complex 34; the response came back that three units had already began to roll. When Medcalf waded into the White Room, he nearly stumbled over the pad crew, who, having given up on their poor, porous masks, were now on all fours, crawling to and from the Spacecraft just beneath the densest smoke, working the hatch bolts until they could take it no longer. Gleaves was almost unconscious, and Babbitt ordered him away from the command module. Hawkins and Clemmons were little better off – Babbitt glanced back into the room, spied two other, fresher technicians, and motioned them into the cloud.
It was another several minutes before the hatch was opened, and then only partway – barely a six-inch gap at the top. This was enough, however, to release a final blast and smoke from the interior of the spacecraft, and to reveal that the fire itself was at last out. With some more shoving and manipulating, Babbitt managed to pry the hatch loose and drop it down inside the cockpit, between the head of the astronauts’ couches and the wall. Then he fell away from the ship, exhausted.
Systems technician Reece was the first to peer into the maw of the cremated Apollo. He poked his head nervously inside, and through the blackness saw a few caution lights winking on the instrument panel and a weak floodlight glowing on the commander’s side. Apart from this he saw nothing – including the crew. But he heard something; Reece was certain he heard something. He leaned in and felt around on the center couch, where Ed White should have been, but he felt only burned fabric. He took off his mask and shouted into the void, “Is anyone there?” No response. “Is anyone there?”
Reece was pushed aside by Clemmons, Hawkins, and Medcalf who were carrying flashlights. The three men played their lights around the interior of the cockpit, but their smoke-stung eyes could make out nothing but what appeared to be a blanket of ashes across the crew’s couches. Medcalf backed away from the ship and bumped into Babbitt. He choked.
“There’s nothing left inside,” he told the pad leader.
Babbitt lunged to the spacecraft. More people crowded around the ship, and more light was trained on its interior. With his eyes slowly recovering, Babbitt saw that there was, most assuredly, something inside. Directly in front of him was Ed White, lying on his back with his arms over his head, reaching toward where the hatch had been. From the left Grissom was visible, turned slightly in the direction of White, reaching through his junior crewman’s arms for the same absent hatch. Roger Chaffee was still lost in the gloom, and Babbitt guessed he was probably strapped in his couch. The emergency escape drill called for the commander and the pilot to handle the hatch while the junior crewman stayed in his seat. Chaffee was no doubt there, waiting patiently – now eternally – for his senior crewmates to finish their work.
From the back of the crowd, James Burch of the Cape Kennedy fire station pushed his way to the spacecraft. Burch had seen this kind of scene before. The other men here hadn’t. The technicians, who made their living maintaining the best machines science could conceive, now made respectful room for the man who takes over when something in one of those machines goes disastrously wrong.
Burch crawled through the hatch and into the cockpit and, unknowingly, stopped atop White. He swept his light across the charred instrument panel and the spider web of singed wires dangling from it. Just beneath him, he noticed a boot. Not knowing if the crew was dead or alive, and not having the time to find out gingerly, he grabbed the boot and pulled hard. The still-hot mass of molded rubber and cloth came off in his hand revealing White’s foot. Burch then patted his hands farther up and felt ankle, shin, and knee. The uniform was partly burned away, but the skin underneath was unmolested. Burch tugged the skin this way and that to see if it would slip from the flesh – a consequence of traumatic burns that, he knew, could cause a victim to shed his outer dermis like a tropical gecko. This skin, however, was intact; indeed the entire body appeared intact. The fire had been exceedingly hot, but it had also been exceedingly fast. It was fumes that claimed this man, not flames. Burch pulled up on White’s legs with as much force as he could, but the body budged only six inches or so and he let it fall back into its couch. The fireman backed away to the edge of the hatch and took another look around the cruel kiln of the cockpit. The two bodies flanking the one in the center looked the same as White’s, and Burch knew that whatever life had been in this spacecraft just fourteen minutes earlier had certainly been snuffed out. He climbed out of the ship. “They are all dead,” Burch intoned quietly. “The fire is extinguished.”
The Soyuz 1 disaster
When the Politburo ordered Chelomei and Mishin to prepare for a spectacular dual manned Soyuz mission for that April, Mishin, in an act of real integrity, refused the assignment. But he was eventually pressured into compliance. The Politburo wanted a dramatic mission that would equal all of Project Gemini’s achievements in a single stroke: the orbital maneuvering, rendezvous, and docking of two spacecraft, followed by the exciting space walk transfer of two crew members between the docked Soyuz spacecraft. Soviet leaders also demanded that the mission coincide as closely as possible with May Day, so they could celebrate “international solidarity” with Eastern bloc nations.
Test engineers fretted over the obvious design flaws in the new Soyuz, while a four-man crew led by veterans Valery Bykovsky, the pilot of Vostok 5, and Vladimir Komarov, the commander of the Voskhod I mission, trained for the dual Soyuz 1 and 2 missions. Komarov would be launched alone aboard the first spacecraft, and Bykovsky and his two crewmates, Yevgeny Khrunov and Aleksey Yeliseyev orbited the next day aboard Soyuz 2. After rendezvous and docking, Khrunov and Yeliseyev would join Komarov aboard Soyuz 1 via a spectacular space walk, using the docked orbital modules as air locks. This dual flight would not only duplicate Gemini’s record of success, it would also demonstrate the Soviets’ capability for similar orbital maneuvers on a more ambitious Soyuz lunar flight.
Just before dawn on April 23, 1967, Colonel Komarov climbed aboard the Soyuz 1 spacecraft, mounted atop a large SL-4 booster. At age 40, Komarov was one of the oldest cosmonauts and certainly the most technically qualified, with years of experience in flight-test engineering. He had been a part of the manned Soviet spacecraft program from its inception and was considered its best-qualified pilot. In addition, his broad shoulders and sharply molded Slavic features made him an ideal representative of this daring new Soviet venture. He had already demonstrated his courage and dedication to duty by commanding the risky Voskhod I mission.
The launch itself was normal, the large booster climbing away into the dawn over Kazakhstan. But as soon as the spacecraft was safely in orbit, serious malfunctions arose. The Soyuz spacecraft was equipped with two solar-panel “wings” that would convert sunlight into electricity, but one panel did not deploy, drastically reducing the spacecraft’s power supply. Worse, Komarov began experiencing the same type of control-thruster problems that had plagued the earlier unmanned test flights.
Soyuz 1 made no attempt to maneuver in orbit, despite the vehicle’s impressive propulsion system. Also, as we now know from Soviet sources, ground control in the Crimea lost the communications link with the spacecraft on several occasions, which indicates that the Soyuz 1 was tumbling so badly that Komarov couldn’t maintain antenna alignment. The original malfunction in the power supply may have affected the spacecraft’s guidance computer, its attitude control thrusters, or – most probably – both. Flight controllers scrubbed the Soyuz 2 countdown as soon as they realized that the first mission was in serious trouble. They had to concentrate on getting their cosmonaut back from space.
Komarov prepared for an emergency reentry with the crippled spacecraft. Mishin became increasingly anxious as Komarov and ground control struggled to align the Soyuz for the braking retrorocket burn as it passed northward across the equator above the Atlantic. On the sixteenth orbit, Komarov prepared for the burn, but it was cancelled when he couldn’t maintain stability. Ninety minutes later he tried again, but at the last moment the
