The testing requirements instituted by NASA ferreted out the unexpected stress-corrosion problems, and sound technical capabilities were able to resolve them. But this unexpected problem came at a tremendous price in cost and schedule when the US was in a race to land humans on the Moon.
“And what many of us felt uneasy about,” said Ecord, “was that we had discovered problems that had never happened before, problems that we never imagined could happen. Was there anything else? Thinking about what we may have missed is what kept us up at night.”
ANOTHER SPACECRAFT TRAGEDY TOOK place in 1967. On April 24, during reentry of the new Soyuz ship, Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when the craft’s parachute didn’t open correctly due to tangled shroud lines. When word of the crash reached the US, astronauts sent a telegram of condolence, and NASA administrator James Webb wondered publicly if international cooperation in spaceflight could have prevented either the fire or this accident: “Could the lives already lost have been saved if we had known each other’s hopes, aspirations and plans? Or could they have been saved if full cooperation had been the order of the day?”
EVERYONE WITHIN NASA FELT PERSONALLY affected by the tragic Apollo 1 fire. There was shock, anger, sadness, fear and sometimes depression. Many felt—similar to Frank Hughes—that they had lost someone akin to a brother or father. Others said, even years later, the Apollo fire was the worst tragedy they’d ever been through. And there was the anguish that came from each person wondering if they personally had been responsible in some way for the accident. It was difficult to fathom how a seemingly innocuous test became a deathtrap for three colleagues, friends, heroes.
“We buried the crew and came back in the next day and said, ‘Jesus, what do we do now?’“ said Hughes. “But then in a few days, the backup crew came in and said, ‘Let’s get into the simulator,’ and it was back to work. We wanted to press on and make things right, to honor their sacrifice.”
While the investigation board’s report was damning, it also provided guiding steps forward. NASA and North American worked together to completely redesign the Block II version of the CM, replacing the flammable oxygen environment for ground tests with a nitrogen-oxygen mix at a lower pressure, designing a new hatch that could open outward in five seconds. They also removed combustible materials, replaced the internal tubing with higher-quality materials, added a flameproof coating to all wires and installed emergency firefighting equipment inside the spacecraft and on the launchpad.
Dr. George M. Lowe, left, and Dr. Wernher von Braun in the Firing Room of the Launch Control Center at the Kennedy Space Center in 1970. Credit: NASA.
NASA searched the country and the world for new fireproof materials, sometimes working with companies to create new flameproof resources: Owens-Corning Fiberglass and DuPont came up with a fireproof fabric called beta cloth for the outer layer of the spacesuits, while 3M developed a substance called fluoroelastomer, a high-temperature rubbery material used for the boots worn inside the spacecraft. NASA researched the new fire-resistant conformal coatings for all the wiring, with special caps for all connections and circuit breakers. The Scheufelen Paper Company of Germany had developed a fire-resistant paper that would now be used for all the printed checklists, procedures and maps the astronauts needed on board.
More than one thousand changes were made, large and small, and under the direction of Max Faget and Aleck Bond, every change was thoroughly tested at MSC’s laboratories: the Vibration and Acoustic Test Facility, the giant Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL) vacuum chamber and the Thermochemical Test Area. Norman Chaffee and dozens of his colleagues evaluated all the new materials in a boilerplate version of the CM.
A test of the Apollo Command Module, during postfire testing at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Credit: NASA.
“For many months, we would conduct flammability tests, outfitting the interior of a pressurized spacecraft with the new materials,” Chaffee said, “and then put an ignition source inside it and initiate a fire. It was all heavily instrumented and filmed where we could watch the progression of the fire, measuring everything from the temperatures, smoke patterns and chemical content.”
Besides changes in the spacecraft, the Apollo management structure transformed as well. George Low replaced Joe Shea as Apollo spacecraft program manager in Houston; in Downey, Harrison Storms was out, and a proposed merger between North American and aerospace company Rockwell-Standard took place in April, forming North American Rockwell. Under new leadership, the company assigned a spacecraft manager with a personalized team to each vehicle and added a program manager whose only assignment was addressing safety.
While the tragedy of the fire could have torn NASA apart with infighting and accusations, instead the agency seemed to pull together as never before. Two people in particular had an important impact: George Low and Frank Borman.
“George just brought us together,” said Glynn Lunney. “He said, ‘Okay, we have a problem but now we have to recover and get this program back on track.’ Through his intellect, his energy and his way with people, George was able to affect a ‘recombining’ wherever we may have been fractured. He let us have our guilt trip for a while, but then he said, ‘Okay, now let’s go do this,’ and he melded us into a real force.”
Low created a special “Change Board,” where all changes to the Apollo spacecraft necessary to make it flightworthy would need to be approved before implementation.
Borman led a “tiger team” at Downey—with authority to make on-the-spot decisions on the hatch, wiring configurations and other improvements that had been planned even before the accident. As North American Rockwell engineers went over the spacecraft piece by piece, the team lent assistance when necessary. But somehow with his stubborn single-mindedness, Borman found a way to rally the troops.
“Although Frank’s job was primarily technical,” Lunney said, “I think the people there had emotional wounds of sorts to heal to get themselves back on track. And I think Frank—God bless him—brought a lot of that to the Downey group and helped with the healing process, moving them on to the stage of transformation, of moving forward. He said, ‘Okay, we’ve had this problem, we’ve had our recriminations. Now let’s get the hell on with it.’ He made them feel they could push through this and really move forward.”
Across NASA, the trauma of the fire precipitated renewed dedication and cooperation among all the NASA centers and the Apollo contractors. NASA leadership provided greater stability, influence and control. While in some areas at NASA the postfire recovery turned into a frantically busy period of enacting the required fixes, in other areas the pause in racing toward the launchpad provided time for improvements and reflection. It gave engineers the time to do what they did best: to think of all the what-ifs that might happen and how they could be prevented.
“I think throughout NASA, we had felt bulletproof in a way,” Norman Chaffee said. “We’d experienced a lot of success, and maybe our thinking had become a little skewed, since if this thing or that thing hasn’t bitten us so far, it must be okay. The Apollo 1 fire really brought home that we can’t tolerate any waiving of requirements or cutting of corners, and we needed to do our job right. It brought all of us to stand up and say, ’This is my personal job to make sure that everything is right.’“
Astronaut Frank Borman looks over the Gemini 7 spacecraft during weight and balance tests. The tests are conducted in the Pyrotechnic Installation Building, Merritt Island, Kennedy Space Center, as part of preflight preparation. Credit: NASA.
WHILE THE MAJORITY OF MSC WORKED feverishly on testing and acquiring new materials and procedures after the fire, the sim team’s schedule slowed.
“All the engineering guys were off redesigning the Command Module and fixing all sorts of things,” said Jay Honeycutt, who joined the sim team in 1966. “But twice a week, we’d all meet in the Control Center and run Apollo 7 sims. Schirra and his crew would be down at the Cape in the simulators, Gl
ynn Lunney was the flight director. Every Tuesday and every Thursday we’d crank everything up.”
Simulators at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Credit: NASA.
The repetitive nature of the work during that time helped everyone in the Sim Group get into a certain rhythm, and they also learned how to do their business on a larger scale. In every aspect, Apollo was so much bigger than what they’d done in Gemini, with multiple spacecraft traveling farther and doing more. The simulators and Mission Control were now more sophisticated, with several computers now handling numerous data streams.
The sim team spent time writing the “scripts” of their upcoming simulations, coming up with realistic mission scenarios and plausible problems but throwing in some occasional fun as well. They studied schematics, talked with engineers and sat in on mission-planning meetings, figuring out how to best point out the weaknesses and strengths of the flight control team, the astronauts and the spacecraft. Harold Miller told his team that the SimSup held the final say on how well the team performed, and the team knew their research on possible faults or failures might hold a vital key to mission success.
The sun peeks through what remains of the gantry on Launch Pad 34 in 2017 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida where Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee lost their lives. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky.
AMID THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THE FIRE and during the rebuilding period, public support for NASA remained relatively strong. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that the three astronauts should not die in vain, and NASA should push on with the missions to the Moon in honor of Grissom, White and Chaffee. Fuel for that sentiment came from an article published by the Associated Press shortly after the fire, with a stirring quote attributed to Grissom: “If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
In going forward, the widows of the Apollo 1 crew—Betty Grissom, Pat White and Martha Chaffee—had requested that NASA officially name the mission their husbands never got to fly as Apollo 1, and also asked that mission designation be retired. NASA agreed, and then went on to change the way remaining flights were named. There were two test flights, originally named AS-202 and AS-203, that were canceled and weren’t renumbered in the Apollo series, but subsequent missions would be named beginning with Apollo 4. Apollo 4 was a test flight, scheduled for November 1967, and it helped NASA get its groove back.
A display screen at Kennedy Space Center in 2017 showing the memorial plaque that is in place at Launch Complex 34 in a tribute to the crew of Apollo 1 who perished in a fire at the launch pad on January 27, 1967, during training for the mission. Credit: NASA.
DESPITE THEIR EARLIER RESERVATIONS about conducting all-up testing, Wernher von Braun and his team were ready for the first flight of their Saturn V rocket without their customary gradual series of test flights. On November 9, 1967, everyone at Kennedy Space Center and the surrounding area witnessed the grandeur of the largest rocket ever flown. While earlier flights of the Saturn 1B had impressively blazed a trail and provided a hint of what a powerful rocket launch could be like, there was no way to prepare for the incredible sound and ferocity of the monstrous 363-foot (111-m) tall Saturn V. As it powered away from the new Launch Complex 39, the ground and buildings shook for miles around. Dust and debris fell from the ceiling of the newly built Launch Control Center. Inside the new CBS News building on-site at Kennedy Space Center, commentator Walter Cronkite shared the experience with viewers around the country.
“My God, our building’s shaking here,” he said, his voice trembling from the rocket’s vibrations as well as emotion. “Oh, it’s terrific, the building’s shaking! This big blast window is shaking! We’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at 3,000 feet! Oh, the roar is terrific!”
NASA was counting on this rocket to allow future flights to get to the Moon, and its maiden voyage was successful by every measure: from its majestic and slow rise from the launchpad to the third stage boosting a test version of an Apollo CSM into orbit. After eight hours and thirty-six minutes of flight, the CM splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
After the Apollo 1 fire, many at NASA had adopted the phrase “ad astra per aspera,” meaning “a rough road leads to the stars.” Later, that phrase would be placed on a plaque on Launch Complex 34 after it was decommissioned, along with another inscription that reads, “They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind’s final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.”
The road to the Moon had certainly been rough in 1967, but the Apollo 4 launch showed that reaching this monumental goal just might be possible. The giant rocket had provided a stirring and triumphant lift in spirits that everyone needed.
The Apollo 4 space mission launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39 at 7:00 a.m. on November 9, 1967. Credit: NASA.
CHAPTER 7
1968
The Apollo Command and Service Modules inside MSC’s Space Environment Simulation Laboratory’s Chamber A, for a test in 1968. The light banks simulate light from the sun. Credit: NASA
You couldn’t have blown us out of there with a stick of dynamite. Everyone was having so much fun.
—JAY HONEYCUTT, Apollo simulation team
A MASSIVE HURRICANE RAVAGING THE Houston area. Or Cold War tensions escalating and the Soviet Union sabotaging NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) facilities. What would happen if, somehow, the Mission Control Center had been destroyed or incapacitated and an Apollo crew was on their way home from the Moon, desperately trying to contact the ground?
“It was one of those what-if scenarios that many of us had never even considered,” said Johnny Cools, who worked in flight control in MSC’s Real Time Computer Complex (RTCC). In the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire (on January 27, 1967), program managers took stock of all the possible things that could go wrong during a mission. One idea that came up was the concept of an off-site, backup Mission Control, just in case a catastrophic event occurred in Houston.
Within the Flight Support Division, Cools was tasked with preparing the procedures and conducting a test run of an Emergency Mission Control Center (EMCC), set up at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. In early 1968, several imaginary disaster scenarios were considered as Cools, Retrofire Officer Chuck Deiterich and a few other flight controllers and IBM computer programmers grabbed what was called a checkpoint tape from the RTCC, carried it on board an aircraft and made their way to Goddard to test operational control of a simulated mission from the EMCC.
The Real Time Computer Complex at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Credit: NASA.
MSC Mission Control Center, Building 30 in 1964. Credit: NASA.
“For every mission, we had the standard procedure to create checkpoint tapes or restart tapes every hour and a half or so,” said Cools, “enabling us to have a backup ‘snapshot’ of the data and telemetry from the flight should we lose the main computer, the Mission Operations Computer, for whatever reason. So for this test, we hand-carried one of those magnetic tape reels, flew to Goddard and performed an initial program load of the mission software to the computer at the EMCC and got everything operational. That test assured us we had the ability—should the need ever arise—to compute a return trajectory for the crew and help them return safely to Earth.”
Potential catastrophes aside, the MSC’s computer center had other backup procedures as well, but the RTCC was the heart and soul—and the brains—of Mission Control’s real-time data-processing abilities. During the stand-down after the Apollo 1 accident, the RTCC was refurbished and the previous IBM 7094 computers were replaced by five brand-new IBM 360-75Js. In total, the new computers had a storage capacity of about 1 megabyte. During each flight, one computer would be assigned as the Mission Operations Computer (MOC). The MOC handled the real-time data: the
telemetry coming in from the spacecraft, the commands going out to the crew, radar processing and trajectory and ephemeris planning. Another computer was designated as a backup, called a dynamic standby, and it performed the same operations as the other flight control computer; however, it was considered an emergency backup system, but it could be brought “online” at the push of a button, becoming the MOC within a second or two. One of the other computers was used by the simulation team, and the remaining computers were used for other computing needs at MSC.
“During the Apollo flights, we would have about nine tape drives that were recording all the data from the mission,” said Cools. “We always had backups because we wanted to make sure that if any drive had a hardware failure that it automatically switched to the next drive and we wouldn’t lose any data.”
The RTCC was located on the first floor of the Mission Control Center, and as it processed all the data from the mission, it provided the ability for data to be displayed on the cathode ray tube (CRT) displays on the flight controller consoles, on the large front display screens and on other data-output devices throughout the Mission Control Center.
Those who worked in the RTCC weren’t just computer experts—they were flight controllers who were responsible for the operation and control of the MOC’s software programs as well as for interfacing with the flight control team in Mission Control.
“We were assigned to sit alongside the flight controllers on consoles during the simulations and testing of operations,” said Cools, “and then we would write the requirements from each flight controller and then hand them off to IBM to be programmed. Once the programming was done, we’d check the systems and the processing to make sure everything was working with internal testing before handing it off to flight control for simulations and then flight operations. We were literally a thread running from the very beginnings of figuring out how this was all going to be done, down to sitting at the consoles and supporting the flights.”
Eight Years to the Moon Page 23