The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  The low approach made for a wonderful photo opportunity. Before it eventually crashed into the Moon, the probe radioed back bushels of gravitational data and a striking landscape photograph. Some in the press called this the picture of the year, and others upgraded it to the picture of the century. It was one of the clearest, closest lunar photographs yet. The mottled and pock-marked surface of the Moon became much more tangible. Instead of flat circles and patches through a telescope lens, people could now see harsh ridges, valleys, hills, and long shadows—a dramatic landscape but not what anyone would call welcoming (see Figure 9.3).31

  figure 9.3 The Moon’s Copernicus Crater as viewed by Lunar Orbiter II. This 2013 version greatly improves the version released in 1966, thanks to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Like the Soviet Luna probes, the Lunar Orbiters had to develop their own film and scan the images before transmitting the results to Earth. (NASA/LOIRP photograph.)

  * * *

  i This was John Norton of contractor TRW.

  ii This gives a simplified version, but for readers who are physics nerds, I will add that the metal rings were circularly magnetized (i.e., clockwise versus counterclockwise). For computer nerds, there was also a small dynamic memory, where the currents could “write” the cores by reversing their clockwise versus counterclockwise magnetic polarities.

  iii Astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett died February 28, 1966.

  iv Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott survived the troubled flight of Gemini VIII on March 16, 1966.

  v Astronaut Eugene Cernan toiled outside the Gemini capsule for about two hours on June 5, 1966, and was helped back aboard by Mission Commander Thomas Stafford.

  10

  1967—From Madness to Miracle

  “Hindsight is wonderful,” Max Faget said of an early 1967 Apollo test. He noted that they’d never had a problem with oxygen inside their capsules—not even a worrisome hint of trouble in the first five years of space capsules. “But, you see, after I started thinking about it, kicking myself for being so stupid,” he said, “I realized that the difference between Mercury and Apollo was that one Apollo was probably equivalent to maybe twenty or thirty Mercuries, simply because there’s so much more volume in [the Apollo capsule] and there’s so much more stuff.”

  “It was a schoolboy mistake,” said Faget’s lifelong design partner Caldwell Johnson. “And, you know, a bunch of us were all involved in it.” He pointed out that the problem could only have happened for a ground-bound test. Once away from Earth, the Apollo missions would fill the crew capsule with oxygen but only to one-third of a normal atmospheric pressure. For test runs on the launch pad, the engineers kept the astronauts stewing in an entire atmospheric pressure’s worth of pure oxygen. As Johnson put it, “It was a bomb ready to go off.”1

  Many space age accounts claim that the space race had functionally ended by 1967: that after losing Korolev and watching America make progress, the Soviets had just shrugged and abandoned any Moon ambitions. The USSR eventually claimed as much, and by the close of Apollo, this idea grew to be gospel. (As newsman Walter Cronkite said in a 1974 television special, “It turned out that the Russians were never in the race at all.”) But the truth is not so straightforward. Records show that cosmonauts practiced special helicopter landings throughout the 1960s (presumably to simulate Moon landings), and the Soviets continued testing Korolev’s massive N-1 Moon rocket through 1972. In any case, if America was not in a race, that was not at all clear to the engineers in 1967. A Soviet Zond spacecraft had already flown, unmanned, past the Moon and on toward Mars. This new, larger ship could presumably hold a few cosmonauts at some point. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution loomed in October 1967, and NASA assumed the USSR would try for a new milestone, perhaps taking a crew of cosmonauts for a Zond spin around the Moon.2

  NASA wanted to launch an Apollo mission by the end of February, despite numerous troubles. In preparation, they needed to test two modules of the eventual Apollo spacecraft—the command module, a larger, more sophisticated version of the earlier capsules, where the astronauts would ride to the Moon, and the service module, nestled right behind it. One could simplify describing the service module as just a large can filled with fuel and oxygen—a sort of U-Haul trailer for the Moon missions—but it handled a great deal more than that. Apollo’s service module featured the primary engine for the lunar flights, and Apollo used that engine both to achieve a parking orbit around the Moon and then to jumpstart its trip back to Earth. Not built for glory, a Moon-bound service module would never bask in a parade or museum. Before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the command module jettisoned its companion on each trip (see Figure 10.1).

  figure 10.1 Artist’s rendering of the Apollo modules (top) and the Saturn V rocket (left), compared, respectively, to spacecraft and rockets from earlier phases of the manned space program, Gemini (the two-seater) and Mercury (the one seater). Running left to right across the top are the service, command, and lunar modules attached in the way they would eventually fly to the Moon together. (NASA image.)

  In January, since the Saturn V was still coming together, cranes loaded the two modules carefully on top of a lesser Saturn rocket. This earlier model would serve as a kind of stunt double for the Saturn V during the launch pad tests.

  The engineers worried and fussed. Two leading managers had a “knock-down, drag-out” January argument over the crew compartment, which still seemed a bit haphazard. It had accumulated more and more material inside; straps, netting, and tangles of wire crossed and circled one another, hanging from the sloped capsule walls and even snaking under the astronaut’s seats. Preparing for a January test, one astronaut requested that engineers leave behind a polyurethane pad; he said he needed it when he stood up to open the hatch from within, because otherwise he would be standing on a bunch of loose wires.3

  On January 27, NASA planned a simulated countdown. The rocket would sit empty of fuel, but the astronauts would ascend an elevator in the support tower, walk across a gantry far above the Florida landscape, and climb one by one into the capsule. There, in a cabin atmosphere of pure oxygen, they would test a few critical systems and practice the countdown.

  One of the busybodies monitoring the test was Joe Shea, who had handled the warning letter in 1966. By January of 1967, Shea had emerged as something of a NASA celebrity, nearly rivaling von Braun. He was handsome, well-spoken, and quick-witted. Known for bright red socks and plentiful puns, he became a go-to person for the media. Time magazine had him queued up for its cover, once NASA finally launched an Apollo mission.

  On the morning of January 27, Shea communicated back and forth with senior astronaut Gus Grissom, who sat inside the capsule. In cabin tests a week earlier, astronauts had complained of a sour milk smell, perhaps from something burning, and when they’d plugged their suits into an electrical circuit, something in the air had made their eyes sting. Today, the audio lines between Mission Control and the capsule were terrible. Voices cut in and out, fighting static. “How do you expect to communicate with us in orbit if you can’t even talk to us on the pad?” Grissom asked Shea. He suggested that Shea come up to the capsule himself to see if he could make sense of which wire was snagged on what to foul the signal. “It’s really messy,” the astronaut said. “We want you to fix it.” Shea considered it, and even inquired with other staff to see if it he could fit in there with the three astronauts. There was room for him to sort of lie at the astronauts’ feet during the test, and maybe he could find the problem. Other engineers said it was too much trouble to get him to the pad and up the tower; meetings in Houston expected him soon anyway.4

  The Cape was learning what eventually came to be known as “Saturn V minutes,” where complexities of the rocket and the Apollo craft meant any test or countdown took about five times as long as anyone would have predicted. The astronauts waited and fiddled with controls, communicating with the engineers as best they could.

  Then, across the sta
tic-laced line, engineers heard a concerned voice. “There’s a fire in here.”

  “We never did find out what caused it,” Faget said later. “It only takes a teeny bit of stuff, with some teeny bit of flammable material. . . .”

  Frank Hughes, not even a year into his NASA work at the time, recalls being in the trenches that day. He was working a 3:00 p.m.-to-midnight shift to revamp one of the simulators. As dusk arrived, a colleague ran up to him. “Something wrong with the crew? Have you heard anything?” He hadn’t.

  “So I try to walk in and call, and the phone was ringing. From then on, it was all hell broke loose,” Hughes said. “The crew was injured; at first, that was what we knew, that they had an accident. Then it just got worse, and worse, and worse.”

  The lives of three astronauts ended within a terrifying half minute.i Something within the cabin sparked—most probably a fatigued, unprotected wire—and with pure oxygen inside, flammable material lit up like dry grass. The astronauts called for help. They tried to pull the hatch inward, relying on months of training. But the fire stoked the cabin pressure higher, holding the hatch firmly in place. With a sickening explosion, the fire finally ripped through the side of the capsule, knocking back technicians who had scurried to help. Contrary to subsequent grisly media reports, the astronauts were not burned to death; all three died from inhaling the fire’s carbon monoxide.5

  The nation mourned for its astronauts, but it also turned a skeptical eye on the space program. On the heels of NASA’s eventual public accident report, the New York Times ripped the agency, saying, “even a high school chemistry student” would avoid a 100-percent oxygen atmosphere. It leveled charges of “complacency . . . incompetence and negligence.”6

  Had the program just been in too great a rush to launch within early 1967? “No, no. I didn’t think so, no,” Faget said. “If they’d said, ‘Relax, take another three or four months,’ we’d still have probably flown the same spacecraft, still would probably have run the same tests, still probably had the same goddamned fire.”

  In fact, the Apollo test in oxygen wasn’t the only one of its kind, and the accident didn’t quite put a stop to the practice in time to save other lives. Engineer Larry Bell had been working on spacesuits for the Gemini program. He recalled a “very, very bad day in my life” shortly after the Apollo fire. He received a phone call from the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas with bad news about a suit test. In a much quieter tragedy, two airmen died when fire burst forth in a pure-oxygen chamber. On his way to the base, Bell remembered that their temperature-control unit in the suit had magnesium in it. “I thought, ‘Oh, my word. Magnesium burns like a torch.’ ” But in the end, the suit wasn’t the culprit. Exposed wires in the chamber had sparked the fire, just like they had at the Cape.7

  The Soviets, who sent their sincere condolences after the launch pad tragedy, suffered their first cosmonaut death soon after, and it marked our species’ first death during a space mission. A cosmonaut took the new Soyuz capsule into orbit in April, where he encountered nonstop problems, from maneuvering to communications with the ground. Attempting to come back to Earth early, his capsule began tumbling and the Soyuz rammed into Earth at deadly speed.ii (The Soviets had never embraced the softer, water-based landings, in large part to maintain secrecy.) After losing four spacefarers in a matter of months, the world owned a deeper appreciation for the dangers of leaving our natural home.

  The Apollo tragedy sank spirits throughout NASA and in the ranks of its devotees. As authors Murray and Cox penned, “It was not only three astronauts who died. . . . Some of the program’s lightheartedness and exuberance died too.”8 Prospects for fulfilling Kennedy’s promise looked grim. While Max Faget, Henry Pohl, and countless others flogged themselves with what-ifs, Joe Shea—he who had fielded the worried 1966 letter and had almost been in the cabin with the three astronauts—accepted blame on a personal level. His star faded as quickly as it had ascended. His work ethic, always beyond reproach (if not downright frightening), became untenable. He worked around the clock reviewing accident diagnostics and plans for changes. As many engineers did that spring, Shea turned to alcohol to end one night’s work and stimulants to face the following early morning.iii

  Shea began to worry NASA’s leadership. They decided he wasn’t fit for congressional testimony and they urged him to take a leave. He refused. As the investigation plodded from one agonizing week to the next, he grew “increasingly melancholy” according to one observer. Then, at a Houston meeting, Shea rose and started giving an update on the investigation. He started calmly, “but within a minute, he was rambling. . . . Whatever was happening in Joe’s head, it all came out in a jumble of mixed words and meaningless sentences,” engineer Chris Kraft later wrote. By July, Shea resigned from NASA.9

  The full investigation, led by Faget, Shea, and others, never pinpointed the exact start of the blaze but clearly implicated the problems of flammable materials resting in pure oxygen gas. With machine-like efficiency and determination, the engineers made a series of recommendations for the Apollo spacecraft. Some were obvious, like reducing flammable materials and including nitrogen in the cabin atmosphere for all ground-based tests, but others fixed long-simmering problems, unrelated to the fire. “We put 125 things on that list for the command module,” engineer and director of flight operations Christopher Kraft later relayed. “Within six months, before the end of 1967, we’d done all 125. Then we did the same thing for the lunar module.”10

  Optimism steadily returned to the Houston center as the program gathered itself and dove more obsessively than ever into the work. A number of the engineers say that the disaster, a clear demonstration of the stakes, drew a new level of focus from younger employees in particular. As von Braun said in one of his pep talks, “I think we should all understand that we are not in the business of making shoes.” The nature of the work, its aspirations, and its risks were wholly unique.

  Bits of good news emerged. Programmers had solved most of the software dilemmas for the Apollo computer by the spring of 1967. And the unmanned probes were perfecting trips to the Moon, whether orbiting there to better map the terrain and gravity, or actually landing. In April, Surveyor 3 inspired the space program when it made a bouncy but successful landing, then used a robotic arm to probe and scoop the lunar soil. To further break the depressive clouds, Houston’s NASA leadership decided to hold a center-wide party in May, celebrating the sixth anniversary of lifting the first American to space and back.11

  In retrospect, many engineers spoke and still speak of the tragedy as not just a turning point but also an important part of the Apollo process. “You kind of hate to say it,” Henry Pohl allowed, with a pause, “but it did give us the breather that we needed to fix an awful lot of problems in the program that, as bad as that was, may have been worse than that, because if we started on a journey to the Moon,” a cabin fire in space would have been even more devastating to the program, with no remnant evidence to evaluate.12

  NASA grew ever more confident in their revamped command module as a ride to the Moon, but it wasn’t clear, in 1967, if astronauts would have anything that could then get them to the lunar surface. The lander was still an earthly mess.

  Pohl recalls a Houston-based test, putting the lander into the big environmental chamber, lowering the pressure, and then mimicking the harsh temperature dichotomies of space. “When we . . . started shining the simulated sun on one side and the other side exposed to liquid helium temperatures,” he said, “it was literally tearing itself apart.” The warm-side metals expanded, while the cold-side metals contracted. Engineers eventually solved this by coating the structures with reflective metallic foils. The lander had never been pretty or sleek, but it came to resemble a child’s awkward, homemade Christmas ornament.13

  In late June, Cape Canaveral received a completed lander for inspection and testing. It was four months late, but engineers still hoped to get an entire Apollo spacecraft in orbit by year’s end. NASA’s direc
tor of Apollo launches wrote a letter to the contractor, Grumman, in charge of the lunar module. “That LM you sent us yesterday is supposed to fly in space, but I wouldn’t even allow it on the launch pad,” he wrote. “It’s propulsion tanks and plumbing leaked like a sieve . . . there were sirens wailing everywhere.” He called the delivered craft “a piece of junk, garbage.” Grumman opted not to debate him, slinking away with their rickety project in tow.

  A new phenomenon emerged for the poor lander. The drive to make it as light as possible—that was the whole advantage for having a separate lander, after all—meant that many of its parts were carefully machined to be as thin as possible. In some cases, engineers used a special chemical process to thin the walls and legs, but, unbeknown to materials scientists at the time, the surviving surface endured a new kind of metal stress. By mid-1967, engineers started finding a slew of cracked parts all over the lander, be it on the inside, on the thin hull, or in one of the legs. Lander architects pivoted to use a newer form of aluminum, and they instituted pervasive inspections, going part by part instead of lander by lander.

  Wiring posed another nasty problem. “Probably the worst choice I made,” according to chief lander designer Tom Kelly, was the use of very fine wire, with tiny connectors in all circuits. The lander “had many miles of such wiring, so this one item saved hundreds of pounds—but at the cost of recurring wire breakage” and difficulties with electrical connections. These troubles persisted through 1967 and beyond. Never mind the paranoid vision of a tiny space pebble punching a hole in the paper-thin module—the nightmare of it short-circuiting and stranding astronauts on the Moon looked completely realistic.14