There would be no final agreement on who in the Apollo spacecraft shouted what. But even today, just reading the words on paper is chilling.
There was a gallant but futile effort to rescue the trapped threesome. The pad rescue team as well as crewmen from North American, mechanics and technicians, grabbed fire extinguishers and rushed toward the inferno. At least twice, shock waves and secondary explosions drove them back, knocking many to their knees. Some got close enough to struggle with the hatch. The heat of the hatch burned through their gloves and the smoke sent them staggering, choking and blinded. The call went out for firemen and ambulances. By then it was too late.
I had just finished hurriedly dressing to go out to dinner when I heard a knock on the door. Thinking the baby-sitter was early, I buttoned my shirt as I walked down the stairs. Again I heard the knock, only this time more insistent. I yelled out, “Hold on, I’m coming.”
Opening the door, I was surprised to see my neighbor and fellow flight controller, Jim Hannigan. He strode in, agitated and breathless. “Have you heard what happened?” he exclaimed. Bewildered, I raised my hands as Jim walked across the room to turn on the TV. He then blurted out: “They had a fire on the launch pad. They think the crew is dead!”
I had a sudden apocalyptic vision of a gigantic explosion that had taken out the flight crew, the Saturn rocket, and the launch complex. Marta had raced down the stairs as Hannigan’s wife, Peggy, visibly upset, walked in the door, crying out, “It’s just awful. I can’t believe it.” Since the details in news bulletins at that point were few, I assumed, from the emotional state of Jim and his wife, that one of the controllers had reached him on the phone. (Kraft had moved quickly to cut off all outgoing calls.)
Confused, I rapidly switched TV channels. There was no new information, only a brief report that an accident had occurred. I grabbed my badge and plastic pocket protector full of pencils. Nodding briefly to Marta, I jumped into our black Plymouth station wagon and tore out the driveway, shooting through traffic lights on the ten-mile drive to the Space Center. I practically dared a cop to get in my way.
I tried to figure out where in the countdown the accident had occurred. Given my awareness of the command problems in Gemini, my mind raced through the current tests. A thousand questions filled my thoughts as I tried to rule out the MCC as a cause of the tragedy on Pad 34. Nothing I knew about the situation made sense. This had been a very low-risk test. I kept telling myself, “The propellant systems are not loaded.” I kept thinking about it the way I would analyze an aircraft accident—did some part of the plane fail, was it pilot error, did someone on the ground screw up?
The radio was still reporting only sketchy details of the accident as I swung into my parking slot behind the MCC building. I bolted from the car and raced to the entrance. Getting inside was difficult. With the news of the fire, every controller was reporting to the MCC to find out what happened. Cars were parked haphazardly behind the building.
Kraft had declared a total freeze on operations to protect the data, terminating phone calls and directing the controllers to write down every event, any and every recollection of what they had seen and heard. With any ground or flight accident, it was essential to the investigation to bring everything to a dead stop while memories and data were still fresh and uncontaminated by the inevitable aftershock, confusion, and second-guessing.
At the Cape, they had been able to keep news of the disaster under wraps for about an hour, but leaks were inevitable. Wives of some of the technicians had received tense phone calls from their husbands, saying only that they would be home late. Sensing that something horrific had happened, the wives called the newspapers and radio stations with anxious questions. Reporters began to put pressure on their contacts who worked at the Cape and at MCC.
Security had barred further entry to the MCC without the permission of Kraft or Hodge. I waited for the guard to break through the busy signal on the phone at the flight director’s console. Cursing in frustration, I walked around to the rear entrance, bluffing my way past the guard, saying, “The main elevators are locked out. I’ve got to take the freight elevator to the second floor.”
Once I was in the control room there could be no doubt that something catastrophic had happened. All I had to do was look into the eyes of the controllers. They seemed stunned, talking in short snatches, all wondering what the hell happened. I finally reached Hodge. Kraft was standing by the surgeon, listening more than talking. Hodge was unusually quiet, muttering under his breath, “It was gruesome,” then lapsing into silence. Clenching his pipe in his teeth, he fought to retain enough composure to stay focused. It wasn’t easy for him. It was impossible for the younger controllers. They were milling around, standing, then sitting, too agitated to stay still. They kept playing back the telemetry recordings, looking for clues, desperately clinging to their belief in their data, expecting to find answers.
Kraft hung up the phone after a lengthy discussion with Slayton, then solemnly returned to the flight director’s console. “Deke thinks we were damned lucky,” he reported, “that we didn’t lose a hell of a lot more. There was fire coming from the capsule, molten metal dribbling down the side of the service module.”
It was not a good time to be talking about luck, but in times of crisis your defenses kick in. This is especially so among people who have loved to fly. They go on autopilot. Their instincts take over. Nothing could be done for the crew. The important thing now was to find out the how and why—to protect the living and to keep moving forward.
Death had come to the space program in the most unimaginable way during a test—to three men, helpless, not in the air, but in a cockpit just 318 feet above the ground. The fire had flashed through the cabin in seconds. You tried not to think of the horror of it. We all thanked God it had been quick, but how long is quick? How long does it take to suffocate, to burn, to die?
Hodge and I had come from flight testing and knew the risks. Kraft was intimately aware of the dangers from the day he launched Shepard in the first primitive Mercury capsule. We knew there was a high probability that some men would die at some point in the program, but none of us could accept losing our crew on the launch pad. We all had assumed that when a calamity struck us, it would be in flight. Our nightmare was an explosion during launch, or a flying coffin, a faulty craft stuck in endless orbit.
Dutch Von Ehrenfried had been at the guidance console during the crew’s last seconds. He was white as a sheet, face drawn, for once speechless and on the edge of tears. The poise I had seen so often on the judo mat and in competition had left him. He was now just a vulnerable young man who had witnessed his friends’ deaths.
John Aaron, filling in on the EECOM console, passed the minutes playing back data, seeing the brief electrical current spike, then the rise in cabin pressure and temperature. He pushed himself beyond exhaustion and finally had to be driven home.
In these harrowing hours and the days that followed there was no way to comprehend or accept the loss of Grissom, forty, White, thirty-six, and Chaffee, thirty-one. If there was anything that could be retrieved from this tragedy, it was the evidence—it was right there in front of us on Pad 34. We had a chance to discover the cause of the fire before another spacecraft was put at risk.
The fire did something else. It reminded the American public that men could and would die in our efforts to explore the heavens. It recreated the tension and uncertainty of the early flights of Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn. The Russians worked in secret, but the entire world could watch our flights on television. Success had become almost routine for us… until now. The country had gotten complacent. Only many years later would the full count of losses become known: these three Americans plus four Russians, all brave, good men who ran out of luck, whose technology failed at a crucial moment.
We were torn between feelings of fatalism and defiance. The United States had catapulted men into space sixteen times without a casualty more serious than a stubbed toe—although we had lived through some very scary situations. In our series of ten Gemini trips, Americans had repeatedly broken all records for survival in space, had strolled casually into the void, had navigated their craft through complex maneuvers, tracking down and docking with another spaceship.
With each flight the bar had been raised higher. No one knew how many orbits Apollo 1 would attempt. Grissom, White, and Chaffee would have been blazing yet another path, an open-ended mission, a bold departure from the rigid, limited spaceflights of the past. Theirs was to be essentially an engineering flight, a shakedown for the Apollo systems.
Built by North American, the Command and Service Module was by far the biggest and most sophisticated space vehicle ever designed. We had come so far, so quickly, from Alan Shepard’s pioneering fifteen-minute flight.
