The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Saying that a craft of any kind didn’t “ring” was one of the most worrisome reports one test pilot could offer another. The term conjured up the image of a subtly cracked bell that looks more or less OK on the surface but emits a flat clack instead of a resonant gong when struck by its clapper. Better that the craft should go to pieces when you try to fly it – that its engine nozzle should drop off, say, or its thrusters break away; at least you’d know what to fix. But a ship that doesn’t ring right could get you in a thousand insidious ways. “If you have any problem,” Schirra told his colleague, “I’d get out.”

Grissom was almost certainly disturbed by the report, but he reacted to Schirra’s warning with surprising nonchalance. “I’ll keep an eye on it,” he said. The problem, as many people knew, was that Gus had “go fever”: he was itching to fly this spacecraft. Sure there were glitches in the ship, but that’s what test pilots were for, to find the glitches and work them out. And even if there was a problem, just getting out, as Schirra had suggested wouldn’t be so easy. The Apollo’s hatch was a three-layer sandwich assembly designed less to permit easy escape than to maintain the integrity of the craft. The inner cover was equipped with a sealed drive, a rack-drive bar, and six latches that clamped onto the module’s wall. The next cover was even more complicated, equipped with bell cranks, rollers, push-pull rods, an over-enter lock, and twenty-two latches. Before lift off, the entire craft was also surrounded by a form-fitting “boost protective cover,” a layer of armor that would shield it from the aerodynamic stresses of powered ascent. The cover was meant to pop off well before the spacecraft reached orbit, but until then, it provided one more layer between the crew inside and a rescue team outside. Under the best conditions, astronauts and rescue crews working together could remove all three hatches in about ninety seconds. Under adverse conditions, it could take much longer.

On Florida’s Atlantic coast, a thousand miles south, the countdown at Cape Kennedy was not going well. From the time the crew members were strapped into their seats, at about one in the afternoon, the Apollo spacecraft had begun fulfill its critics’ worst expectations. When Grissom first plugged his suit hose into the command module’s oxygen supply, he reported a “sour smell” flowing into his helmet. The odor soon dissipated and the environmental control team promised they’d look into it. Shortly afterward, and throughout the day, the astronauts found nettlesome problems with the air-to-ground communications system as well. Chaffee’s transmissions were more or less clear, White’s were spotty at best, and Grissom’s hissed and crackled like a cheap walkie-talkie in an electrical storm.

“How do you expect us to talk to you from the moon,” the commander snapped through the static, “when we can’t even communicate from the pad to the blockhouse?” The technicians promised they’d look into this too.

At 6:20 Florida time, the countdown reached T minus 10 minutes, and the dock was stopped temporarily while the engineers fiddled with the communications problem and a few other glitches. As in any real launch, this ersatz one was being monitored at both the Cape and the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. The protocol called for the Florida team to run the show from countdown through liftoff through the moment the booster’s engine bells cleared the tower; then they would hand the baton to Houston.

Helping to run the show in Florida were Chuck Gay, the chief spacecraft test conductor, and Deke Slayton, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. Before ever getting a chance to fly in space, Slayton had been grounded because of an irregular hearbeat, but he had managed to make lemonade out of that particular lemon, getting himself appointed director of Flight Crew Operations – in essence, chief astronaut – while quietly and insistently lobbying for a return to flight status. So much an astronaut at heart was Slayton that earlier today, when the communications from the ship first started to go to hell, he had offered to climb into the spacecraft, fold himself into the lower equipment bay at the astronauts’ feet, and remain there for the countdown to see if he couldn’t dope out the static problem himself. The test directors vetoed the idea, however, and Slayton instead found himself seated at a console next to Stu Roosa, the capsule communicator, or Capcom. In Houston, the overseer today – as on most days – was Chris Kraft, deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center and the man who had served as flight director on all six Mercury flights and all ten Geminis.