At the capcom station in the blockhouse, Stu Roosa frantically tried to raise the crew by radio while Deke Slayton collared the blockhouse medics. “Get out to the pad,” he ordered them. “They’re going to need you.” In Houston, a helpless Chris Kraft saw and heard the chaos on the gantry and found himself in the utterly unfamiliar position of having no idea what was going on aboard one of his ships.
“Why can’t they get them out of there?” he said to his controllers and technicians. “Why can’t somebody get to them?”
At the assistant test supervisor’s station, Schick wrote in his log: “1832: Pad leader ordered to help crew egress.”
On gantry level 8, Babbitt picked himself up from his desk, ran to the elevator, and grabbed a communications technician. “Tell the test supervisor we’re on fire!” he shouted. “I need firemen, ambulances, and equipment.” Babbitt then ran back inside and grabbed Gleaves and systems technicians Jerry Hawkins and Stephen Clemmons. Wherever the ship had ruptured, it wasn’t visible to the pad leader, which meant that the rip could provide no access to the men in the cockpit. This meant there was only one way to get to them. “Let’s get that hatch off,” he shouted to his assistants. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”
The four men gathered fire extinguishers and dove into the black cloud vomiting from the spacecraft. Blindly firing the extinguishers, they beat back the flames just a bit, but the inky smoke and dense cloud of poisonous fumes proved a killing combination, and the men quickly retreated. Behind them, at a supply station, systems technician L. D. Reece found a cache of gas masks and handed them to the choking pad crew. Gleaves tried to remove the strip of tape that activated the mask and noticed with incongrous clarity that the tape was the same color as the surrounding mask and thus nearly impossible to see with all the smoke. (Remember to report that for next time. Yes, must remember to report that.) Babbitt got his mask activated and in place, but found that it formed a vacuum around his face, causing the rubber to cling uncomfortably and making it impossible to breathe. Flinging the mask away and trying another one, he discovered that it worked only a little better.
Diving into the smoke, the pad crew wrestled with the hatch bolts only for as long as the heat and their faulty gas masks would allow them to. Then they stumbled out again, gasping and hacking in the marginally cleaner air until they had enough breath for another try. On the gantry levels below, word had now spread that a flaming pandemonium was playing out above. At level 6, technician William Schneider heard the cries of fire from overhead and ran for the elevator to take him up to level 8. The car had just left, however, and Schneider headed for the stairs. On his way up, he found that the fire was now licking down to levels 6 and 7, reaching the Spacecraft’s service module. Seizing a fire extinguisher, he began somewhat futilely to spray carbon dioxide into the doors that led to the module’s thrusters. Down on level 4, mechanical technician William Medcalf heard the cries of alarm and dove into another elevator to take him up to level 8. When he reached the White Room and opened the door, he was unprepared for the wall of heat and smoke and the tableau of choking men that greeted him. He took the staircase down to a lower level and returned with an armload of gas masks. When he arrived, he was greeted by the wide-eyed, soot-smeared Babbitt, who shouted, “‘Two firemen right now! I have a crew inside and I want them out!”
Medcalf radioed the alarm to the Cape’s fire station, alerting them that trucks were needed at launch complex 34; the response came back that three units had already began to roll. When Medcalf waded into the White Room, he nearly stumbled over the pad crew, who, having given up on their poor, porous masks, were now on all fours, crawling to and from the Spacecraft just beneath the densest smoke, working the hatch bolts until they could take it no longer. Gleaves was almost unconscious, and Babbitt ordered him away from the command module. Hawkins and Clemmons were little better off – Babbitt glanced back into the room, spied two other, fresher technicians, and motioned them into the cloud.
It was another several minutes before the hatch was opened, and then only partway – barely a six-inch gap at the top. This was enough, however, to release a final blast and smoke from the interior of the spacecraft, and to reveal that the fire itself was at last out. With some more shoving and manipulating, Babbitt managed to pry the hatch loose and drop it down inside the cockpit, between the head of the astronauts’ couches and the wall. Then he fell away from the ship, exhausted.
Systems technician Reece was the first to peer into the maw of the cremated Apollo. He poked his head nervously inside, and through the blackness saw a few caution lights winking on the instrument panel and a weak floodlight glowing on the commander’s side. Apart from this he saw nothing – including the crew. But he heard something; Reece was certain he heard something. He leaned in and felt around on the center couch, where Ed White should have been, but he felt only burned fabric. He took off his mask and shouted into the void, “Is anyone there?” No response. “Is anyone there?”
Reece was pushed aside by Clemmons, Hawkins, and Medcalf who were carrying flashlights. The three men played their lights around the interior of the cockpit, but their smoke-stung eyes could make out nothing but what appeared to be a blanket of ashes across the crew’s couches. Medcalf backed away from the ship and bumped into Babbitt. He choked.
“There’s nothing left inside,” he told the pad leader.
Babbitt lunged to the spacecraft. More people crowded around the ship, and more light was trained on its interior. With his eyes slowly recovering, Babbitt saw that there was, most assuredly, something inside. Directly in front of him was Ed White, lying on his back with his arms over his head, reaching toward where the hatch had been. From the left Grissom was visible, turned slightly in the direction of White, reaching through his junior crewman’s arms for the same absent hatch. Roger Chaffee was still lost in the gloom, and Babbitt guessed he was probably strapped in his couch. The emergency escape drill called for the commander and the pilot to handle the hatch while the junior crewman stayed in his seat. Chaffee was no doubt there, waiting patiently – now eternally – for his senior crewmates to finish their work.
From the back of the crowd, James Burch of the Cape Kennedy fire station pushed his way to the spacecraft. Burch had seen this kind of scene before. The other men here hadn’t. The technicians, who made their living maintaining the best machines science could conceive, now made respectful room for the man who takes over when something in one of those machines goes disastrously wrong.
Burch crawled through the hatch and into the cockpit and, unknowingly, stopped atop White. He swept his light across the charred instrument panel and the spider web of singed wires dangling from it. Just beneath him, he noticed a boot. Not knowing if the crew was dead or alive, and not having the time to find out gingerly, he grabbed the boot and pulled hard. The still-hot mass of molded rubber and cloth came off in his hand revealing White’s foot. Burch then patted his hands farther up and felt ankle, shin, and knee. The uniform was partly burned away, but the skin underneath was unmolested. Burch tugged the skin this way and that to see if it would slip from the flesh – a consequence of traumatic burns that, he knew, could cause a victim to shed his outer dermis like a tropical gecko. This skin, however, was intact; indeed the entire body appeared intact. The fire had been exceedingly hot, but it had also been exceedingly fast. It was fumes that claimed this man, not flames. Burch pulled up on White’s legs with as much force as he could, but the body budged only six inches or so and he let it fall back into its couch. The fireman backed away to the edge of the hatch and took another look around the cruel kiln of the cockpit. The two bodies flanking the one in the center looked the same as White’s, and Burch knew that whatever life had been in this spacecraft just fourteen minutes earlier had certainly been snuffed out. He climbed out of the ship. “They are all dead,” Burch intoned quietly. “The fire is extinguished.”
The Soyuz 1 disaster
The Soviets also had a setback in t
he spring of 1967 after they had been having problems with the attitude control thrusters of their Soyuz spacecraft. Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2 were to rendezvous and dock in an attempt to catch up with the achievements of the Gemini program.
The Soviet space program didn’t then have the sophisticated ground simulators and computerized test equipment which NASA used, relying heavily on test flights to find flaws in their equipment – and plenty of flaws were showing up. Phillip Clar was Britain’s leading observer of the Soviet space program and he noted: “Clearly Soyuz was not yet ready to carry men, and it is surprising that the test program was not slowed down as each unmanned test threw up new problems.” Aldrin:
When the Politburo ordered Chelomei and Mishin to prepare for a spectacular dual manned Soyuz mission for that April, Mishin, in an act of real integrity, refused the assignment. But he was eventually pressured into compliance. The Politburo wanted a dramatic mission that would equal all of Project Gemini’s achievements in a single stroke: the orbital maneuvering, rendezvous, and docking of two spacecraft, followed by the exciting space walk transfer of two crew members between the docked Soyuz spacecraft. Soviet leaders also demanded that the mission coincide as closely as possible with May Day, so they could celebrate “international solidarity” with Eastern bloc nations.
Test engineers fretted over the obvious design flaws in the new Soyuz, while a four-man crew led by veterans Valery Bykovsky, the pilot of Vostok 5, and Vladimir Komarov, the commander of the Voskhod I mission, trained for the dual Soyuz 1 and 2 missions. Komarov would be launched alone aboard the first spacecraft, and Bykovsky and his two crewmates, Yevgeny Khrunov and Aleksey Yeliseyev orbited the next day aboard Soyuz 2. After rendezvous and docking, Khrunov and Yeliseyev would join Komarov aboard Soyuz 1 via a spectacular space walk, using the docked orbital modules as air locks. This dual flight would not only duplicate Gemini’s record of success, it would also demonstrate the Soviets’ capability for similar orbital maneuvers on a more ambitious Soyuz lunar flight.
Just before dawn on April 23, 1967, Colonel Komarov climbed aboard the Soyuz 1 spacecraft, mounted atop a large SL-4 booster. At age 40, Komarov was one of the oldest cosmonauts and certainly the most technically qualified, with years of experience in flight-test engineering. He had been a part of the manned Soviet spacecraft program from its inception and was considered its best-qualified pilot. In addition, his broad shoulders and sharply molded Slavic features made him an ideal representative of this daring new Soviet venture. He had already demonstrated his courage and dedication to duty by commanding the risky Voskhod I mission.
The launch itself was normal, the large booster climbing away into the dawn over Kazakhstan. But as soon as the spacecraft was safely in orbit, serious malfunctions arose. The Soyuz spacecraft was equipped with two solar-panel “wings” that would convert sunlight into electricity, but one panel did not deploy, drastically reducing the spacecraft’s power supply. Worse, Komarov began experiencing the same type of control-thruster problems that had plagued the earlier unmanned test flights.
Soyuz 1 made no attempt to maneuver in orbit, despite the vehicle’s impressive propulsion system. Also, as we now know from Soviet sources, ground control in the Crimea lost the communications link with the spacecraft on several occasions, which indicates that the Soyuz 1 was tumbling so badly that Komarov couldn’t maintain antenna alignment. The original malfunction in the power supply may have affected the spacecraft’s guidance computer, its attitude control thrusters, or – most probably – both. Flight controllers scrubbed the Soyuz 2 countdown as soon as they realized that the first mission was in serious trouble. They had to concentrate on getting their cosmonaut back from space.
Komarov prepared for an emergency reentry with the crippled spacecraft. Mishin became increasingly anxious as Komarov and ground control struggled to align the Soyuz for the braking retrorocket burn as it passed northward across the equator above the Atlantic. On the sixteenth orbit, Komarov prepared for the burn, but it was cancelled when he couldn’t maintain stability. Ninety minutes later he tried again, but at the last moment the maneuver was stopped because of poor alignment. Komarov was in desperate trouble. He had probably exhausted the fuel not only from the Soyuz’s main thrusters on the instrument module, but also from the vital thrusters on the reentry module.
Komarov finally completed his retrorocket burn on the eighteenth orbit, even though he didn’t have sufficient fuel to steer the reentry module. Just after 3:00 am Greenwich time on April 24, Soyuz 1 plunged back into the atmosphere, spinning wildly; Komarov abandoned all attempts at a controlled reentry path for a normal touchdown near Tyuratam. The cosmonaut imparted a spin to the module that was probably a last-ditch effort to keep the heat shield pointed along the flight path and prevent end-over-end tumbling, which would have incinerated the spacecraft.
The Soyuz module plunged on a ballistic trajectory almost 400 miles short of the designated landing zone, and Komarov was unable to stop the violent spin in the lower atmosphere. When he reached an altitude of about 30,000 feet, he deployed his small drogue parachute, which was quickly followed by the main chute. But the parachute lines fouled around the hot, spinning crown of the module, and his reserve parachute system also tangled.
There have been reports of questionable reliability that Western intelligence overheard Komarov’s last radio transmissions as his crippled reentry module plunged toward Earth. He reportedly screamed to his wife: “I love you and I love our baby!” But it’s unlikely the Soviets would have allowed a radio connection between the doomed cosmonaut and his wife that we eavesdropping imperialists could hear.
Komarov’s death was certainly instantaneous when the Soyuz module plunged into the steppes at several hundred miles an hour. The Soviets’ official announcement of the accident stunned the world, especially since they had broadcast just 12 hours before that Komarov’s flight was proceeding normally. According to Moscow, Komarov died “as a result of tangling of parachute cords as the spacecraft fell at a high velocity.”
The Apollo program is revised
After the Apollo 1 disaster, the next five Apollo missions were unmanned tests. Apollo 7 was manned by Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham. Frank Borman was the astronaut on the NASA commission which investigated the Apollo 1 disaster, as a result of which the Apollo spacecraft was improved. In his biographical accounts, Jim Lovell referred to himself in the third person. Jim Lovell:
With Borman as point man and the rest of the pilots now backing him up more quietly, the astronauts got nearly everything they had been lobbying for in a new, safer spacecraft. They had wanted a gas-operated hatch that could be opened in seven seconds, and they got it; they had wanted upgraded, fireproof wiring throughout the ship, and they got it; they had wanted non-flammable Beta cloth in the spacesuits and all fabric surfaces, and they got it. Most important, they had wanted the firefeeding, 100 percent oxygen atmosphere that swirled through the ship when it was on the pad to be replaced by a far less dangerous 60–40 oxgen-nitrogen mix. Not surprisingly, they got that too.
The Apollo program itself was revised. Jim Lovell:
The modifications being made to the Apollo spacecraft were not the only changes NASA explored in the wake of the fire. Also scrutinized were the missions those ships would be sent on. Though John Kennedy had been dead since 1963, his grand promise – or damned promise, depending on how you looked at it – to have America on the moon before 1970 still loomed over the Agency. NASA officials would have considered it a profound failure not to meet that bold challenge, but they would have considered it an even greater failure to lose another crew in the effort. Accordingly, chastened Agency brass began making it clear, publicly and privately, that while America was still aiming for the moon before the end of the decade, the breathless gallop of the past few years would now be replaced by a nice, safe lope.
According to the tentative flight schedule, the first manned Apollo flight would be Schirra’s Apollo 7, intended to be nothing more than
a shakedown cruise of the still-suspect command module in low Earth orbit. Next would come Apollo 8, during which Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart would go back into near-Earth space to test-drive both the command module and the lunar excursion module, or LEM, the ugly, buggy, leggy lander that would carry astronauts down to the surface of the moon. Next, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders would pilot Apollo 9 on a similar two-craft mission, this time taking the ships to a vertiginous altitude of 4,000 miles, in order to practice the hair-raising, high-speed re-entry techniques that would be necessary for a safe return from the moon.
After that, things were wide open. The program was scheduled to continue through Apollo 20, and, in theory any mission from Apollo 10 on could be the first to set two men down on the moon’s surface. But which mission and which two men were utterly unsettled. NASA was determined not to rush things, and if it took until well into the Apollo teens before all the equipment checked out and a landing looked reasonably safe, then it would have to take that long.
NASA’s plans are threatened
Lovell:
In the summer of 1968, two months before Apollo 7 was scheduled for launch, circumstances in Kazakhstan, southeast of Moscow, and in Bethpage, Long Island, northeast of Levittown, conspired to scramble this cautious scenario. In August, the first lunar module arrived at Cape Kennedy from its Grumman Aerospace plant in Bethpage, and in the assessment of even the most charitable technicians, it was found to be a mess. In the early checkout runs of the fragile, foil-covered ship, it appeared that every critical component had major, seemingly insoluble problems. Elements of the spacecraft that were shipped to the Cape unassembled and were supposed to be bolted together on site did not seem to want to go together; electrical systems and plumbing did not operate as specified; seams, gaskets, and washers that were designed to remain tightly sealed were springing all manner of leaks.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 21
