The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Project Gemini had achieved its objectives: long duration flights, rendezvous and docking and some new ones. These included the ability to live and work inside and outside a spacecraft for the time period it took to get to the moon and back. The pool of expertise both on the ground and among the astronauts had grown rapidly.

The Apollo 1 disaster

Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee were the astronauts who were designated to fly the Apollo I mission and on 27 January 1967 were rehearsing the countdown sequence in their spacecraft. Jim Lovell was at a celebration at the White House but was thinking about his fellow astronauts, especially those three. Lovell:

Today NASA had scheduled a full-scale dress rehearsal of the countdown for the first mission of the Apollo spacecraft, set to begin three weeks from now. If things had gone as planned, at this moment, the three-man crew would be zipped into their pressure suits, strapped to their seats, and locked behind their command module’s hatch, sealed in a 16 pound-per-square-inch atmosphere of pure oxygen.

Lovell himself had gone through such tests numerous times in preparation for his Gemini flights and the missions on which he had served as part of the back-up crew. Lovell:

There was nothing inherently dangerous about a countdown test, yet if you asked anyone at the Agency, they’d tell you they couldn’t wait until this one was over.

The commander, Gus Grissom, had flown in space in both the Mercury and Gemini programs and had run through these counterfeit countdowns dozens of times. The pilot, Ed White, had flown in Gemini too, and had also had more than his share of pad training. Even the junior pilot, Roger Chaffee, who had never been in space, was rigorously tutored in the art of flight rehearsal. No, the worry in this exercise was the ship. The Apollo spacecraft, by even the most charitable estimations, was turning out to be an Edsel. Actually, among the astronauts it was thought of as worse than an Edsel. An Edsel is a clunker, but an essentially harmless clunker. Apollo was downright dangerous. Earlier in the development and testing of the craft, the nozzle of the ship’s giant engine – the one that would have to function perfectly to place the moonship in lunar orbit and blast it on its way home again – shattered like a teacup when engineers tried to fire it. During a splashdown test, the heat shield of the craft had split open, causing the command module to sink like a $35 million anvil to the bottom of a factory test pool. The environmental control system had already logged 200 individual failures; the spacecraft as a whole had accumulated roughly 20,000. During one checkout run at the manufacturing plant, a disgusted Gus Grissom walked away from the command module after leaving a lemon perched atop it.

Yesterday afternoon so the whispers went, all of this finally reached a head. For much of the day, Wally Schirra – a veteran of Mercury and Gemini, and commander of the backup crew that would replace Grissom, White, and Chaffee if anything happened to them – ran through an identical countdown test with his crew, Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele. When the trio climbed out of the ship, sweaty and fatigued after six long hours, Schirra made it clear that he was not pleased with what he had seen.

“I don’t know, Gus,” Schirra said when he met later with Grissom and Apollo program manager Joe Shea in the crew’s quarters at the Cape, “there’s nothing wrong with this ship that I can point to, but it just makes me uncomfortable. Something about it doesn’t ring right.”