Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  Two and a half years before, astronaut Ted Freeman had been killed in a plane crash. To everyone’s horror, the first person to tell his wife about her husband’s death had been a news reporter, knocking on her door to get some quotes.

  Since then NASA had been much more careful. If someone was killed, the nearest astronaut would be located and immediately sent to the wife’s home to tell her the bad news. If the nearest astronaut was more than twenty minutes away, the nearest astronaut wife, usually a neighbor within walking distance, would be called as well to keep her company until the astronaut arrived.146

  Looking into the hatch of Apollo 1 on January 28, 1967, one day after the fire.

  All that remains of the center couch, where Ed White had sat, is its metal frame.

  Now Bill Anders, who happened to be home at the time, was the astronaut assigned to give the news, and Jan Armstrong was the astronaut’s wife assigned to keep her company.

  When the Bormans arrived shortly thereafter Susan was shocked by what she saw. She and Pat had both seen their share of death: after all, their husbands were military test pilots, and both had witnessed the death of many other women’s husbands.

  Yet things were different that night. Three decades later Susan can still remember how the feeling of disbelief and catastrophe that permeated that house “unnerved me and unglued me like I had never been unnerved or unglued before.”

  That the men had died on the ground certainly made their death harder to take. Test pilots died while in the air, which was what all the astronauts and their families braced themselves for. No one at NASA had prepared them for an accident on the ground.

  That one of the dead men was Ed White also made it more difficult. To many of the NASA community, including Susan, Ed was the astronaut’s astronaut. He was strong, clearheaded, and able to solve any problem. Yet he had been killed in mere seconds, on the ground.

  The grief was further amplified because some government official in Washington was already telling Pat White how to run the funeral. Ed had always told Pat that he wanted to be buried at West Point. Yet, try as she might, she was unable to make anyone understand that. The officials in Washington had immediately called to tell her that the government wanted all three men buried together, to make a “statement.” They insisted that Ed would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Frank stepped in. Almost as soon as he walked in the door he called the bureaucrats and told them in no uncertain terms that Ed White was going to be buried at West Point, just as he and his family had wanted.147

  Then Frank was gone. Deke Slayton wanted him to represent the astronauts on the investigation committee NASA was forming, and before the evening was over he was piloting a plane to Florida. The board was going to inspect the Apollo 1 capsule that next morning.

  In the weeks that followed, Susan and Pat spent a great deal of time together. The two women were very much alike, and had become friends almost as soon as they had met. They both loved their husbands and would have done anything for them. And they both were gladly and completely dependent on them for leadership.

  Each evening Susan would go to Pat’s home, trying to comfort her. But Pat was inconsolable. She had not anticipated Ed’s death. He had been her pillar and her strength and, as Susan had with Frank, she had built her life around him. Now he was gone, and over and over again she asked Susan, “Who am I? What do I do now?”

  Susan walked home across the suburban lawns and found herself asking the same questions. Who am I? she asked. What would I do if Frank died?

  She had no answer. A test pilot’s wife simply never thinks about the possibility that her husband could die. To think about the negatives only defeats you.

  Borman testifying before Congress, April 17, 1967. Sitting next to him, from left to right, are

  astronauts Jim McDivitt, Deke Slayton, Wally Shirra, and Alan Shepard.

  Yet, from this moment on Susan Borman began thinking about the risks Frank was taking. She began thinking that he could be next, and that she would be sitting where Pat White was now. Her faith in NASA and the space program was shattered. She resolved to keep this doubt secret, however. She told no one, including her husband.

  For the next three months, as the review board investigated the fire, Frank practically lived in Florida. The three astronaut couches were carefully removed from the capsule and replaced with a wooden platform to allow panel members to get inside the capsule without disturbing the evidence. Borman sat in the command module, surrounded by what he subsequently described as a “fire-blackened charnel house,”148 carefully studying every detail in order to discover the cause of the fire. Later, Borman repeatedly played the communication tapes of the accident, listening to the anguished scream of Roger Chaffee crying, “We’re burning up!” in an effort to find out what happened.

  The astronauts’ deaths destroyed the lives and careers of several people at NASA. One man had a nervous breakdown. Borman, however, saw it no differently than the many other deaths he had witnessed while he was a test pilot. This was risky work, and people sometimes died doing it.

  Nonetheless, Borman felt himself getting increasingly angry. Everywhere he and the rest of the investigation committees looked, they found sloppy workmanship by both the contractor and by NASA.

  When Borman had been a freshman at West Point, something had happened that would define the rest of his life. The plebe’s life was brutal: up at dawn, working sixteen hours a day, little time off, and little sympathy from anyone. One day the cadets had been running the plebes around all day, doing twenty-mile hikes, endless drills, and continuous workouts.

  The day ended with bayonet drills on the West Point grounds. The plebes made repeated forward thrusts with their bayoneted rifle, holding it out at full stretch as if they had just stuck it in the gut of an enemy soldier. Never a big man, Borman only weighed one hundred forty pounds when he was eighteen. Now he was literally trembling with exhaustion. He couldn’t hold the rifle steady.

  Observing this with contempt was a small, wiry lieutenant colonel who was actually a bit shorter than Borman. The officer came up to Frank and began screaming at him, telling him that he couldn’t hack it, that he wasn’t good enough.

  Borman stopped trembling. He grew both calm and angry and looked that “little weasel” in the eye. No bastard was going to tell him he couldn’t do something. He might be a naïve, country boy suddenly thrust into the hard, competitive world of West Point, but they’d have to kill him to get him out of the Academy. It was the same determination and strength of will that allowed him to bring every plane he ever flew safely back to earth.

  Now, twenty years later, it was the same thing. Borman decided that he was going to do whatever it took to make sure the Apollo spacecraft flew again. And when it did, it would be the safest spacecraft ever built.

  By mid-April, only ten weeks after the fire, the review board completed its investigation. More interested in solving the problem than laying blame, they made several recommendations, all of which were quickly adopted.

  The Apollo capsule hatch would be redesigned. The old design had actually been two hatches, an inner hatch and an outer one, removable only by laboriously unscrewing some lug nuts. No one could have opened it in less than ninety seconds. The new hatch could be opened in under ten.

  The use of a pure oxygen atmosphere before reaching orbit would be abandoned. At sea level the capsule pressure was set at 16.7 pounds per square inch, slightly higher than atmospheric pressure. This positive pressure isolated the capsule environment from the outside environment. Once in orbit the capsule pressure was then reduced to 5.5 pounds per square inch. At 16.7 pounds per inch pressure, however, pure oxygen is a lethal incendiary. By introducing a mixed atmosphere of forty percent nitrogen on the ground, the oxygen was diluted. As the capsule pressure was lowered to 5.5 pounds per inch in orbit, the nitrogen would be purged.

  The use of combustible materials inside the capsule was to be severely reduced. More than 2,50
0 different items were removed, replaced with nonflammable materials.

  Finally, the investigation ordered a complete overhaul of the quality control systems used to supervise construction. They had discovered an amazing complacency and negligence in both NASA and the contractors, not from greed or maliciousness but from simple overconfidence. As Borman said to Congress, “Quite frankly, we did not think, and this is a failing on my part and on everyone associated with us, we did not recognize the fact that we had the three essentials, an ignition source, extensive fuel and, of course, we knew we had the oxygen.”

  Borman now flew to Downey, California to act as the head of a NASA team helping North American Aviation redesign the spacecraft. George Low, the new head of the Apollo spacecraft program in Houston, had asked Borman to act as his “alter-ego,” to make sure the redesign at North American was done correctly.

  Borman spent the next year helping to incorporate the investigation’s recommendations into a newly designed Apollo capsule.

  SOYUZ 1

  Floating 125 miles above the earth, Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov announced that “On the eve of the glorious historic event, the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, I convey warm greetings to the peoples of our homeland who are blazing mankind’s road to communism.”149 After more than two years, the Soviets had finally returned to space.

  Komarov, who had piloted the October 1964 three man Voskhod mission, had blasted off early on the morning of April 23, 1967 in a brand new spacecraft, intended by the Soviets not only to take the first human to the moon, but to act as the foundation for their restructured long-term space program. With this spacecraft the Soviets hoped to build space stations and colonize the planets, establishing communism throughout the solar system.

  Soyuz 1 was different from any previous spacecraft. Like the Gemini and Apollo capsules, it carried its retro-rockets and fuel tanks in a special equipment module attached to its rear. Unlike Gemini and Apollo, Soyuz actually had two separate habitable sections for the cosmonauts. The front section, called the orbital module and for use only in space, had a docking port for linking up with another Soyuz.

  Attached to the orbital module was the crew module, bell-shaped with a flat heat shield at its base. When the time came to return to earth the cosmonauts would eject the round orbital module and return in the crew module.

  Other innovations included the use of solar panels to provide energy rather than the fuel cells and batteries that American spacecraft used. When Soyuz reached orbit, the two winglike panels would unfold on each side of the equipment section.

  Komarov’s mission called for him to spend a day in orbit checking out the new Soyuz craft. Then another Soyuz with three cosmonauts aboard would blast off, chase him much as Gemini 6 had done with Gemini 7, and then dock. Because the docking port in this first Soyuz design contained no tunnel for crew transfers, two cosmonauts from Soyuz 2 would open the hatch and space walk across to Komarov’s Soyuz 1. The three would then undock their craft from Soyuz 2 and return to earth, leaving the fourth cosmonaut to spend several more days in space.

  Though Soviet space flights were no longer scheduled merely to upstage the West (as they had been under Khrushchev), the desire to score political points nonetheless played a part in Komarov’s flight. Despite serious life- threatening failures on all three previous unmanned Soyuz test flights (one exploded on the launchpad and the other two had attitude control failures causing serious damage during reentry), Brezhnev pressured his engineers to fly the fourth Soyuz flight manned. With the Apollo investigation just completed, he wanted a political triumph to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet technology.150

  Unfortunately, things began going wrong as soon as Komarov reached orbit. Only one of the two solar panels unfolded, cutting his electrical power in half. His main shortwave radio failed, forcing him to use his backup radio.

  Then the system for keeping the spacecraft properly oriented began to fail. Unlike American space capsules, the Soyuz craft had been designed so that it could be automatically piloted from the ground. In fact, Soviet cosmonauts were intended to be merely backup observers, not pilots.

  Hence, when the automatic control system broke down and Komarov was forced to manually pilot his craft, he was using thruster controls that were difficult to use and functioned only sporadically.

  By now mission control had canceled the second Soyuz launch and were desperately trying to figure out how to get Komarov back to earth alive. Unfortunately, their ground-to-capsule communications network was not very complete, and from the seventh to thirteenth orbits, more than nine hours, they had no way to talk to Komarov. “Try to get some sleep,” they told him as his tumbling capsule moved out of range.

  When they finally regained contact nine hours later, Komarov reported an almost completely out of control spacecraft. Recognizing that he might not survive reentry, the flight director had Komarov’s wife Valentina brought to mission control so she and Komarov could have a last few precious minutes of private conversation.

  Finally, on the seventeenth orbit Komarov manually fired the retro- rockets. Now he had to hold the bucking spacecraft with the heat shield in front, protecting him for the searing fire of reentry.

  Miraculously, he succeeded. The crew module’s drogue chute deployed as planned, and it looked like Komarov would survive.

  But now the spacecraft’s main parachute failed to release. In a last ditch attempt to save his life, Komarov deployed his reserve chute, only to have this tangle with the still attached drogue. Plummeting earthward at more than four hundred miles an hour, the Soyuz 1 craft smashed into the soil of Russia, south of the Ural mountains.

  Komarov was killed instantly.

  Decades would pass before the details of this tragedy became public knowledge, both in and out of the Soviet Union. Soviet officials merely announced that Komorov had “completed the full and complex program of testing the systems of Soyuz 1” during his one day flight, that he had then been “asked to stop flying and land,” and that his death occurred when his “parachute system did not work.”151

  Hidden behind their tight-lipped secrecy, however, was an inconsolable sorrow and regret. Komorov’s death was even more devastating to the Soviets than the Apollo launchpad fire was to the Americans. Never again would they fly a cosmonaut on a spacecraft that hadn’t been tested thoroughly. Never again would they let their desire to be first allow them to take such chances.

  Unbeknownst to the Americans, this newfound Soviet caution would have significant consequences on the outcome of the race to the moon.

  COLUMBIA

  On April 9th, 1968, an overflow crowd gathered in a small chapel on the Columbia University campus in New York City and listened as Reverend D. Moran Weston read excerpts from the works of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Five days earlier King had been standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, chatting with some friends, when he was gunned down by an assassin’s bullet. Almost immediately riots and looting broke out in New York, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston and several other cities. In Washington more than six hundred fires were set, with entire blocks burning to the ground. Twelve thousand federal troops were called out to patrol the city. In Chicago, the riots killed nine people and injured three hundred, requiring five thousand guardsmen to stop the violence.152

  The Columbia University community now gathered to mourn the death of the civil rights leader. Weston finished speaking, and then asked everyone to hold hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.”

  Then David Truman, university vice-president, stood up to say his own eulogy for Reverend King. Before he could reach the podium a twenty-year-old young man with scruffy black hair stepped up onto the stage. The student’s name was Mark Rudd.

  “Columbia’s administration is morally corrupt, unjust and indulges in racist policies,” Rudd shouted. He then reeled off a series of charges about the university’s anti-union policy and its construction of a gym in a public park a
djacent to the campus. “If we really want to honor this man’s memory then we ought to stand together against this racist gym.” Rudd then marched from the room, followed by about three dozen followers.153

  The tensions at Columbia had been fed and nurtured by a series of increasingly violent events in the last three years, both in America and in the jungles of Vietnam. Since 1965, riots in urban black neighborhoods had become an almost annual occurrence, with looting and bloodshed in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland in 1966 and Buffalo, Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit and Newark in 1967. Most required the National Guard to enforce peace.

  In Vietnam, the Johnson Administration had increased the number of American troops to just under 550,000 men.154 In the three years since the Tonkin Gulf resolution bombing missions over North Vietnam had become a daily routine. By the beginning of 1968, the war had claimed the lives of 16,000 Americans.155

  Then in late January, 1968, the war exploded. During the Lunar New Year holiday of Tet, the Vietcong unleashed their biggest offensive. Beginning in the central areas of South Vietnam, the assault soon spread across the entire country, from the northern city of Hue to parts of the Mekong delta, south of Saigon. More than half the country’s provincial capitals were attacked. In Saigon guerrillas stormed the U.S. embassy, setting off mines and occupying part of the embassy grounds for over six hours before being killed. For a short while the Vietcong managed to close all roads into Saigon, as well as forcing the shutdown of the city’s airport. Soon, parts of the city were evacuated so that U.S. combat jets could bomb Vietcong-held neighborhoods.

  Though the North Vietnamese were driven back, unable to hold any of their gains and losing somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers, the offensive succeeded in planting in the United States widespread doubt of the country’s ability to win the war as well as of the legitimacy of the South Vietnam government. In driving the North Vietnamese out of Saigon, Americans were witness to a public execution. The executioner, a South Vietnamese general, claimed that because the captured man had a handgun he was a Vietcong terrorist. With news cameras rolling, the general pulled out his pistol, put it to the prisoner’s head, and shot him.