By November 1967, it was clear that Congress had lost all of its early enthusiasm for spaceflight, manned or unmanned. The country was waging a costly, bloody, unpopular war in Vietnam. Young U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and few Americans understood what exactly they were dying for. And at home, things were chaotic—there were campus protests over the war that climaxed in a one-hundred-thousand-strong march on Washington, race riots in cities across America that included twenty-six dead in Newark and forty-three dead in Detroit, and multiple problems with the president’s well-meaning but expensive and inefficiently administered Great Society programs. The Apollo 1 fire had been the last straw for Congress. The president refused to increase taxes, so he looked to the space program to provide relief. NASA’s 1968 budget had been slashed by $420 million. Virtually every program except Apollo was put on hold, and that included planetary probes such as the ambitious Project Voyager, originally scheduled to launch in 1973 and land a life-detection capsule on Mars. (The successful Viking program would grow out of Project Voyager, and the Voyager name would be given to a new deep-space probe launched a decade later.)
A lot was riding on the successful flight of this new vehicle and its millions of functional parts, more than just fulfilling Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade directive. If NASA failed to meet its self-imposed deadline, it would be a black eye for American political commitment, technological competence, and prestige. Thousands of NASA employees would be furloughed or fired, and the agency’s centers would be put on standby status. Another disaster would not only ruin any chance of meeting Kennedy’s deadline but probably finish Apollo for good.
At exactly 7:00 a.m., on November 9, 1967, ignition occurred, and seconds later the monster rocket began to slowly lift off pad 39A. The noise was louder and the sound pressure it generated was greater than anyone there had ever experienced. As it continued higher and then arced to the southeast, an eight-hundred-foot-long flame spewed from the first stage. Three orbits and almost nine hours later, the command module floated down into the Pacific near Midway Island. The mission was deemed a complete success. It had achieved every one of its goals, including a simulated lunar trajectory that had taken the spacecraft eleven thousand miles into space and resulted in a plunge into the atmosphere at 24,900 miles per hour. The big service propulsion system (SPS) engine in the rear of the service module did its job and propelled the spacecraft back down to Earth, and the guidance system navigated it through precise reentry maneuvers. The Saturn V worked—and so had Mueller’s daring all-up approach. NASA might still be able to make Kennedy’s deadline.
Chapter Eleven
Phoenix and Earthrise
To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together.
Archibald MacLeish
The first unmanned test flight of the Saturn V had been a resounding success. The second, made on April 4, 1968, and intended to reaffirm the booster’s reliability, was close to a disaster. The first stage had pogo problems similar to the Titan’s—it vibrated badly. The second stage, complicated by engine malfunctions, pogoed even worse, and had there been any astronauts aboard, they might have been shaken into unconsciousness, or even to death. The third stage ignited, then shut down and failed to reignite. Only skillful work by Gene Kranz’s Mission Control team prevented all three stages from busting into pieces; they managed to get the command-service module into orbit and through a successful reentry and splashdown.
Wernher von Braun and his team leaders observed the launch from the firing room a safe distance away. They returned to Huntsville with a massive diagnostic challenge ahead of them. Teams immediately began working around the clock, seven days a week, to pinpoint the problems and correct them. The diagnosis took twenty days. Von Braun reassured his NASA bosses that the issues were minor—for instance, one rocket engine quit because of a simple human mistake in wiring—and would be fixed.
NASA accepted the Apollo 7 spacecraft from North American Aviation in May 1968 and began strict checkout tests. When Schirra and his crew flew it into space, it would be a different, and more reliable, animal.
By the scheduled launch date in October, Schirra’s crew had trained for more than a year, including spending almost six hundred hours together in the command-module simulator with its 725 manual controls arrayed before, beside, and above them. They were ready for the real thing.
A few weeks before the flight, Schirra announced that he would retire after it. By 1968, thirty-six thousand people worked directly for NASA, and it was fast becoming a bureaucracy; Schirra thought it was overly influenced by politics and special interests, and he wanted out. Besides, it seemed highly unlikely that he, or anyone, would get to command two missions in the Apollo program. There were too many good, experienced astronauts now, and too few seats, and Schirra felt that at the age of forty-five, he had about outlived his usefulness to the agency.
“Three Astronauts Ready to Face Challenge Three Others Died For” ran the Miami Herald headline before the launch. Von Braun was at the Cape, and in interviews he brought up the Russian threat, pointing out the “spectacular performance” of Zond 5 and rating Russia’s chances of a circumlunar flight before Christmas as better than America’s. Landing a man on the moon, he said, would be “a photo finish.”
The USSR had launched Zond 5 less than three weeks earlier, on September 22. Its Proton booster, with roughly the same thrust as the Saturn IB, was capable of sending a cosmonaut or two around the moon on a free-return trajectory but not actually orbiting it, and its Soyuz spacecraft—much improved since Vladimir Komarov’s death in April 1967—was large enough to transport them there. Soviet scientists had described the Zond program’s mission as “testing new systems in distant regions of extraterrestrial space,” and four previous unmanned Zonds had been sent out as probes to Mars, Venus, and the moon, but few in the West believed that was Zond 5’s only purpose—especially when U.S. tracking ships had picked up a Russian voice issuing from the spacecraft reeling off instrument readings. It soon became clear that it was only a recording. The spacecraft splashed down safely in the Indian Ocean—the Soviets’ first water landing—after seven days in space and a loop around the moon. A month later, the Soviets announced that its biological payload of flies, worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and two tortoises had been recovered and was safe and sound, though the turtles had lost 10 percent of their body weight. Many observers suspected a manned Zond was next, perhaps by the end of the year. And even if the craft just made a loop around the moon, the USSR could claim that it had won the space race—after all, the Russians had never committed publicly to a lunar landing the way the Americans had. In any case, it would take at least some of the starch out of a U.S. landing.
And there was also the looming specter of Webb’s Giant, the large Soviet booster Jim Webb continued to use as a threat against budget cuts in congressional hearings. He didn’t provide specifics, since his information was top secret. The previous December, CIA reconnaissance satellites had produced the first photos of the rocket, and it was indeed the monster that analysts had expected. The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates predicted the earliest Soviet lunar landing in mid- to late 1969—about the same time as NASA’s planned landing.
On September 16, 1968, a few weeks prior to the Apollo 7 launch, Webb made a visit to the White House to discuss the Russian space threat and NASA’s future. President Johnson, dismayed by the widespread animosity toward him that the Vietnam War had engendered, had already decided he wouldn’t run again in November. Webb had always planned to leave the agency when Johnson left office—he felt NASA needed to be depoliticized, and his departure would be a good way to start. Webb suggested his new deputy, Thomas Paine, as his successor and hoped he would be acceptable to the next president, whether he was Republican or Democrat. Johnson agreed on Paine, and to Webb’s astonishment, he insisted on making the announcement about Webb’s retirement, which
would go into effect in three weeks, that afternoon. The president liked and admired Webb, who had served him loyally, and the reason for his decision to move up Webb’s resignation date, four months ahead of the new administration, would remain a mystery.
Webb’s early resignation took everyone by surprise, and many in NASA had their own opinions of why he was leaving. Some thought it was the fire and the extensive grilling he had received over it in the congressional hearings. Besides having to defend the agency ad nauseam, he’d been confronted with that damaging internal report he’d known nothing about. Some thought the public embarrassment had knocked the wind out of him…or maybe he just didn’t want the responsibility of another tragedy. “He was never the same after the fire,” remembered Bob Gilruth.
Thomas Paine would prove himself to be a more than capable administrator. But Jim Webb, with his Washington insider’s knowledge and experience and his willingness to fight tooth and nail on the Hill for NASA, would be missed.
On the morning of October 11, 1968, four days after his official resignation, Webb breakfasted with Deke Slayton, the Apollo 7 crew, and a few other NASA officials. As the astronauts ate the traditional steak and eggs, technicians were pumping super-cold liquid oxygen and hydrogen into the booster’s tanks. At 11:03 a.m., Webb would watch his first manned launch as Apollo 7 blasted into space twenty months after the scheduled liftoff of Grissom’s Apollo 204. Pad leader Guenter Wendt was the last person the crew saw before they were sealed into their new, improved command module.
The flight went smoothly from a technological standpoint. The mission experienced only minor hardware problems, mostly glitches in the electrical system, and Apollo’s every system was thoroughly tested during the eleven days the spacecraft was in Earth orbit. On this manned flight, unlike the previous sixteen, it was not the rocket thrusters or rendezvous radars that were balky but the crew members.
It started before the launch, when Schirra had objected to the number of biomedical sensors the doctors were attaching to him; Slayton overruled him. On the second day in orbit, Schirra developed a severe head cold. The nature of weightlessness made it difficult for him to clear his sinuses—drainage, after all, depends on gravity—and decongestant tablets didn’t seem to help much. The cold, his unhappiness over NASA’s decision to placate the American taxpayers with regular live transmissions from the crew, and the plethora of experiments planned, some of them dreamed up during the flight—all these contributed to his irascibility. A naval officer, Schirra, began exhibiting more of his uncooperative “I’m captain of this ship” attitude. Whether it was rejecting suggested experiments and insulting their originators (“I wish you would find out the idiot’s name who thought up this test. I want to talk to him personally when I get back down”) or just complaining (“I’ve had it up to here today”), Schirra set a surly tone that never completely disappeared during the flight. He seemed oblivious to the fact that the information on his ship’s screens and gauges was just a fraction of the amount of data Mission Control had, and important decisions depended on it.
On the second day out, Schirra refused to go through with a scheduled TV transmission, meant to be the first live broadcast from space, “without any further discussion”—even after Slayton, acting as CapCom, pleaded with him just to turn the TV switch on. When he and his crew finally went on air in glorious black-and-white the next day and then six more times during the eleven-day flight, Schirra turned the charm back on, at least temporarily. From the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything, read a card opening the show, and all three crew members became ebullient tour guides during the seven- to nine-minute broadcasts. “The Wally, Walt, and Donn Show” was a big hit with viewers, and after the astronauts returned, each of them was presented with a special Emmy Award.
It played well on TV, but Chris Kraft gave the mission a different name: the Wally Schirra Bitch Circus. Some of the flight controllers half joked about purposely landing the spacecraft in the middle of a hurricane swirling near Hawaii. Years later, flight director Gene Kranz—who had claimed Schirra was one of his favorite astronauts to work with—reported that there wasn’t anyone in Mission Control who didn’t want to “pull the plug on Wally Schirra and leave him to circle the Earth on his own there without communications for a while.”
The normally easygoing Eisele acquired not only Schirra’s cold, though a less severe one, but also his attitude. On an open microphone, he criticized a test, saying that he wanted “to talk to the man, or whoever he was, that thought up that little gem.” That man turned out to be flight director Glynn Lunney, who was not amused. Eisele also criticized at length a Mission Control error with the onboard computer that forced a system restart—an understandable response but one that could have been handled without the ad hominem remark “Somebody down there screwed up royally.”
Cunningham, a pugnacious ex-Marine fighter pilot turned scientist, never caught their colds and wasn’t as uncooperative. Schirra claimed they all had colds, either to bolster the strength of his complaints to Mission Control or to refute the idea that two rookies were doing better in space than the old pro. He also accused an argumentative Eisele of threatening mutiny. Despite using ten boxes of tissues and downing plenty of Actifed tablets, Schirra never completely shook his cold symptoms during the flight.
The clashes with Houston continued right up to reentry, when Schirra flouted an important mission rule. He insisted that his crew would not wear their helmets during the dangerous plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere, claiming that the pressure buildup might cause their eardrums to rupture in the pressurized suits. The flight surgeon disagreed, and Mission Control, worried about a life-threatening pressure leak, insisted they wear the helmets. Slayton again got on the mike to talk to Schirra, but Wally was adamant. To avoid an unpleasant public confrontation, Flight Control allowed them to leave their helmets off. Reentry occurred with neither burst eardrums nor pressure leaks.
After the mission, the three astronauts were all tarred with the same brush and considered hard to get along with. Schirra was given a good talking-to by Slayton, but he was retiring, so he didn’t care, and he made no attempt to keep his crewmates from going down with him when Chris Kraft swore that neither Cunningham nor Eisele would fly again. Despite Deke’s protestations, several apologies by the two crew members to Mission Control, and a personal appeal to Kraft by Cunningham, they never did. (Kraft heard Cunningham out and acknowledged that he should have another chance, but the astronaut left the program before that could happen.) Slayton was in charge of the crew selections, but he was hamstrung. “I wasn’t going to put anybody on a crew that Kraft’s people wouldn’t work with. Not when I had other guys,” he said. The blackballing sent a message to the rest of the astronauts, and it was one they got: Individualism or, put another way, disrespect to Mission Control would not be tolerated. This was a team effort.
Despite the human problems and a few minor electrical issues, NASA called the mission “101 percent successful.” Every system had been thoroughly tested, and any faults found were minor and could be easily fixed. The service module’s SPS engine, which would play an important part in a trip to the moon, had been test-fired eight times. Schirra’s suggestion of the Phoenix as the name of the spacecraft might have been overly dramatic—and it was quickly shot down by NASA—but the textbook flight had allayed many fears both inside and outside NASA. Eleven days was more than enough time to complete a lunar-landing mission, and after 163 orbits and more than four million miles, this had been the shakedown cruise to end them all. An unsuccessful flight—or, worse, one with a tragic ending—might have prompted more calls to cancel the program. It almost certainly would have dashed any hopes of landing on the moon by the end of the decade. But faith had been restored—in Apollo, in NASA, and in the ability of man and machine to fly to the moon.
The Apollo timetable called for four more progressively complex flights before an attempted landing by Apollo 12 late in 1969—if, that is, the problema
tic LM was ever finished. But the Apollo 7 mission had gone so well that one of NASA’s administrators decided on a big change in the schedule. The seed of the idea had been planted two months earlier.
One Sunday early in August 1968, two months before the Apollo 7 launch, Frank Borman was at the North American Aviation plant in Downey involved in some testing when he got a call from Deke Slayton summoning him back to Houston. After a quick T-38 flight to Ellington AFB and a ten-minute drive to MSC, he arrived at Slayton’s office.
Jim McDivitt’s mission was next in the schedule, so Deke had told him first: The next manned Apollo flight was going to the moon. McDivitt wasn’t interested—he and his crew would rather stick with the flight they’d been training for, a test of the command-service module and LM in low Earth orbit, with an EVA and docking thrown in. Like most test pilots, they wanted to be the first to fly a craft, and they preferred the challenges offered by their own mission. The moon journey provided fewer of those—“You were just a passenger,” McDivitt’s LM pilot, Rusty Schweickart, said later of the Apollo 8 crew. “You weren’t really doing anything.” That was fine with Slayton; while McDivitt’s crew had been working extensively with the LM, Borman’s crew had barely started their LM training.
Shoot for the Moon Page 24
