by Jay Barbree
And yet, incredibly, the astronauts functioned as the well-drilled team they were. Immersed in flames curling along, about, under their bodies, splashing against their transparent visors, wrapping about their torsos, the astronauts attempted to perform their emergency duties.
Gus Grissom’s most immediate task was to push hard against a lever that instantly would depressurize the cabin. That alone would have sent the heavy oxygen atmosphere, even engulfed in flame, gushing forth from Apollo like the afterburner of a powerful jet engine. Gus tried, but the lever itself was in flames.
Ed White twisted his body painfully, reaching over his left shoulder to pull the release grip of the inner hatch with all the strength he had. An instant later he could not see past the fire roaring about his helmet.
Chaffee performed in perhaps the most incredible manner of all. To maintain communications he had to remain in his couch, to lie there in the fire as it exploded steadily, relentlessly. He made the cry beseeching the gantry crew to get them out of the holocaust and, then, as he began another call, he reached his body across Ed White to help Gus with the hatch as the heat roared into his lungs. In his final moment a scream burst involuntarily from his seared windpipe and larynx. Before he could comprehend any further, the air in his and his crewmates’ lungs was sucked out. The lives of Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White had been snuffed out in eight-and-one-half seconds.
At that moment when the spark flared beneath Grissom’s couch, there were twenty-seven men working at various levels of the gantry. This included the five in the White Room at the entry hatch to 012.
Pad leader Donald Babbitt was stunned to hear the anguished cries from the spacecraft. The words from Grissom, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” galvanized Babbitt to instant action. His voice carried across the working level, “Get them out of there!” James Gleaves, closest to the capsule, spun about to help open the hatch. Babbitt already had rushed from his desk to slam his hand against the emergency call button.
He had just enough time to hit the alarm and not a second more as a blinding sheet of flame burst from Apollo and an explosive shock wave slammed Babbitt to his knees. The five men on Level 8 staggered backward, battered by the concussion, running to escape both heat and roaring fire. They lurched and stumbled, dazed, along the swing arm. Secondary blasts pursued them as they reached the tower elevator. Here they stopped. Babbitt grasped a man wearing a headset and a mike and spun him around. Babbitt shouted: “We’re on fire! I need firemen, ambulances, equipment, now!”
Struggling to breathe and choking on the fumes sweeping across the work level and the swing arm, yet without hesitation, the workmen with Babbitt grabbed every fire extinguisher they could see. If ever men ran willingly straight through the gates of hell, these were the men. Faces seared by the heat, hands singed by flames lashing out from Apollo, knowing explosives could engulf them in one last fiery crescendo, they dashed back to the spacecraft to spray the hatch and try to cool it off so they could open it with hands already shedding scorched skin.
Other men ran frantically to Level 8, wearing gas masks and carrying extinguishers. Another flaw in the system: the masks were designed to protect their wearers against fumes from a fuel spillage. They proved useless against the thick smoke. But they stayed. Against terrible pain, washed by waves of heat, toxic fumes, and choking smoke, they fought down the flames with their extinguishers.
The men fought as long as they could before choking painfully for air to breathe, before falling back to make room for others to get to the hatch. As quickly as those men were overcome, the original crews rushed back in. Without a word of instruction they battled in relays to open the hatch and release the three astronauts inside.
Jim Pierce of North American Aviation immediately called the main office in Downey, California. His anguished descriptions were carried through loudspeakers in the company’s conference room. Pierce’s voice described what sounded like the end of the world.
“The whole thing could blow up any minute! I . . . there’s fire spewing from the spacecraft . . . I can see molten metal falling away!”
Someone in the Downey office cried out, “Oh, Jesus!” His voice was barely heard over people bursting into tears.
On Level 8 the blaze was out. Babbitt’s men, exhausted, some injured, finally managed to open the hatch to the spacecraft. They reeled backward as a blast of heat gushed out in equalizing pressure. Thick toxic smoke billowed forth. Nearly six minutes had passed since the first shouted cry of “Fire!”
As best they could, Babbitt’s crew struggled to reach the astronauts. They might still be alive. There was only that hope. The rescuers tried desperately to see through the swirling ash and smoke. Blinded, they groped with their hands for survivors. Then they stopped. The bodies were unmoving.
In the blockhouse, Rocco Petrone stared, white-faced and trembling, at the televised scenes of the open hatch and the men fighting to reach the astronauts. He hit his microphone so they would hear him in the White Room. “Can you do something for the guys?” he asked.
A voice came back, choking. “No . . . no . . . it’s too late.”
Rocco turned away from the television monitor, shattered. He looked at a man standing by him. “Turn off the television. Please. I don’t want to look at it.”
There had been a sliver—no more—of hope. Moments before Petrone was told, “It’s too late,” a voice on Level 8 was shouting over the radio loop, “Get a doctor out here, quick!”
Deke Slayton heard the call. You don’t need a doctor for dead men. Deke grabbed two doctors standing nearby, Fred Kelly and Alan Harter, and all three ran from the blockhouse.
Deke lived a lifetime in that mad run to the launch pad. He and Gus had been close friends for years. They had hunted, fished, flown together every chance they had. All the way to the pad he was holding out that last fading glimmer of hope that maybe, just possibly, somehow miraculously, the guys could still be alive—and could have been protected by their suits. But he knew the odds were less than slim. They’d been in that fire much too long.
But he kept running, kept hoping, kept that silent screaming inside his head that something had kept them alive.
Suddenly he could think of only one thing, of what had happened years before when he and Gus had been in a water rescue exercise, when he had fallen off his raft and almost drowned because he had never really learned how to swim. It was Gus who swam to him. It was Gus who saved him.
Hang in there, buddy! he shouted in his head as his leg muscles drove him faster and faster to the pad. Hang in there, Gus! Hang in there.
Alan Shepard was in Dallas, about to make a dinner speech, when someone hurried to his side at the head table. In a hoarse whisper he told Alan that Gus, Ed, and Roger were dead, killed by a fire at the launch pad. The news hit Alan with the force of a sledgehammer.
Numbed with shock, he moved in a fog to the podium. He fought to speak, his voice a rasping, almost silent choking sound. “I . . . I have just been informed of the loss . . . the loss of my comrades . . . ”
A long silence followed. Alan Shepard remembers little of what he said that night.
Deke and the doctors reached the pad, rode the elevator to Level 8, rushed along the swing arm to the White Room. The hatch had been open only moments.
What Alan Shepard could only imagine, Deke saw for himself. Saw the doctors lean into Apollo 1’s open hatch, saw them pull out slowly. One turned to Deke, shaking his head. “They’re gone.”
Lola Morrow, secretary in the Astronaut Office at the Kennedy Space Center, was in tears, wracked with sobs, when Deke walked in minutes later.
“Every telephone in the office was ringing,” Lola recalled. “The whole world was calling. Deke came in and he was shaking like a leaf. He had a cigar, but he couldn’t light it. I tried to light it for him. He couldn’t hold it he shook so badly. So did I . . . I never managed to light it.”
Wearily, still in shock and pain, Deke phoned the Astronaut Of
fice in Houston. Soon he was speaking with Wally Schirra, who had flown there from the Cape after the “plugs-out” test had begun. Wally had the news already, and he’d set in motion what he knew Deke was calling for him to do.
Wally had already assigned other astronauts to notify each family. They were to offer whatever they needed. They reached Betty Grissom first and then Pat White.
When they reached Martha Chaffee, she was on the telephone, calling the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach to see if Roger was in his room.
NASA fought off the newsmen, many of whom were also close friends of the astronauts who had died. It was impossible to hide the story. The Canaveral press corps had too many sources directly on pad 34. That kind of news travels fast. NASA stayed tight-lipped until all the families were told. Then it released officially what the permanent press at the Cape already knew.
As midnight approached, after Deke Slayton and Chuck Friedlander had answered a thousand phone calls, had done all they could, the two men sat staring at the walls. Friedlander was the chief of the Astronaut Office at the Cape, and he moved to a locked cabinet. Alcohol wasn’t permitted on the government installation, but Friedlander returned with a full fifth of scotch, and he and Deke sipped the whisky until sunrise. For Deke it was the beginning of the time needed to cover the wounds, and he was back remembering his first look inside Apollo 1—how devastating it was. How everything inside was burned, black with ash—a death chamber. The crew had obviously been trying to get out. The three bodies were piled in front of the seal in the hatch. Ed White was on the bottom, and Gus and Roger were crumpled on top of him. The suits had protected them from the flames. None of them had any physical burns of any consequence. It was all that goddamn shit in the environmental control systems that got them, asphyxiated them. Deke remembered how he had to turn his head away.
It was over.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Aftermath
ON THE EVENING OF JANUARY 27, 1967, an unusually large contingent of NASA officials and supervisors crowded with other government representatives into the International Club in Washington, DC, to hear an address by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Earlier in the day, Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to the United States, had signed the Russian half of a new treaty with the U.S., an agreement that stipulated that henceforth space would be used only for peaceful purposes. Applause from both sides greeted the signing. Toasts were offered, and Lyndon Johnson seized the opportunity to wax enthusiastic about America’s marvelous progress in its efforts to land men on the moon before the end of the decade.
Dobrynin smiled, fully aware of the new Russian program that would leapfrog the Americans in the race to the moon. As he listened to Johnson, he knew that several Russian spacecraft were already in their long pre-launch countdown and would slice several years from Russia’s own manned lunar effort.
The group left the White House to reassemble for dinner at the International Club. Among the officials present were Dr. Wernher von Braun, who by now had been transferred from the Army missile team to NASA, Bob Gilruth, Jim Webb, and a large contingent of top aerospace industry officials. Despite the agreements signed that day, many of the Americans found it difficult to refrain from tweaking Russian sensitivities. Gemini had soared so high and far into the future that some Americans snidely commented that while the United States would be reaching out through the solar system, the Russians would be performing repetitive orbital yo-yos over the earth.
No comments could ruffle Dobrynin, who before leaving his homeland had been updated on the scheduled flights of the new Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2 spacecraft, both technically superior to the older Vostok and Voshkod machines, and as capable as Gemini in its ability to rendezvous, raise and lower orbits, and change orbital planes. Furthermore their design would allow for more sophisticated space-walking activities. With a few changes Soyuz would be capable of zipping once around the backside of the moon and returning to earth with a single cosmonaut on board.
If the schedule held, in only three months the Russians would launch the two Soyuz machines into earth orbit. They would be directed by advanced systems, radar, and robotic controls, and travel to a rendezvous point while in each ship a cosmonaut would monitor his spacecraft’s progress. Then, several hundred feet from each other, the pilots would take over manually and maneuver vessels to a docking. The two cosmonauts would then engage in a space-walking adventure. Each cosmonaut would leave his Soyuz and “hand walk” to the other’s ship and occupy that craft. They would then separate, perform additional maneuvers, and then return to earth.
If all went as planned, Soyuz 1 would depart the world precisely at 3:35 A.M. Moscow time on April 23, and Soyuz 2 would follow exactly one day later. It would be a tremendous accomplishment for the motherland, Dobrynin mused, and might even quiet the prattling, boastful Americans.
Dobrynin turned to look at Vice President Humphrey, surrounded by the congressional space delegation. Most of them had never seen a rocket leave the earth.
Dobrynin’s eyes suddenly narrowed as he saw the president of North American Aviation, Lee Atwood, in an excited conversation with another man. The ambassador watched with growing interest, first as Atwood left the main room of the club, then as he returned visibly upset.
As he passed Bob Gilruth, Atwood whirled suddenly to grab Gilruth’s hand. A brief conversation ensued; Gilruth left the room swiftly. Dobrynin kept his eyes on Atwood, who was now leaning close to Jim Webb, his agitation greater than ever. Whatever he had to say to Webb turned the top NASA man visibly pale.
Dobrynin sensed something very important was happening, and the faces he saw told him that whatever had happened must be very bad indeed. Wernher von Braun left the room on the run. Other executives dashed to telephones. The buzz of excited, almost frantic conversation grew louder.
Dobrynin could hardly believe his eyes. Some of the men were crying!
In the midst of what was obviously a grim tragedy, club waiters started to serve dinner. Hardly anyone paid attention. The ambassador watched a man rush to the side of Webb; the NASA administrator strode rapidly away. He had already received something of terrible import from Lee Atwood. What could this new message be?
Webb took a telephone call from Julian Scheer, his deputy director for public affairs. “Jim, there’s been an accident at the Cape. A fire—”
“I know,” Webb broke in. “What’s happened since?”
Scheer hit him between the eyes. There was no other way. “Sir, the Apollo 1 crew is dead.”
Dazed, shocked, Webb forced himself to return to the reception room. He spoke privately, haltingly, with Vice President Humphrey. Then he motioned for attention. The room fell utterly silent. They listened, shattered, as Webb told them that the three astronauts had just died in a fire at the launch pad. He turned and left the International Club, rushing to his office at NASA headquarters, only several blocks away.
Webb knew all his skills would be required to manage this crisis—skills honed as a Marine pilot, as Harry Truman’s budget director, and later undersecretary of state, and as director of such enterprises as McDonnell Aircraft, the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, and Sperry Gyroscope.
His key staff was soon at his side. Immediately they turned the tragedy over to Major General Samuel C. Phillips, a master manager, who had ramrodded the Air Force’s Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile program into fruition before being recruited by NASA to run the entire Apollo program.
Phillips called the Cape. “Impound all records, all tapes, every last piece of equipment associated with that fire, and I mean everything. Put the clamps down everywhere. I’m on my way.”
In Houston, events were brutally personal, individual, starkly emotional. Deke, Alan, and other astronauts visited the women who had instantly become widows. They were gathered at the home of Patricia White.
“I was still badly shaken. Rattled and battered is a good way to say how I felt,” said Deke Slayton. “Betty, Pat, and Marth
a were holding up better than I was. They broke the tension by making me a surprise presentation.”
It was incredible. These three women had lost their husbands to that raging fire in the ship they had hoped to fly through space. Now they were concerned with Deke.
There was a long-standing tradition that each person selected as an astronaut was to receive a silver astronaut pin, its design a shooting star soaring upward, trailing a long, comet-like tail. After any newcomer reached vacuum above earth and became an astronaut in deed as well as name, he received a second, gold pin. The three pilots of Apollo 1 had decided on their own that because of Deke’s heart problem the odds were he’d never fly in space. Yet without Deke they might never have had a chance to boost off their launch pads.
So Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had arranged to fly a gold astronaut pin aboard Apollo 1 and, after the flight, present it to Deke to wear. Gus also knew Deke would never wear a pin that exactly matched the pins worn by men who’d sailed around the earth, so the three astronauts inserted a small diamond in place of a star.
“Since what those guys planned could never happen now,” Deke recalled, “the wives, for whatever reason, chose this, the saddest and grimmest occasion in their lives, to present that pin to me. I was absolutely overwhelmed. Flattened. It was a gesture I’ll never forget.”
In the days following the Apollo 1 fire, the fallen astronauts were being remembered in almost every home in the nation. The home of Frank Sinatra was no exception.
“Ten days before Gus, Ed, and Roger died,” Alan Shepard recalled, “they were flying to the Downey plant in California in search of an updated Apollo simulator. They ran into minor problems with one of their T-38 jets and had to land at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. While the jet problem was being fixed, they decided to take a Vegas break from their day-and-night training schedule.