Apollo: The Race to the Moon (32 page)

Like many of the staff at Kennedy that morning, Beddingfield had worked through the night, grabbing a catnap on his desk as dawn broke. He was a pyrotechnics expert, and sitting atop the ruined spacecraft at Pad 34 was a fully operational Apollo escape rocket. No one knew how badly the support structure of the escape rocket had been weakened by the fire and no one wanted to find out what would happen if the structure collapsed. Beddingfield’s job during the night had been to rig the crane on the launch tower so that it took the weight of the escape rocket off the spacecraft. He still had to decide how to detach the struts of the escape rocket from the body of 012 without jostling anything.

Simpkinson had known Beddingfield from the old days. In fact, Simpkinson had interviewed the young Air Force flight-test engineer when he had applied for a job at the Cape back in 1959. Later, he had sent Beddingfield to Picatinny Arsenal to study pyrotechnics. They hadn’t worked together since Mercury, but Simpkinson remembered Beddingfield as “one of the few guys I could give a job to and it got done,” and so it came about that Beddingfield found himself drafted for membership on the Disassembly Panel.

Simpkinson and Beddingfield returned to the O&C Building to figure out how to get into the spacecraft. By the end of the day, they had come up with a solution. They would use the four vertical struts on the outside of the spacecraft that supported the launch escape tower as the suspension points for a cantilevered Lucite floor. The floor would be hinged, like an end table, so that it could fit inside the hatch of 012 and then be unfolded to cover the interior of the spacecraft. That way the investigators could crawl on hands and knees around the interior, looking and photographing but not touching anything.

“If you wanted something made, it got made before you could blink an eye,” recalled Simpkinson. All the resources and every employee of the Kennedy Space Center—as well as any of the other centers and the contractors—were at the disposal of the investigating teams, day or night. Simpkinson wanted a Lucite floor? Cantilevered but strong enough to hold the weight of a few men at a time? Sculpted to fit the inside of the spacecraft? Hinged? The contraption was designed, fabricated, and assembled within the next two days.

Joe Shea went from the meeting in the O&C Building to the offices in the front of the building to brief Bob Seamans, who had just arrived. By that time, Shea was able to recite to Seamans a large number of things that probably hadn’t caused the fire. The actual cause remained mysterious. Shea also ordered that spacecraft 014 out at Downey be shipped to the Cape—014 was nearly a duplicate of 012. It would be used for practice in taking apart the burned spacecraft.

Those tasks out of the way, Shea went back to the working area in the O&C where endless strips recording the data from Friday’s Countdown Demonstration Test (C.D.D.T.) now papered the walls. It was there that Shea, with Slayton and a handful of others, first listened to the recording of the astronauts’ voices in the last moments. Everyone in the room was carefully clinical. Had the astronauts had any earlier indications of problems? No evidence of that on the tape. Perhaps more sophisticated analysis might be able to tease it out.

Shea spent the rest of that Saturday arguing about the schedule with Mueller and Phillips and Gilruth. The fire was going to set them back. Mueller wanted to make up the time. The easiest way to do it would be to put the all-up philosophy to work again. Instead of flying a repeat of the Grissom mission—Grissom’s crew was to have orbited the earth in a command module, without a lunar module aboard—Mueller argued for skipping it and going directly to an earth-orbit test of both the command module and the lunar module. Gilruth was opposed. If Apollo 1 had been a useful mission (and if it wasn’t, why risk three men?), then they owed it to the program and to the memory of the lost crew to do the mission. It was ultimately an emotional argument, Shea thought, but Gilruth’s strategy was right for the wrong reasons. Shea had been part of the trauma at Houston just twenty-four hours ago. The next flight was going to have everybody on edge anyway. Adding a LEM to the first mission after the fire would be an unnecessary stress on an organization that was already scraped raw. Make it as simple as possible, Shea thought: Use a Block II C.S.M. on the first flight, but leave the LEM behind.

Shea found himself taking Gilruth’s side against Mueller, which didn’t happen often, and “the arguments on my side were all qualitative, non-analytic, the worst kind to try to win with Mueller,” Shea said. Mueller was intransigent at first, but Gilruth and Shea kept at it. At 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, Mueller went to bed saying perhaps it could be worked out. Shea, who had now been functioning almost continuously since he had had breakfast with the Apollo 1 crew on Friday morning, still couldn’t sleep. He stayed up again until four, talking with Sam Phillips.

By 8:00 Sunday morning, Shea, Mueller, Gilruth, and Phillips were conferring again, pinning down the details of their decision of the night before. It was a three-hour job, finally ending with agreement that the next flight would be a Block II C.S.M., Grumman would get some breathing space in its schedule, but that the all-up test for the Saturn V—Mueller’s central concern—would go ahead as planned.

Next question: Who would represent the Office of Manned Space Flight during the investigation of the fire? Mueller was head of manned space flight for all of NASA, but he couldn’t do it; he would have to stay in Washington to represent O.M.S.F. with the Administration and Congress. Sam Phillips, Mueller’s deputy and head of the Apollo Program Office at headquarters, was the logical alternative. Phillips had already said so to Mueller. But Shea wanted the job for himself. He proposed a break and took Mueller aside.

ASPO was his responsibility, Shea told Mueller, and ASPO was going to take responsibility for the fire. But if ASPO was going to take responsibility, then the guys from ASPO had to be “the catalysts to solve the problem.” That was the only way for them to work through this thing. So Shea had to be O.M.S.F.’s lead man. Shea added that he wasn’t “going to sleep anyway until I understood what had happened.” For the second time in twenty-four hours, Mueller accepted an argument based on emotional considerations. Shea had the job.

At mid-afternoon on Sunday, Shea left for Houston and still, after almost forty-eight hours, his work for that weekend wasn’t done. He went home, changed, and spent the rest of Sunday with his wife, driving from home to home in Clear Lake, visiting the widows of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Then back to the Cape.

Early Monday morning, he threw himself into the investigation with an intensity that eclipsed even his previous episodes on the Titan and Apollo—he was “on high blower,” he would say later, a jet on afterburner. He broke off only once during the first week, to return to Houston to brief a meeting of the Apollo contractors. “What is done is done,” Shea began, and he clicked off a brisk summary of where the program stood. He discussed how they must guard against overreaction. He concluded with a call to do better as fulfillment of their obligation to the dead crew.

The speech was balanced and disciplined—dispassionate without being cold, optimistic without being sanguine. Seamans watched him and thought that the words sounded fine, but that Shea looked exhausted. Something in Shea’s tone bothered Deke Slayton, too. He telephoned Shea at home that night, just to say he had heard the speech and was worried that Joe might be taking the accident too personally. He shouldn’t do that, Slayton said. Everyone had confidence in him. Shea thanked him for his concern, and went back to the meeting he was having in his living room with Charles Berry, the chief of the Medical Division. Shea got to bed about midnight. He was up before dawn to catch a plane back to the Cape.

On the way to the Cape after the speech to the contractors, he wrote down in his technical diary an eleven-point agenda for getting the program back on track. At the end of it, he wrote a note to himself: “I may be overoptimistic (as usual) but the above seems like it is so obvious now that it has to go. Get memo dictated in detail today & assignments going. Begin to focus Board redesign suggestions so good guys can concentrate.”

Up on Level A8, and later in the cavernous Pyrotechnic Installation Building over near the O&C Building, Simpkinson’s disassembly of spacecraft 012 was under way, an investigation that would be remembered by many as the most intense single effort of the whole Apollo Program.

It was a tortuous experience. Marty Cioffoletti, the young North American engineer, remembered writing Test Preparation Sheets (T.P.S.) for removing the engines from the command module and disassembling the propulsion system. He explained the process. Suppose the disassembly was approaching the point where the team would be ready to take out a screw in one of Cioffoletti’s systems. Before Cioffoletti or any of his technicians could touch it, Cioffoletti had to write a T.P.S. that would specify the physical action (unscrew the screw). The part number of that particular screw. The torque that was supposed to be necessary to break the screw loose.

With the T.P.S. in hand, Cioffoletti, the presiding engineer, would read an instruction. A North American quality inspector would move into place. One of NASA’s inspectors would move into place. A photographer would be called over. A North American technician would get into the burned-out spacecraft (observing whatever specific precautions were detailed for getting to that particular part of the spacecraft at that particular stage of the disassembly process) and then, using the specified mechanical device, take the screw out. The engineer would record the torque necessary to break it free. The technician would hand the screw to the North American quality inspector, who would make sure that it was the right part and the right part number, recording his results on his copy of the T.P.S. The North American inspector would hand it to the NASA inspector, who would record his observations. The photographer would take a picture of the part. The engineer would then put the screw in a plastic bag, label it, and take it to the appropriate repository.

If in the course of this process you found that an unanticipated step had to be added, or a planned step changed, everything came to a halt while the revised T.P.S. was sent to the Review Board for approval of the deviation—“even though you were the one who wrote the procedure in the first place.” This, for a screw. It was, Cioffoletti said, “the most excruciating technical dissection of a machine I could ever imagine happening.”

It drove some of the astronauts to distraction. They knew the interior of that spacecraft. It was a second home. They knew what it looked like and felt like, how you moved around in it, the things that got joggled and bumped and scraped. If only they could get to 012—but there was Scotty Simpkinson, the Cerberus of the disassembly hangar, growling at anyone who tried to get close without following procedures. In retrospect, Simpkinson was sympathetic. “They just got disgusted with the rigmarole you had to go through to take a look at an idea you had, you know. ‘What if this happened? Well, if we could just see that thing, we could tell if it did.’ Then they’d have to go through badges, and certain times of day, and all that kind of stuff. And it kind of got them upset.” But there wasn’t any choice, Simpkinson said. “You just cannot go haphazard at an accident review, that’s all. Just can’t do it.”

And through it all, the North American engineers kept saying to themselves, Please don’t let it be my system, please let my system be clean, please let it be someone else’s responsibility. “I hate to say that,” Cioffoletti said, “but you really thanked God it wasn’t your system, that it was somebody else’s, and you could breathe easy again.”

Once the data had been pulled together and one could be fairly sure about what events had occurred in what order—Simpkinson’s Disassembly Panel was just one of twenty-one panels working on the overall investigation—there remained the problem of deciding the cause. A fire has three requirements: oxygen, flammable materials, and an ignition source. The spacecraft had oxygen in abundance, pure and under pressure. The spacecraft also contained flammable materials, more than anyone had intended. All that the investigators needed to do was discover the ignition source.

The panels on the investigation kept weeding out possibilities until finally two things became clear. First, they would never be able to prove exactly what had happened, though a short in the cable bundle near the E. C. U. was the prime suspect. Second, this had not been a one-in-a-million freak accident that could never happen again. There were lots of ways a fire could have gotten started in that spacecraft. Combustibles? There were 5,000 square inches of Velcro in a cabin that was supposed to have contained 500. A source of ignition? Unless the elements of the electrical system were installed immaculately, the tangle of wiring in the spacecraft could be a scattering of match heads waiting for something to scratch them.

North American quickly came under scrutiny. The next spacecraft in line, C.M. 017, intended for the first all-up flight of the Saturn V, had arrived at the Cape two weeks before the fire and been subjected to the standard inspection before being taken to the V.A.B. for mating with the launch vehicle. After the fire, it was removed and taken back to the O&C Building’s White Room for a new and more thorough examination.

Like everyone else at the Cape, the inspectors waited for the 204 Board to complete its work, fearful that the fire had been caused by something they had missed. Now, with that possibility still on everyone’s mind, the inspectors went after 017 in a state of mind that bordered on obsessive. They began finding skinned wires and called Joe Bobik, the Cape’s chief inspector for the spacecraft. Bobik went to the White Room and looked for himself. “The more I looked, the worse it looked. The wires weren’t routed neat, they were crisscrossed in a junky way. That kind of stuff. I went to Rocco [Petrone] and I said, ‘Hey, Rocco, we’ve got a problem. I want to inspect that whole vehicle.’” They were finding too many skinned wires, he told Petrone—twenty or thirty already. Petrone was incredulous. “Yeah,” Bobik told Petrone, “don’t look too great, either; workmanship’s not the best.”