One Small Step Page 11
By the time we got to Gemini 12 with Buzz Aldrin there were handholds and work stations. On the Shuttle, you see it in space. I mean, they don’t go out without being anchored in two or three different ways. But we were stupid; we hadn’t thought of that. So, the point is, I was going over to this Agena, propelling myself with this dorky little gas gun. So anyhow, I was using this little gun to get over to something, to grab something that had not been designed to be grabbed, and I’m in this bulky suit that I described before, it doesn’t want to bend too well, I’m immobilized. I’m having a tough time as I’m going along, pitch, rolling and yawing, trying to keep this dorky little gun through the center of mass of my body, and then I arrive at this goddamned Agena, which is not meant to be grabbed, and I’ve got to grab it. So, the first time I grabbed it, I went to the end of it, and it had a docking collar. Docking collars are built to be nice and smooth so that the probe that goes into them will be forced into them. They have smooth lips and edges on them, and that’s what I was grabbing. Well, I grabbed the docking collar. It wasn’t meant to be grabbed, bulky glove, and my momentum is still carrying me along, so I just slipped, and as I went by, then I went cartwheeling ass over teakettle, up and around and about, until I came to the end of my tether, I went back to the cockpit, and then John Young got a little bit closer to the Agena the second time, and when I went over to it the second time I was able to get my hand down inside a recess between the main body of the Agena and the docking collar where there were some wires, and grab some wires.
There were a couple of rendezvous on Gemini 10. We rendezvoused with two different Agenas: our own Agena, call it Agena 10, and then a dead, inert Agena that had been used by the Gemini 8 flight, that had been up in the sky for a couple of months just sitting there. These Agenas were different in two respects. Agena 10 we could ask questions and it would answer. It had a transponder. So we could ask it: “How far away are you?” and it would tell us. The Gemini 8 Agena had dead batteries. Its transponder could not reply. So when we asked it questions, it would not answer. This meant that we could not find out how far away from the Agena we were. We had to just deduce our range by the apparent size of the Agena or the actual size.
The Gemini project closed in November 1966 after two more missions. It had accumulated 80 man-days in space over ten missions. It had performed orbit changes, spacewalks, rendezvous and reboosts. It had seen adversity overcome in orbit. All those techniques would be needed for the Apollo project. The way to the Moon was open. But 1967 was to be a very bad year for everyone.
TIMELINE
1966 January 14 Soviet space scientist Sergei Korolev dies. He is succeeded by Vasily Mishin
March 16 Gemini 8 is launched, with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott on board, but a problem when docking with an orbiting Agena spacecraft means that an emergency reentry maneuver has to be performed
June 3 Gemini 9 astronaut Gene Cernan tries unsuccessfully to become the first man to maneuver outside the spacecraft using a rocket pack
“We’re on fire! Get us out of here”
DEATH AND THE ASTRONAUT
APOLLO 1 AND SOYUZ
1967–1968
Despite failures as well as successes, both the Russian Voskhod and the American Gemini programs seemed to be paving the way toward the next prize in the space race—landing a human safely on the Moon. But the dangers and technical difficulties inherent in achieving this glittering prize were made starkly clear to the world in a series of catastrophes that claimed the lives of astronauts, cosmonauts and others.
The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the Moon and then bring them safely back to Earth—a goal announced by US President John F. Kennedy in 1961. While often cited as one of the greatest achievements in human history, it started with disaster.
The crew in training for the ill-fated Apollo/Saturn 204 mission, later to be renamed Apollo 1.
The Apollo 1 Disaster
On January 27, 1967, at launch pad 34 at Cape Canaveral, three astronauts were performing a so-called “plugs-out” test, in which the newly designed Apollo capsule positioned above a Saturn 1B rocket would be isolated from external equipment. The crew of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee had been chosen for the first manned Apollo flight. They were sealed inside the capsule, breathing a high-pressure 100 percent oxygen atmosphere. The crew members were in their horizontal couches running through a checklist when a voltage spike was recorded at 6:30 and 54 seconds. Ten seconds later Chaffee said: “Hey …,” and scuffling sounds were heard. Grissom shouted: “Fire,” followed by Chaffee, who said: “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.” Then White repeated: “Fire in the cockpit.” Seconds later Chaffee yelled:
We’ve got a bad fire! Let’s get out! We’re burning up! We’re on fire! Get us out of here!
Just 17 seconds after the first indications of fire, the transmission ended with a scream as the capsule ruptured due to the expanding gases. Toxic smoke was leaking from it. The astronauts had tried to open the hatch but it was too awkward, too complicated. The pure oxygen atmosphere did not give them a chance. Postmortems showed they all had extensive third-degree burns and had died due to a combination of smoke inhalation and burning. To this day no one knows what caused the initial spark. The subsequent inquiry found that the documentation was so poor that no one was even sure what was within the spacecraft at the time of the accident.
Borman: We were having dinner with some friends on a lake in Huntsville, Texas; and a highway patrolman knocked on the door and said that I was supposed to call Houston right away. Susan and I left and drove back to Houston and went over to Ed White’s house, because Susan was close to Pat White.
Armstrong: I was in Washington. The president was signing the Outer Space Treaty with other nations that kept the Moon as the property of all people. It was a non-staking-a-claim treaty. I’d known Gus Grissom for a long time. Ed White and I bought some property together and split it. I built my house on one-half of it, and he built his house on the other. We were good friends, neighbors. I suppose you’re much more likely to accept loss of a friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose them in a ground test. That was an indictment of ourselves. I mean, it happened because we didn’t do the right thing somehow.
When Gene Kranz came off Gemini and turned his attention toward Apollo he was in for an unpleasant surprise:
I was really shocked by how far we had yet to go before we could pull together a coherent Apollo operation with the same quality that we were now experiencing in the Gemini operation. And this was particularly true in our relationships with North American Rockwell who made the Apollo Command Module. Rockwell is a very good contractor, but they hadn’t been flying in space before. All of our experience had been with McDonnell. And Rockwell was used to building fighter airplanes, rolling them out of the factories, etc., and they weren’t about to listen to anybody that wasn’t a test pilot. This friction in January, I think, led to the disaster that we had with the pad fire. The fact is that we really weren’t ready to do the job, and yet we were moving on. We were sitting there that day, running the test. I had done the shift prior to the fire, and things weren’t right that day, and I knew they weren’t right. And yet I continued on. I think everybody that was working that test knew things weren’t right. We weren’t ready! But nobody stood up and assumed the accountability and said: “We’re not ready. It’s time to regroup.” And I think this was one of the very tough lessons that came out of Apollo 1, that we said, “From now on, we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do.”
We did have an onboard tape that was probably running. It was probably burned up. But, where they had the air-to-ground, which was from the spacecraft to the blockhouse, and in the 21 seconds from the time you first heard the noise to the time it was over, no one was exactly sure what they said. So, I remember the very next day (I think it was the next day) I was down at the Cape. We flew back either—this was Friday—we flew back either on Saturday or Sunda
y. I flew back once, I think, to take Gus’s uniform down there for the burial. And then I flew back and we stayed there—Donn and I stayed there—and we sat down with the tapes. We had to—I think Frank Borman and Donn Eisele and I, because we knew the guys, we knew their voices, we sat down and went through this. And even then, we couldn’t agree exactly on what went on. And they wanted to get it down to timing. So, I ended up taking those tapes up to Bell Labs up in New Jersey, where they broke it down, did all the magic things they do with it. You know, today it would’ve been easy with digitizing, but it was tough in those days and they still had some controversy afterward.
McDivitt: We were doing those same things in Gemini and Mercury. We could’ve had exactly the same problem with Gemini and Mercury. We were pressurizing the spacecraft at 5 psi over atmospheric, which was 20 psi. We had a 100 percent oxygen environment. I did the same test on top of the Gemini that they were doing at the time that the fire occurred. And we did it on every Gemini spacecraft. I think we did it on every Mercury spacecraft, too. To this day, nobody knows how the fire started. But we just had a lot of bad circumstances come together. And some of the North American people maintain to this day that they were never told that the spacecraft would ever be tested in this configuration. If they didn’t know it, they were the only people in the whole world that didn’t know it. But, you know, everybody had their own idea how this was going to work, I guess. But it was one of those circumstances. You had all this flammable material in there and a 100 percent oxygen environment at 20 psi. That’s seven times more oxygen than we have in this room right now.
Schirra: I was annoyed at the way what became Apollo 1 came out of the plant at North American Aviation’s plant in Downey, California. It was not finished. So it was shipped to the Cape with a bunch of spare parts and things to finish it out. And that, of course, caused this whole atmosphere of developing where I would almost call it a first case of bad “go” fever. “Go” fever meaning that we’ve got to keep going, got to keep going, got to keep going! When my crew did the test that was followed by Gus and his guys, we were in sea-level atmosphere; no pure oxygen. We were in shirtsleeves. And there were things going on I didn’t like at all. I was no longer annoyed; I was really pretty goddamn mad! There were glitches, electronic things that just didn’t come out right. That evening I debriefed with Apollo Spacecraft Program Office Manager Joe Shea and Gus. And I said: “If there are any things that go wrong, like a glitch in the electronic circuits and bad sounds, scrub!” Because Gus and his guys were going to do it in pure oxygen and in an environment that’s not very forgiving. We didn’t realize how unforgiving it was at that point. We’d gone through the same environment with Mercury and Gemini and made it through. Not that I think of it in that way, but that’s how I look at it in retrospect. Gus, I can recall saying: “If I can’t talk to the blockhouse, how the hell are we going to go to the Moon with this damn thing?” That’s how bad the communications were. He should have scrubbed. He didn’t. He was himself involved in “go” fever.
After the accident Frank Borman was asked if he thought that NASA could not recover from the disaster. He replied: “Never, not for one instant.”
The prime Apollo 1 crew (from left) “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who all died in a fire during testing.
Russia Aims for the Moon
Despite later denials, the Soviets were desperate to beat the Americans to the Moon—too desperate. They had three manned programs on the go. The first was a manned flight around the Moon called the L1 project. The second, the L3 project, was a manned landing that required a lunar lander and a giant booster called the N1. The third was their orbital missions. For all three of these manned programs, the Soyuz spacecraft was to be the centerpiece.
The first mission planned was intended to be a “spectacular”—the docking of two Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit, followed by the transfer of two crew members from one vehicle to the other via a spacewalk. Soviet space leaders believed that this single mission would overshadow the achievements of Gemini. Since September 1965, four air force cosmonauts had been training for the commander’s spot on the two Soyuz spacecraft: veterans Bykovsky, Gagarin, Komarov and Nikolayev. Vladimir Komarov was the leading contender for the commander aboard the active Soyuz.
Engineers began the ground testing of the first flight model of the Soyuz spacecraft on May 12, 1966, and it had echoes of the Apollo 1 Command Module. There were many problems—over 200 known faults. Instead of the anticipated 30 days, it took four months to debug the ship and even then the cosmonauts had no confidence in it. One night Komarov confided to a colleague:
I’m not going to make it back from this flight. If I don’t make this flight, they will send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yuri, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.
There are some reports that Gagarin tried to get Komarov removed from the flight, knowing that it would then have to be canceled because they would not risk him on such a mission.
Fire on the Soyuz Launchpad
There were severe problems with the Soyuz’s parachute system. Two of the seven drop tests from an aircraft failed. Kamanin wrote in his diaries:
One has to admit that the Soyuz parachute system is worse than the parachute system of the Vostoks and the spacecraft isn’t much to look at in general: the hatch is small. The communications equipment is outdated, the emergency rescue system is primitive and so on. If the automatic docking device turns out to be unreliable (which cannot be ruled out) our space program will be headed for an ignominious failure.
The first Soyuz test spacecraft lifted off successfully from Baikonur on November 28, 1966, entering a lower orbit than expected. The Soviet news agency TASS designated the spacecraft Kosmos-133 and did not indicate that the flight had any connection with the manned space program. The mission ran into problems almost immediately, making the spacecraft unusable. The launch of the second test Soyuz, with which it was to have automatically docked, was canceled.
Two weeks later the Soviets tried again. As the rocket ignited they noticed that it did not seem to be working properly. Then it shut down, remaining on the launch pad. Steam filled the area as thousands of gallons of water poured onto the launch mount. About 27 minutes after the abort, the launch escape system suddenly ignited. In seconds the rocket’s third stage caught fire. Kamanin described the scene:
I ran to the cosmonauts’ house and ordered everyone who was there to quickly go from the rooms into the corridors. It proved to be a timely measure: within seconds a series of deafening explosions rocked the walls of the building, which was located 700 meters (2296 ft.) from the pad. Stucco fell down and all the windows were smashed. The rooms were littered with broken glass and pieces of stucco. Fragments of glass hit the walls like bullets. Clearly, if we had remained in the rooms a few seconds longer we would all have been mowed down by broken glass. Looking out through the window openings I saw huge pillars of black smoke and the frame of the rocket devoured by fire.
The next Soyuz test spacecraft was prepared for its two-day mission in early 1967. It took off on February 7, and this time reached orbit successfully. TASS announced the flight as Kosmos-140, another in a long series of nondescript generic satellites with no stated mission. Trouble started on its fourth orbit. The solar panels were not being directed toward the Sun, and so the craft’s batteries could not be charged. In addition, fuel levels in the maneuvering thrusters were down to 50 percent remaining. All was not forlorn, however. It was thought that all of these problems could have been overcome if a cosmonaut had been on board. The remaining systems, such as life-support, the main engine and thermal control, worked well. Nevertheless, the cosmonauts could see that the Soyuz capsule was a reckless gamble. Despite these problems, officials kept pointing out that a cosmonaut had not been in space for nearly two years.
A Death in Soyuz 1
The State Commission decided to press ahead with the dual manned launches, setting April 23 as t
he launch date. The cosmonaut in the active Soyuz 1 would be Komarov. The following day, as the spacecraft was flying over Baikonur, the passive Soyuz 2 would be launched with Bykovsky, Yeliseyev and Khrunov on board. After docking, Yeliseyev and Khrunov would spacewalk to the Soyuz 1 which, with a crew of three, would return the following day. Soyuz 2, with a crew of one, would also return that same day.
A film exists of Komarov being driven to the launch pad in a bus. He looks condemned. Kamanin and Gagarin accompanied him to the rocket. Gagarin went with him all the way to the top of the rocket and remained there until the hatch was sealed. Soyuz 1 lifted off on time. Komarov was the first cosmonaut to make a second flight. He was 40 years old. He ran into problems straight away.