When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.” It was a funny crack, but with an edge.
In marked contrast to the tiny Mercury capsule, Apollo was, in spaceflight terms, practically a luxury liner. It had hammocks for full-length sleeping, hot and cold water, and a primitive galley. The spacecraft was the transportation for the crew to Earth orbit, to lunar orbit, and back home. It consisted of two sections, or modules, the upper one cone-shaped, the lower a cylinder. In the top section, called the command module, the astronauts occupied three cockpit couches looking up at a maze of controls—gauges, dials, switches, lights, and toggles. The service module was essentially an engine room. It housed the fuel, the crew’s oxygen, the basic electrical system, and a large rocket with 22,500 pounds of thrust that would supply the propulsion required to enter and leave a lunar orbit. The CSM was thirty-four feet long and weighed about thirty tons when fully fueled.
The Saturn booster rockets were enormous. Towering 223 feet above the launch pad, the two-stage Saturn IB rocket provided 1.6 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and was used for Apollo Earth orbital missions not requiring an LM, or lunar module.[1] The S-IB was a prototype for the Saturn V and used the same S-IVB upper stage as the more powerful Saturn V.
The Saturn V rocket with 7.7 million pounds’ thrust at liftoff was the largest rocket ever developed by the United States. Standing 363 feet tall, it was used for missions that carried both the CSM and LM.
The LM was a buglike, rocket-powered craft that two astronauts would board for the descent to the Moon’s surface. The LM, with landing legs folded, was mounted on an adapter at the forward end of the S-IVB, which was in turn enclosed by four tapered conical panels with the CSM perched on top. For lunar missions the S-IVB (the third stage of the rocket) injected the CSM and LM into Earth orbit, and after a checkout period the engine reignited to place both spacecraft into a lunar trajectory.
The capsule of Apollo 1 was a total loss, charred and blackened both inside and out, its sensitive instruments ruined beyond any useful purpose—except for whatever clues it might surrender. The three bodies had been left strapped in their seats for seven hours while the first anguished experts tried to sort out the causes of a fiery accident that traumatized an entire nation.
One by one the controllers left after securing the records, the log-books, and the voice and telemetry tapes. Almost by reflex, everyone drifted over to the Singing Wheel, the controllers’ watering hole.
As the word of the Apollo 1 fire spread through the Clear Lake area, Nelson Bland, the owner of the Singing Wheel, cleared the building except for the controllers. Throughout the evening, more drifted in as others left. Worried wives came looking for their husbands, clustering in one of the back rooms. It was like the nights of years earlier, when you lost a squadron pilot and a good friend. All that was lacking were the songs we used to sing back then, our way of saying, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “death shall have no dominion.” This night, however, was one of limited and subdued conversation. We mourned our crew and the loss of whatever naivete we had left.
We had known setbacks before. We had lived through some bad days, but we had never taken a knockout punch like this one. I wished there were some way to get in a judo match. I just wanted to feel some physical pain. The beer was not helping anything.
When we returned to our homes that night, we were changed in ways none of us could describe.
The next day was no different. The controllers wandered between the offices and the control center, their minds now moving to the question, “What’s next?” Kraft was nowhere to be seen. I guessed that he was probably working with Bob Gilruth, Deke Slayton, and Joe Shea, the Apollo program manager, to put together an investigative team. The day stretched on forever as dribs and drabs of data filtered into the offices. There were many rumors, few facts.
As I was sitting in my office, a picture of an antique biplane hanging in a tree caught my eye. I had carried it with me to keep me on track since my time in flight test at Holloman Air Force Base. A caption below the picture read:
Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.
No one understood the risk any better than Gus Grissom. He had been quoted as saying, “If we die we want people to accept it. We hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
Roger Chaffee had been CapCom for my first mission as flight director. I had worked with Gus and Ed White in Mercury and Gemini, but we hadn’t spoken for some time except for brief phone calls or crisp de-briefings after a test. Now it was too late. They were gone, and all I had were some foggy memories of three Americans who had died in the race for supremacy in space. A rational feeling or not, I felt that I had personally let down the crew of Apollo 1. But I also knew that I had to put aside these feelings and take the lead in rallying the controllers to get us moving forward again. I had seen Mueller, Low, and Williams get out in front and lead when we had had problems and setbacks. Now it was my turn to set an example.
Monday morning, I told Hodge I was calling a meeting of my branch and my flight control team in the auditorium. Hodge, deeply disturbed by the fire and still searching for his own answers, agreed and expanded the meeting to include the civil servants, Philco controllers, and our spacecraft contractors.
The auditorium in our office area held 250 and was half full when John and I arrived. The controllers were still in the bewildered state they had been plunged into on Friday night—muted and somber, feeling, as I did, that we had failed our crew, but not knowing what to do about it. Hodge spoke first, citing the known facts of the accident, then describing the newly appointed review board and the investigating team headed by the director of the Langley Research Center, Floyd Thompson.
I recognized a few of the Thompson committee members. Frank Borman, the Gemini astronaut, and Max Faget, the director of engineering, were from MSC, and John Williams was from the Cape launch team. When Hodge completed his briefing, I still did not know what I wanted to say as he motioned me to the microphone. Emotionally I had come out of the shock, and my feeling now was one of pure anger. Anger that we in Flight Control in some way had let the crew down.
I climbed the four steps to the stage, looking at all those faces of people I knew so well. I wanted them to get beyond shock, then say, as St. Peter did in one of his epistles, “Let us get good and angry—and then let us make no mistakes.” Yes, we had experienced a terrible tragedy and a devastating setback, but this was not the end. The testing and the program would go on and we were the ones who would carry it forward. It was up to us to make sure that the Apollo 1 crew had not died in vain.
I started talking about my feelings, and the words finally poured out. I didn’t quite know where they came from, but I spoke slowly, deliberately, and with conviction. “Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.
“We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’
“I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job! We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.”
My remarks were received with silence, no movement, no shifting in the seats. The controllers, each and every one, knew what I meant. I was just putting their thoughts into words.
“From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough and Competent.’
