Falling to Earth (17 page)

Not long after the fire, I was assigned back to Downey to resume work on the Block II spacecraft. This time, my job was to improve everything we could, based on the lessons of the fire. Jack Swigert, who would later fly on the Apollo 13 mission, joined me in this important duty. Because of his work improving the command module, Jack probably saved his own life years later when Apollo 13’s service module failed and he helped to bring the crippled spacecraft home.

A lifelong bachelor, Jack had a party at his house every weekend and dated every woman in sight. He was a real skirt chaser and a playboy. He spent a lot of time in Miami, where Eastern Airlines had a flight attendant school. I guess the odds of dating were much better around all of those young women. He was also notoriously tight with money, asking a girl out on a date only to have her pay. There was one story going around about a girl he dated in Washington, D.C. He not only asked her to pay for dinner, but also to fill his car up with gas, telling her that he had forgotten to bring any money. He was apparently upset when this girl did not invite him back to her place—but no one could blame her.

All of this behavior was generally considered okay; no one cared about Jack’s private life as long as he did his job as well. Thankfully, he was very good at what he did. He’d been a fighter pilot and a great test pilot before joining NASA and was well regarded in the flying fraternity.

I was confident that the Block II spacecraft we worked on before the fire was already a fine vehicle. Still, to make it even safer, Jack and I worked with the North American and NASA engineers to help redesign the equipment inside, replacing anything flammable with fire-resistant materials such as Beta cloth. It took us months to figure out everything that needed to be done. Because of the work carried out by everyone involved with the spacecraft in those first crucial months, we pulled the Apollo program back from the brink and removed any fears of cancellation. NASA had to earn confidence in its abilities all over again, and it did.
We
did.

I felt no apprehension at all getting back into an Apollo spacecraft right after the fire. I knew that we were going to make the upgraded command module the safest space vehicle ever built. My engineering background, I think, was the major reason I was assigned to this task. I spent months inside the spacecraft, helping to develop and test new malfunction procedures, getting familiar with the systems and then redesigning them. While Jack Swigert and I worked on our procedures, the spacecraft hatch was also redesigned. The Apollo command module soon had an outward-opening hatch with a quick-action lever, and it worked excellently.

Jack and I spent countless hours going over every single system, working on elaborate diagrams to show what would happen if multitudes of different actions were taken. The spacecraft engineers had created procedures to describe what a crew should do if something went wrong with the spacecraft, and the flight controllers in Houston then modified them. Until tested in a real spacecraft, however, we had no idea if the procedures would really work. Jack and I needed to make sure. We soon found that the procedures, based on spacecraft blueprints, did not always match the reality. So we went through every detail of every imaginable flight moment with each spacecraft part, and did a great deal of rewriting to perfect the procedures. The collaboration produced an enormous malfunction procedures manual that every Apollo crew consulted diligently in their training.

I was in California every week for at least a year and a half doing this crucial work. I would leave Houston on Sunday night and was back by Friday night unless a test overran into the weekend. For the amount of time I spent there, I may as well have bought a house in Downey. I got to know hotel rooms far better than my own home. We were determined to get back into space again, and all other considerations—including our family lives—were sidelined until we achieved this goal.

If I thought the tragedies of 1967 were over after the fire, I was wrong. In June, Ed Givens, an astronaut in my selection group, died in a car crash close to the space center in Houston. Only a few months later, in October, we lost another astronaut. This time, it was someone I knew well. C.C. Williams had just learned that he and his wife, Beth, were going to have a second child. He was flying a T-38 when something went wrong. Somehow one of the aileron controls on his wing became stuck, causing the aircraft to roll and then nose down. C.C. tried to get the airplane under control, but it was impossible, and by the time he gave up and bailed out there was no time for his parachute to open. NASA lost one of the nicest, most humble guys I had ever met.

C.C. perished a month before Mike Adams, another pilot I had met at Edwards. Selected as an astronaut for MOL before transferring to the X-15 rocket plane program, Mike died while flying an X-15 back from a suborbital spaceflight. It was a horrific year for the American space program, worsened when MOL astronaut Bob Lawrence was killed in December in yet another airplane crash.

America had just lost seven astronauts in one year. Not surprisingly, the deaths of my colleagues did my marriage little good. In retrospect, telling Pam that I was joining the astronaut corps the year before had been a nail in the coffin when it came to our relationship, and I can only guess that the Apollo 1 fire was privately very traumatic for her, too. After all, I was training to do the same things as my now-dead colleagues.

In hindsight, the Apollo 1 fire was much tougher on Pam than it was on me. To my dismay, I began to understand that she would rather be divorced from me than constantly dreading the day when someone would inform her I had died in an airplane or spacecraft accident.

At the time, I really couldn’t understand her point of view. I didn’t see what difference it would make. If you lose a person, I reasoned, you lose them, and it does not matter how. Perhaps Pam wished to keep her own initiative and choices, rather than leaving it to fate. For now, however, although we were essentially living separate lives, we officially stayed married. I was working so hard in California that year that I was hardly ever home anyway, even if she had wanted me to be.

It was also a terrible year to become an astronaut. When I was selected the year before, NASA also began to recruit a new group of scientists into the astronaut corps in the belief that, although none were jet pilots, they could be trained to fly with us in space. There would be missions to a number of space stations then in the planning stages, they were told. However, by the time eleven had been selected in August of 1967, our budget had been severely cut. The number of missions shrank, along with the need for these extra astronauts. On their first day in Houston, Deke Slayton told them bluntly and honestly that they were not needed any more. Over the next couple of years many of them quit and returned to their scientific careers; the others endured a long wait of more than a decade before finally flying on the space shuttle. Some of those guys became great pilots and good friends of mine. But the writing was on the wall from the outset. They would not fly Apollo missions, and it was beginning to feel like not all of my group would get the chance either.

So 1967 was a gloomy and difficult time. At the end of the year, however, I received some good news. Ed Mitchell, Fred Haise, and I were reconfirmed as the support crew for a new version of the planned second manned Apollo flight. Despite losing colleagues, ominous budget cuts, and the gradual disintegration of my marriage, I kept some modest pride knowing that my hard work was paying off.

Our support crew didn’t stay the same for long: Jack Lousma soon replaced Fred Haise, who was pulled away to other duties. The planned mission was a prestigious one: the first test flight of the lunar module. Our roles, however, were anything but glamorous. We did the dog work, helping the crew with planning, meetings, and any other little details they needed to clear up. We even brought them coffee if they asked for it.

This would be the first mission where two American manned spacecraft would link together, and so the docking system was a vital new piece of engineering that could
not
fail. I was asked to focus on this key element of the mission. While Ed Mitchell was out on the East Coast working on the lunar module, I was back at Downey and at the Cape, working on this docking system. I was basically out there on my own, which I took to be a good indicator of how much Deke trusted me.

Did the support role mean I might soon be on a backup crew? I didn’t know. I simply tried to do the best job I could. I was grateful to be working for one of the best prime crews that NASA had ever assembled. Jim McDivitt was mission commander. He knew not only what he wanted to do, but also how to do it: the sign of a good commander. He was very decisive, but also very nice about it.

Jim was a ball of fire. Slightly built and with a sunny disposition, he laughed a lot and made things easier for the crew. He was good at taking suggestions and making decisions. While training with him, I discovered that his parents had moved to Jackson, Michigan, when he was in college, and they now lived only two blocks away from my parents.

As I got to know him and his wife, Pat, we soon became like family. Through Jim’s parents, the two of them even uncovered the nickname my mother had used for me when I was young. Jim began to call me “Sonny” on every possible occasion. Four decades later, I have almost forgiven him.

At the time, I didn’t get to know the other two prime crewmembers well. Rusty Schweickart was the lunar module pilot, which meant that, like Ed, he spent most of his time on the East Coast with the lunar module, so I rarely worked with him. The other crewmember, command module pilot Dave Scott, was someone I only saw during the major tests and checks on the command module at Downey.

I remembered Dave Scott from West Point, and it was no surprise to me that his star had continued to rise. Like me, he’d spent some time at the University of Michigan and as an Edwards test pilot, although in different years. But he’d also managed to squeeze in graduate work at MIT, served in a fighter squadron overseas, and was selected by NASA as an astronaut a full three years ahead of me. He was four months younger than me, yet had outpaced me on all career fronts. The guy was damn impressive, and NASA’s golden boy. I think everyone in Houston believed one day Dave would be the chief of staff of the air force. He just seemed destined for greatness.

My good opinion of Dave grew as I got to know him better. He was at the very least the equal of anyone in the astronaut office—and I suspected he was better than all of them. When he came to check out the spacecraft, he took meticulous notes, then gradually checked off each item to ensure that everything was resolved to his satisfaction. Absolutely no detail, however small, got past him. He’d flown in space once before, on the Gemini 8 mission in 1966 with Neil Armstrong, bedeviled by a stuck thruster which spun the spacecraft out of control. Dave and Neil nearly passed out, but kept their cool and saved the spacecraft and their lives by regaining control and returning from orbit. They impressed their NASA colleagues, especially their fellow pilots. They had taken care of the problem and made it home. Less-skilled pilots would have died up there.

During my year preparing and checking the mission’s command module in Downey, I came to know every mechanic, test conductor, and technician who worked on the spacecraft. Every day I was sure to ask them if there were any problems. If something is wrong, I said, please share it with me. I assured them I would get the problem resolved. It was a lesson I’d learned when running the armaments shop back in my fighter squadron days. The spacecraft was the most important thing in the world to me; it had to be flawless. I told the team of technicians that if a problem arose with the command module, I would keep it within our small group while we fixed it. But I also promised there would be hell to pay if something was wrong with the space vehicle and they didn’t tell me about it.

In August of 1968, to our surprise, we learned that instead of testing the command and service module along with the lunar module in Earth orbit, the second manned Apollo mission would now fly all the way to the moon and back. The lunar module was slipping behind in its development and would not be ready in time for the proposed launch date. If America didn’t send astronauts to orbit the moon soon, the Soviets might beat us to it. So NASA shuffled the order of flights. Deke told Jim McDivitt that his crew would still be the first to test the lunar module, but they would now fly the third manned Apollo mission. The spacecraft I worked on for a year would now fly with a different crew—minus a lunar module—on the prior flight.

The stakes were now even higher for the command module. It would take humans around the moon, and the service module attached to it had only one engine to get the crew back to Earth. If something went wrong, three astronauts would be stuck circling the moon forever.

But before the command module I worked on could fly, NASA had to successfully carry out the first manned Apollo mission, our first flight since the fire. The Apollo 7 mission, as it was named, was commanded by my old mentor and friend Wally Schirra. It was a huge confidence booster for NASA to fly again after the tragedy of the fire, but I was so busy when Wally’s crew launched in October 1968 that I couldn’t pay much attention. Besides, I had every confidence in the Apollo spacecraft and knew that once they entered orbit they would be just fine. If anything went wrong, they could come home at once.

Apollo 8, the next mission, was a very different story. The crew would leave Earth orbit and eventually lose sight of our planet altogether as they orbited the moon’s far side. Nothing could go wrong with the spacecraft had worked on so hard.

In December of 1968, I watched the Apollo 8 liftoff at the Cape. In addition to sending that spacecraft around the moon for the first time, we launched it on the mighty Saturn V rocket. It was only the third time that this rocket had ever been launched; the prior two launches were unmanned flights. The previous test had not gone perfectly; severe engine oscillations violently shook the rocket as it climbed into space. Some of the engines had also failed to fire for as long as they should have. The designers believed they had fixed all the problems. Still, it was a gutsy decision to put people on top of the rocket on the next flight. That NASA was willing to take the chance demonstrated confidence in both the machine and its designers.