Apollo: The Race to the Moon (34 page)

Shea became uncomfortable at headquarters, and trying to work on a few pet projects there didn’t help. His wife and daughters were still in Houston. He found himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, reading the newspapers. Sometimes he would walk out into the streets of Washington, always alone, prowling the museums, sitting on a bench in the gardens of Dumbarton Oaks. The Phillips Gallery became a favorite haven in those days, quiet and serene. Sometimes, he found himself wishing he had been in the spacecraft on that Friday evening in January. Finally, in July 1967, six months after the fire, Joe Shea left NASA and took a job as head of engineering for the Raytheon Corporation in Boston.

Another six months passed. One winter’s day in early 1968, as Shea talked to someone on the telephone, Berry Shea heard her husband laugh. It was the first time she’d heard him do that in almost a year, she remarked when he hung up. Shea thought that it seemed longer.

So passed the fire. For those who weren’t in the program, it was soon forgotten. Pad 34, far to the south of the huge complexes where they launched the Saturn Vs, is not a stop on the bus tour of Kennedy Space Center, and there isn’t much to see anyway. The squat domed blockhouse remains, padlocked. The great slab of the launch pad is still there, grass growing through the cracks in the concrete, as are the rusty railroad tracks once used to bring up the gantry. The concrete flame deflectors, too massive to move, are off to one side, with faded painted stenciling—ABANDON IN PLACE. Otherwise, there is just scrub, sand, and the sea.

The ironies surrounding the fire make it the stuff of fable. The astronauts, a few weeks from confronting the perils of outer space, died on top of an unfueled booster sitting on the pad—that is the most obvious irony. But there are others.

Consider the case of Gus Grissom and his appointment in Samarra. The first spacecraft, the Mercury capsule, had an explosive device on the hatch so that the astronaut could escape quickly in an emergency. If there had been such a device on the Apollo spacecraft, the crew would have blown off the hatch as soon as the fire started to spread, the pure oxygen under pressure in the spacecraft would instantaneously have been replaced by ordinary Florida air, and the fire would have guttered. The crew would have gotten a scare and Grissom might have gotten a singed leg.*

[* Reflecting on this, Rocco Petrone pointed out that he probably wouldn’t have permitted an explosive hatch to be armed for a ground test, because of the potential danger to the ground crew in the White Room—which opens a whole new set of what-ifs (one may imagine Petrone’s unenviable position after the fire, in that case). The Apollo hatch as redesigned after the fire was not explosive. but could be opened in three seconds.]

But at the end of his suborbital Mercury flight in Liberty Bell 7, Gus Grissom’s hatch blew and Grissom nearly drowned. Grissom insisted that the hatch had misfired on its own. Because of that, the explosive hatch was reckoned to be too dangerous, and the designers of the hatch for Apollo focused on ensuring that the hatch was safe from accidental opening, not on ensuring that it could be opened quickly. Thus, when the fire broke out, Grissom was sitting inside a spacecraft whose hatch was secured by six bolts.

Consider the strangely intertwined sequence of events that Sam Beddingfield was left to contemplate on quiet evenings. Sam Beddingfield was an old friend of Grissom’s. He had been disturbed after Liberty Bell 7 by how ready the astronauts and the engineers were to blame Grissom for the blown hatch. He believed in Grissom’s composure and honesty, so he had approached his job as one of the investigators of the Liberty Bell accident with special zeal. It was Beddingfield who had identified two specific, documentable sequences of events that indeed could have blown the hatch in the manner that Grissom described. It was largely because of that work that the hatch was discarded for Gemini and Apollo. If Beddingfield had been less motivated by his friendship with Grissom, would those alternative explanations have been found and demonstrated? If they hadn’t been found, would Grissom still have been on flying status during Apollo?

There were two smaller, bitter ironies for Beddingfield as well: The plugs-out countdown on January 27 was to have ended with a test of the emergency egress system—as it certainly did. And Sam Beddingfield himself was to have been the supervising engineer.

Consider this elusive overarching irony: Might it not, after all, have been a good thing for Apollo that the fire occurred? Many in NASA thought so. Shea himself decided that the fire provided a better and more “gentle”—his word—ambience at the top. “The fire could have been, and for a lot of people it was, a unifying force,” he said. “It brought home how the things we used to bitch about, the trivia, the nitpicking, any of those itty-bitty things could cause a problem.” After the fire, there was more of a “we’re all in this together” feeling, Shea thought.

A senior ASPO engineer once talked about the personal loss the fire represented to him—as Houston’s project officer for the LEM, he had gotten to know Grissom and White well—but, still, “from an overall standpoint of the program, it might have been one of the best things that could have happened.” It is a tough judgment, he recognized, but “I think we got too complacent in the manned program… . The fire really woke people up.” Another engineer thought that the fire gave the Apollo Program some time it was unwilling to give itself: “The Apollo design had progressed to a point where a lot of things were put up on the shelf as being the kind of thing—‘Well, let’s not worry about that right now, we’ll pick it up later.’” He said it wasn’t so much that Apollo 1 would have been dangerous if they’d flown it, but rather that “once the fire occurred, the flight schedule came to a screeching halt and everybody stopped and took stock.” People then had the time to go back and work in a less pressured fashion on “all of these things that everyone had in their back pocket that they should have worked on, and hadn’t had a chance to.”

There were other considerations as well. If the fire hadn’t delayed the flight schedule, there would have been delays anyway. The lunar module wasn’t going to be ready for its first scheduled flight. The fire gave Grumman a chance to catch up. The Flight Operations Division was still in the process of re-equipping the Control Center to support Apollo missions; they would have been hard pressed to keep to the schedule that NASA was using before the fire.

And there were the Velcro and the Raschel netting: If it hadn’t been for the fire on the ground, there might well have been a fire in space. Tom Markley grieved for what the fire did to Shea, but he remembered too the day a week after the fire when Caldwell Johnson came running into his office and set up a movie projector. “Let me show you how this damn stuff explodes in pure oxygen,” Johnson said, and turned on the projector. Markley was “totally aghast” himself. “It just went ZOOP! It was unbelievable. The stuff burned like you couldn’t imagine.” It was Markley’s opinion that if the Apollo 1 fire had occurred during a mission, NASA wouldn’t have flown for another decade.

For Joe Shea, the accident’s ironies achieved the dimension of tragedy. Consider the paradox in Shea’s narrow escape, when only a technical hitch kept him from being in the spacecraft during the fire. So lucky for him, it first seems, that they couldn’t hook up the headset in time. So morbid of him, it first seems, to wish occasionally that he had been in the spacecraft after all. And yet if Shea had been in the spacecraft, he would have been sitting in the bay beneath the astronauts’ couches—down beside the E.C.U. and the netting that probably first caught fire. Furthermore, the film that Caldwell Johnson showed to Markley also showed that the hot spot would have remained there like an ember for ten seconds before it went ZOOP—ten seconds for Shea, lying with his head a few feet from the E. C. U ., to see the glow and smother the fire with his hand or shoulder. In the months after the fire, Shea, brooding about that possibility, even came to an estimate. It was a better than even chance, he decided, that he would have seen it and have been able to react in time to smother it. “And I really don’t want to think about it any more,” he said, “because you can’t get any more data.”

Consider how differently the dice fell for the men who followed Shea. Eighteen months after the fire, George Low persuaded NASA to take the audacious step of sending Apollo 8 to the moon on a circumlunar flight, arriving at the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968. Shea would have fought the decision—too big a risk. But it was a brilliant success. And yet, suppose that the accident that would occur on Apollo 13, when the oxygen tank exploded, had occurred on Apollo 8 instead. Apollo 13 used its lunar module as a lifeboat to keep the crew alive during the return to earth. Apollo 8 had no lunar module. The crew of Apollo 8 would have been dead when the spacecraft reached the moon on Christmas Eve, and George Low would be remembered as the man who took a crazy chance just to get to the moon by an arbitrary deadline.

Or there was Apollo 12, two and a half years after the fire, when the spacecraft was struck by lightning a few seconds after launch. Every system in the spacecraft was battered by a gigantic charge of electricity. But the flight controllers checked out the systems while the spacecraft remained in earth orbit, and, when all seemed to be in order, Chris Kraft and Rocco Petrone approved their recommendation to send Apollo 12 to the moon. It was another courageous decision, and the rest of the mission was nearly flawless. Yet, if the electrical surge had weakened one of the systems in an unsuspected way and a catastrophe had resulted—for that matter, even if something unrelated to the lightning had caused a catastrophe—then Kraft and Petrone would be remembered as the men who had insisted on sending men to the moon in a spacecraft that had been hit by lightning.

For Apollo 1, a spark became an ember, the ember became a blaze, and Shea held himself responsible. Dispassionately, he could review the events leading up to the fire and conclude that he had not been pushing the program at the expense of safety; that, strictly speaking, the fire was not his fault. Nonetheless, he refused to grant himself absolution. Years later, the question was put to him: What then was the mistake for which you wouldn’t forgive yourself? “For me, it isn’t as simple as ‘the mistake’—it goes back to a concept that when you are responsible for a project, there are no shades of gray,” he wrote in response. “You may not know every detail, but you should construct an environment where nothing can fall through the cracks. For Apollo, that was rigorous ground test and closing out all action items before the real, irreversible danger begins at launch. Ironically, even that philosophy worked. The fire did indeed occur in ground test. The flaw was not recognizing the danger of the plugs-out test in pure oxygen at atmospheric pressure, and closing out the critical actions before that test.”

“It’s another lesson in life,” Glynn Lunney once said, thinking of such things. “Boy, you can think you’re the smartest sonofabitch anybody ever saw, but there’s so many events that occur that can affect one’s performance or one’s role in life. You still can’t stop people from stuffing rags in pipes and things like that, all of which make somebody look dumb in retrospect. The obvious question is ‘Jesus, why didn’t you guys see that?’” That is the question Shea refused to quit asking of himself. For years after, as he neared the top of one of the nation’s largest high-tech corporations, he kept the photograph that the crew of Apollo 1 had given him displayed prominently near the front entrance of his house. Shea would not let himself so much as enter or leave his own home without passing by the inscription: “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”

John Hodge, the Houston flight director on duty during the fire, once reflected on how the fire brought out a difference between engineers like Shea who came out of the world of missiles and systems engineering, and those who had come out of the flight-test business. For a Joe Shea, there must always be a way to do it right, so that nobody gets hurt. It’s just a matter of being smart enough and careful enough, and if you aren’t, it’s your fault. Hodge shook his head at that thought, comparing it with the attitude of the people who had come out of flight-test. “You understand that that risk is there,” Hodge said, “and when it happens it’s terrible, you wish it didn’t happen, you wish you were smarter, but you know it’s going to happen and so you learn to live with that. You worry about it a lot and you think about it a lot but when it does occur it doesn’t kill you.” There is a truth that his friend Joe Shea couldn’t accept, Hodge said, that few people outside the business can: “You lose crew. Pilots die flying experimental aircraft.”

Chapter 16. “You’ve got to start biting somewhere”

During the years when the spacecraft was being designed and built, the man who managed ASPO was the fulcrum of the spacecraft side of the Apollo Program, with an influence far beyond his place in the organization chart. This had been true in the fall of 1963, when Joe Shea went to Houston, and it remained true in the spring of 1967. On Sunday morning, April 2, Robert Gilruth and George Low flew to Washington to recruit Joe Shea’s replacement.

Their choice was Chuck Mathews, a founding father of manned space flight—one of the Space Task Group’s original forty-five, the first director of Flight Operations for Mercury, the man who rescued Gemini when it encountered managerial troubles. With the successful completion of Gemini, Mathews had recently been promoted out of Houston into Mueller’s office at headquarters. Gilruth and Low checked into the Georgetown Inn and invited him over for a talk.

They ran into a stone wall. Mathews had just moved to Washington and promised his family that this was it—no more moves for a while, no more weeks on end when he hardly saw the children. The ASPO job was tempting, but he just couldn’t accept. Anyway, Mathews and George Mueller had been talking it over themselves and had decided on another person for the job. The person they had decided upon was George Low.