Apollo: The Race to the Moon (30 page)

“I became scared,” L.D. Reece told the Review Board, the only person in all the Review Board testimony who openly acknowledged that Level A8 was a frightening place to be at that moment. Smoke was billowing out of the umbilical arm and secondary fires were burning not only on Level A8 but on Level A7 as well. Though the Saturn’s propellant tanks were empty, the spacecraft was still a bundle of pyrotechnics, with explosive materials packed into all kinds of places. And fastened to the top of the command module was the escape tower assembly, powered by a solid-fuel escape rocket with greater initial thrust than a Redstone. To be on Level A8 was not unlike being in a fire at a dynamite factory, with the added thrill of being 200 feet high on an open tower. Nonetheless, Babbitt and his men returned to the swing arm.

Jim Gleaves tried first, heading back toward the White Room almost immediately after reaching the umbilical tower, but he was stopped by the smoke and flames before he could get to the spacecraft. In the meantime, Reece had found the gas masks. Some didn’t work at all and the ones that did weren’t much help—they had been designed to screen toxic gases, not thick smoke—but the flames had died down enough so that Babbitt, Gleaves, Jerry Hawkins, and Steve Clemmons took the only fire extinguisher they could find and went back into the White Room. Hawkins managed to put out the fire around the hatch area of the spacecraft before the hose of his gas mask came off and he had to retreat again. Presently, Gleaves too had to flee the White Room, coughing violently.

To get the astronauts out, Babbitt and his men had to remove three separate hatches: the boost protective cover (B.P.C.) that would shield the command module during launch, the ablative hatch, and the inner hatch. After one of the early trips, Gleaves returned, again choking from the smoke and fumes. “I got the B.P.C. hatch,” he told Hawkins. “Get the others.” It took several more trips—they could stay beside the spacecraft for only seconds at a time. On what he thinks was his third trip, the smoke had cleared enough so that Babbitt could see his headset where it had fallen to the floor. Miraculously, it still worked. Thereafter, each time that Babbitt left the side of the spacecraft to get some air, he paused to report to George Page, giving the blockhouse and the ACE Control Room their first reliable information about what was going on.

The smoke was still so thick that they were working mostly by feel. The ablative hatch finally came off. The face of the inner hatch remained too hot to touch, but the handles were cool enough to hold on to. Even so, they couldn’t rotate it to get it out and they couldn’t seem to push it straight into the cabin. To make matters worse, Babbitt and his men were near collapse. Gleaves, almost unconscious from the smoke, had to be ordered to leave. Hawkins and Clemmons weren’t in much better shape. Dodging back into the umbilical tower on one of his trips for air, Babbitt asked Reece and Henry Rogers, a NASA quality control inspector who had happened to be on his way up to Level A8 when the fire occurred, to go in and help get the hatch off. The five of them—Babbitt, Hawkins, Clemmons, Reece, and Rogers—continued their frantic relay, working for as many seconds as they could in the choking smoke, running back to the umbilical tower to breathe, running back to the hatch to wrestle with it some more. Finally they managed to push it a little way into the spacecraft and to one side.

A wave of heat and smoke poured from the opened spacecraft as the hatch gave way. Hawkins and Clemmons peered into the blackness. The small fluorescent lights near the astronauts’ headrests were still lit, glowing dimly in the roiling smoke and ash, but the two men could make out nothing within. They had time only to lean into the spacecraft and try to feel with their hands for the astronauts before being driven outside for more air.

L.D. Reece was working his way toward the spacecraft as Hawkins and Clemmons staggered by. As he approached, he thought he could hear the astronauts calling out for help. He got to the hatch and leaned in as far as he could, feeling around the center couch. He felt nothing. Still convinced he had heard the crew calling, he took his mask off and yelled several times into the blackness. He was choking now, so he dropped his mask on the center couch and fled back to the swing arm.

Finally the smoke thinned and the ash settled enough to see. Two days later, citing an unnamed “official source,” the New York Times would report a charnel house of horrors, with incinerated bodies consisting of little more than bones, with fingernail scratches and shreds of flesh embedded in the metal of the hatch where Ed White had scrambled frantically to get out. The reality was not quite so dreadful as that. There was Ed White’s handprint on the hatch, outlined in ash, but no scratches in the metal, no torn flesh. The astronauts were not incinerated. The flames had extinguished themselves quickly and the suits had provided substantial protection. Grissom had sustained burns to his leg and Chaffee to his back (from the pad that White had asked be left in the capsule), but they were survivable. The crew had died of asphyxiation, not burns, and they had not suffered long. “It is estimated that consciousness was lost between 15 and 30 seconds after the first suit failed,” the Medical Analysis Panel concluded, and the first suit had failed no later than the rupture of the spacecraft—the Medical Panel knew that, because a portion of Grissom’s suit had been blown through the breech in the spacecraft, landing five feet outside the command module on the White Room floor.

Still, it had been a terrible few seconds. Grissom was lying on his back on the floor of the command module, where he had crawled to try to escape the fire. White had in the last moments given up his attempt to open the hatch and was lying transversely across the spacecraft just below the hatch. Chaffee was still on his couch.

Babbitt went back to his headset and called to the test conductor. In pain from smoke inhalation and flash burns, his eyes red and puffing shut, his voice down to a rasp, Babbitt tried to concentrate on how he should handle this. Some part of him said he shouldn’t be saying that the crew was dead over an open loop. So when he got to the headset he said simply that the hatches were open and “I cannot describe what I saw.”

From the time when the fire was first reported to the time when Babbitt first reported that the hatch had been opened, five minutes and twenty-seven seconds had elapsed.

Petrone watched the televised picture of the open hatch on his monitor. There was nothing to be seen, just a featureless black hole in the side of the spacecraft. He couldn’t make himself take his eyes off the monitor, couldn’t bear to look at it any longer. He turned to Paul Donnelly, his test supervisor.

“Paul, have ’em cut that camera off.” The black hole was everywhere in the blockhouse, on perhaps thirty screens.

“Roc, that’s life,” Donnelly said.

“Yeah, I know that’s life,” Petrone said, “but I want that camera off.” The screens went blank.

Sam Beddingfield, driving up the narrow access road to Pad 34, saw exactly what he expected to see as he returned from his dinner in Cocoa Beach: the umbilical tower rising beyond the blockhouse alongside the Saturn I, the conical spacecraft gleaming in the spotlights against the last remnants of twilight. He was returning to the blockhouse to conduct the final item in the checklist. There was no hurry. He had phoned from the restaurant and learned that countdown was far behind schedule, just as Beddingfield had expected it to be.

So why were the guards at the gate waving at him like that? Beddingfield wondered. Then he saw in his rearview mirror that he was being overtaken by an ambulance. He pulled aside and the ambulance raced past him toward the launch tower. Beddingfield pushed his car back into gear and drove up to the blockhouse, wondering what had happened and whether it would interfere with that last item on the checklist, the one he was going to supervise. They were going to simulate an emergency to see how fast the astronauts could get out of the spacecraft.

To John Hodge, the flight director in Houston’s Mission Control that night, the fire will always be something that happened early in the morning. Flight simulations were so realistic that Hodge would find his palms starting to sweat at T–3 minutes, and according to this one’s schedule they were nearing the moment of an early-morning launch. But in fact it was the end of a long day. This was not one of the hair-raising flight simulations, it had been going on for a long time, there wasn’t that much for Houston to do in the prelaunch phase, and at 5:31:04 Houston time, Hodge was presiding over a team of flight controllers who were about as somnolent as flight controllers ever get.

John Aaron, sitting at the console monitoring the environmental systems on the spacecraft, knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. Aaron wasn’t even supposed to be on shift that night; his buddy Rod Loe was. But today was Loe’s wedding anniversary and his wife, Tina, had arranged for some friends to come over and play poker. So Loe and Aaron had traded off, and it was Aaron who was sitting at the console when the data flickering on his screen abruptly showed a bulge in the cabin pressure, then disappeared.

John Frere, sitting at a console in one of the computer rooms at the Control Center, was heartsick. The Control Center was still working out the bugs in its communications system with the Cape, and recently they had been having a mysterious problem. For no apparent reason, a computer at Houston would occasionally send a command to the Cape—a valid, correctly formatted command that no one at Houston had intended to send. He telephoned his boss, Pete Clements, who was out at Ellington Air Force Base. Clements raced his car to the Control Center, thinking to himself that somehow his computer had caused this thing, whatever it was. By the time Clements arrived, Frere had managed to eliminate that dreadful possibility. He ran out to meet Clements’s car as it pulled into the parking lot. “It’s not us! It’s not us!” he shouted.

Hodge was getting calls from his controllers that they had lost telemetry, but he couldn’t make out what was going on. One minute they’d had the loop, then came “a great jumble of talk, difficult to understand.” Then nothing but silence. Hodge called to the Cape on his loop to tell them that Houston had lost its telemetry. “Stand by one, Houston,” the Cape said—that’s what the Cape would say whenever Houston called and they were busy. That’s about all they got for a while, said Hodge. “We could surmise that something serious had happened, but we didn’t think in terms of all three of them being killed.” He called Chris Kraft, who came over immediately. Shortly thereafter, George Low and Joe Shea walked into Mission Control.

Normally, Shea would have gone straight home from the airport, but he’d been away from the office for three days and wanted to leaf through the mail. He had been at his desk for only a few minutes when Low called on the squawk box that linked the senior staff in Building 2, saying that there had been a fire in the spacecraft and that they had better get over to the Control Center. Shea swore briefly. It was one damned thing after another, and this accident, no matter how trivial it turned out to be, was going to mean a delay.

He and Low walked quickly across the M.S.C. grounds to Mission Control in Building 30. The spacecraft’s hatch was still closed when they got there—or at least, that was the last word they’d had from the Cape. They watched, and waited, and occasionally asked a question. “Stand by one, Houston.” Finally the word came through that the astronauts were dead.

Shea arranged for a NASA plane to fly him to the Cape that night, and then he drove home. By the time he arrived, his wife and daughters had heard the first bulletins over the radio. Shea took his wife to their bedroom to explain what had happened and momentarily allowed the anguish that was to consume him to burst into the open. But he stopped it there and packed quickly and went back to his office long enough to give Tom Markley some instructions. Shea would be working out of the Cape for a while. Tom would have to protect the program in Houston. It was going to be a difficult time. Shea left for Ellington Air Force Base to catch the plane.

It was the beginning of a long journey for Joe Shea. Some months earlier, speaking to a U.P.I. correspondents’ dinner in Dallas, Shea had speculated on what this moment would be like. Sooner or later an astronaut would die, he had told them. That was inevitable. The odd thing was that in a way the effects might be worse for the people on the ground. The astronauts would be dead, whereas the people on the ground would have to live with the knowledge that they might have done things differently. This could be more painful than dying, Shea had said. Presumably, most of his audience thought Shea had been exaggerating to make a point.

By a strange coincidence—the fire was strewn with strange coincidences—the top executives of the whole Apollo Program were in the same room when the fire occurred. Webb, von Braun, Gilruth, Debus, Phillips, Mueller, plus the chief executives of the companies that held the prime contracts for Apollo—North American, Grumman, Boeing, Martin, Douglas, McDonnell—were all together, in one room, celebrating a successful day.

Some years earlier, Mueller had established what was known first as the Gemini Executives Group, later as the Gemini-Apollo Executives Group. At this meeting, with the Gemini flights successfully completed, it would become the Apollo Executives Group. It was an elite club that Mueller liked to bring together four times a year. Friday was the first day of a two-day meeting, and as of dinnertime it had been especially glittering. Sixty ambassadors had signed an international space treaty banning the use of space for military purposes in the East Room of the White House that afternoon, and Webb had obtained President Johnson’s permission to bring the Executives Group along for the reception. It had been quite impressive—“a spine-tingling affair,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary. Among other details, she recalled “Jim Webb’s happy face.”

The Executives Group had left the White House for dinner at the International Club on 19th Street a few blocks away. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended, along with members of the Senate and House who held key positions on the Space and Appropriations Committees. They were still standing around with drinks in their hands when the calls began coming in. No one is sure who got the first one—probably Kurt Debus, from Rocco Petrone in the blockhouse. Lee Atwood heard via a phone call from Stormy Storms at Downey.