“When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will
The specific cause of the Apollo 1 fire was never identified, but the conditions that led to the fire were clear. We had a sealed cabin, pressurized with oxygen. There were extensive combustibles in the cabin, including a lot of explosively flammable Velcro. The wiring and plumbing systems were vulnerable to damage and, in retrospect, we made the wrong hatch design tradeoffs. It is easy to see all of this in 20/20 hindsight. Like so much in technology, there was a necessary tradeoff. The hatch was a two-piece design. The exterior opened outward while the interior pressure hatch opened inward. It was a brute, heavy and awkward. Given the design, a rapid escape from the spacecraft was impossible. But the NASA and North American designers hadn’t been as worried about escape contingencies as they were about the possibility of a hatch popping open into the vacuum of space or another inadvertent opening during a water landing. The premature opening of Gus Grissom’s Mercury hatch and the loss of his capsule was a lesson not easily forgotten.
A fire on the ground was considered such a remote possibility that the cabin contained no extinguisher. Even if there had been one, it probably would not have worked quickly enough in a time frame of a few seconds. Today’s Halon gas full-flood system might have worked. The fire involved a pure-oxygen cabin atmosphere, flammable materials, and an ignition spark from somewhere in the spacecraft. Before we could fly again, we had to eliminate one or more of these elements in the interior of the spacecraft. Everyone—designers, launch team, MCC, and even the crew—had not given enough thought to what an oxygen-rich atmosphere could do, particularly in a cabin stuffed with flammable material.
I worked with the controllers, assembling the data for the Thompson committee. After putting the data together, I listened for the last time to the final minutes of the plugs-out countdown. We took all the tapes and other records—everything from MCC and the Cape—and shipped them up to the investigating committee.
As we fought back from the tragedy,
At the time of the accident, every element of the program was in trouble. The command and lunar modules were behind schedule, the software was late, and the systems were often failing during testing. The Saturn had had problems also. The second-stage (S-II) rocket was an engineering and production nightmare. After a second S-II explosion, in ground testing, there were some contractor changes at the production and test facilities. There were recriminations, but no excuses.
Engineers were having difficulty moving the leading-edge technologies from the laboratories to the production line. At North American and in the U.S. Congress, the report written by General Sam Phillips before the fire raised questions about competence, quality, and workmanship by the manufacturer. If they sneezed, we caught the flu. Every spacecraft design change triggered more changes in Mission Control and in the simulators. The traffic piled up and engineers found they were making changes on changes.
By late spring, however, the program emerged from the chaos of the fire. Momentum began to build again.
In March 1967, the mission designations were changed. After the Apollo 1 fire, there would be no Apollo 2 or 3. Two unmanned Saturn IB flight tests—AS201 and 202—were not redesignated with a sequence number. The next mission after those two Saturn IB flights was designated Apollo 4, the first flight of the Saturn V. For our own internal purposes, mission types were given letter designations. The controllers preferred this letter sequence since it denoted the broad objectives and was used in lieu of numerical designations.
• First manned Command Service Module (CSM)—C
• Manned test of CSM and Lunar Excursion Module (LEM)—D
• High Earth orbit (up to 4,000 miles) and test of the CSM at lunar reentry speeds—E
• Full lunar dress rehearsal, with CSM and LEM—F
• First lunar landing—G
• Subsequent lunar missions—H1, H2, and H3
• Extended lunar surface missions—J1, J2, J3, and so on.
The general public, of course, knows the main flights in the lunar sequence by number—G was Apollo 11, H2 the all-too-well-named Apollo 13, and so forth.
The summer and fall of 1967 were the busiest times I had ever known. Nothing seemed stable. Change was constant. The two certainties were that Wally Schirra would fly the first manned CSM mission, and the lunar landing goal for 1969 was unchanged. We had two and a half years to pull it off. Everyone went back to the drawing board. The command module would be redesigned at a cost of $75 million, and a safer spacecraft emerged.
Among the changes was a unified hatch that combined the exterior launch protective cover with the pressure hatch. (The launch cover protected the CSM surface from the rocket blast when the escape tower was jettisoned during launch.) The entire hatch mechanism swung out and could be opened by the crew in ten seconds.
11. OUT OF THE ASHES
When we completed a mission, it was like putting pictures into a scrapbook and then turning to a fresh, blank page. Someday we would have the luxury of looking back and remembering all the moments captured in those earlier pages, but the press of events gave us no time to indulge in reflections, to celebrate past accomplishments —or to grieve. For a time we simply could not dare to look back at the Apollo 1 inferno. We could only look forward to the next blank page, the next mission. But there was no way that any of us could escape those thoughts that come unbidden in the dark hours of the night: we would dream about those terrible last seconds. They would be with us forever. We would not leave the sadness behind until we accomplished what Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee wanted America to do—land on the moon.
Spaceflight forced you to live with risk by focusing on the task at hand. I would compare it to a pilot walking away from an accident, muttering, “Son of a bitch, that was close!” Then, still shaken, he lights up a cigarette, picks up his helmet and parachute, and starts reviewing his actions and identifying what, if anything, he would do differently the next time. After hoisting a few with his squadron mates, he gets ready again to climb into his cockpit home.
At Mission Control, certain things were understood. Every mission must achieve its objectives, and it must be accomplished on schedule if we were to keep John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon in this decade.
While we were recovering from the fire, the space scientists sponsored by NASA continued their work to develop a follow-on exploration program for the Moon. I was sent to the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, in August 1967 to brief a group of government, individual, and university scientists on the Mission Control Center’s mission responsibilities and on the techniques we used to develop mission rules.
Preparing for the briefing in the campus library, I realized how narrow my world had become because of the intensity and isolation of my work over the last seven years. I had never been on a West Coast campus. What I saw was beyond my belief, the TV headlines coming alive. It was my first live encounter with the hippie generation. Their songs and chanted slogans dimly penetrated the library as we worked. When I left I was glad to get back to a
