“This tether is doing something I never thought it would do,” reported Conrad. “It’s like the Agena and I have a skip rope between us and it’s rotating and making a big loop. It’s like we are skipping rope with this thing. Man, have we got a weird phenomenon going on here. This will take somebody a little time to figure out.”
Conrad tried every trick he could think of to straighten the line. Although the line was curved, it seemed to still have tension. “I can’t get it straight,” he complained, but the ground engineers said to leave it alone. “So we really gritted our teeth and waited,” Conrad said, and sure enough centrifugal force took over and the line smoothed out. They managed to use their thrusters to start the combination spinning once every nine minutes as they orbited the Earth. The cable remained taut and the two spacecraft happily spun their way around the Earth, while the astronauts then tired of watching the Agena and turned to eating their evening dinner.
Their rest was interrupted by the Hawaii Capcom suggesting they accelerate the spin rate. Although they had some initial problems with the line, “Oh, look at that slack! It’s going to jerk this thing all to heck,” called Gordon. It did stabilise again, and they were able to test their strange combination for artificial gravity. They put a camera against the instrument panel, and sure enough, when they let it go it drifted gently to the back of the cabin. The crew did not feel any physiological effects to themselves, though.
Apart from problems with Gordon’s spacewalk, the mission was a great success, and Gemini XI returned to earth under automatic control to be picked up by the USS Guam. The Agena came down on 30 December 1966.
Conrad enjoyed this mission. “We got to fly the whole thing, which was the closest to the world I had left, that is flying airplanes. Like the M equals one rendezvous without help from the ground; we hand flew most of the burns – they weren’t controlled by the computer; that sort of thing. It was a great flight.”
The Soviet’s new G-1 booster was vertically staged, using lox, kerosene and clusters of RD-7 (Semyorka) engines. They were hoping it would enable them to make a circumlunar flight in 1967.
Gemini XII: Aldrin space walks on his first flight
Lovell commented, “This mission was supposed to wind up the Gemini Program and catch all those items that were not caught in previous flights.” Such as sorting out the Cernan and Gordon spacewalk problems. The Air Force wanted to try the Astronaut Manoeuvring Unit (AMU) from the Gemini IX mission again, but it was decided to limit Aldrin’s space walk to conducting set tasks. Although Lovell was now a seasoned space traveller with the 14-day mission behind him, it was Buzz Aldrin’s first flight. Lindsay:
Unfortunately they weren’t able to boost themselves up to the planned 740 kilometres high orbit due to a suspected faulty fuel pump in the Agena engine, so they were reassigned to witness a rare eclipse of the sun, west of the Galapagos islands, ending near Brazil. The two astronauts enjoyed a box seat view of the 8 second eclipse, 274 kilometres above the 800 scientists gathered below to watch the event in South America. Aldrin took excellent photographs of the eclipse, unaffected by the Earth’s atmosphere.
“We hit the eclipse right on the money, but we were unsuccessful in picking up the shadow,” Lovell announced to Houston.
Using the experience and advice of Cernan in Gemini IX, Aldrin worked tirelessly training himself in a tank of water before the mission to work at all the experimental tasks until he felt he was perfect. During his long space walk Aldrin moved to a panel where he plugged in electrical cables, turned bolts, snapped hooks through rings, peeled off velcro strips, while experimenting with foot holds and his tether cable. He was able to complete all the tasks and suffered none of the fogging, perspiring, and tiredness of some of the earlier missions, although he did complain of cold feet.
Aldrin described:
In the first EVA I mounted a telescoping hand rail that went from one end of the spacecraft to the other; then I did some night photography, pretty much just standing up and shooting for ultraviolet light. In the longest EVA I had activities with the docked Agena. I used the handrail to try to move up hand over hand to the Agena at the nose and there I tested a number of different fasteners and tethers and handholds, and attached a tether to the docking adapter. Then I went to the back of the spacecraft and did extensive evaluations of the foot restraints using one and two restraints that were excellent in their tight and positive control.
I used a lot of different connectors and fastenings and tried a lot of work tasks primarily to evaluate how well those foot restraints went. The last EVA was just doing a dump of things overboard.
I didn’t have trouble such as fogging up with my suit – it was a question of managing energy – I just didn’t fight the problem. I got good restraints and managed to get good control of inertia and balance so I was exerting myself less – I just didn’t fight the problem.
Gemini XII splashed down and was picked up by the aircraft carrier USS Wasp. As soon as it had left the launch pad demolition crews began to dismantle the launch complex for scrap. All the Gemini astronauts became Apollo astronauts.
Project Gemini had achieved its objectives: long duration flights, rendezvous and docking and some new ones. These included the ability to live and work inside and outside a spacecraft for the time period it took to get to the moon and back. The pool of expertise both on the ground and among the astronauts had grown rapidly.
The Apollo 1 disaster
Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee were the astronauts who were designated to fly the Apollo I mission and on 27 January 1967 were rehearsing the countdown sequence in their spacecraft. Jim Lovell was at a celebration at the White House but was thinking about his fellow astronauts, especially those three. Lovell:
Today NASA had scheduled a full-scale dress rehearsal of the countdown for the first mission of the Apollo spacecraft, set to begin three weeks from now. If things had gone as planned, at this moment, the three-man crew would be zipped into their pressure suits, strapped to their seats, and locked behind their command module’s hatch, sealed in a 16pound-per-square-inch atmosphere of pure oxygen.
Lovell himself had gone through such tests numerous times in preparation for his Gemini flights and the missions on which he had served as part of the back-up crew. Lovell:
There was nothing inherently dangerous about a countdown test, yet if you asked anyone at the Agency, they’d tell you they couldn’t wait until this one was over.
The commander, Gus Grissom, had flown in space in both the Mercury and Gemini programs and had run through these counterfeit countdowns dozens of times. The pilot, Ed White, had flown in Gemini too, and had also had more than his share of pad training. Even the junior pilot, Roger Chaffee, who had never been in space, was rigorously tutored in the art of flight rehearsal. No, the worry in this exercise was the ship. The Apollo spacecraft, by even the most charitable estimations, was turning out to be an Edsel. Actually, among the astronauts it was thought of as worse than an Edsel. An Edsel is a clunker, but an essentially harmless clunker. Apollo was downright dangerous. Earlier in the development and testing of the craft, the nozzle of the ship’s giant engine – the one that would have to function perfectly to place the moonship in lunar orbit and blast it on its way home again – shattered like a teacup when engineers tried to fire it. During a splashdown test, the heat shield of the craft had split open, causing the command module to sink like a $35 million anvil to the bottom of a factory test pool. The environmental control system had already logged 200 individual failures; the spacecraft as a whole had accumulated roughly 20,000. During one checkout run at the manufacturing plant, a disgusted Gus Grissom walked away from the command module after leaving a lemon perched atop it.
Yesterday afternoon so the whispers went, all of this finally reached a head. For much of the day, Wally Schirra – a veteran of Mercury and Gemini, and commander of the backup crew that would replace Grissom, White, and Chaffee if anything happened to them – ran through
an identical countdown test with his crew, Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele. When the trio climbed out of the ship, sweaty and fatigued after six long hours, Schirra made it clear that he was not pleased with what he had seen.
“I don’t know, Gus,” Schirra said when he met later with Grissom and Apollo program manager Joe Shea in the crew’s quarters at the Cape, “there’s nothing wrong with this ship that I can point to, but it just makes me uncomfortable. Something about it doesn’t ring right.”
Saying that a craft of any kind didn’t “ring” was one of the most worrisome reports one test pilot could offer another. The term conjured up the image of a subtly cracked bell that looks more or less OK on the surface but emits a flat clack instead of a resonant gong when struck by its clapper. Better that the craft should go to pieces when you try to fly it – that its engine nozzle should drop off, say, or its thrusters break away; at least you’d know what to fix. But a ship that doesn’t ring right could get you in a thousand insidious ways. “If you have any problem,” Schirra told his colleague, “I’d get out.”
Grissom was almost certainly disturbed by the report, but he reacted to Schirra’s warning with surprising nonchalance. “I’ll keep an eye on it,” he said. The problem, as many people knew, was that Gus had “go fever”: he was itching to fly this spacecraft. Sure there were glitches in the ship, but that’s what test pilots were for, to find the glitches and work them out. And even if there was a problem, just getting out, as Schirra had suggested wouldn’t be so easy. The Apollo’s hatch was a three-layer sandwich assembly designed less to permit easy escape than to maintain the integrity of the craft. The inner cover was equipped with a sealed drive, a rack-drive bar, and six latches that clamped onto the module’s wall. The next cover was even more complicated, equipped with bell cranks, rollers, push-pull rods, an over-enter lock, and twenty-two latches. Before lift off, the entire craft was also surrounded by a form-fitting “boost protective cover,” a layer of armor that would shield it from the aerodynamic stresses of powered ascent. The cover was meant to pop off well before the spacecraft reached orbit, but until then, it provided one more layer between the crew inside and a rescue team outside. Under the best conditions, astronauts and rescue crews working together could remove all three hatches in about ninety seconds. Under adverse conditions, it could take much longer.
On Florida’s Atlantic coast, a thousand miles south, the countdown at Cape Kennedy was not going well. From the time the crew members were strapped into their seats, at about one in the afternoon, the Apollo spacecraft had begun fulfill its critics’ worst expectations. When Grissom first plugged his suit hose into the command module’s oxygen supply, he reported a “sour smell” flowing into his helmet. The odor soon dissipated and the environmental control team promised they’d look into it. Shortly afterward, and throughout the day, the astronauts found nettlesome problems with the air-to-ground communications system as well. Chaffee’s transmissions were more or less clear, White’s were spotty at best, and Grissom’s hissed and crackled like a cheap walkie-talkie in an electrical storm.
“How do you expect us to talk to you from the moon,” the commander snapped through the static, “when we can’t even communicate from the pad to the blockhouse?” The technicians promised they’d look into this too.
At 6:20 Florida time, the countdown reached T minus 10 minutes, and the dock was stopped temporarily while the engineers fiddled with the communications problem and a few other glitches. As in any real launch, this ersatz one was being monitored at both the Cape and the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. The protocol called for the Florida team to run the show from countdown through liftoff through the moment the booster’s engine bells cleared the tower; then they would hand the baton to Houston.
Helping to run the show in Florida were Chuck Gay, the chief spacecraft test conductor, and Deke Slayton, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. Before ever getting a chance to fly in space, Slayton had been grounded because of an irregular hearbeat, but he had managed to make lemonade out of that particular lemon, getting himself appointed director of Flight Crew Operations – in essence, chief astronaut – while quietly and insistently lobbying for a return to flight status. So much an astronaut at heart was Slayton that earlier today, when the communications from the ship first started to go to hell, he had offered to climb into the spacecraft, fold himself into the lower equipment bay at the astronauts’ feet, and remain there for the countdown to see if he couldn’t dope out the static problem himself. The test directors vetoed the idea, however, and Slayton instead found himself seated at a console next to Stu Roosa, the capsule communicator, or Capcom. In Houston, the overseer today – as on most days – was Chris Kraft, deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center and the man who had served as flight director on all six Mercury flights and all ten Geminis.
Kraft, Slayton, Roosa, and Gay were eager to get this exercise over with. For more than half a day, the crew had been flat on their backs under the weight of their own bodies and their bulky pressure suits, in couches not designed for the oppressive load of a one-g environment but the friendly float of weightless space. In a few more minutes, they could get the countdown rolling again, complete their simulated blastoff, and then get those men out of there.
But this was not to be. The first sign that something was amiss came moments before the clock was set to start running again, at 6:31 p.m., when technicians watching the video monitor of the comand module noticed a sudden movement through the hatch window, a shadow moving rapidly across the screen. Controllers accustomed to the deliberate movements of well-drilled crewmen plodding through a familiar countdown snapped their heads to the screen. Anyone who didn’t have a monitor directly in front of him or who was out on the scaffold-like gantry surrounding the Apollo ship and its 224-foot booster would have noticed nothing. A moment later, a voice crackled down from the tip of the rocket.
“Fire in the spacecraft!” It was Roger Chaffee, the rookie, calling out.
On the gantry, James Gleaves, a mechanical technician monitoring communications through his headset, turned with a start and began running toward the White Room, which led from the uppermost level of the gantry to the spacecraft. In the blockhouse, Gary Propst, a communications control technician, looked instantly to his top-left monitor, the one connected to a camera in the White Room, and thought – thought – he could make out a bright glow of some kind through the hatch’s porthole. At the Cape’s Capcom console, Deke Slayton and Stu Roosa, who had been reviewing flight plans, looked at their monitor and believed they saw something that looked like a flame playing about the seam of the hatch.
At a nearby console, assistant test supervisor William Schick, who was responsible for keeping a log of every significant event in the course of the countdown, looked immediately at his flight clock and then dutifully recorded: “1831: Fire in the cockpit.”
On the communications line, those same words echoed down from the spacecraft “Fire in the cockpit!” shouted Ed White through his balky radio. The flight surgeon glanced at his console and saw that White’s heartbeat had spiked dramatically. Environmental control officers looked at their readouts and noticed that spacecraft motion detectors were picking up furious movement inside the craft. On the gantry, Gleaves heard a sudden whoosh coming from the command module, as if Grissom were opening the O2 vent to dump the spacecraft’s atmosphere – precisely what you’d want to do if you were trying to choke off a fire. Nearby, systems technician Bruce Davis saw flames shoot from the side of the ship near the umbilical cord that connected the ship to the ground systems. An instant later fire began dancing along the umbilical itself. At his blockhouse monitor, Propst could see flames behind the porthole; through them, he could also see a pair of arms – from the position, they had to be White’s – reaching toward the console to fumble with something.
“We’re on fire! Get us out of here!” Chaffee shouted, his voice clear on the ship’s one perfect channel. From the left of Propst
’s screen, a second pair of arms – they had to be Grissom’s – appeared in the porthole. Donald Babbitt, the pad leader – whose desk was just twelve feet away from the spacecraft, on the top level of the gantry-level – shouted to Gleaves, “Get them out of there!” As Gleaves dashed toward the hatch, Babbitt turned to grab his pad-to-blockhouse communications box. Just then, a huge burst of smoke erupted from the side of the craft. Beneath it, a duct that was supposed to vent steam now sent out tongues of flame.
From the blockhouse Gay, the test director, called up to the astronauts in disciplined tones: “Crew egress.” There was no answer. “Crew, can you egress at this time?” “Blow the hatch!” Propst screamed to no one in particular. “Why don’t they blow the hatch?”
Through the smoke on the gantry, someone shouted, “She’s going to blow!”
“Clear the level,” someone else ordered.
Davis turned and ran toward the southwest door of the gantry. Creed Journey, another technician, threw himself to the ground. Gleaves backed warily away from the ship. Babbitt stayed at his desk, intent on raising the blockhouse on his comm box. On the ground, the environmental control console recorded the cabin pressure at 29 pounds per square inch, twice sea level, and the temperature off the scale. At that moment, with a crack and a roar and a burst of hideous heat, the Apollo 1 spacecraft – America’s flagship moonship surrendered to the inferno inside it, splitting at the seam like an old treadless tire. Fourteen seconds had elapsed since Chaffee’s first cry of distress.
A dozen feet away from the Apollo command module, Donald Babbitt felt the full force of the explosion. The pressure wave knocked him back on his heels and the blast of heat felt as if someone had flung open the door of a giant furnace. Sticky, molten globules shot from the ship, splattered his white lab coat and burned through to his shirt beneath. The papers on his desk charred and curled. Nearby, Gleaves felt himself slammed backward against an orange emergency escape door – an escape door that he now discovered had been installed to open in, not out. Davis, turning away from the ship, felt a scorching breeze at his back.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 20