Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The modifications being made to the Apollo spacecraft were not the only changes NASA explored in the wake of the fire. Also scrutinized were the missions those ships would be sent on. Though John Kennedy had been dead since 1963, his grand promise – or damned promise, depending on how you looked at it – to have America on the moon before 1970 still loomed over the Agency. NASA officials would have considered it a profound failure not to meet that bold challenge, but they would have considered it an even greater failure to lose another crew in the effort. Accordingly, chastened Agency brass began making it clear, publicly and privately, that while America was still aiming for the moon before the end of the decade, the breathless gallop of the past few years would now be replaced by a nice, safe lope.

According to the tentative flight schedule, the first manned Apollo flight would be Schirra’s Apollo 7, intended to be nothing more than a shakedown cruise of the still-suspect command module in low Earth orbit. Next would come Apollo 8, during which Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart would go back into near-Earth space to test-drive both the command module and the lunar excursion module, or LEM, the ugly, buggy, leggy lander that would carry astronauts down to the surface of the moon. Next, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders would pilot Apollo 9 on a similar two-craft mission, this time taking the ships to a vertiginous altitude of 4,000 miles, in order to practice the hair-raising, high-speed re-entry techniques that would be necessary for a safe return from the moon.

After that, things were wide open. The program was scheduled to continue through Apollo 20, and, in theory any mission from Apollo 10 on could be the first to set two men down on the moon’s surface. But which mission and which two men were utterly unsettled. NASA was determined not to rush things, and if it took until well into the Apollo teens before all the equipment checked out and a landing looked reasonably safe, then it would have to take that long.

Lovell:

In the summer of 1968, two months before Apollo 7 was scheduled for launch, circumstances in Kazakhstan, southeast of Moscow, and in Bethpage, Long Island, northeast of Levittown, conspired to scramble this cautious scenario. In August, the first lunar module arrived at Cape Kennedy from its Grumman Aerospace plant in Bethpage, and in the assessment of even the most charitable technicians, it was found to be a mess. In the early checkout runs of the fragile, foil-covered ship, it appeared that every critical component had major, seemingly insoluble problems. Elements of the spacecraft that were shipped to the Cape unassembled and were supposed to be bolted together on site did not seem to want to go together; electrical systems and plumbing did not operate as specified; seams, gaskets, and washers that were designed to remain tightly sealed were springing all manner of leaks.

Some glitches, of course, were to be expected. In ten years of building sleek, bullet-shaped spacecraft designed to fly through the atmosphere and into orbit, no one had ever attempted to build a manned ship that would operate exclusively in the vacuum of space or in the lunar world of one-sixth gravity. But the number of glitches in this gimpy ship was more than – even the worst NASA pessimists could have imagined.

At the same time the LEM was causing such headaches, CIA agents working overseas picked up even more disturbing news. According to whispers coming from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet Union was making tentative plans for a flight around the moon by a Zond spacecraft sometime before the end of the year. Nobody knew if the flight would be manned, but the Zond line was certainly capable of carrying a crew, and if a decade of getting sucker-punched by Soviet space triumphs had indicated anything, it was that when Moscow had even the possibility of pulling off a space coup, you could bet they’d give it a try.

NASA was stumped. Flying the LEM before it was ready was clearly impossible in the cautious atmosphere that now pervaded the Agency, but flying Apollo 7 and then launching nothing at all for months and months while the Russians promenaded around the moon was not an attractive option either. One afternoon in early August, 1968, Chris Kraft, deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and Deke Slayton were summoned to Bob Gilruth’s office to discuss the problem. Gilruth was the overall director of the Center and, according to the scuttlebut, had been meeting all morning with George Low, the director of Flight Missions, to determine if there was some plan that would allow NASA to save face without running the risk of losing more crews. Slayton and Kraft arrived in Gilruth’s oflice, and he and Low got straight to business.

“Chris, we’ve got serious problems with the upcoming flights,” Low said bluntly. “We’ve got the Russians and we’ve got the LEM and neither one is cooperating.”

“Especially the LEM,” Kraft responded. “We’re having every kind of trouble it’s possible to have.”

“So it couldn’t be ready by December?” Low asked.

“No chance,” said Kraft.

“If we wanted to fly Apollo 8 on schedule, what could we do with just the command-service module that will further the program?”

“Not much in Earth orbit,” Kraft said. “Most of what we can do with that we’re already planning to do on 7.”

“True enough,” Low said tentatively. “But suppose Apollo 8 didn’t just repeat 7’s mission. If we don’t have an operative LEM by December, could we do something else with the command-service module alone?” Low paused for a moment. “like orbit the moon?”

Kraft looked away and fell silent for a long minute, calculating the incalculable question Low had just asked him. He looked back at his boss and slowly shook his head.

“George”, he said, “That’s a pretty difficult order. We’re having a hell of a struggle getting the computer programs ready just for an Earth-orbit flight. You’re asking what I think about a moon flight in four months? I don’t think we can do it.”

Low seemed strangely unperturbed. He turned to Slayton. “What about the crews, Deke? If we could get the systems ready for a lunar mission, would you have a crew that could make the flight?”

“The crew isn’t a problem,” Slayton answered. “They could get ready.”

Low pressed him. “Who would you want to send? McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart are next in line.”

“I wouldn’t give it to them,” Slayton said. “They’ve been training with the LEM for a long time, and McDivitt’s made it clear he wants to fly that ship. Borman’s crew hasn’t been at it as long, plus they’re already thinking about deep-space reentry, something they’d need for a mission like this. I’d give it to Borman, Lovell, and Anders.”

Low was encouraged by Slayton’s response, and Kraft, infected by the enthusiasm of the other men in the room, began to soften. He asked Low for a little time to talk to his technicians and see if the computer problems could be resolved. Low agreed, and Kraft left with Slayton, promising an answer in a few days. Returning to his office, Kraft hurriedly assembled his team around him.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want an answer in seventy-two hours,” he said. “Could we get our computer problems unravelled in time to get to the moon by December?”

Kraft’s team vanished, and returned not in the requested seventy-two hours, but in twenty-four. Their answer was a unanimous one: yes, they told him, the job could be done.

Kraft got back on the phone to Low: “We think it’s a good idea,” he told the director of Flight Missions. “As long as nothing goes wrong on Apollo 7, we think we ought to send Apollo 8 to the moon over Christmas.”