First Man

by James R. Hansen

  The moment they entered their hotel rooms on the fifth and top floor of the Georgetown Inn, which was at about 7:15 P.M., the four astronauts saw the red message light on their telephones. The front desk relayed to Neil the urgent need to call the Manned Spacecraft Center. Dialing the number he was given—a number that he did not recognize—he reached what turned out to be the Apollo program office. The man on the phone in Houston shouted to Neil, “The details are sketchy, but there was a fire on Pad 34 tonight. A bad fire. It is probable the crew did not survive.” The anonymous NASA employee then told Neil what Cooper, Gordon, and Lovell were also hearing at approximately the same instant: “It won’t be long before the media gets word. When they do, they’ll pounce on anyone connected to the agency. It is strongly suggested that you four disappear until we get further word to you. Don’t leave the hotel tonight.”

  Replacing the phones on their cradles, the four astronauts headed into the hallway to find out what the others had heard. In the meantime, the owner of the Georgetown Inn, Collins Bird, a man whose hotel often hosted astronauts and NASA program leaders, had picked up on the bad news from Bob Gilruth, as the MSC director came into the hotel immediately after the White House event. The considerate hotelier arranged for the astronauts to occupy a large suite just steps from their fifth-floor rooms.

  Before congregating in the suite, each astronaut tried to call home. Neil could not reach Janet. Astronaut Alan Bean had telephoned Janet shortly after the accident and told her to get over to the Whites’. Pat White was not home when Janet arrived; she was picking up her daughter Bonnie from ballet class. Janet was waiting near the Whites’ carport when mother, daughter, and son Eddie drove into the driveway. Contrary to the portrayal of this incident in previous books and in a memorable episode of the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, Janet “did not know anything when I went over there. I only knew there was a problem. When Pat and her children arrived, I helped them in with some groceries. All I could say was ‘There’s been a problem. I don’t know what it is,’ and I didn’t.”

  Remembering how the press got to Ted Freeman’s wife first with the news of his death, NASA sent over one of its astronauts to tell Pat the horrible news. The unhappy messenger was Bill Anders. “I had been in a simulation and just gotten home,” Anders remembers. “I was out in my yard, about three blocks from where the Armstrongs and Whites lived, and I got a call from Al Bean, whom Deke had assigned to tell me that there had been a fire and that Gus, Roger, and Ed had been killed. I was to go down to the Whites’ and tell Pat about it before she heard it on television. I got a quick summary of what happened and then went over and knocked on the door. Pat came to the door and Jan was there. I think Jan already suspected, but Janet also knew that NASA preferred that one of the guys tell her. Pat was distraught.”

  “After Bill got there and told Pat,” Janet remembers, “a number of other people arrived: Bill’s wife Valerie, the Bormans, and I think also the Staffords. We stayed there until three or four o’clock in the morning, and I went back and forth between the houses to check on the kids. We all sat there and talked about death and what it meant to each one of us. It was an interesting conversation, a unique time to share ourselves.”

  Back in their suite at the Georgetown Inn, Neil and his fellow astronauts had tried to eat some dinner. They had no trouble drinking down a bottle of scotch. Late into the night, they talked about what must have happened to cause such a disaster down at the Cape.

  None of the astronauts liked the Block I spacecraft that North American Aviation had built for NASA, the early version of the Apollo command module that was to be test-flown in Earth orbit prior to any lunar mission. Certainly not Gus Grissom, who after one checkout run at the manufacturer’s plant in Downey, California, had left a lemon on top of the module. As the long night in the Georgetown Inn wore on, the topic of conversation, as Jim Lovell remembers, moved “from concern for the future of the program, to predictions about whether it would now be possible to get to the Moon before the end of the decade, to resentment of NASA for pushing the program so hard just to make that [JFK] artificial deadline, to rage at NASA for building that piece of crap spacecraft in the first place and refusing to listen to the astronauts when they told the agency bosses they were going to have to spend the money to rebuild it right.”

  Lovell and Gordon confirm that Neil spoke the least of the four men. “I don’t blame people for anything,” Neil relates. “These types of things, in the world we are living in, happen, and you should expect them to happen. You just try your best to avoid them. And if they do happen, you hope you have the right kind of procedures, equipment, knowledge, and skill to survive them. I’ve never been a blamer.”

  As for the deaths of Grissom, Chaffee, and especially his good friend and neighbor Ed White, “I suppose you’re much more likely to accept a loss of a friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose them in a ground test.” According to Neil, “that was an indictment of ourselves. It happened because we didn’t do the right thing somehow. That’s doubly, doubly traumatic. That’s not the way you want it to happen. Not that it’s any less noble. It just hurts…. When certain things happen in flight, there is just nothing you can do to handle them. You are doing what you want to be doing at the time, so injuries and even deaths are easier to accept than in a ground test, where there should be escapes available for any accident that occurs. But in this case, there weren’t.” As to why all the brainpower at NASA and in the aerospace industry missed the danger of ground testing the spacecraft in a 100 percent oxygen-rich environment, “Well, it was some bad oversight. We’d been getting away with it for a period of time, as we had tested that way all through the Gemini program, and I guess we just became too complacent.”

  Four days after the fire, two separate funerals were held in honor of the three fallen astronauts. The date was January 31, the very same day of the year that Neil and Janet had buried their beloved daughter back in California five years earlier.

  Naturally, Neil and Janet attended both of the funerals; Neil’s mother came to Houston to watch her grandsons. The first funeral, for Grissom and Chaffee, took place with utmost gravity and military dignity at Arlington National Cemetery. So angry and upset were Grissom’s parents and Chaffee’s father with what they feared had been a needless accident that they greeted President Johnson very coldly when he came over to express his sympathies. The funeral for Ed White took place later the same day inside the Old Cadet Chapel at West Point, as both Ed and his father (who was still alive) had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy overlooking the Hudson River. Neil served as one of the pallbearers, along with four other members of what had been the New Nine: Borman, Conrad, Lovell, and Stafford. Buzz Aldrin, from the third class of astronauts, also served as a pallbearer for White’s body. Ed had performed America’s first space walk back in June 1965, on Gemini IV. Buzz had performed its most recent, just ten weeks earlier, on Gemini XII.

  Not until many years later did Neil give any thought whatsoever to the ironic combination of tragedies that linked his house fire in April 1964 with the Apollo fire in January 1967: Ed White helping the Armstrongs fight the flames and save their children; Ed then being killed in a fire in which there was no one, with no way, to help him or his crewmates; the Apollo fire occuring literally on the eve of the Armstrongs’ wedding anniversary and that of Karen’s death; Janet being the one that had to prepare Pat White for the news that her husband had just been killed; White, Grissom, and Chaffee being buried on the same calendar day that Muffie was put in the ground. When asked why the irony escaped him at the time, Neil today responds, “It is a remarkable coincidence. Ed was able to help me save the situation, but I was not in a position to be able to help him.”

  The day after the launchpad fire, Dr. Robert Seamans, NASA’s deputy administrator, speaking for Administrator James Webb, announced the formation of an accident investigation board. Armstrong’s name was not on the list, Apollo 1 being one of the few major a
ccidents in U.S. space program history that Neil would not be asked to help investigate. “I was involved in doing other things [flying helicopters and practicing lunar landing simulations],” Neil remembers, “and was immersed in my job.”

  The only astronaut to serve on the panel was Frank Borman. The assertive commander of Gemini VII performed exceptionally well, both as a technical expert who worked behind the scenes to identify the precise causes of the fire and as a NASA spokesman answering questions from the press and testifying before House and Senate space committees.

  In contrast to the independent investigation formulated by the Reagan White House in 1986 following the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, a body on which Armstrong would serve as vice chairman, the Johnson administration allowed NASA to keep the Apollo fire investigation entirely in-house. Panel chair Floyd L. Thompson, the sixty-nine-year-old director of NASA’s Langley Research Center, served with five other NASA officials, one air force official, and one official from the U.S. Bureau of Standards.

  With NASA controlling the investigation, progress came swiftly. Within twenty-four hours of the inferno, Thompson and his committee were on hand at Pad 34. Not having to face a daily media circus, the Apollo 204 Review Board, as it was formally called, quickly found what had caused the accident. By April 5, 1967, after only ten weeks on the job, most of it on site at Kennedy Space Center, Thompson’s panel submitted its formal report. According to its terse engineering prose, an arc from faulty electrical wiring in an equipment bay inside the command module had started the fire. In the 100 percent oxygen atmosphere, the crew had died of asphyxia caused by inhalation of toxic gases. The board report concluded with a list of eleven major recommendations for hardware and operational changes.

  It would take NASA two years to fix all the problems with Apollo. A special Apollo Configuration Control Board, chaired by George Low, eventually oversaw the completion of 1,341 design changes for the spacecraft. Never again would a grounded spacecraft risk the highly explosive 100 percent oxygen-rich atmosphere. On the launchpad, astronauts would breathe a mixture of 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen. The nitrogen would be bled off as the spacecraft ascended.

  “We were given the gift of time,” Armstrong notes. “We didn’t want that gift, but we were given months and months to not only fix the spacecraft, but also rethink all our previous decisions, plans, and strategies, and change a lot of things for the better. We got that added benefit, but we regret the price we had to pay.” Neil’s Apollo 11 command module pilot Mike Collins agrees: “It gave everyone not working on fire-related matters a breather, a period to catch up on their work.”

  In retrospect, some key space program officials, including Chris Kraft, even believe that if the launchpad fire had not happened, the overall goal of landing on the Moon may never have been reached, so important was it for NASA to go back and rethink the Apollo procedures and really produce a top-notch spacecraft. Armstrong’s perspective on this “what if” has always been more judicious: “The operative word is ‘may.’ It ‘may’ have happened that Apollo had not been able to reach its goal.”

  What is clearer historically is that when Apollo did get back on track, it was again going full speed. Not that it was ever a runaway, but in the closing years of the decade the train did have to barrel through some scheduled stops in order to make it to the Moon on time.

  The Apollo fire investigation board issued its formal report on a Friday, April 5, 1967. Early the next Monday morning, Deke Slayton called together a group of his astronauts. The men assembled in a small conference room on the third floor of Building 4 at the Manned Spacecraft Center. “Deke had a lot of meetings that would come down on a pretty regular basis,” Armstrong recalls. “He’d chew us out, or praise us, or both, or have a little heart to heart with us about this or that.”

  This meeting was different. It was not a full pilots’ meeting. Slayton had invited only eighteen of his astronauts to attend, though NASA’s astronaut corps now numbered nearly fifty. None of the new scientist-astronauts, such as Harrison Schmitt or Owen Garriott, were there. Only one of the original Mercury astronauts, Wally Schirra, sat at the conference table. All the rest came from the second and third groups of astronauts. Five of the men who were present, all of them from the third group, had not yet flown in space. They were Bill Anders, Gene Cernan, Walt Cunningham, Donn Eisele, and Clifton C. “C.C.” Williams. (Major Williams would be killed a few months later, in December 1967, when his T-38 airplane crashed into a swamp in the Florida panhandle. Although he was flying an almost brand-new aircraft, either a tool or loose material was floating in the aileron control system of Williams’s plane, resulting in an uncontrollable rolling situation during the cruise portion of his flight from Kennedy Space Center to Ellington AFB. Williams ejected at too low of an altitude to survive.) The other thirteen were all veterans of at least one Gemini flight: John Young (Gemini III and X), Jim McDivitt (Gemini IV), Pete Conrad (Gemini V and XI), Schirra (Gemini VI), Tom Stafford (Gemini VI and Gemini IX), Frank Borman and Jim Lovell (Gemini VII and XII), Armstrong and Dave Scott (Gemini VIII), Mike Collins (Gemini X), Dick Gordon (Gemini XI), and Buzz Aldrin (Gemini XII).

  “Father Slayton,” as some of the men jokingly called the chief of the Astronaut Office behind his back, was not one for beating around the bush. Slayton told them straight out: “The guys who are going to fly the first lunar missions are the guys in this room.”

  “Tom Stafford hunched forward and nodded his head,” Gene Cernan observed. “Neil Armstrong, who eventually would be most affected by the announcement, showed no emotion.” Unlike the astronauts who had not yet been in space, and who felt lucky to be included in the elite group, it came as no surprise to Armstrong or to any of the other spaceflight veterans that they were on Deke’s list for the Apollo missions. After all, as Neil has said with no immodesty intended, “Who else was around that would be flying those flights? I think it was more of a confidence-building thing for Deke to be telling us.”

  Yet not even Neil missed the significance of Slayton’s words. Every astronaut around the conference table knew that he had just qualified as a finalist in “an unofficial and largely unspoken competition in which the prize was the ultimate flight test, the first lunar landing.” At this early stage of the contest, it was anybody’s guess who would get the job, but if the private thoughts of the eighteen astronauts present that April morning had been surveyed, the smart money would have been spread out almost evenly across the seven men from the New Nine who had already served as a commander for a Gemini flight. That meant McDivitt, Borman, Stafford, Young, Conrad, Lovell, or Armstrong. The oldest astronaut in the program, Wally Schirra, would not have been a good bet, not necessarily because of his age (Schirra was forty-four, whereas Borman and Lovell were thirty-nine, McDivitt was thirty-seven, and the other four were thirty-six), but because Wally had upset Slayton by complaining about the nature of the Apollo 2 mission to which he had originally been assigned back in 1966. Deke responded by moving Schirra’s crew (Eisele and Cunningham) out of the prime role for Apollo 2 to the backup crew for Grissom, White, and Chaffee in Apollo 1.

  At the meeting, Slayton laid out the course of the entire Apollo program. The first manned Apollo mission, the one delayed by the fatal fire, would take place in approximately a year and a half, after a series of major equipment tests. NASA was now calling this first manned mission Apollo 7. In honor of Grissom, White, and Chaffee, there would be no other Apollo 1. There was also to be no Apollo 2 or 3. Slayton told his astronauts that the upcoming Apollo flights would proceed from type A through type J. The A mission, to be performed by the unmanned flights of Apollo 4 and Apollo 6, would test the three-stage Saturn V launch rocket as well as the reentry capabilities of the command module. The B mission, involving Apollo 5, would be an unmanned test of the lunar module. The C mission—which Apollo 7, the first manned flight, was to satisfy—would test the Apollo command and service modules (CSM), the Apollo crew accommodations, and t
he Apollo navigation systems in Earth orbit. The D mission would test the combined operations of the CSM and the lunar module (LM), also in Earth orbit. The E mission would also test the combined operations but do it in deep space. The F mission amounted to a full-dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, while the G mission would be the landing itself. Following the first landing came the H mission, with a more complete instrument package aboard the LM for improved lunar surface exploration, followed by the I mission, originally conceived as lunar-orbit-only flights with remote-sensing packages inside the CSM and no lander. NASA had made no plans beyond the J mission, which repeated the H mission but with a lander capable of staying on the lunar surface for a longer period of time.

  Slayton then named the first three Apollo crews. To the surprise of some, Deke called on Schirra to command Apollo 7. Joining Wally was his established crew of Eisele and Cunningham. (After being named commander, Schirra announced that Apollo 7 would be his last mission prior to his retirement from NASA.) Backing up Wally’s crew would be Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan. After Schirra’s crew had been moved out of Apollo 2 to serve as backup for Apollo 1 back in 1966, Stafford’s crew had become the backup for Jim McDivitt’s Apollo 2 crew. Now, however, McDivitt was to become commander for Apollo 8, the proposed first test of the lunar module. Serving on McDivitt’s Apollo 8 crew were Dave Scott and Rusty Schweikart, with Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and C. C. Williams serving as backups. (Al Bean would replace Williams on Conrad’s crew after Williams’s death in December 1967.) Comprising the crew for Apollo 9, which was to be a manned test of the CSM and LM in high Earth orbit, was Frank Borman, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders. Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin would serve as the Apollo 9 backup crew.

  This took the Apollo crew assignments up through the D mission, Slayton told his astronauts. For Armstrong, it was clear that his command of an Apollo mission could come no sooner than Apollo 11, as an astronaut had never moved from a backup crew (in Neil’s case, backup on Apollo 9) to the very next prime crew (Apollo 10). Considering that missions E and F, according to the master plan, would have to be accomplished before NASA moved on to the actual Moon landing, which was the G mission, it appeared at the time of Slayton’s pronouncement that the historic first step onto the surface of another heavenly body would not happen at least until Apollo 12. If Neil ended up getting the command for Apollo 11, he would be flying the dress rehearsal for the landing, not the landing itself.