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.”

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.

Kraft, Slayton, Roosa, and Gay were eager to get this exercise over with. For more than half a day, the crew had been flat on their backs under the weight of their own bodies and their bulky pressure suits, in couches not designed for the oppressive load of a one‑g environment but the friendly float of weightless space. In a few more minutes, they could get the countdown rolling again, complete their simulated blastoff, and then get those men out of there.

But this was not to be. The first sign that something was amiss came moments before the clock was set to start running again, at 6:31 p.m., when technicians watching the video monitor of the comand module noticed a sudden movement through the hatch window, a shadow moving rapidly across the screen. Controllers accustomed to the deliberate movements of well‑drilled crewmen plodding through a familiar countdown snapped their heads to the screen. Anyone who didn’t have a monitor directly in front of him or who was out on the scaffold‑like gantry surrounding the Apollo ship and its 224‑foot booster would have noticed nothing. A moment later, a voice crackled down from the tip of the rocket.

“Fire in the spacecraft!” It was Roger Chaffee, the rookie, calling out.

On the gantry, James Gleaves, a mechanical technician monitoring communications through his headset, turned with a start and began running toward the White Room, which led from the uppermost level of the gantry to the spacecraft. In the blockhouse, Gary Propst, a communications control technician, looked instantly to his top‑left monitor, the one connected to a camera in the White Room, and thought – thought – he could make out a bright glow of some kind through the hatch’s porthole. At the Cape’s Capcom console, Deke Slayton and Stu Roosa, who had been reviewing flight plans, looked at their monitor and believed they saw something that looked like a flame playing about the seam of the hatch.

At a nearby console, assistant test supervisor William Schick, who was responsible for keeping a log of every significant event in the course of the countdown, looked immediately at his flight clock and then dutifully recorded: “1831: Fire in the cockpit.”

On the communications line, those same words echoed down from the spacecraft “Fire in the cockpit!” shouted Ed White through his balky radio. The flight surgeon glanced at his console and saw that White’s heartbeat had spiked dramatically. Environmental control officers looked at their readouts and noticed that spacecraft motion detectors were picking up furious movement inside the craft. On the gantry, Gleaves heard a sudden whoosh coming from the command module, as if Grissom were opening the O₂ vent to dump the spacecraft’s atmosphere – precisely what you’d want to do if you were trying to choke off a fire. Nearby, systems technician Bruce Davis saw flames shoot from the side of the ship near the umbilical cord that connected the ship to the ground systems. An instant later fire began dancing along the umbilical itself. At his blockhouse monitor, Propst could see flames behind the porthole; through them, he could also see a pair of arms – from the position, they had to be White’s – reaching toward the console to fumble with something.

“We’re on fire! Get us out of here!” Chaffee shouted, his voice clear on the ship’s one perfect channel. From the left of Propst’s screen, a second pair of arms – they had to be Grissom’s – appeared in the porthole. Donald Babbitt, the pad leader – whose desk was just twelve feet away from the spacecraft, on the top level of the gantry‑level – shouted to Gleaves, “Get them out of there!” As Gleaves dashed toward the hatch, Babbitt turned to grab his pad‑to‑blockhouse communications box. Just then, a huge burst of smoke erupted from the side of the craft. Beneath it, a duct that was supposed to vent steam now sent out tongues of flame.

From the blockhouse Gay, the test director, called up to the astronauts in disciplined tones: “Crew egress.” There was no answer. “Crew, can you egress at this time?” “Blow the hatch!” Propst screamed to no one in particular. “Why don’t they blow the hatch?”

Through the smoke on the gantry, someone shouted, “She’s going to blow!”

“Clear the level,” someone else ordered.

Davis turned and ran toward the southwest door of the gantry. Creed Journey, another technician, threw himself to the ground. Gleaves backed warily away from the ship. Babbitt stayed at his desk, intent on raising the blockhouse on his comm box. On the ground, the environmental control console recorded the cabin pressure at 29 pounds per square inch, twice sea level, and the temperature off the scale. At that moment, with a crack and a roar and a burst of hideous heat, the Apollo 1 spacecraft – America’s flagship moonship surrendered to the inferno inside it, splitting at the seam like an old treadless tire. Fourteen seconds had elapsed since Chaffee’s first cry of distress.

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.

It was another several minutes before the hatch was opened, and then only partway – barely a six‑inch gap at the top. This was enough, however, to release a final blast and smoke from the interior of the spacecraft, and to reveal that the fire itself was at last out. With some more shoving and manipulating, Babbitt managed to pry the hatch loose and drop it down inside the cockpit, between the head of the astronauts’ couches and the wall. Then he fell away from the ship, exhausted.

Systems technician Reece was the first to peer into the maw of the cremated Apollo. He poked his head nervously inside, and through the blackness saw a few caution lights winking on the instrument panel and a weak floodlight glowing on the commander’s side. Apart from this he saw nothing – including the crew. But he heard something; Reece was certain he heard something. He leaned in and felt around on the center couch, where Ed White should have been, but he felt only burned fabric. He took off his mask and shouted into the void, “Is anyone there?” No response. “Is anyone there?”

Reece was pushed aside by Clemmons, Hawkins, and Medcalf who were carrying flashlights. The three men played their lights around the interior of the cockpit, but their smoke‑stung eyes could make out nothing but what appeared to be a blanket of ashes across the crew’s couches. Medcalf backed away from the ship and bumped into Babbitt. He choked.

“There’s nothing left inside,” he told the pad leader.

Babbitt lunged to the spacecraft. More people crowded around the ship, and more light was trained on its interior. With his eyes slowly recovering, Babbitt saw that there was, most assuredly, something inside. Directly in front of him was Ed White, lying on his back with his arms over his head, reaching toward where the hatch had been. From the left Grissom was visible, turned slightly in the direction of White, reaching through his junior crewman’s arms for the same absent hatch. Roger Chaffee was still lost in the gloom, and Babbitt guessed he was probably strapped in his couch. The emergency escape drill called for the commander and the pilot to handle the hatch while the junior crewman stayed in his seat. Chaffee was no doubt there, waiting patiently – now eternally – for his senior crewmates to finish their work.

From the back of the crowd, James Burch of the Cape Kennedy fire station pushed his way to the spacecraft. Burch had seen this kind of scene before. The other men here hadn’t. The technicians, who made their living maintaining the best machines science could conceive, now made respectful room for the man who takes over when something in one of those machines goes disastrously wrong.

Burch crawled through the hatch and into the cockpit and, unknowingly, stopped atop White. He swept his light across the charred instrument panel and the spider web of singed wires dangling from it. Just beneath him, he noticed a boot. Not knowing if the crew was dead or alive, and not having the time to find out gingerly, he grabbed the boot and pulled hard. The still‑hot mass of molded rubber and cloth came off in his hand revealing White’s foot. Burch then patted his hands farther up and felt ankle, shin, and knee. The uniform was partly burned away, but the skin underneath was unmolested. Burch tugged the skin this way and that to see if it would slip from the flesh – a consequence of traumatic burns that, he knew, could cause a victim to shed his outer dermis like a tropical gecko. This skin, however, was intact; indeed the entire body appeared intact. The fire had been exceedingly hot, but it had also been exceedingly fast. It was fumes that claimed this man, not flames. Burch pulled up on White’s legs with as much force as he could, but the body budged only six inches or so and he let it fall back into its couch. The fireman backed away to the edge of the hatch and took another look around the cruel kiln of the cockpit. The two bodies flanking the one in the center looked the same as White’s, and Burch knew that whatever life had been in this spacecraft just fourteen minutes earlier had certainly been snuffed out. He climbed out of the ship. “They are all dead,” Burch intoned quietly. “The fire is extinguished.”