by Gene Kranz
It was not a good time to be talking about luck, but in times of crisis your defenses kick in. This is especially so among people who have loved to fly. They go on autopilot. Their instincts take over. Nothing could be done for the crew. The important thing now was to find out the how and why—to protect the living and to keep moving forward.
Death had come to the space program in the most unimaginable way during a test—to three men, helpless, not in the air, but in a cockpit just 318 feet above the ground. The fire had flashed through the cabin in seconds. You tried not to think of the horror of it. We all thanked God it had been quick, but how long is quick? How long does it take to suffocate, to burn, to die?
Hodge and I had come from flight testing and knew the risks. Kraft was intimately aware of the dangers from the day he launched Shepard in the first primitive Mercury capsule. We knew there was a high probability that some men would die at some point in the program, but none of us could accept losing our crew on the launch pad. We all had assumed that when a calamity struck us, it would be in flight. Our nightmare was an explosion during launch, or a flying coffin, a faulty craft stuck in endless orbit.
Dutch Von Ehrenfried had been at the guidance console during the crew’s last seconds. He was white as a sheet, face drawn, for once speechless and on the edge of tears. The poise I had seen so often on the judo mat and in competition had left him. He was now just a vulnerable young man who had witnessed his friends’ deaths.
John Aaron, filling in on the EECOM console, passed the minutes playing back data, seeing the brief electrical current spike, then the rise in cabin pressure and temperature. He pushed himself beyond exhaustion and finally had to be driven home.
In these harrowing hours and the days that followed there was no way to comprehend or accept the loss of Grissom, forty, White, thirty-six, and Chaffee, thirty-one. If there was anything that could be retrieved from this tragedy, it was the evidence—it was right there in front of us on Pad 34. We had a chance to discover the cause of the fire before another spacecraft was put at risk.
The fire did something else. It reminded the American public that men could and would die in our efforts to explore the heavens. It recreated the tension and uncertainty of the early flights of Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn. The Russians worked in secret, but the entire world could watch our flights on television. Success had become almost routine for us . . . until now. The country had gotten complacent. Only many years later would the full count of losses become known: these three Americans plus four Russians, all brave, good men who ran out of luck, whose technology failed at a crucial moment.
We were torn between feelings of fatalism and defiance. The United States had catapulted men into space sixteen times without a casualty more serious than a stubbed toe—although we had lived through some very scary situations. In our series of ten Gemini trips, Americans had repeatedly broken all records for survival in space, had strolled casually into the void, had navigated their craft through complex maneuvers, tracking down and docking with another spaceship.
With each flight the bar had been raised higher. No one knew how many orbits Apollo 1 would attempt. Grissom, White, and Chaffee would have been blazing yet another path, an open-ended mission, a bold departure from the rigid, limited spaceflights of the past. Theirs was to be essentially an engineering flight, a shakedown for the Apollo systems.
Built by North American, the Command and Service Module was by far the biggest and most sophisticated space vehicle ever designed. We had come so far, so quickly, from Alan Shepard’s pioneering fifteen-minute flight. When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.” It was a funny crack, but with an edge.
In marked contrast to the tiny Mercury capsule, Apollo was, in spaceflight terms, practically a luxury liner. It had hammocks for full-length sleeping, hot and cold water, and a primitive galley. The spacecraft was the transportation for the crew to Earth orbit, to lunar orbit, and back home. It consisted of two sections, or modules, the upper one cone-shaped, the lower a cylinder. In the top section, called the command module, the astronauts occupied three cockpit couches looking up at a maze of controls—gauges, dials, switches, lights, and toggles. The service module was essentially an engine room. It housed the fuel, the crew’s oxygen, the basic electrical system, and a large rocket with 22,500 pounds of thrust that would supply the propulsion required to enter and leave a lunar orbit. The CSM was thirty-four feet long and weighed about thirty tons when fully fueled.
The Saturn booster rockets were enormous. Towering 223 feet above the launch pad, the two-stage Saturn IB rocket provided 1.6 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and was used for Apollo Earth orbital missions not requiring an LM, or lunar module.* The S-IB was a prototype for the Saturn V and used the same S-IVB upper stage as the more powerful Saturn V.
* LEM versus LM: In the early planning of the Apollo program, the term “LEM” was used, but by the time the program got started, the “excursion” (E) was dropped from the vernacular and it simply became Lunar Module.
The Saturn V rocket with 7.7 million pounds’ thrust at liftoff was the largest rocket ever developed by the United States. Standing 363 feet tall, it was used for missions that carried both the CSM and LM.
The LM was a buglike, rocket-powered craft that two astronauts would board for the descent to the Moon’s surface. The LM, with landing legs folded, was mounted on an adapter at the forward end of the S-IVB, which was in turn enclosed by four tapered conical panels with the CSM perched on top. For lunar missions the S-IVB (the third stage of the rocket) injected the CSM and LM into Earth orbit, and after a checkout period the engine reignited to place both spacecraft into a lunar trajectory.
The capsule of Apollo 1 was a total loss, charred and blackened both inside and out, its sensitive instruments ruined beyond any useful purpose—except for whatever clues it might surrender. The three bodies had been left strapped in their seats for seven hours while the first anguished experts tried to sort out the causes of a fiery accident that traumatized an entire nation.
One by one the controllers left after securing the records, the log-books, and the voice and telemetry tapes. Almost by reflex, everyone drifted over to the Singing Wheel, the controllers’ watering hole.
As the word of the Apollo 1 fire spread through the Clear Lake area, Nelson Bland, the owner of the Singing Wheel, cleared the building except for the controllers. Throughout the evening, more drifted in as others left. Worried wives came looking for their husbands, clustering in one of the back rooms. It was like the nights of years earlier, when you lost a squadron pilot and a good friend. All that was lacking were the songs we used to sing back then, our way of saying, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “death shall have no dominion.” This night, however, was one of limited and subdued conversation. We mourned our crew and the loss of whatever naïveté we had left.
We had known setbacks before. We had lived through some bad days, but we had never taken a knockout punch like this one. I wished there were some way to get in a judo match. I just wanted to feel some physical pain. The beer was not helping anything.
When we returned to our homes that night, we were changed in ways none of us could describe.
The next day was no different. The controllers wandered between the offices and the control center, their minds now moving to the question, “What’s next?” Kraft was nowhere to be seen. I guessed that he was probably working with Bob Gilruth, Deke Slayton, and Joe Shea, the Apollo program manager, to put together an investigative team. The day stretched on forever as dribs and drabs of data filtered into the offices. There were many rumors, few facts.
As I was sitting in my office, a picture of an antique biplane hanging in a tree caught my eye. I had carried it with me to keep me on track since my time in flight test at Holloman Air Force Base. A caption below the picture read:
Aviation i
n itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.
No one understood the risk any better than Gus Grissom. He had been quoted as saying, “If we die we want people to accept it. We hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
Roger Chaffee had been CapCom for my first mission as flight director. I had worked with Gus and Ed White in Mercury and Gemini, but we hadn’t spoken for some time except for brief phone calls or crisp de-briefings after a test. Now it was too late. They were gone, and all I had were some foggy memories of three Americans who had died in the race for supremacy in space. A rational feeling or not, I felt that I had personally let down the crew of Apollo 1. But I also knew that I had to put aside these feelings and take the lead in rallying the controllers to get us moving forward again. I had seen Mueller, Low, and Williams get out in front and lead when we had had problems and setbacks. Now it was my turn to set an example.
Monday morning, I told Hodge I was calling a meeting of my branch and my flight control team in the auditorium. Hodge, deeply disturbed by the fire and still searching for his own answers, agreed and expanded the meeting to include the civil servants, Philco controllers, and our spacecraft contractors.
The auditorium in our office area held 250 and was half full when John and I arrived. The controllers were still in the bewildered state they had been plunged into on Friday night—muted and somber, feeling, as I did, that we had failed our crew, but not knowing what to do about it. Hodge spoke first, citing the known facts of the accident, then describing the newly appointed review board and the investigating team headed by the director of the Langley Research Center, Floyd Thompson.
I recognized a few of the Thompson committee members. Frank Borman, the Gemini astronaut, and Max Faget, the director of engineering, were from MSC, and John Williams was from the Cape launch team. When Hodge completed his briefing, I still did not know what I wanted to say as he motioned me to the microphone. Emotionally I had come out of the shock, and my feeling now was one of pure anger. Anger that we in Flight Control in some way had let the crew down.
I climbed the four steps to the stage, looking at all those faces of people I knew so well. I wanted them to get beyond shock, then say, as St. Peter did in one of his epistles, “Let us get good and angry—and then let us make no mistakes.” Yes, we had experienced a terrible tragedy and a devastating setback, but this was not the end. The testing and the program would go on and we were the ones who would carry it forward. It was up to us to make sure that the Apollo 1 crew had not died in vain.
I started talking about my feelings, and the words finally poured out. I didn’t quite know where they came from, but I spoke slowly, deliberately, and with conviction. “Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.
“We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’
“I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job! We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.”
My remarks were received with silence, no movement, no shifting in the seats. The controllers, each and every one, knew what I meant. I was just putting their thoughts into words.
“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.
“When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room 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.”
The specific cause of the Apollo 1 fire was never identified, but the conditions that led to the fire were clear. We had a sealed cabin, pressurized with oxygen. There were extensive combustibles in the cabin, including a lot of explosively flammable Velcro. The wiring and plumbing systems were vulnerable to damage and, in retrospect, we made the wrong hatch design tradeoffs. It is easy to see all of this in 20/20 hindsight. Like so much in technology, there was a necessary tradeoff. The hatch was a two-piece design. The exterior opened outward while the interior pressure hatch opened inward. It was a brute, heavy and awkward. Given the design, a rapid escape from the spacecraft was impossible. But the NASA and North American designers hadn’t been as worried about escape contingencies as they were about the possibility of a hatch popping open into the vacuum of space or another inadvertent opening during a water landing. The premature opening of Gus Grissom’s Mercury hatch and the loss of his capsule was a lesson not easily forgotten.
A fire on the ground was considered such a remote possibility that the cabin contained no extinguisher. Even if there had been one, it probably would not have worked quickly enough in a time frame of a few seconds. Today’s Halon gas full-flood system might have worked. The fire involved a pure-oxygen cabin atmosphere, flammable materials, and an ignition spark from somewhere in the spacecraft. Before we could fly again, we had to eliminate one or more of these elements in the interior of the spacecraft. Everyone—designers, launch team, MCC, and even the crew—had not given enough thought to what an oxygen-rich atmosphere could do, particularly in a cabin stuffed with flammable material.
I worked with the controllers, assembling the data for the Thompson committee. After putting the data together, I listened for the last time to the final minutes of the plugs-out countdown. We took all the tapes and other records—everything from MCC and the Cape—and shipped them up to the investigating committee.
As we fought back from the tragedy, Tough and Competent joined with Discipline and Morale in defining the culture of the controllers. These words became our rallying cry. The controllers gave me a T-shirt with the words stenciled across the chest. I was proud of their gift and proud to wear it. The ultimate success of Apollo was made possible by the sacrifices of Grissom, White, and Chaffee. The accident profoundly affected everyone in the program. There was an unspoken promise on everyone’s part to the three astronauts that their deaths would not be in vain.
At the time of the accident, every element of the program was in trouble. The command and lunar modules were behind schedule, the software was late, and the systems were often failing during testing. The Saturn had had problems also. The second-stage (S-II) rocket was an engineering and production nightmare. After a second S-II explosion, in ground testing, there were some contractor changes at the production and test facilities. There were recriminations, but no excuses.
Engineers were having difficulty moving the leading-edge technologies from the laboratories to the production line. At North American and in the U.S. Congress, the report written by General Sam Phillips before the fire raised questions about competence, quality, and workmanship by the manufacturer. If they sneezed, we caught the flu. Every spacecraft design change triggered more changes in Mission Control and in the simulators. The traffic piled up and engineers found they w
ere making changes on changes.
By late spring, however, the program emerged from the chaos of the fire. Momentum began to build again.
In March 1967, the mission designations were changed. After the Apollo 1 fire, there would be no Apollo 2 or 3. Two unmanned Saturn IB flight tests—AS201 and 202—were not redesignated with a sequence number. The next mission after those two Saturn IB flights was designated Apollo 4, the first flight of the Saturn V. For our own internal purposes, mission types were given letter designations. The controllers preferred this letter sequence since it denoted the broad objectives and was used in lieu of numerical designations.
First manned Command Service Module (CSM)—C
Manned test of CSM and Lunar Excursion Module (LEM)—D
High Earth orbit (up to 4,000 miles) and test of the CSM at lunar reentry speeds—E
Full lunar dress rehearsal, with CSM and LEM—F
First lunar landing—G
Subsequent lunar missions—H1, H2, and H3