Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  On 27 January 1967, a full ground test was scheduled to run through the countdown procedures. The spacecraft was in position on top of the Saturn rocket on Pad 34. The three astronauts were suited up inside. The double-hulled hatch was securely closed as if for space flight. The cabin was filled with oxygen.

  They were over five hours into the countdown, having encountered the usual quota of annoying faults, when the communications system began to fail. Grissom couldn’t hear flight control. How could he hear them from the moon, he demanded, if he couldn’t hear them from a few miles away? Next, his microphone wasn’t working properly. It was past six o’clock. Some of the engineers wanted to pack up for the night. They were overruled. The countdown had to be completed, all systems tested and the capsule passed as fit. Suddenly the decision of whether to continue or not was taken out of everyone’s hands.

  ‘Fire!’ It was the unmistakable voice of Ed White.

  A split second later, they heard Gus Grissom.

  ‘We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.’

  On the blockhouse monitors, Deke Slayton saw an intense brilliance from inside the craft. Frantic figures were dimly outlined against a whirling fury of flames. Grissom was trying to open the hatch. Chaffee, still strapped in his seat, refused to leave the communications.

  ‘Get us out,’ he cried. ‘We’ve got a bad fire. We’re burning up!’ The flames were white. They filled the cabin.

  The men working on the gantry could not at first comprehend what was happening. There was no fuel in the rocket, yet they could hear men screaming for help and the roar of flames. Someone pushed the emergency button. Then it became clear. The fire was inside the Apollo capsule.

  Technicians ran forward to open the hatch but were thrown several feet as an explosion blew a hole in the side of the craft, shooting out flames. Flung back by the blast, they were forced to retreat as further blasts ripped from the capsule. More men appeared with fire extinguishers intent on killing the blaze. Rushing into the white-hot flame and thick black smoke, they attacked the fire, ignoring the choking fumes, determined to save the three men. But it took too long to put it out. The hatch was too hot to touch. Toxic flames disabled the rescuers.

  Six minutes elapsed before they could open the hatch. While the capsule was still trembling with heat, the blackened interior dark with smoke and acrid fumes, they brought out the three bodies. As he rushed to the launch pad, Deke Stayton hung on to hope. An incomprehensible miracle was required but when he saw the three space suits melted and covered in fused electrical wires and the grim interior from which the men had struggled to escape, the haunting horror of it all was the only reality. The temperature inside the capsule had reached 2500 degrees F. Grissom, Chaffee and White had died of asphyxiation within a minute.

  Over the following weeks, a team of nearly two thousand took the charred Apollo apart. Nothing was too small to warrant anything less than an exacting study. The many miles of wires weaving like intestines in the belly of the craft were especially suspect. The craft had been full of flammable substances, all steeped in oxygen. After the blaze, it was impossible to point the accusing finger with any real assurance at any one culpable system or piece of equipment.

  The known facts were damning enough. The astronauts had been locked into the craft. Ninety seconds at least were required to unlock the hatch. For over five hours, pure oxygen had seeped into every absorbent surface. The atmosphere was pure oxygen under pressure. While the capsule was undergoing tests, bunches of electrical wires had been lying around, trodden on and tripped over. The wires under Grissom’s seat were frayed. One small spark was all it took to transform the oxygen ‘air’ into an inferno. The three men had not the remotest chance of escaping. The explosion had ripped the capsule open seventeen seconds after the fire began, and the fearsome speed with which the flames took hold doomed anything they touched.

  The loss was felt throughout the space industry. At a dinner in May to commemorate the sixth anniversary of Al Shepard’s flight, the mood was sombre. Von Braun spoke movingly of Grissom, White and Chaffee. Al Shepard spoke too. He was now reconciled to von Braun’s policy of ‘safe but sure’. Looking pointedly at von Braun, he declared his support for the decision to delay his flight into space. ‘A different decision could have given us the first flight – but could so easily have ended in failure,’ he conceded. ‘Our total space effort today is second to none. I want every chance for this country to be first in everything it does. And yet, if we should lose the race to the moon, say for example by a month, we cannot be more than temporarily dismayed … We will be remembered in fact for how we did it, and not when we did it.’

  The report on the Apollo tragedy comprised more than three thousand pages and was damning of NASA and North American Aviation. It was found that the next Apollo craft, still under construction, contained as many as 1400 faults. A duplicate of the Apollo craft was built, then deliberately fired in order to study it. Many recommendations were made and half a billion dollars spent on improving the design. The American space programme was temporarily halted. Months elapsed, which could only favour the Soviets.

  In the Soviet Union, Chief Designer Vasily Mishin was aware that the Apollo 1 disaster left a most fortuitous gap in the American space programme. The Soviets had not produced a manned flight for two years but now had a chance to catch up. Mishin was hungry for further triumphs which he was sure the Soyuz capsule would provide. Rumours of the new mission spread, reaching the international press agency UPI, which promised ‘the most spectacular space venture in history … involving in-flight transfer of crews between two ships’. To gain experience of orientating the craft and docking in space, the first manned test of the Soyuz was to be an elaborate double flight. On day one, a single cosmonaut would be launched in Soyuz 1. The next day, when the original craft flew over Baikonur, Soyuz 2, carrying three cosmonauts, would be launched. Once the ships had docked, two cosmonauts from the second ship would transfer to Soyuz 1 and return to earth.

  Despite the optimism, the first Soyuz to be ground tested in May 1966 had produced more than two thousand defects – even the parachute system seemed to be less effective than the one used in Vostoks, failing to open with alarming regularity. There had been three unmanned tests of the Soyuz, all of which had given cause for concern. Launches had already been delayed several times but political pressure from above was increasingly insistent on a stunning space flight to coincide with the May Day celebrations. Mishin wanted a little more time for testing. The new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, conscious of the many successful Gemini missions, was impatient.

  Cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin were both strong contenders to lead the mission. Komarov had earned his spurs on the three-man Voskhod mission, whereas, since his first flight in 1961, Gagarin had taken on more of a public relations role. For some time he had expressed his desire to lead another space flight but was constantly thwarted by Kamanin who decided he was too valuable to put at risk. He had, however, for the first Soyuz flight been appointed as Komarov’s backup. The day for the launch was set for 23 April 1967 but, as the date approached, engineers continued to identify faults in the craft – more than two hundred. A report was duly drafted but the authorities would not listen and no one had the confidence to raise it directly with Brezhnev.

  Kamanin made it clear to Vladimir Komarov that his safety was paramount and that the docking procedure would be delayed if problems arose. Such talk of possible ‘problems’ while in space confirmed a deep unease Komarov had about the flight and about Soyuz in particular. If he followed his sixth sense with its warning signals of danger and refused to go, he was worried they would send the backup pilot: ‘That’s Yura – and he’ll die instead of me,’ he confided to a friend. He felt he had to protect Gagarin. There was no alternative but to do his duty and take his allotted place in the lead Soyuz 1. He dedicated his flight to the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and ensured that he was the one strapped into the cosmonau
t’s couch when it took off at 3.35 a.m.

  The launch went without a hitch but problems arose quickly once the craft was in orbit. ‘I feel well,’ Komarov reported. ‘The parameters of the cabin are normal. The left solar battery has not opened … Short wave communications are not working.’

  The Soyuz drew much of its power from the sun. Once in orbit, two solar panels were supposed to extend on either side of the craft to gather enough power from the sun to run the ship. One had failed to open, causing an imbalance which meant that the remaining solar panel could not be orientated to take advantage of the sun’s heat. With only battery power to keep the craft going, Komarov was not in immediate danger, but power was far below what was needed to run it for long-duration flight. With one solar panel out of action and the other incorrectly orientated, there was barely power for more than a twenty-four-hour flight.

  At Baikonur, the senior officials from the state commission supervising the launch decided that Komarov might just manage to free the jammed panel if he changed the attitude of the Soyuz, enabling him to obtain full power from the sun. The operation did not work. Engineers now felt sure that Komarov’s attempts at re-orientation to the sun would fail and that he would merely waste precious fuel in the attempt. This could put a successful retrofire for the return trip in doubt.

  By his fifth orbit, the situation was looking grim. Whatever Komarov did, he could not orient the ship. He shut down the automatic control system and operated the ship manually. Control was sporadic. Soon he would be out of contact with the ground for a whole nine hours as he passed over America and the Atlantic Ocean. He was advised by ground control to get some sleep while they tried to resolve the situation. At the end of the thirteenth orbit, Komarov’s voice was heard faintly at Baikonur. He was in serious trouble. He was advised to re-enter on the seventeenth orbit, using the automatic orientation system for stabilizing the Soyuz. But this system failed. At that point, ground control postponed re-entry to the eighteenth orbit. For this second attempt, he would have to attempt the impossible and re-orient the tumbling craft manually, controlling the ship in the darkness of the earth’s shadow. The state commission recognized that Komarov’s chances were limited. The most likely outcome would be a horrific burn-up as the craft experienced an incorrect re-entry or the more protracted disaster of being fired into a higher orbit from which there was no return. As he tumbled out of control there seemed little hope.

  Rumour has long been rife that on the ground they decided the time had come for Komarov to have a last conversation with his wife. A large black car whisked Valentina Komarova to a radio point. She understood the situation: that they had little time together, that these could be their last words and that the tumult of emotions she was feeling must be suppressed. Twice he had been ill as his craft turned and tumbled. He forced his voice to sound calm and controlled. They said their most private goodbyes with the world listening as he tried to control his mad machine. And then she moved away. Alexei Kosygin, second in command to Brezhnev as Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, is alleged to have spoken to him next, informing him that he was a Soviet hero. Then suddenly it was time to act like one.

  Re-entry was about to begin. Unbelievably, the retro rockets worked and slowed down the craft, but Komarov had no control over the machine. On the ground, radio outposts in Turkey could hear his cries of despair: ‘This devil ship,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing I lay my hands on works properly.’

  He struggled manually to make the craft obey him. With superb skill using the cabin gyroscopes, he succeeded in orienting the ship correctly on to the narrow re-entry channel. He was through. Gravity was winning the battle to pull the spacecraft back to earth. Soon the parachutes would open to slow him down and stop the dead weight of the craft falling like a meteor, spinning like a top. He heard the sound of the parachute mechanism – but he was still tearing through the sky. The parachute had not opened.

  There was still a small hope. The reserve chute was yet to open. It failed, never filling with air, streaming behind, an orange banner mocking the enterprise as he made his headlong fall. Retro rockets should have fired before touchdown to cushion the landing. Ironically, they did work after the cosmonaut, aware now of his fate and with no reproach in his voice, slammed into the solid earth at 400 mph. That was when the retro rockets exploded, creating a funeral pyre in the deserted landscape.

  Local farmers were soon on the scene. They covered the blazing remains of the capsule with soil in an attempt to put the fire out. By the time the search party arrived there was very little left but ashes. Later fragments from the exploded ship were buried with Komarov’s hat in a mound at the crash site. A gun salute remembered the hero.

  For Mishin and Gagarin, agonizing over the twenty-four-hour horror flight with its grizzly conclusion, the only solution was to lose themselves in drink. But afterwards, according to Kamanin, Gagarin and other leading cosmonauts wanted to see Mishin himself named in the Soyuz crash report. They argued that Mishin was not conversant with the complexity of the Soyuz. Several of the cosmonauts felt that Mishin should have brought the craft down earlier, as soon as it was evident that Komarov was in trouble – rather than try to continue the mission – and felt that he had a ‘weak knowledge’ of the Soyuz. Kamanin was in no doubt. He thought Mishin sadly lacking in the leadership qualities that Korolev had had in such abundance. Where Korolev had inspired, Mishin usually just created friction. The unspoken understanding was that Korolev would not have let this happen.

  ‘The road to the stars is steep and dangerous,’ Gagarin later said to the press. ‘But we are not afraid … Space flights cannot be stopped.’ Neither America nor the Soviet Union had a spacecraft that worked. The tantalizing trip to the moon, so constant in its reappearance every month, was still the stuff of dreams.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘How can we get out of this mess?’

  Nine months had passed since the Apollo 1 disaster, months in which the war in Vietnam had continued to escalate. Key strategic sites in North Vietnam had been obliterated in a series of air strikes yet this did not seem to diminish the Vietcong’s power to retaliate. Almost five hundred thousand American troops were now in Vietnam. ‘Search and destroy’ missions were underway on the ground in a war which was both increasingly unpopular and unwinnable. Despite millions of tons of bombs being dropped on strategic targets, American military might had not been able to crush the spirit of the communist troops who continued to strike back.

  If America was losing face in Vietnam with ‘Uncle Sam’s’ vigour put in question, no one could doubt the superiority of the American rocket industry as the ultimate icon of power in the symbolic race for supremacy against the Soviets was wheeled out for all the world to see. On 26 August 1967, the giant doors of the vehicle assembly building at Cape Canaveral – now renamed Cape Kennedy – slid open to reveal the glistening white Saturn V. Reaching over thirty-six storeys high, with a height of 363 feet and engines capable of producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust, von Braun’s Saturn V was an impressive cylinder of power as it was slowly moved, upright, on a gigantic crawler, to Pad 39A. It was so heavy some doubted it would ever get off the ground.

  The unmanned launch was planned for early autumn, but myriad details connected with getting it fuelled and into position took longer than expected. The Director of Launch Operations, Rocco Petrone, came to understand that the Saturn V lived in its own time dimension. He was dealing with what he called the ‘Saturn V minute’, which he calculated was actually about five minutes. ‘If I asked a guy how long something would take, he’d tell me 10 minutes and it would come up maybe in an hour,’ he explained. ‘Everything about the Saturn V was bigger. If you had to pick up a valve, you couldn’t pick it up by hand. You had to get a fork-lift truck.’

  In November, the rocket was ready for launch. It had been in position for some weeks, a new landmark on the flat landscape. By night, floodlights bathed it in brilliance. The wind was almost visible chasing leaves and
debris around its summit. Launch was set for 7 a.m. on 8 November 1967 and by dawn the wind had eased. The morning was still. No one was allowed near the rocket. A safety zone of three and half miles was in operation. Four hundred and fifty technicians were absorbed in front of their screens at the control centre. The mission, Apollo 4, would not only test the Saturn V but also a redesigned Apollo command module – in which a raft of innovations had been introduced, including a new hatch. Queues of cars were lining the roads, full of people intent on seeing the launch and living a piece of history. All the leading figures from NASA were there to observe. En masse from Cocoa Beach the press were decamping in leisurely fashion to their observation posts, casually unconcerned about being late. Countdowns were never on time.

  For von Braun and those close to him, the launch would be the culmination of years of work. As far back as the 1930s, on another continent, in another age, von Braun had dreamed of this legendary rocket with its amazing power. Now he sat with Arthur Rudolph, who had shared the long journey from Bleicherode, to watch the spectacle as they tried to lift a rocket with the weight of a Navy destroyer off the launch pad. Von Braun felt certain that Saturn V had the power to ‘toss a jet aircraft into orbit – or even boost a Chevrolet clear out of the solar system’. Even so, there was no way of being completely certain of the F-1 engines, let alone all the new systems under ‘all-up’ testing on that day – fuels, pumps, electronic systems, control systems. They watched with concern as, with three minutes to go, computers took over.

  Countdown was faultless. Fuelling was complete. Helium created pressure in the tanks that would bring the five powerful pumps into action. When the ignition flames were alight, 1 ton of fuel per second would arrive to be consumed by the huge engines, gently at first. Full power was delayed so that the rocket could adjust. Then the gargantuan appetite of the colossal engines converted power into a terrifying force, beyond human scale. And if one infinitesimal fault hidden among the many thousands of cooperating systems failed, the three-mile limit for safe viewing might not prove enough and the steel shutters on the control block designed to close in the event of an explosion might well prove inadequate. The four arms holding the rocket received the signal to withdraw. The giant, claw-like restraining bolts clasping the rocket at its base were released. On time and painfully slowly, the rocket began to rise. At first there was no sound, only tremors and reverberations that shook the roofs and windows. Then came the sound: deafening, like a physical force.