The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

A dozen feet away from the Apollo command module, Donald Babbitt felt the full force of the explosion. The pressure wave knocked him back on his heels and the blast of heat felt as if someone had flung open the door of a giant furnace. Sticky, molten globules shot from the ship, splattered his white lab coat and burned through to his shirt beneath. The papers on his desk charred and curled. Nearby, Gleaves felt himself slammed backward against an orange emergency escape door – an escape door that he now discovered had been installed to open in, not out. Davis, turning away from the ship, felt a scorching breeze at his back.

At the capcom station in the blockhouse, Stu Roosa frantically tried to raise the crew by radio while Deke Slayton collared the blockhouse medics. “Get out to the pad,” he ordered them. “They’re going to need you.” In Houston, a helpless Chris Kraft saw and heard the chaos on the gantry and found himself in the utterly unfamiliar position of having no idea what was going on aboard one of his ships.

“Why can’t they get them out of there?” he said to his controllers and technicians. “Why can’t somebody get to them?”

At the assistant test supervisor’s station, Schick wrote in his log: “1832: Pad leader ordered to help crew egress.”

On gantry level 8, Babbitt picked himself up from his desk, ran to the elevator, and grabbed a communications technician. “Tell the test supervisor we’re on fire!” he shouted. “I need firemen, ambulances, and equipment.” Babbitt then ran back inside and grabbed Gleaves and systems technicians Jerry Hawkins and Stephen Clemmons. Wherever the ship had ruptured, it wasn’t visible to the pad leader, which meant that the rip could provide no access to the men in the cockpit. This meant there was only one way to get to them. “Let’s get that hatch off,” he shouted to his assistants. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”

The four men gathered fire extinguishers and dove into the black cloud vomiting from the spacecraft. Blindly firing the extinguishers, they beat back the flames just a bit, but the inky smoke and dense cloud of poisonous fumes proved a killing combination, and the men quickly retreated. Behind them, at a supply station, systems technician L. D. Reece found a cache of gas masks and handed them to the choking pad crew. Gleaves tried to remove the strip of tape that activated the mask and noticed with incongrous clarity that the tape was the same color as the surrounding mask and thus nearly impossible to see with all the smoke. (Remember to report that for next time. Yes, must remember to report that.) Babbitt got his mask activated and in place, but found that it formed a vacuum around his face, causing the rubber to cling uncomfortably and making it impossible to breathe. Flinging the mask away and trying another one, he discovered that it worked only a little better.

Diving into the smoke, the pad crew wrestled with the hatch bolts only for as long as the heat and their faulty gas masks would allow them to. Then they stumbled out again, gasping and hacking in the marginally cleaner air until they had enough breath for another try. On the gantry levels below, word had now spread that a flaming pandemonium was playing out above. At level 6, technician William Schneider heard the cries of fire from overhead and ran for the elevator to take him up to level 8. The car had just left, however, and Schneider headed for the stairs. On his way up, he found that the fire was now licking down to levels 6 and 7, reaching the Spacecraft’s service module. Seizing a fire extinguisher, he began somewhat futilely to spray carbon dioxide into the doors that led to the module’s thrusters. Down on level 4, mechanical technician William Medcalf heard the cries of alarm and dove into another elevator to take him up to level 8. When he reached the White Room and opened the door, he was unprepared for the wall of heat and smoke and the tableau of choking men that greeted him. He took the staircase down to a lower level and returned with an armload of gas masks. When he arrived, he was greeted by the wide-eyed, soot-smeared Babbitt, who shouted, “‘Two firemen right now! I have a crew inside and I want them out!”

Medcalf radioed the alarm to the Cape’s fire station, alerting them that trucks were needed at launch complex 34; the response came back that three units had already began to roll. When Medcalf waded into the White Room, he nearly stumbled over the pad crew, who, having given up on their poor, porous masks, were now on all fours, crawling to and from the Spacecraft just beneath the densest smoke, working the hatch bolts until they could take it no longer. Gleaves was almost unconscious, and Babbitt ordered him away from the command module. Hawkins and Clemmons were little better off – Babbitt glanced back into the room, spied two other, fresher technicians, and motioned them into the cloud.