maneuver was stopped because of poor alignment. Komarov was in desperate trouble. He had probably exhausted the fuel not only from the Soyuz’s main thrusters on the instrument module, but also from the vital thrusters on the reentry module.
Komarov finally completed his retrorocket burn on the eighteenth orbit, even though he didn’t have sufficient fuel to steer the reentry module. Just after 3:00 am Greenwich time on April 24, Soyuz 1 plunged back into the atmosphere, spinning wildly; Komarov abandoned all attempts at a controlled reentry path for a normal touchdown near Tyuratam. The cosmonaut imparted a spin to the module that was probably a last-ditch effort to keep the heat shield pointed along the flight path and prevent end-over-end tumbling, which would have incinerated the spacecraft.
The Soyuz module plunged on a ballistic trajectory almost 400 miles short of the designated landing zone, and Komarov was unable to stop the violent spin in the lower atmosphere. When he reached an altitude of about 30,000 feet, he deployed his small drogue parachute, which was quickly followed by the main chute. But the parachute lines fouled around the hot, spinning crown of the module, and his reserve parachute system also tangled.
There have been reports of questionable reliability that Western intelligence overheard Komarov’s last radio transmissions as his crippled reentry module plunged toward Earth. He reportedly screamed to his wife: “I love you and I love our baby!” But it’s unlikely the Soviets would have allowed a radio connection between the doomed cosmonaut and his wife that we eavesdropping imperialists could hear.
Komarov’s death was certainly instantaneous when the Soyuz module plunged into the steppes at several hundred miles an hour. The Soviets’ official announcement of the accident stunned the world, especially since they had broadcast just 12 hours before that Komarov’s flight was proceeding normally. According to Moscow, Komarov died “as a result of tangling of parachute cords as the spacecraft fell at a high velocity.”
The Apollo program is revised
With Borman as point man and the rest of the pilots now backing him up more quietly, the astronauts got nearly everything they had been lobbying for in a new, safer spacecraft. They had wanted a gas-operated hatch that could be opened in seven seconds, and they got it; they had wanted upgraded, fireproof wiring throughout the ship, and they got it; they had wanted non-flammable Beta cloth in the spacesuits and all fabric surfaces, and they got it. Most important, they had wanted the firefeeding, 100 percent oxygen atmosphere that swirled through the ship when it was on the pad to be replaced by a far less dangerous 60–40 oxgen-nitrogen mix. Not surprisingly, they got that too.
The modifications being made to the Apollo spacecraft were not the only changes NASA explored in the wake of the fire. Also scrutinized were the missions those ships would be sent on. Though John Kennedy had been dead since 1963, his grand promise – or damned promise, depending on how you looked at it – to have America on the moon before 1970 still loomed over the Agency. NASA officials would have considered it a profound failure not to meet that bold challenge, but they would have considered it an even greater failure to lose another crew in the effort. Accordingly, chastened Agency brass began making it clear, publicly and privately, that while America was still aiming for the moon before the end of the decade, the breathless gallop of the past few years would now be replaced by a nice, safe lope.
According to the tentative flight schedule, the first manned Apollo flight would be Schirra’s Apollo 7, intended to be nothing more than a shakedown cruise of the still-suspect command module in low Earth orbit. Next would come Apollo 8, during which Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart would go back into near-Earth space to test-drive both the command module and the lunar excursion module, or LEM, the ugly, buggy, leggy lander that would carry astronauts down to the surface of the moon. Next, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders would pilot Apollo 9 on a similar two-craft mission, this time taking the ships to a vertiginous altitude of 4,000 miles, in order to practice the hair-raising, high-speed re-entry techniques that would be necessary for a safe return from the moon.
After that, things were wide open. The program was scheduled to continue through Apollo 20, and, in theory any mission from Apollo 10 on could be the first to set two men down on the moon’s surface. But which mission and which two men were utterly unsettled. NASA was determined not to rush things, and if it took until well into the Apollo teens before all the equipment checked out and a landing looked reasonably safe, then it would have to take that long.
NASA’s plans are threatened
In the summer of 1968, two months before Apollo 7 was scheduled for launch, circumstances in Kazakhstan, southeast of Moscow, and in Bethpage, Long Island, northeast of Levittown, conspired to scramble this cautious scenario. In August, the first lunar module arrived at Cape Kennedy from its Grumman Aerospace plant in Bethpage, and in the assessment of even the most charitable technicians, it was found to be a mess. In the early checkout runs of the fragile, foil-covered ship, it appeared that every critical component had major, seemingly insoluble problems. Elements of the spacecraft that were shipped to the Cape unassembled and were supposed to be bolted together on site did not seem to want to go together; electrical systems and plumbing did not operate as specified; seams, gaskets, and washers that were designed to remain tightly sealed were springing all manner of leaks.
Some glitches, of course, were to be expected. In ten years of building sleek, bullet-shaped spacecraft designed to fly through the atmosphere and into orbit, no one had ever attempted to build a manned ship that would operate exclusively in the vacuum of space or in the lunar world of one-sixth gravity. But the number of glitches in this gimpy ship was more than – even the worst NASA pessimists could have imagined.
At the same time the LEM was causing such headaches, CIA agents working overseas picked up even more disturbing news. According to whispers coming from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet Union was making tentative plans for a flight around the moon by a Zond spacecraft sometime before the end of the year. Nobody knew if the flight would be manned, but the Zond line was certainly capable of carrying a crew, and if a decade of getting sucker-punched by Soviet space triumphs had indicated anything, it was that when Moscow had even the possibility of pulling off a space coup, you could bet they’d give it a try.
NASA was stumped. Flying the LEM before it was ready was clearly impossible in the cautious atmosphere that now pervaded the Agency, but flying Apollo 7 and then launching nothing at all for months and months while the Russians promenaded around the moon was not an attractive option either. One afternoon in early August, 1968, Chris Kraft, deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and Deke Slayton were summoned to Bob Gilruth’s office to discuss the problem. Gilruth was the overall director of the Center and, according to the scuttlebut, had been meeting all morning with George Low, the director of Flight Missions, to determine if there was some plan that would allow NASA to save face without running the risk of losing more crews. Slayton and Kraft arrived in Gilruth’s oflice, and he and Low got straight to business.
“Chris, we’ve got serious problems with the upcoming flights,” Low said bluntly. “We’ve got the Russians and we’ve got the LEM and neither one is cooperating.”
