At the Cape, the main mission simulator was so far behind in incorporating the latest developments that Grissom hung a large lemon from it a few days before the test. And in a December press conference, Grissom had stated that a successful flight would be one in which he and his crew made it back alive. The reporters laughed, thinking he was joking. It wasn’t entirely clear that he was, particularly in view of what he told Al Shepard in private: “This is the worst spacecraft I’ve ever seen.” He told his wife that his crewmates were not spending enough time on the command module—“He thought they should be working instead of playing,” she remembered. But he was careful not to gripe too loudly. “They’ll fire me,” he told his old Gemini 3 crewmate, John Young.
The pressure to get these components finished and shipped to Cape Kennedy was intense, and despite some shoddy workmanship and incomplete inspections, they did. There was just too much involved for the astronauts to stay on top of it all. Grissom gave Slayton and Shepard a long list of problems, and they assured him they’d be fixed before the actual launch. But Go Fever had taken over, and there wasn’t enough time to do things right or fix what needed to be fixed now. NASA had three manned Apollo missions scheduled for 1967 and a total of fifteen Saturn V rockets on order, though it was hoped that a lunar landing would be accomplished by the ninth or tenth launch—and before the end of the decade. Keeping such a tight schedule depended on a good, solid shakedown flight to find all the problems in the command-service module.
Though the actual mission was set for February 21, 1967, there were several important tests scheduled before then. One was a plugs-out test: a simulated full countdown, at the end of which the spacecraft would be switched to internal power, almost identical to actual launch conditions, to test the compatibility of all systems and make sure that the spacecraft could function on internal power alone. It would involve only the command and service modules, no booster, so it would be safe, a routine dress rehearsal that was scheduled to run for about five hours. Inside the cabin, the environment would be 100 percent oxygen, not Earth’s sea-level atmosphere of 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, in order to avoid the bends that nitrogen in the blood could induce. A single-gas atmosphere also eliminated the need for complex plumbing, which was required to maintain the proper mix, and that plumbing’s extra weight. Pure oxygen, though highly flammable, had been used in Mercury and Gemini with no complications.
Wally Schirra and his backup crew had been in the cone-shaped command module two days before performing a similar countdown test, this one plugs-in, using external power with the hatch left open. They had done it at sea-level atmosphere, breathing ambient air, and without spacesuits. That test had become a twenty-three-hour marathon that had ended at three a.m. the previous day. Afterward, Schirra told Grissom that he had a bad feeling about the spacecraft. “You’re going to be in there with full oxygen tomorrow,” he said, “and if you have the same feeling I do, I suggest you get out.”
At about noon on a chilly Friday, January 27, at Cape Kennedy’s launchpad 34, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, in their white flight suits, took the elevator two hundred and twenty feet up to level eight and went across the twenty-foot catwalk to the White Room, a protective enclosure surrounding the command module during installation and checkout. Deke Slayton was with them—he had considered lying down at their feet in the cabin during the test to try to figure out some of the communications problems dogging the command module, but Grissom vetoed the idea. By one p.m. they were strapped into their couches, familiar from hours spent in vacuum-chamber tests in Houston, and Slayton left for the blockhouse, where he would monitor the test. The command-service module sat atop the unfueled Saturn IB booster.
Technicians sealed the three-part entry hatch—first the inner hatch, then the outer hatch, and finally the booster cover cap. The original design had called for a one-piece hatch that would be released by explosive bolts, but when Grissom nearly drowned after splashdown in the Liberty Bell 7, the design had been changed to one that could never be accidentally opened. None of the astronauts liked it, since it eliminated the possibility of an EVA from the command module. A simpler, hinged hatch was in the works, though it wouldn’t be available on Grissom’s Block I version. You needed a wrench to loosen the six bolts on the inner hatch (in simulations, no one had been able to do that in under ninety seconds), and the hatch couldn’t open unless the pressure inside and out was equal. The cabin was pressurized to 16.7 pounds per square inch, slightly higher than sea-level atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch.
The crew sat three abreast, their shoulders almost touching: Grissom on the left in the commander’s seat, senior pilot White in the middle, and pilot Chaffee on the right. Above them and in front of them were multiple gauges, switches, dials, lights, and toggles.
The crewmates had been at the Cape all week, but they’d spent the previous Sunday night with their families. Grissom and his wife had discussed the big party scheduled for all the astronauts and their wives for the day after the launch, Saturday, back in Houston. One of the last things he’d done was pluck a lemon from the tree in his backyard for the simulator. The crew hoped to finish this plugs-out test—and a practice emergency egress that Grissom had insisted on—at a reasonable time so they could fly their T-38s back to Houston, get a good night’s sleep in their own homes, and try to let some steam off at the party.
But the command module wasn’t cooperating. The astronauts slowly worked their way through the preflight checklist and waited through several holds while the ground crew labored to fix a radio glitch; constant static marred communication between Mission Control and the spacecraft. After Grissom had to repeat himself several times to be understood, his frustration boiled over: “I said, Jesus Christ, if we can’t communicate across three miles, how the hell are we going to communicate when we’re on the moon?”
The day wore on. At 4:00 p.m., one shift of technicians left and another came on. At 5:40 p.m., near sunset, another hold was called at T minus ten minutes to deal with one more communications problem before the simulated liftoff, when the plugs would be pulled. This, everyone hoped, would be the final delay. After it, they could proceed with the last ten minutes, finish it up, get through the emergency-egress practice—the three astronauts would take the gantry’s high-speed elevator down to a fireproof truck waiting at the base of the pad—and get out of there. Someone suggested that the test be postponed, but that was overruled. Redoing the test would cost more time, and time was something they didn’t have.
A few seconds before 6:31 p.m., as the crew members once more ran through their checklist, there was a slight surge in voltage.
Nine seconds later, one of the crew yelled, “Hey!”
A moment passed, then a voice—maybe White’s—rang out: “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”
Seven seconds of silence followed. Then a garbled transmission, possibly from Chaffee: “We’ve got a bad fire—let’s get out…we’re burning up.”
There was a final howl of pain, and nothing more.
The twenty-seven men of the pad rescue team rushed across the catwalk. Fourteen seconds after the first shout of alarm, the command module’s hull ruptured, spewing flames and gases. The shock wave knocked them down, and some of them ran across the catwalk to the elevator, believing that the command module had exploded or was about to. Several grabbed fire extinguishers, ran to the White Room, and struggled to open the module’s hatch, but the heat and smoke drove many of them back. They returned moments later, some with gas masks. While the pad leader called for firefighters and ambulances, five men took turns with a hatch-removal tool, working by touch in the dense, dark smoke and making several trips in and out of the White Room to breathe. About five minutes after the first report of fire, they finally got all three hatches open, but by then it was too late. The fire had lasted just twenty-five seconds, but the three astronauts were gone, asphyxiated by the toxic gases in the cabin. There was no fire extinguisher inside.<
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A quarter of a mile away, in the concrete blockhouse, Deke Slayton, Grissom’s best friend, was sitting next to rookie astronaut Stu Roosa, the CapCom, and talking to Rocco Petrone, the no-nonsense director of launch operations at Cape Kennedy. Slayton jumped up from his seat when he heard the first shout. He and everyone else there turned to the video monitors and watched helplessly as flames in the spacecraft built to a white glare and then subsided. Slayton thought he saw a movement in the cabin. A few seconds later, they heard someone at the launchpad yell for a doctor. Slayton and two physicians rushed to the pad, rode the elevator up to level eight, and hurried into the White Room, where the hatch was already open. When Slayton peered in, he saw a blanket of black ash covering everything. “It looks like the inside of a furnace,” he said; the Washington Post used those words as a headline a few days later.
It would be determined later that a spark below and to the left of Grissom’s couch—probably a short in a bundle of wires somewhere in the many miles of wiring in the command-service module—had reached something flammable and ignited a fire that had raged through the cabin, burning anything and everything in its path: belts and straps, nylon netting, spacesuits, helmet covers, oxygen hoses, aluminum coolant tubes, and the many Velcro fasteners and patches scattered everywhere. The pure oxygen was almost instantly replaced by carbon monoxide and toxic black smoke that invaded the crew’s oxygen lines. The official cause of death was suffocation, although the men had also suffered serious but not life-threatening burns. It was later estimated that the interior temperature reached at least twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit—the melting point of stainless steel, found melted inside.
In the last seconds before he died, Grissom had moved out of his seat, presumably to try to help White open the hatch bolts. The heat and the melted material had welded the astronauts to various parts of the cabin and, for Grissom and White, to each other. When Slayton looked inside the blackened shell, he couldn’t tell which head belonged to which body. After all the doctors, firemen, and other emergency personnel had arrived, the scene was extensively photographed, inside and out, to aid in the forthcoming investigation. At about 12:30 a.m., they began removing the bodies; it would take ninety minutes to complete the job. Twenty-seven pad technicians were taken to the hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.
Sometime later, after the escape rocket was disarmed, Slayton left for his office. As word of the tragedy spread through NASA’s ranks, Deke and Chuck Friedlander, the gregarious chief of the astronaut support office at Cape Kennedy, spent hours calling everyone who needed to know. Deke alerted astronauts in the Houston area and gave them a tough assignment: They or their wives were to get over to the Grissom, White, and Chaffee homes as quickly as possible to tell the families what had happened before they heard it on the news or got calls from inquiring reporters. Michael Collins had the task of driving over to Nassau Bay to tell Martha Chaffee. A few astronaut wives had arrived at her house earlier but hadn’t told her; when she saw Collins arrive, she knew. She and Collins retreated to a back bedroom to discuss it out of earshot of the children. When Martha Chaffee told her eight-year-old daughter, Sheryl, that she wouldn’t be seeing her father again, Sheryl thought her parents were getting divorced. Her mother explained that there had been a fire and that her father was dead. Then her mother gave her a necklace with two hearts that he had planned to take up to space with him.
Jo Schirra walked over to the Grissom house through a hole in the backyard fence the families shared (they had deliberately made the hole so they could visit without alerting newsmen or sightseers in front). Another neighbor, whose husband was a NASA engineer, was already there—her husband had told her to go over and have a drink with Betty, but he didn’t tell her why. As soon as she saw Jo’s face, Betty Grissom knew it was bad. Jo told her there had been an accident and that Gus had been injured, though she said she didn’t know how badly. A few minutes later, when a black NASA car pulled up outside, Betty knew. Her two sons—Mark, thirteen, and Scott, sixteen—were in their rooms. She went to tell them. Neither one cried. She didn’t either.
Jan Armstrong, who lived next door to the Whites, was standing in their driveway when thirteen-year-old Ed White III rode up on his bike. Ed and his ten-year-old sister, Bonnie, were sent to another neighbor’s house. Astronaut Bill Anders, who lived three blocks away, soon arrived to tell Pat White of her husband’s death. She became distraught. Other families—the Bormans, the Staffords—showed up to offer support.
About two a.m. at Cape Kennedy, Friedlander picked up a ringing phone. It was Lowell Grissom, Gus’s brother. He was calling from his parents’ house. No one from NASA had phoned to tell them—Betty had. Friedlander handed the phone to Deke, who talked to Lowell for a few minutes. Slayton also called Tom Stafford and his crew, who were preparing for the second manned Apollo flight. They and their backups were running tests on their Block I spacecraft at the North American Aviation plant in California. Slayton told them all to get back to Houston. There would be no further testing for a while.
Earlier in the day, five astronauts—Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Dick Gordon—had spent the afternoon at the White House with Bob Gilruth, President Johnson, and other dignitaries to witness the signing of a space treaty outlawing the militarization of space and forbidding the staking of a land claim on the moon or any other heavenly body. The treaty was signed simultaneously in London and Moscow. Afterward, Carpenter took a taxi straight to the airport, but the others went to their hotel, the Georgetown Inn, where they were told of the accident. Gilruth joined them a short time later. The men gathered in a private suite and tried to eat dinner, then stayed up late into the night with a bottle of Scotch, discussing what they thought had happened at the Cape and pondering the future of Apollo. They wondered whether they would make Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline or if the manned space program would continue at all. There was also anger at NASA for accepting such a flawed spacecraft from the contractor.
Nine hundred miles away from the Cape, at Mission Control in Houston, John Hodge and a roomful of flight controllers had been monitoring the countdown through voice and radio only. When several of them suddenly lost telemetry, heard something about a fire, then lost communications with the Cape, it was unclear what was happening, but they knew it wasn’t good. Hodge called Kraft from his office, and they soon found out.
Gene Kranz had been at home, getting ready to go out with his wife, when his next-door neighbor, a NASA branch chief, knocked on his door and told him of the fire. He raced back to the MSC, but there was nothing he or anyone there could do. One flight controller broke down in the parking lot outside the control center, sobbing and saying, “It’s horrible! It’s horrible!” A few others walked across the highway to the Holiday Inn bar. Kranz and most of the others gathered at the Singing Wheel, the two-story, barnlike building a mile or so west of the MSC that had become the favorite watering hole for Mission Control. The proprietor, Nelson Bland, sent out all the other customers. The evening wore on and they ordered pitcher after pitcher of Lone Star beer and mourned the astronauts; eventually, wives came in looking for husbands and congregated in a back room.
Near midnight at Cape Kennedy, a weary and numb Slayton made the last of many phone calls. Friedlander pulled out a fifth of Scotch from a locked cabinet. He and Slayton sipped the whiskey until four in the morning. “It was,” Slayton remembered, “a bad day. Worst I ever had.”
After sixteen manned missions in which twenty-six astronauts had returned to Earth safely, three had died in a spacecraft on the launchpad during a routine test, and in a fire—the greatest fear of every pilot. The death toll could have been worse; if the flames had reached the solid fuel of the escape tower rocket atop the command module, many more people might have perished. They might well have lost everyone on that level of the gantry, something the technicians were quite aware of while fighting to get the hatch open. And earlier in the day, not only Slayto
n but Joe Shea had considered joining the crew—lying on the floor beneath them—to see the problems inside the spacecraft firsthand.
After the success and safety of the Mercury program and the Gemini program, the American public had forgotten how dangerous spaceflight was. The fire was a deadly reminder that men could die, and without even leaving Earth. Astronauts had perished previously in air crashes, but that was different.
The fire would change everything in NASA. “After this, nothing would be the same again,” Kranz remembered later.
The day after the fire, NASA announced the formation of a nine-person accident investigation board to be chaired by the head of Langley Research Center, Floyd Thompson. The board also included Max Faget, three other NASA managers, and one astronaut, Frank Borman, chosen by Gilruth and Slayton for his unwavering integrity and thoroughness. Borman flew to Cape Kennedy the day after the accident. After viewing the charred insides of the Apollo command module, even a straight arrow like Borman was shaken to the point of imbibing. That night he, Slayton, and Faget went out to a nightclub, where they drank several toasts to Grissom, White, and Chaffee, then had several drinks more. At some point, Faget began doing handstands while a go-go dancer gyrated a few feet from him. They ended the evening by throwing their glasses against a wall—a fighter pilot’s tribute that a submariner like Faget could understand.
A few months before the Apollo 204 fire, Grissom’s parents had come from Indiana to visit. Gus asked Chuck Friedlander to give them a tour of Cape Kennedy. Since Gus’s mother was so worried about this mission, Gus had asked Friedlander ahead of time to make sure he pointed out all the safety features along the way. Friedlander took Gus’s parents up the elevator to level eight and walked them over to the command module. Mrs. Grissom, who had glasses and short, wavy gray hair, turned to him and asked, “Can I touch it for luck?” Friedlander held her around the waist while she reached out and put her hand on the command module. For the rest of his life, Friedlander would wonder how often she thought of that moment.
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