WITCH HUNT

The fire in the AS-204 spacecraft on 27 January 1967 left plenty of blame to go around and both North American, whose workmanship was seen as shoddy, and NASA, who had overseen them and given their seal of approval, were savaged by the media, by the public and by lawmakers alike. The media, indeed, were making up their own stories. On 10 February, for example, Time magazine cited the New York Times as having quoted an unidentified official who claimed that Grissom, White and Chaffee had screamed repeatedly for help in those frantic seconds. Their bodies, the official added, had been incinerated. . .

Fearing that Congress could pull the plug on Apollo with immediate effect, the agency set to work on the night of the disaster on its own internal review, with an eight-man panel headed by Langley Research Center director Floyd Thompson. Although Olin Teague, chair of the House Space Subcommittee, was keen for NASA to complete its work, others within the Senate were impatient and called for a hearing on 27 February. There, Administrator Jim Webb was verbally grilled, with representatives condemning ‘‘the level of incompetence and carelessness” as ‘‘just unimaginable”. Recriminations took an uglier turn when Senator Walter Mondale probed Webb for details of something called ‘The Phillips Report’.

Apollo’s programme manager, a retired Air Force general named Sam Phillips, had strongly criticised North American’s performance as prime contractor for over a year. He considered their relationship with NASA to be quarrelsome and disagreeable and had established a ‘tiger team’ to inspect the situation. This had

Seated before a Senate hearing, NASA’s senior management were verbally grilled and NASA’s “carelessness” and “incompetence” were particularly attacked. From left to right are Bob Seamans, Jim Webb, George Mueller and Sam Phillips.

left him with serious concerns, so much so that on 16 December 1965 he wrote a scathing memo to North American chairman Lee Atwood, placed the company on notice to improve and told George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of Manned Space Flight, that he had “lost confidence” in the prime contractor. Now, in the spring of 1967, Jim Webb revealed that he had never been made privy to the contents of Phillips’ report.

Others, including North American inspector Thomas Baron, had since 1965 condemned the level of poor workmanship they saw at Cape Kennedy, together with infractions of cleanliness and safety rules. Although Baron’s judgements were refuted by North American in its congressional testimony, they cannot have helped to quieten those who were looking for blame. Some, including the writer Erik Bergaust in his 1968 book ‘Murder on Pad 34’, even implied that NASA had blood on its hands for racing recklessly with the decade and killing the three men in the process.

Against this backdrop of public and media fury, the Thompson board worked for ten weeks, assisted by 1,500 technicians, and traced all possible sources of fire in Apollo’s 30 km of electrical wiring and even re-enacted the blaze in a command module mockup. Additionally, Spacecraft 014, the Block 1 vehicle originally assigned to Wally Schirra’s Apollo 2 mission, was shipped from Downey to Cape Kennedy for systematic dismantling and inspection alongside the burnt-out Spacecraft 012. Cabin pressures, the investigators found, had soared from the normal test pressure of 1.15 bars, slightly above sea-level equivalent, to 2.0 bars, rupturing the spacecraft’s hull, but it was Bureau of Mines expert Robert van Dolah who revealed the damning truth: an escape hatch, capable of being opened in a couple of seconds, might have saved the astronauts. Thompson’s report was published on 9 April and ran to 3,300 pages. It found no definitive cause for the fire, but suspected an unexplained arc on wiring beneath Grissom’s left footrest, which spurted to another object and ignited the 100 per cent oxygen atmosphere.

The report cited ‘‘deficiencies in command module design, workmanship and quality control’’, including uncertified and highly-flammable materials in the cabin, as having contributed to the tragedy. Additionally, it revealed that many safety checks simply were not done, nor was there enough fire-suppression equipment at Pad 34. ‘‘It was,’’ wrote Deke Slayton, ‘‘about as scathing a document as you’d ever see from a government agency towards itself.’’

Days later, Thompson and others found themselves testifying before the House and quickly discovered that even pro-Apollo congressmen were fiercely unsympa­thetic. Some lawmakers even went so far as to suggest reviewing the business of selecting contractors for the lunar effort. At one stage, responding to a question from Congressman John Davis of Georgia, North American’s John McCarthy raised the possibility that Grissom himself might have inadvertently started the fire by kicking a batch of loose wires. Although Slayton admitted that McCarthy’s comment was only raised in response to a question, he wrote that ‘‘it really pissed me off… because there were no grounds for the story – it was pure speculation, not to mention physically impossible’’.

The effect of the fire elsewhere in the space agency was equally dramatic. Bob Gilruth, who had become a virtual father figure to many of the astronauts, broke down in tears upon learning of the tragedy. In his autobiography, Wally Schirra recalled taking him out on for a spin on his Cal 25 sailboat a few months after the accident and, whilst manning the tiller, Gilruth fell asleep. “Maybe it was the first chance he’d had to relax, to realise he had to push ahead and forget the tragedy,” Schirra wrote. “Gilruth was carrying a tremendous load.’’ So too was Joe Shea, the man who might have been inside the command module, sitting in precisely the spot where the fire started that terrible evening. He took the fire very badly, shifting into overdrive in an impossible personal crusade to solve Apollo’s problems… and, in doing so, drove himself to the brink of a breakdown. Eventually, he was moved to NASA Headquarters, then left to work for Raytheon. Years later, Shea would wonder if he could have snuffed out the fire… and convinced himself, with 70 per cent certainty, that he could have successfully smothered it.

It was the straight-talking Frank Borman who summed up what should happen in testimony on 17 April. “Let’s stop the witch hunt,’’ he told Congress, “and get on with it.’’ Getting on, though, would involve more than a year and $75 million-worth of changes to turn Apollo into a very different machine to that in which Grissom, White and Chaffee had died. Its cabin would now be pressurised with a mixture of 60 per cent oxygen and 40 per cent nitrogen, then steadily replaced with pure oxygen at partial pressure after launch as the nitrogen leaked out. No major structural reworking of the command module would be necessary. All flammable materials were to be removed and, crucially, a new 32 kg single-piece hatch was implemented, which opened outwards and could be sprung in just five seconds. Its mechanism, assisted by a cylinder of compressed nitrogen gas, could be opened with a little finger.

Elsewhere, aluminium plumbing, which melted at 580°C, was replaced by stainless steel, and coolant pipelines which could release flammable glycol when ruptured were ‘armour-plated’ with high-strength epoxy. Wire bundles were encased in protective metal panels and nylon netting and plastic containers were replaced by fire-retardant materials such as Teflon. Intricate ‘Velcro maps’ were created to limit the presence of this useful, but highly flammable, material and identify exactly where every piece of it would be located in the command module’s cabin. Paperwork was kept to a minimum, to such an extent that the crews were barred from taking reading materials with them. ‘‘No books or magazines,’’ wrote Wally Schirra. ‘‘Nor could we take anything made of paper to play with, such as cards or puzzles. We would find boredom a serious problem as we progressed through ten days in orbit.’’

The space suits to be worn by the astronauts had their nylon outer coatings replaced by beta cloth – an advanced fibreglass material produced by Owens – Corning Fibreglass Corporation – and supported by 14 layers of fire-resistant material. ‘‘We’re paying a price for safety,’’ Apollo 7 flight director Glynn Lunney told Time magazine. ‘‘The suits are bulkier, the fibreglass itches like hell and the seat belts are difficult to cinch down because they are so stiff, but you are seeing a spacecraft several hundred per cent improved.’’ Further, an emergency venting system capable of reducing the cabin pressure in seconds provided an extra safeguard to snuff out fires. Overall, the changes increased Apollo’s weight by 1,750 kg and placed it just beneath the Saturn V’s total lifting capacity for lunar missions. As a

result, parachutes were enlarged to permit safer splashdowns at greater weights, some redundant systems were eliminated and lead ballast was removed.

By extension, of course, the disaster which had befallen the command module could also afflict Grumman’s lunar module and increased fervour was placed on reviewing its materials, too. Nylon-based items were replaced by beta cloth and ‘booties’ were installed over circuit breakers to lessen the risk of electrical shorts. This work on the lunar module – the machine which would actually set men on the Moon – refocused attention on the key question: would John Kennedy’s dream ever be realised, within the decade, or at all? At the beginning of 1967, NASA had spent $23 billion on Project Apollo and many now questioned the need for America to go there. The continuing threat of the Soviet Union provided one reason: Leonid Brezhnev’s increasingly regressive and repressive regime had, only a year before, consigned writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky to hard labour for penning satirical, anti-Soviet texts. In some minds, it harked back to far darker times under Stalin.

When physicist Edward Teller was asked by Congress what he expected men to find on the Moon, he replied: ‘‘The Russians!’’ Even now, the sense of fear was as strong as ever. For their part, the Russians, mysteriously, had been conspicuously absent from the manned spaceflight business for almost two years by the time of the Apollo 1 fire, but their ambitions in Earth orbit were ready for a new resurgence. The death of Sergei Korolev and the appearance of a successor, Vasili Mishin, had pushed the Soviet Union’s new spacecraft – Soyuz (‘Union’) – further and further behind schedule. Now, three months after the deaths of Grissom, White and Chaffee, it was ready to go. Or was it?