III.
OUT
Chapter Nine
Inferno
We just became anesthetized by success.
Congressman Olin Teague
Gus Grissom was pleased at being selected to command the first Apollo mission; making the first flight of a brand-new craft was every test pilot’s desire, what he lived for. But Grissom wasn’t surprised. Of course it would be a Mercury astronaut, and there weren’t many of them left in the program. John Glenn had retired, and after his canceled Senate run, he was now an executive with Royal Crown Cola. Scott Carpenter had elected not to get involved in Gemini; instead, he’d developed a fascination with underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, then requested detached duty to become involved with a navy experiment called Sealab. He’d broken an arm in a motorcycle accident—a grounding injury that resulted in his losing some mobility after surgery—and after that, it was likely only a matter of time before he would officially resign from the astronaut corps. Gordon Cooper was still annoying the NASA brass despite his superb handling of two compromised missions, and he wouldn’t be on anyone’s list for a shakedown flight. Deke Slayton and Al Shepard were both still grounded for medical reasons.
That left two of the original Mercury Seven: Wally Schirra and Gus Grissom. And since Gus had flown before Wally in both Mercury and Gemini and since Wally preferred a later flight in a program, the choice seemed obvious. But Gus hadn’t taken any chances. He was careful not to irritate any of his NASA bosses, and that extended to Chris Kraft. “I just close my eyes and kiss his ass,” Grissom told Rene Carpenter one day while relaxing poolside at an astronaut party at Schirra’s house. Kraft had gone after him, he told her, when the hatch problem occurred on his Mercury mission.
The Apollo spacecraft Grissom would command was the Block I, a prototype version of the craft that would ultimately journey to the moon and land men there: the more sophisticated Block II. The Block I was missing several features necessary for that mission—for instance, the docking tunnel that astronauts would use to move into the lunar module, an advanced hatch, and much more. The Block I booster rocket would also be different: the shorter, less powerful Saturn IB, which provided only enough thrust to boost an Apollo spacecraft into Earth orbit. Grissom’s flight would be a shakedown cruise to check out every one of Apollo’s advanced systems, from the booster and the spacecraft to launch operations, Mission Control, and others. Grissom, an engineering perfectionist, was looking forward to an open-ended mission that could last up to fourteen days.
But there were complications.
The launch was originally set for November 1966, the same month as the last Gemini flight. The date slipped to January 1967, then February 21, 1967. Developmental delays had plagued both spacecraft and rocket—according to Joseph Shea, the manager of the Apollo program in Houston, by the time the command-service module was accepted by NASA, in December of 1966, it had had approximately twenty thousand test failures. Test failures were a part of the process, but the endless fixes meant long delays, missed delivery dates, and, in some cases, shipments to Cape Kennedy of mediocre work that would have been unacceptable in another time. The idea was just to get it there and get NASA to accept it; problems would be handled later, during the craft’s checkout process. Any modifications—and there were many—meant extensive redesigning, and that meant more difficulty meeting the lofty but essential safety and reliability standards. The list of things that could result in death for a crew was a long one.
The LM, especially, was behind schedule. No one at Grumman, one of America’s finest and most successful aircraft manufacturers, had fully realized the difficulty of the job the firm had taken on. In 1959, the company’s Mercury design had been chosen as the best of eleven entries, but the contract had gone to runner-up McDonnell; Grumman had been judged too busy with other military aircraft commitments. But the firm’s engineers had been studying lunar-orbit rendezvous long before NASA had selected that mode in July 1962—in May 1960, Grumman representatives had had a meeting with Bob Gilruth, Max Faget, and James Chamberlin about a potential lunar lander—and their diligence helped win them the coveted LM contract. Grumman’s design, like the other contractors’ in the running, had been based on general specifications provided by Faget’s office. But the company hadn’t realized that NASA expected it to redefine and redesign the LM “item by item.”
That process took much longer than anyone there had expected. The engineers had to think not only outside the box but beyond the immutable laws of aerodynamics underpinning every aircraft produced at their Long Island plant, since this vehicle would fly only in the vacuum of space and never feel the lightest breeze. That and other requirements meant constant and costly redesigns. And in addition to building a spacecraft that could do all the things asked of it in a vacuum and in low- or no-gravity, the engineers had to watch another important issue: weight. NASA offered a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus for every pound eliminated, but the ounces came off grudgingly, through hollowed-out joints, single window panels, and aluminum cabin walls milled to a hundredth of an inch thick. That barely met the minimum structural strength needed, and the fragile result could easily be damaged. Assembly and testing required complicated schemes that were costly and time-consuming and could only approximate, never duplicate, true operational conditions. Seats in the vehicle were deemed unnecessary, since the flight would be short and in one-sixth gravity; the two astronauts would stand like trolley motormen, tethers holding them in place. And combustion problems continued to plague the ascent engine, which would launch the astronauts off the lunar surface. It would have no backup, so it had to be as close to 100 percent reliable as possible.
Just as important was the LM’s descent engine, which required something not even invented yet: a throttleable rocket motor. Rocket engines were ignited and remained at constant thrust until turned off. The astronauts flying the LM would need to throttle the engine over its full range of thrust while dropping to the lunar surface and moving over it to find a smooth landing spot among the moon’s boulders and craters. That component had run into serious problems during testing, problems that hadn’t been solved and wouldn’t be for months. The lunar module was nowhere near ready, and it would not be involved in this test.
The Apollo hardware had been in development since 1961, even before NASA knew how they would get to the moon. That these components would help them get there had been a leap of faith on its own; whatever the mode, it would involve the Saturn booster at von Braun’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the command and service modules at North American Aviation, and the lunar module at Grumman. By 1966, twenty thousand contractors were working frantically to keep pace with NASA’s unforgiving schedule, and often failing.
The funding, fortunately, was not lacking. Years earlier, NASA administrator Jim Webb had made sure to overestimate the Apollo budget when he presented it to Congress, and since then he’d done a hell of a job keeping the program well funded and unbothered. That hadn’t prevented cost overruns and delays in every aspect of the program due to the sheer size of the undertaking, and it was under more pressure and criticism than ever before. Justification had also become a problem. The United States had clearly surpassed the USSR in manned space accomplishments, and besides, the Soviets hadn’t launched a man or woman into space in almost two years, not since Alexei Leonov had performed the first EVA. Nikita Khrushchev and the occasional Russian scientist had claimed a lunar landing would be too expensive and too dangerous, and that position was seconded by a prominent British astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell, who, after an extended July 1963 visit to the USSR and its observatories, had announced that a platform in Earth orbit, not a moon landing, was now the focus of the Soviet space program. Still, maybe they were planning to put their own man on the moon, or around it, this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution. After all, the Soviets liked to link their space ostentations to anniversaries for extra punch in the prestige area.
Few at
NASA believed the Soviets’ claims that they weren’t trying to reach the moon. On a wall at MSC was a large sheet of paper displaying several dates that represented the next launch window for a manned Zond; the Soviets had been sending an unmanned version of the small probe into space, with mixed results. And there were clues pointing to a Soviet moon-landing attempt. In 1965, after Leonov’s EVA, the Soviet press reported that his spacesuit was a prototype for one to be used on the lunar surface. And CIA analysts studying spy-satellite photographs of construction at the Baikonur cosmodrome concluded that a huge new booster was being prepared, one that could only be aiming for the moon. Jim Webb and other NASA officials had conceded that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the USSR would reach the moon first—“a worldwide propaganda disgrace,” Missiles and Rockets called that possibility. The magazine proposed a solution: Change the national goal to an even more impressive target in space before a manned lunar landing. “Then,” its editors suggested, “if the Russians were the first to arrive on the Moon, we would be in a position to gracefully acknowledge their achievement while pointing out that to us the Moon was but a way-station en route to a more distant objective.” There was no official response from NASA.
No one in the West knew it, but the Russians had, in fact, run out of space spectaculars for the moment. Sergei Korolev had been pulling rabbits out of his ushanka fur hat for years to satisfy the demands of his country’s political leaders. The USSR might have committed to a lunar landing, but the corresponding budgets were, as always, threadbare and consisted of more than two dozen different programs within a program, or “design bureaus.” Each one was dedicated to a specific task—communications satellites, earth-observation satellites, military missiles, interplanetary probes, and more—and they were all fighting for those meager rubles. Operating on the theory that competition would bring out the best ideas, administrators sometimes assigned two or more design bureaus to the same task. One of Korolev’s rivals, engineer/designer Vladimir Chelomey, was also working on a moon rocket.
Korolev had suffered from heart and kidney problems for a long time, the result of his Gulag stay. After he had a heart attack in December 1960, doctors had warned him that if he didn’t reduce his workload, he would face an early death. Hospital visits for gallbladder issues, intestinal bleeding, and more heart problems followed in the next few years, but he continued to work eighteen hours a day, six days a week. Early in January 1966, he was admitted to a Moscow hospital for what was considered routine surgery to remove benign polyps in his large intestine.
In his absence, Vasily Mishin, a competent engineer and Korolev’s deputy, assumed control of the program. A few days later, Mishin and his design bureau were severely criticized in a board meeting. He decided to resign. Only a phone call from Korolev, who had heard about the matter, persuaded him not to. “Just wait till I get back from the hospital,” the Chief Designer told him, “and we’ll decide who is right and who is wrong.”
Korolev would never get the chance to discuss it. On January 14, 1966, while doctors were removing the polyps, they found a large, cancerous tumor in his abdomen. Complications ensued, including severe hemorrhaging, and he died that night, two days after his fifty-ninth birthday. His cremated ashes were interred in a niche in the Kremlin Wall, the highest honor for a Soviet hero and a deserving one for the guiding force behind the Soviet space program.
Korolev’s shoes proved too big for Mishin to fill. He did not have Korolev’s genius for finding compromise solutions to large-scale problems, or his gift for leadership, or his ability to deal with the Soviet bureaucracy, and the deeply flawed moon rocket program he inherited was far too much of a challenge, as it might have been even for Korolev. Mishin would also find Leonid Brezhnev’s regime more repressive and difficult to work with and less interested in grandiose space plans that had no direct impact on Soviet defense than Khrushchev’s had been. (In October 1965, the cosmonaut corps had sent a letter to Brezhnev complaining of the lack of support for Russia’s manned space program. They received no answer.)
In his obituary, published in Pravda with a photograph two days after his death, Korolev was identified by the title Chief Designer for the first time; his death was blamed on a “long and fatal illness.” It would be decades before his importance to Soviet manned spaceflight was fully appreciated inside and outside Russia.
In addition to the ongoing (but decidedly lessened) Soviet threat, Americans had serious matters closer to home to worry about. The country had changed dramatically since those halcyon years of the late fifties when the nation was flush from the postwar industrial boom and free of major social disturbances. Those seemingly happy days had hidden underlying stresses that blew up in the sixties, and by 1966, deadly race riots rooted in poverty and inequality were frequent, and protests against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War were escalating.
Despite the increased criticism and apathy toward it, the Apollo program continued, though NASA’s budget, adjusted for inflation, was about to start shrinking. It was still massive—for 1966, it was 4.4 percent of the federal budget—but the message from Congress appeared mixed; they were essentially saying, Go ahead and land on the moon, but don’t count on another program of equal size after that. More than anything, what kept NASA going was its commitment to a beloved leader cut down in his prime less than three years into his administration, a president who had been indifferent to the space effort at first but who had come to embrace it, at first for political purposes, then with genuine enthusiasm. His death had only strengthened that promise, and the people of NASA and others in government would keep it, despite the naysayers in Congress and the scientific community who said that the dangers of manned spaceflight outweighed its benefits and that machines and robots could do the same things as their human counterparts and more—and for a lot less money.
By late 1966, Go Fever had taken hold at both NASA and the factories of its thousands of contractors. The rush was on to get everything done as quickly as possible, and that meant overlooking potential small issues, since dealing with them might lead to missed delivery dates. The end of the race was in sight. And though Grissom was well aware of the command module’s problems, he was caught up in Go Fever too. Because if this flight went well and the next few did also, he was convinced he’d be the first choice to land on the moon. After all, NASA’s upper management, which included Slayton and Kraft, believed that it should be a Mercury astronaut if at all possible, and he was the only one left that they trusted to get the job done right. Following his successful Gemini flight, he felt he’d redeemed himself after the bad ending of his Mercury mission, and his relationship with the press had much improved; from then on, one newsman said, he was “a reporter’s delight.” If he and his crew could just get through these tests and NASA could get those fixes done on his spacecraft, they’d be all right.
Grissom’s crewmates were thirty-six-year-old Ed White, the first American spacewalker and already a national hero, and thirty-one-year-old Roger Chaffee, a member of the 1963 group of astronauts. White had recently told his father, who had been a barnstorming pilot in the thirties, that his goal was to make the first flight to the moon. Chaffee, though he hadn’t flown in Gemini, was highly regarded; he was a former navy pilot of fighter jets and spy planes—he had flown reconnaissance missions over Cuba during the missile crisis in October 1962—and a perfectionist as an engineer. Chaffee and Grissom were both Purdue graduates, and the two had become close—Chaffee had even picked up some of Grissom’s habits, like salting his speech with an occasional profanity. Gus, who would soon turn forty-one, was fond of the young pilot and referred to him as “a really great boy.”
Grissom hadn’t been able to ride herd on the Apollo spacecraft from its earliest manufacturing stages as he’d done with Gemini. Because the two programs were developed concurrently, other astronauts had been involved in the early assembly and testing of the command-service module at North American Aviation’s plant in Downey, California, a
nd they hadn’t been allowed the input Grissom had with Gemini. To make matters worse, the contractor had been unwilling to share data and drawings with NASA flight controllers and astronauts. But Grissom was doing his best to catch up, and he wasn’t happy about how things were going. None of the Apollo components was progressing smoothly or on schedule.
In fact, if the module had been a horse, “they would have shot it sometime in 1966, perhaps as early as 1965,” said Walt Williams, the former Mercury operations director. What would be Grissom’s craft, AS-204—labeled as such because it was Apollo-Saturn, launched into space by the fourth booster produced in the second Saturn series, the Saturn IB—was particularly rife with problems, from its communications and propulsion to its environmental systems and beyond. This resulted in an unruly accumulation of electrical wiring—there was some twenty miles of it in the spacecraft—that could barely be squeezed in. Apollo was several orders of magnitude more complex than Gemini, and everyone was beginning to find out what that meant for schedules.
Slayton had assigned Grissom the first Apollo flight soon after Gus’s March 1965 Gemini 3 mission. Gus and his crewmates began spending weeks away from home, either at North American Aviation’s factory in California or at Grumman’s on Long Island, though most of their time was spent at the former—Jim McDivitt, who was off Gemini 4 in early June, had been assigned to the LM, and Grumman was in charge of that. They spent long days attending countless meetings, monitoring design and manufacturing reviews, making inspections, and testing the spacecraft, which mostly meant sitting in it for hours on end while reporting design and operational flaws to one or more engineers or technicians. Some North American Aviation engineers had dubbed Grissom “the Nitpicker” for his thoroughness. Grissom’s home life and that of his crewmates and their backups consisted largely of spending a single weekend night with their families to remind their kids that they had fathers and their wives that they had husbands.
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