Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  “I want you to do it,” Johnson said again, and extended his hand. This was the only time Webb and the president had sealed an agreement with a handshake. Johnson had given Webb precisely what he wanted. The space agency would oversee and contain the entire accident-review process.

  However, within a few hours NASA had already run into a public-relations disaster. Most of the details NASA had provided the press were correct, but the assertion that the astronauts had died instantaneously came into question when a reporter broke a story that audiotapes that captured the astronauts reporting the fire and calling out, “Get us out of here!” When reporters questioned Julian Scheer about the tapes, he denied their existence, relying on mistaken information he had been given by NASA officials in Houston and the Cape. A day later, after learning the recordings did indeed exist, Scheer issued a correction. But NASA’s reputation for honesty was badly damaged, and it took more than a year for the agency to repair its relationship with the press corps.

  Journalists covering the space program were already used to NASA officials keeping engineering and safety concerns from the public. Past problems had been minimized, as it was assumed that if such information were more widely known, morale and public support could erode. But after the horrific accident, reporters who had been accommodating in the past began to aggressively push back against official stonewalling. They questioned the wisdom of the moon program, its expense, and its objectives. They sought to uncover whether the three astronauts’ deaths may have been preventable.

  Quietly, James Webb instituted his own investigation as well. He asked NASA’s lawyers to conduct a separate internal review to determine if any managerial lapses might have contributed to the fire. If there was a flaw in his system of managerial oversight, he would discover it. In the meantime, he reasoned that the only way to sustain the Apollo program and guard the space agency against its critics would be to act as a human lighting rod. He would personally absorb the blame and responsibility and accept the consequences. Webb undoubtedly remembered Truman’s famous motto from when he had served as the president’s director of the Bureau of the Budget: “The buck stops here!”

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  BORMAN AND THE other members of the Apollo review board started by impounding documents and data about the accident and collecting eyewitness accounts. Early meetings focused on reviewing all the existing technical circumstances at the time of the fire, and within days it became evident that no single cause could be isolated. Once the Apollo 1 command module was lowered from its position atop the Saturn 1B and removed from Pad 34, the review board began its physical inspection. Borman entered the interior, and his first task was to lie on the astronauts’ couches and dictate the position of every switch on the control panels to accurately document their state at the moment of the inferno. A second, identical spacecraft was flown in from the North American plant, and both were carefully disassembled one piece at a time, every item examined in detail.

  What the review board discovered was disturbing. Although the precise origin of the electrical spark that had caused the fire was impossible to determine, the board concluded the accident had been the result of a combination of bad decisions: the choice of a pressurized cabin with a 100 percent oxygen atmosphere; a hatch design that required at least ninety seconds to unlatch and open from the inside; the inclusion of combustible materials inside the spacecraft; vulnerable electrical wiring; and the use of a combustible and corrosive coolant. The inspection also revealed numerous instances of poor installation, design, and workmanship. When the spacecraft was taken apart, the board even discovered a forgotten socket wrench left inside the spacecraft by a North American workman months before.

  Most shocking, however, was the conclusion that the fire had been entirely preventable. In addition to a series of bad engineering choices, the fire may have been exacerbated by the strained relationship between NASA personnel and North American Aviation’s management. For all of Webb’s administrative checks and balances, a caustic internal NASA memo—which came to be known informally as “the Phillips Report”—documented deficiencies in North American’s workmanship and management more than a year before the accident. But the memo had been kept from Webb’s eyes. A second safety-and-reliability memo, authored by an outside contractor only four months before the tragedy, also warned of a possible internal fire danger. The head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office had deemed the memo not worth pursuing, assuming any risk of a fire was remote and that instituting preventive action would cause delays and harm working relationships.

  It was a moment of reckoning. NASA and its contractors experienced a sudden crisis of confidence. The space agency’s reputation as the gold standard for managerial and technical brilliance was tarnished. Engineers who had placed their faith in raw data and systems analysis were shaken to realize the fatal implications of things they had overlooked or discounted. Armstrong and Scott had nearly perished on Gemini 8 due to a poorly designed electrical circuit in a thruster. Now a series of seemingly banal mistakes had killed three brave men during a routine test. As the investigation progressed, Borman watched the fire claim additional victims. A few colleagues already overworked and emotionally invested in the country’s quest for the Moon became so overwrought that they suffered emotional breakdowns, incapacitating exhaustion, and episodes of mania. One consultant was literally carried out of an accident-review-board meeting in a straitjacket.

  Six months earlier, James Webb had confronted Lyndon Johnson on the front page of The New York Times about the nation’s future space planning. Now the immediate future of both Apollo and NASA was in doubt. Webb sensed a growing public skepticism toward technology. For the time being, he cautioned, NASA should avoid any language that implied “we are the apostles of a new ideology—as a new semi-religion of technology.” Rather, in the wake of the tragedy, Webb believed NASA should project an image of humble workmen struggling to overcome a setback.

  Webb was prepared to assume the role of the man in the crosshairs when he appeared on Capitol Hill. Congressmen and senators who for years had avoided criticizing the massive space program, for fear of appearing unpatriotic, now responded to the country’s grief by putting NASA’s management on the hot seat in public hearings. But it was mostly political theater, with elected officials using the media for personal publicity. Some questioned how an accident inquest overseen by the space agency could possibly remain impartial. Others wasted time asking prosecutorial questions about technical matters they didn’t understand.

  The Senate hearing’s most dramatic moment came when Minnesota’s freshman Democratic senator, Walter Mondale, ambushed Webb with questions about the 1965 internal Phillips Report critical of North American Aviation. Mondale had obtained a copy leaked to ABC’s science correspondent Jules Bergman. Up to this point Webb had been unaware of the document’s existence, and when responding to Mondale he appeared defensive and unprepared. The experience damaged Webb’s reputation in the press and irreparably affected his relationship with members of NASA management, upon whom he had previously relied without question. Ironically, the Phillips Report had little bearing on the specific causes of the fire, though it did reveal the long-existing tension between NASA and one of its prime contractors.

  Fortunately for Webb and NASA, another figure at the center of the Apollo fire investigation soon garnered far more attention from the television news cameras than the middle-aged Washington bureaucrat in charge of the space agency. With a name, face, and biography already familiar to the public, Frank Borman was the one member of the investigation review board whose every word prompted interest.

  Borman arrived in Washington already anointed an astronaut hero. But on Capitol Hill and in the press, Borman was valued as a direct, articulate witness unafraid to speak his mind. Webb considered Borman the ideal public face of NASA: a humble, serious, hardworking, and patriotic American committed to fulfilling Kennedy
’s mandate. Since joining NASA in 1962, Borman had thought of himself as a soldier in the Cold War, assigned to a new and exploratory field of combat. As they headed to the capitol in the back seat of Webb’s signature chauffeured black Checker, Webb told Borman, “I don’t want you doing anything to try to protect me or NASA. The American people have a right to know exactly the unvarnished truth, and I want you to tell them.”

  Borman detailed what he and the board had discovered. Despite an established system of checks and balances, poor design decisions made by North American had been allowed to slip past NASA’s management safeguards. However, Borman’s faith in the system was not eroded; rather, he was convinced that once the design weaknesses were corrected, a far safer spacecraft would result. And in his most memorable assertion, Borman stated publicly that he would gladly fly the Apollo spacecraft with confidence after all the recommended changes had been made.

  Before the news cameras, Borman projected a mature gravitas that differed from that of other high-profile astronauts. He was neither as ingratiating as John Glenn nor as free-spirited as some of the other Mercury astronauts. When responding to questions, Borman trained his blue eyes on congressmen with a gaze that could be both intimidating and disarmingly transparent. There was never any doubt about the honesty and integrity behind Borman’s words. And, true to Webb’s advice, Borman never hesitated to offer criticism where he thought it was deserved, calling out both NASA and North American for their errors.

  Nothing said on Capitol Hill ultimately proved as persuasive for the future of Apollo as a few words Borman delivered bluntly during a special hearing of the House’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. After asserting unhesitatingly his eagerness to fly the redesigned Apollo, Borman stated, “You are asking us if we have confidence in the spacecraft management, our own training, and…confidence in our leaders. I am embarrassed because it appears to be a party line. The response we have given is the truth. We are servants of the Congress and the people. We are trying to tell you that we are confident in our management, and in our engineering, and in ourselves.” He then addressed the House members from the speakers’ table: “I think the question is really, are you confident in us?”

  Borman had put the House committee on the spot. Previous to that moment, the committee’s chairman had believed the members were prepared to vote to delay the lunar program, perhaps indefinitely. But suddenly everything in the room had changed.

  A West Virginia representative who a few days earlier had called for sweeping changes to NASA’s management now asked for a moment to speak. “Mr. Chairman, I think we ought to end these hearings just as fast as possible and get on with the space program.”

  “Amen” was the chairman’s only response. After a second of silence, the hearing room erupted in spontaneous applause.

  Borman followed up his appearances on Capitol Hill with interviews on the television networks’ Sunday political-discussion programs. Some even wondered if Borman might have a political future in Washington. When he returned to Houston, he was asked by the Manned Spacecraft Center’s director Robert Gilruth to temporarily step away from the astronaut team once again. His work on the review board had proven so valuable that NASA wanted him to oversee the Apollo spacecraft redesign, working with North American in California.

  NASA was now demanding zero-defects perfection from North American, and Borman would be there to make sure they complied. The redesigned spacecraft would include an improved hatch that could be opened from the inside in five seconds. All combustible materials would be eliminated from the cabin, and there would now be an additional emergency oxygen supply system. The spacecraft’s atmospheric environment was changed to transition from a pressurized oxygen/nitrogen mixture while on the launchpad to a pure-oxygen atmosphere when entering space.

  Working with the engineers and designers at North American would take many weeks, but neither Borman nor Gilruth imagined it would consume nearly an entire year.

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  HIS PUBLIC REPUTATION damaged, Webb remained as NASA’s administrator despite newspaper editorials calling for his removal. He had instituted major management changes within NASA and privately demanded North American do likewise. But North American’s CEO refused to comply. Webb had refrained from openly criticizing them during his Capitol Hill testimony, but he leaked word that NASA was considering transferring the Apollo contract to one of a number of other aerospace vendors. North American’s chief knew, however, that if another contractor took over the spacecraft contract at this late date, it would be impossible to achieve the Moon landing before the end of the decade—in fact, it might even mean the Soviets would get there first. After weighing the situation, though, North American’s CEO decided it was wiser to work with NASA than to risk calling Webb’s bluff. He backed down and reluctantly replaced his head of the Apollo project. Webb had once again prevailed.

  The news of the changes at North American made newspaper front pages, and within days the calls for Webb to resign disappeared. But the space agency still had a major image problem with the press and public. During the hearings on Capitol Hill, cynical journalists began referring to NASA’s acronym as “Never A Straight Answer.” Every few months The New York Times published editorials questioning the purpose of the entire Apollo program and Kennedy’s deadline. A NASA official remembers jaded journalists of the time acting as if NASA was nothing more than a big national façade overseen by a “bunch of bums” who “didn’t know what the hell [they] were doing.”

  By mid-1967, the percentage of Americans convinced that putting a man on the Moon was worth the expense had fallen to 43 percent. Few at NASA or in Washington were attempting to revive President Kennedy’s aspirational rhetoric from his Rice University address five years earlier. Yet it continued to reverberate in the popular culture. Filmed shortly after the Apollo fire, a scene from an episode of NBC’s Star Trek is a case in point. Captain Kirk wants to persuade the starship Enterprise’s doubtful Dr. McCoy to consent to a dangerous experiment. Balancing potential perils with possible benefits, Kirk alludes to the bold idealism of the United States in the late 1960s:

  “Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the Moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to….Risk. Risk is our business. That’s what the starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.”

  Even if a majority of Americans no longer supported the Apollo program, prime-time entertainment had no reluctance to do so. Star Trek justified it as a decisive moment in the inevitable march of human progress—rhetorically framed through the historical perspective of a fictional hero three hundred years hence.

  NASA was about to undertake the most complicated and dangerous series of piloted missions ever attempted in the history of spaceflight. Its image weakened, it was unlikely to survive another disaster.

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  A YEAR HAD passed since the last live television broadcast of a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy. Not that long ago, Titan missiles carried a Gemini crew into space nearly every other month. But the Apollo 1 fire had brought about an abrupt pause. The maiden test launch of the Saturn V moon rocket promised to be like nothing anyone had seen before. More than 250 journalists were present at the Cape’s new press site near the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Saturn V had been put together. They were there to witness the most powerful rocket ever constructed and to find out whether the United States could put the recent tragedy aside and move forward.

  On this early morning launch in November, the Apollo 4 command module was unoccupied. And no journalist would be allowed within three miles of the launch site. It was impossible to reliably predict the extent of the damage should the 363-foot-tall rocket explode on liftoff.<
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  Wernher von Braun’s team at the Marshall Space Flight Center had begun working on the Saturn V in January 1960, the same month that John Kennedy announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Had a normal development schedule been followed—with each stage of the rocket tested one at a time in a series of progressive launches—the Saturn V would have taken many more years before it was ready to carry a crew. But George Mueller had persuaded von Braun to test all three live stages together during this first test flight. It was an audacious and risky option that, if successful, would save millions of dollars and eliminate months of additional testing.

  At 7:00 A.M., television audiences tuning in for the Today show and CBS Morning News got a dramatic look into the future as the Saturn began to gradually rise from the launchpad. At that moment the five F-1 engines were consuming fifteen tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene per second, producing energy equal to the combined power of eighty-five Hoover Dams.

  Sitting in the press site, some of the journalists noticed that the corrugated-metal roofing covering the outdoor bleachers was beginning to vibrate, and reporters could feel the force of a concussive shock wave beating against their faces. While describing the launch on CBS, Walter Cronkite and a producer noticed the large window in their broadcast booth was starting to vibrate, and both attempted to keep it from dislodging. With the audio roar of the Saturn’s engines crackling in the background, Cronkite yelled, “This big glass window is shaking! We’re holding it in with our hands! Look at that rocket go!” In the nearby Launch Control Center, NASA engineers seated at their consoles watched as plaster dust from the ceiling fell on their workstations.

  The launch was a magnificent physical display of harnessed chemical power that left those present in awe. The events that swiftly followed were equally spectacular, though they occurred absent any eyewitnesses. Above the Earth’s atmosphere, each of the individual stages of the Saturn V operated precisely as expected. Mueller’s gamble had paid off. In orbit the Saturn’s third stage, the S-IVB, was reignited, an operation necessary when sending a future Apollo spacecraft on a trajectory to the Moon. Then the Apollo service module’s engine was successfully test-fired as well. And finally the command module separated from the service module and reentered the Earth’s atmosphere at thirty-six thousand feet per second, simulating conditions a three-person crew would encounter when returning from a lunar mission.