its first stage alone twenty-one times more powerful than the Atlas, would have just two. But everybody trusted von Braun’s team. After all, he and most of his top supervisors had been working together, and very successfully, for thirty years or more, since Peenemünde and the V-2, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.

  On June 20, 1944, under the auspices of the German army, von Braun and his rocket team at Peenemünde had launched a forty-six-foot-high V-2 rocket that became the first to soar into outer space, reaching an altitude of 109 miles. Twenty-three years and four months later, early in the morning of November 9, 1967, the first Saturn V test flight would be attempted at Kennedy Space Center. The Apollo “stack” stood 363 feet tall—sixty-two feet higher than the Statue of Liberty—and was two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the V-2. It weighed 6.2 million pounds, and its first stage alone generated 7.6 million pounds from its five huge Rocketdyne F-1 engines—the power necessary to free the spacecraft from the shackles of Earth’s gravity—and would burn 212,000 gallons of kerosene and 346,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, a total of 2,200 tons of fuel, if it cleared the launchpad. The next two stages would burn almost half a million more gallons of fuel.

  Just transporting the Saturn’s massive components to Kennedy and assembling them had been a lengthy and complicated process. The first and second stages had been shipped from Huntsville by river barge to the Gulf of Mexico, then down and around Florida and up through the Banana River to Merritt Island. The smaller third stage was flown to the Cape in a specially converted freight aircraft called the Super Guppy; a similar model delivered the command and service modules and the LM. They were joined in the Cape’s Vehicle Assembly Building, a 525-foot-high structure with 1.5 million square feet of floor space that could fit four Saturn V launch vehicles, each in its own bay. When finally constructed, the spacecraft and its launch tower were moved to pad 39A, three and a half miles distant, on a three-thousand-ton tractor called the Crawler that traveled at a speed of one mile an hour.

  The test was a year behind schedule. It would have been even further behind if not for a radically new approach.

  The Germans at the Marshall Space Flight Center were deliberate and cautious in their work and in their testing. They had planned the initial live test of the Saturn to include the booster’s first stage with dummy upper stages. If that wa
s successful, the next flight test would consist of live first and second stages and a dummy third stage—and so it would continue, with just one major change between flight tests. At least ten tests were planned.

  But NASA budget cuts would not permit that extravagance—and the Saturn V fabrication delays meant that such a plodding schedule would dash hopes of achieving a lunar landing before the end of the decade. Enter the forward-thinking George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for manned spaceflight, hired by Jim Webb in September 1963 specifically to reorganize the agency’s unwieldy management structure and improve efficiency. Early in 1964, after studying the Apollo schedule, he decided to implement a testing concept he had successfully used in his previous job at a civilian space technology company: instead of step-by-step trials, all the functional components of the Saturn V would be tested at the same time. After Mueller explained his thinking, most of NASA’s top managers agreed—but not von Braun. When he first heard the idea and realized Mueller also wanted to include a live Apollo command-service module as a payload, he was resistant. If the rocket blew up before the first stage was jettisoned two minutes into the flight, how would they be able to ascertain which component was faulty? The risk of failure seemed much too high. But von Braun’s Teutonic deliberateness eventually wilted, and he bowed to the logic, and the necessity, of the “all-up” approach. “It sounded reckless, but George Mueller’s reasoning was impeccable,” he wrote years later. All-up testing would become integral to the program.