vulnerable to kicking and chafing.
But it quickly became evident that the spacecraft hatch was the major cause of my colleagues’ deaths. Had just one of them been able to open it up, they would have survived. The hatch design was a disaster: it sealed from the inside, so the greater the interior pressure, the tighter the seal. For keeping a spacecraft airtight in space that design made sense, but it was lethal during a pressurized test on the ground. It was an example of a system designed by nonpilots; safety was not the most important factor.
North American Aviation built the spacecraft and naturally shouldered much of the blame. But the accident was more complicated than that. I believe there were too many people involved for one specific group to be responsible. Others blamed the tragedy on the intense pressure to fly Apollo to the moon before the end of the decade. Yes, there was pressure, but personally I don’t think it directly led to any oversights. The cause of the fire was tougher to swallow. The fault belonged to all of us: how can you blame any one person or group for something that everyone had overlooked?
No one had taken the time to consider that an electrical spark in the spacecraft, while unlikely, would be disastrous. For three dangerous ingredients to come together like this—flammable material, sparking wires, and pressurized pure oxygen—a lot of details must have been overlooked by a lot of people, and not just those at North American. These details were probably missed because, until January of 1967, everything had worked fine, so we were overconfident. No one wanted to stop and think about potential problems. In this instance, it killed three men.
I later heard talk about shoddy workmanship on the Apollo spacecraft by North American and accusations that this problem may have contributed to the fire. But in the months before the fire, I saw just the opposite. North American’s engineers were very particular, detailed, thorough, and determined to do a good job. I was especially impressed with how well they kept records. Initially, I thought the amount of paperwork they required was too much. But one night we were checking a spacecraft and found that one particular wire inside a large bundle did not work—it had chafed and exposed raw wiring. The company went back to their records and diagrams, and within days had replaced not only that particular wire, but every piece of that faulty batch of wire in every part of every spacecraft it had assembled. Damn impressive.
Not long after the fire, I was assigned back to Downey to resume work on the Block II spacecraft. This time, my job was to improve everything we could, based on the lessons of the fire. Jack Swigert, who would later fly on the Apollo 13 mission, joined me in this important duty. Because of his work improving the command module, Jack probably saved his own life years later when Apollo 13’s service module failed and he helped to bring the crippled spacecraft home.
A lifelong bachelor, Jack had a party at his house every weekend and dated every woman in sight. He was a real skirt chaser and a playboy. He spent a lot of time in Miami, where Eastern Airlines had a flight attendant school. I guess the odds of dating were much better around all of those young women. He was also notoriously tight with money, asking a girl out on a date only to have her pay. There was one story going around about a girl he dated in Washington, D.C. He not only asked her to pay for dinner, but also to fill his car up with gas, telling her that he had forgotten to bring any money. He was apparently upset when this girl did not invite him back to her place— but no one could blame her.
All of this behavior was generally considered okay; no one cared about Jack’s private life as long as he did his job as well. Thankfully, he was very good at what he did. He’d been a fighter pilot and a great test pilot before joining NASA and was well regarded in the flying fraternity.
I was confident that the Block II spacecraft we worked on before the fire was already a fine vehicle. Still, to make it even safer, Jack and I worked with the North American and NASA engineers to help redesign the equipment inside, replacing anything flammable with fire-resistant materials such as Beta cloth. It took us months to figure out everything that needed to be done. Because of the work carried out by everyone involved with the spacecraft in those first crucial months, we pulled the Apollo program back from the brink and removed any fears of cancellation. NASA had to earn confidence in its abilities all over again, and it did.
I felt no apprehension at all getting back into an Apollo spacecraft right after the fire. I knew that we were going to make the upgraded command module the safest space vehicle ever built. My engineering background, I think, was the major reason I was assigned to this task. I spent months inside the spacecraft, helping to develop and test new malfunction procedures, getting familiar with the systems and then redesigning them. While Jack Swigert and I worked on our procedures, the spacecraft hatch was also redesigned. The Apollo command module soon had an outward-opening hatch with a quick-action lever, and it worked excellently.
Jack and I spent countless hours going over every single system, working on elaborate diagrams to show what would happen if multitudes of different actions were taken. The spacecraft engineers had created procedures to describe what a crew should do if something went wrong with the spacecraft, and the flight controllers in Houston then modified them. Until tested in a real spacecraft, however, we had no idea if the procedures would really work. Jack and I needed to make sure. We soon found that the procedures, based on spacecraft blueprints, did not always match the reality. So we went through every detail of every imaginable flight moment with each spacecraft part, and did a great deal of rewriting to perfect the procedures. The collaboration produced an enormous malfunction procedures manual that every Apollo crew consulted diligently in their training.
I was in California every week for at least a year and a half doing this crucial work. I would leave Houston on Sunday night and was back by Friday night unless a test overran into the weekend. For the amount of time I spent there, I may as well have bought a house in Downey. I got to know hotel rooms far better than my own home. We were determined to get back into space again, and all other considerations—including our family lives—were sidelined until we achieved this goal.
If I thought the tragedies of 1967 were over after the fire, I was wrong. In June, Ed Givens, an astronaut in my selection group, died in a car crash close to the space center in Houston. Only a few months later, in October, we lost another astronaut. This time, it was someone I knew well. C.C. Williams had just learned that he and his wife, Beth, were going to have a second child. He was flying a T-38 when something went wrong. Somehow one of the aileron controls on his wing became stuck, causing the aircraft to roll and then nose down. C.C. tried to get the airplane under control, but it was impossible, and by the time he gave up and bailed out there was no time for his parachute to open. NASA lost one of the nicest, most humble guys I had ever met.
C.C. perished a month before Mike Adams, another pilot I had met at Edwards. Selected as an astronaut for MOL before transferring to the X-15 rocket plane program, Mike died while flying an X-15 back from a suborbital spaceflight. It was a horrific year for the American space program, worsened when MOL astronaut Bob Lawrence was killed in December in yet another airplane crash.
America had just lost seven astronauts in one year. Not surprisingly, the deaths of my colleagues did my marriage little good. In retrospect, telling Pam that I was joining the astronaut corps the year before had been a nail in the coffin when it came to our relationship, and I can only guess that the Apollo 1 fire was privately very traumatic for her, too. After all, I was training to do the same things as my now-dead colleagues.
In hindsight, the Apollo 1 fire was much tougher on Pam than it was on me. To my dismay, I began to understand that she would rather be divorced from me than constantly dreading the day when someone would inform her I had died in an airplane or spacecraft accident.
At the time, I really couldn’t understand her point of view. I didn’t see what difference it would make. If you lose a person, I reasoned, you lose them, and it does not matter how. Perhaps Pam wished to keep her own initiative and choices, rather than leaving it to fate. For now, however, although we were essentially living separate lives, we officially stayed married. I was working so hard in California that year that I was hardly ever home anyway, even if she had wanted me to be.
It was also a terrible year to become an astronaut. When I was selected the year before, NASA also began to recruit a new group of scientists into the astronaut corps in the belief that, although none were jet pilots, they could be trained to fly with us in space. There would be missions to a number of space stations then in the planning stages, they were told. However, by the time eleven had been selected in August of 1967, our budget had been severely cut. The number of missions shrank, along with the need for these extra astronauts. On their first day in Houston, Deke Slayton told them bluntly and honestly that they were not needed any more. Over the next couple of
