by Jay Barbree
The year 1967 rolled in like a political garbage truck with its tires burning. This was the year Johnson would have to begin his fight for reelection. He needed a public relations miracle to recapture the hearts and minds of the electorate, and the prize Johnson wanted was Apollo. If he could get NASA to boost that program ahead of its own schedule and get Americans safely to the moon and back during the election-year struggle, his political fortunes would turn around. LBJ passed the word to his private staff that he would “very much appreciate” NASA getting off dead center and flying again. The message to NASA was clear: “Get off your asses, gentlemen.”
With the technical staff working overtime, quickened by scathing insults from Gus Grissom and other leaders of the Apollo team, Spacecraft 012 (Apollo 1) received its final inspection and was moved to Launch Pad 34. There it was bolted and connected to its Saturn 1B rocket the first week of January. Additional tests, however, were required on the pad. One considered essential involved pressurizing the unmanned ship with 100 percent oxygen. When that test had been completed to everyone’s satisfaction, a final test would be run with the three-man crew aboard. But given the pressure of time, NASA decided to skip the unmanned test and go directly to the “full dress rehearsal” with 100 percent oxygen, the crew in position, and the spacecraft hatch sealed just as tightly as it would be for a launch. NASA posted Friday, January 27, for the all-up “plugs out” run.
On the morning of the test, Grissom, White, and Chaffee shared an early lunch in their crew quarters with Apollo spacecraft manager Joe Shea. Deke Slayton, and Grissom’s backup commander, Wally Schirra, joined them. Deke recalled, “There had been a lot of communications problems with the spacecraft, and Gus wanted to hassle Joe a bit, chew on his ass about them.”
Shea didn’t need any hassling. He knew the Apollo craft had problems. He was a lightning rod, catching most of the heat, the man in NASA who had to ride North American Aviation to do better. Just six weeks earlier, in a frank and revealing news conference, he had admitted that, yes, there were problems with Apollo, that more than twenty thousand failures of one sort or another had plagued the program. Most were trivial, but there were enough important faults to cause deep concern. Said Shea, “We hope to God there is no safety involved in the things that slip through.”
“Suddenly,” Deke recalled again, “Gus suggested to Shea, ‘Goddamn it, Joe, if you think the sonofabitch is working, why don’t you get your ass in the cabin with us and see what it sounds like?’
“Joe didn’t think much of the idea. It didn’t make sense to him, and he told Gus he’d monitor the test from the blockhouse. Then, after thinking about it for a while, I said, hell, maybe it would be a good idea if I got in there with you guys to see firsthand how the system really worked. In fact, that was my intent when we left for the launch pad.
“But when we got there and started loading the guys into the spacecraft, it became obvious this was a dumb shit thing to do because whatever communications hookup they gave me wouldn’t be the same that Gus and the guys were using. So I opted at the last minute not to get in. Instead I went to the blockhouse.”
Just before Gus slipped into the Apollo, Wally Schirra held him back a moment. Wally hated the hatch of the Apollo. As far as he was concerned, it should have been built with a quick-opening explosive mechanism that operated swiftly like those in the Mercury. For Schirra, capsule 012 had an ominous feel. The hatch was double-hulled. It had to be opened manually, and to escape in an emergency it was necessary to open both hulls of the hatch and then release a third hatch that was part of a protective metal shield that insulated Apollo during liftoff. Engineers had designed it that way to avoid an accidental loss of the hatch en route to the moon or during the punishing reentry, when Apollo would come blazing back to earth at more than twenty-four thousand miles per hour. This design came about, ironically, after Grissom’s Mercury capsule had sunk when the hatch inexplicably blew after he splashed down.
“Listen to me, Gus,” Wally told his friend. “It’ll take you a minimum of ninety seconds to get all those hatches open. If you have a problem, even a communications problem, get out of the cabin until the problem is cleared. Got it?”
“Got it.” Gus heard the warning, then filed it away somewhere in the back of his mind.
“Standby to begin the count,” the words came from the blockhouse through speakers mounted around the launch pad and the steel gantry surrounding the 224-foot-tall combination of Saturn 1B rocket and Apollo 1.
The launch team initiated the rehearsal—an exercise called a “plugs-out” test—a dry run for everything except fueling and the actual launching.
In full spacesuits the astronauts strapped themselves into Apollo 1, Grissom on the left, White center, and Chaffee on the right. Technicians closed and sealed the spacecraft hatch. The three were now plugged tightly within a ship from which they could not possibly remove themselves for a minimum of ninety seconds to two minutes.
“Confirm hatch closed and sealed,” came the call. Pure oxygen was then pumped into the cabin until the pressure gauges read 16.7 pounds per square inch, two pounds higher than the normal sea-level pressure of the nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere outside the ship.
NASA’s test called for a capsule environment free of any contaminants. The extremely high oxygen content and cabin pressure within the ship would create this environment, and served no other purpose. Once the capsule was in space, cabin pressure would be reduced to a level of five pounds per square inch, less than one-third the thick oxygen atmosphere in the ship at the time of launch. Engineers had vetoed an earthlike nitrogen-oxygen mixture for Apollo because of the extra complexity of handling two gases, the extra plumbing that would be required, and the extra weight it would add.
The test was monitored from three separate outside locations. In the White Room, an enclosed platform on Level 8, the spacecraft level of the gantry, five technicians from North American Aviation were on immediate standby for any emergency should the astronauts need their assistance. They would never forget that day.
An elaborate blockhouse sixteen hundred feet from the rocket held a crew to run down the systems checks of the booster. Five miles away, in an operations building, electronic tendrils reached underground to the spaceship under the guidance of the ACE (Automatic Checkout Equipment) Control Room. Only one person at each of these two control sites was permitted to talk directly to the astronauts. Skip Chauvin, the electronics genius who served as spacecraft test conductor, had set himself up in the ACE facility. In the blockhouse it was Stuart Roosa, a recent addition to the astronaut corps who was cutting his teeth as a communicator with a flight crew. Sitting close to Roosa were Deke Slayton, Joe Shea, and Rocco Petrone, director of NASA launch operations. As a U.S. Army major, Petrone had worked with the von Braun rocket team at Huntsville. Enamored with rocketry, he had left the military and joined NASA to send astronauts to the moon.
Small problems appeared in the launch pad rehearsal. The astronauts called in, annoyed and obviously disturbed with a sour odor that filled their cabin. It seemed to come from the unit that controlled their cabin environment. Grissom didn’t like it. Moments later, the sour smell was sucked away by interior controls. Then it returned. Angry muttering was heard from inside the Apollo. Again the cabin systems purged the foul odor.
It didn’t take long for Grissom to wish he’d hung a lemon outside the spacecraft as well as the simulator. Despite the long and tedious months of problems, checks, repairs, and more repairs, and the assurances that the ship was now flight-ready, the communications system aboard Apollo started unraveling. The system had angered Grissom for months, and now its problems choked the lines between Apollo and its test control sites.
Static crackled painfully in pressure suit helmets. Something electrical was screwing up badly. The static went from annoying to unacceptable. Often the crew couldn’t understand or even hear any calls from Chauvin or Roosa. But Gus’s voice carried over the lines with no question of his moo
d.
“If I can’t talk with you only five miles away,” he snapped, “how can we talk to you from the moon?”
“Hold,” came the call from Chauvin. Again and again the static, clearing up and then coming back like gravel tumbling down a metal chute, snarled voice calls. The countdown stretched on for hours.
Joe Shea began to pace back and forth in the blockhouse. He had a large team waiting for him in Houston, and he had to leave. He wrote down cryptic notes about whose ass he would kick over the communications lines foul-up and left the blockhouse to catch his flight to Texas.
Slowly, haltingly, stumbling from one glitch to another, the count went down to T-minus 10 minutes.
“Damn it, I can’t even shut off my microphone now!” Gus complained. There was a promise of terrible trouble with that call. Communication over those lines was electric. The electrical system was a mess that kept getting worse.
Immediately Chauvin halted the count, standing by to define the problems and get the system back on line. It was already after six o’clock. The crew had been in the cabin more than five hours. Someone commented that John Glenn had flown three times around the world in less than five hours. Tempers were short.
An engineer contacted Chauvin. “Let’s cancel out today. This could go on forever. We’re better off if we shut down and do the full test again.”
Chauvin shook his head. Time was more important. It was becoming damned critical with all the pressures mounting to get this ship on its way into orbit. Houston was antsy, and there was that unofficial pressure from the White House filtering through the NASA ranks. Fly the bird.
Chauvin reminded his team that communications, no matter how screwed up, were not the primary reason for the test. He felt they were close to the “plugs-out” climax and a verification of the onboard systems and ordered the test to continue. They’d simply bypass the problem with Grissom’s mike. The entire problem might amount to no more than a loose wire.
They scheduled the countdown to pick up again at 6:31 P.M.
No one saw it begin. No one knew then, or ever, just when it came to life. The catastrophe that was to engulf Apollo 1 at T-minus 10 minutes and holding had commenced hours earlier. A technician on the Saturn gantry had reviewed his checklist of procedures and time lines for events to be activated. The hatch had been sealed, the astronauts secured in their couches, the spacecraft powered up. Internal cabin pressure began rising for the tight seal required for the “contamination-free” environment.
Valves opened, pure oxygen flowed into the cabin. The pressure went through changes. Ambient air of 21 percent oxygen, nearly 79 percent nitrogen, and a smattering of other normal atmospheric gases were flushed from the three-man cabin. Sensors confirmed the desired reading of 16.7 pounds per square inch of 100 percent oxygen. And the cabin, its equipment, wiring, plastic, Velcro, suits, instruments, anything and everything was soaked in pure oxygen.
If everything had functioned perfectly, the tragic events that overtook Spacecraft 012 might never have happened. But this was a ship beset by problems and one that couldn’t even communicate properly with a blockhouse sixteen hundred feet distant.
This was the spacecraft that an Apollo quality-control inspector, Thomas Baron, had condemned as “sloppy and unsafe,” the ship that spacecraft manager Joe Shea admitted had been plagued with more than twenty thousand failures in its construction and assembly. This was the same craft John Shinkle, Apollo program manager, castigated as missing at least “half the damn engineering work” that had been listed as completed, and that Rocco Petrone, director of launch operations, railed against as a totally unacceptable “bucket of bolts.” This was the spacecraft that had been awash in a thick soup of 100 percent oxygen for more than five hours.
Pure oxygen under normal conditions is one of the most dangerous and corrosive gases known. In a short time it can corrode and transform iron and other metals into flaky garbage. As a fire’s oxidizer, in its pure form, it fans flames at their most rapid pace. It had been used in the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft without trouble, and NASA engineers had become complacent about the possibility of a fire.
For more than five hours the oxygen in the pressurized cabin of 012 had permeated the surface of everything in the cabin, everything from plastic to paper checklists, to nonmetallic insulation, to aluminum and fabric—everything. Pure oxygen ate into the material and squeezed under outer molecule layers.
Below the couch on which Gus Grissom lay ran bundles of wires. All kinds of wires performing all kinds of tasks. Some carried electrical current to different operating systems of 012. Others were hooked to the suits of the astronauts for medical monitoring and communications. The wires had not been brought together in sealed and protected tubing but had been laced together with plastic and other strapping. The wire was in lousy shape. It had been moved, shaken, pushed, shoved, squeezed, stepped on, and in some cases had lost its outer insulation to constant rubbing and friction. It was a mess.
Somewhere beneath the seat of the commander of Apollo 1 an open wire chafed. Insulation was torn. The wire, charged with electrical power, lay bare.
It sparked.
The spark exploded. In an instant faster than thought, the tiny flicker of electricity became a massive shock wave of flame, which fed on the oxygen-soaked environment of the pressurized capsule interior.
In the blockhouse, Deke Slayton and Rocco Petrone froze where they were, muscles stiffened, voices cut off in mid-sentence, eyes staring in disbelief at the television monitors displaying the interior conditions of Spacecraft 012. There wasn’t time to verbalize thought. Something horrifying, unbelievable, was rampaging in Apollo.
In that same moment, what had been the cabin of Apollo became an incredible whirlwind of fire raging and tearing at everything it could reach. As fast as the shock wave smashed back and forth against the three men caught helplessly inside, Slayton and Petrone knew their world would never again be the same.
The monitors and instruments were messengers from hell. As Deke flicked his eyes from one gauge to another, he saw a huge supply of oxygen flowing into the spacesuits.
The gauges showing electrical currents had gone mad. The flow surged wildly, needles flickering.
The cabin temperature gauges were all jammed hard against the upper limits of their pegs. A radar beacon died; in a split second it simply fell off line.
Throats clinched with the awful shock. Deke, Rocco, and the others with them, could only stare, wordless with disbelief. Deke’s worst nightmares were alive and screaming.
On the medical monitors Ed White’s pulse rate leapt crazily upward. The gauges showed sudden bursts of movement by the three men.
“Fire!”
A single word from Ed White followed immediately by the deep voice of Gus Grissom:
“We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”
Then, before an instant could pass, Roger Chaffee:
“Fire!”
Then a garbled transmission and the final plea:
“Get us out!”
Another transmission, words no one would ever understand, and—
Silence.
In the blockhouse Deke hit his feet. “What the hell?”
Horrified eyes were glued to every monitor. One screen showed a view through the spacecraft window—Deke thought he saw a shadow moving inside. He couldn’t be sure. Instantly he turned to another monitor. Muscles rigid, mouth open, he saw orange flames flickering about the area of the spacecraft hatch, expanding swiftly, becoming a terrifying white glare. Violent blinding flashes followed by thick boiling smoke.
He grasped at hope. Maybe it was a fire in the White Room? No . . . It couldn’t . . .
Then came the icy shock of reality. Those calls of fire, they had come from inside the spacecraft.
Skip Chauvin and Stuart Roosa were trying frantically to talk with the crew. Again and again they called, desperate, their faces chalk-white.
No response.
At the moment Ed W
hite had cried “Fire!” one man had seen more than a moving shadow. In a room near the base of the launch stand, technician Gary Probst, startled by the sudden cry, locked his gaze on a television monitor fed by a camera that zoomed in for a close-up look of the spacecraft porthole. Gary saw a partial view of the Apollo interior from over Ed White’s shoulder. Flames flashed across the porthole. The next moment he saw White’s gloved hands reach above his head toward the mechanism that secured the hatch. Grissom’s arms came into view. The picture flickered with sudden intense motion.
Apollo 1 was a single, huge blowtorch. The polyurethane foam cushioning that spread over the spacecraft floor had absorbed so much oxygen it acted as an oxygen source, gushing upward in a wall of pure fire between the crew and the hatch that was their only escape. In those timeless seconds flames danced wildly and attacked hose lines feeding to helmets that in turn fed to noses and throats and lungs.
No human being could get that hatch open in less than ninety seconds under perfect operating conditions. These weren’t perfect conditions.
Metal pipes and solder joints flowed like warm jelly, casting off even more flame as they dropped to the spacecraft flooring, bubbling and hissing like tiny lava pits, spattering molten drops of blazing metal about the cabin. The heat tore into oxygen sources, melting them open, and additional oxygen under tremendous pressure instantly transformed into screeching blowtorches of pure white fire.
The life-support system was caving in on itself, melting, bursting, collapsing. Cooling fluid spewed through the capsule. In the atmosphere of now-blazing oxygen and soaring temperature the cooling fluid poured forth like water from a hose, only it was flammable and it, too, burst into flames and sprayed its own fiery torrent across the cabin.