Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

Using the experience and advice of Cernan in Gemini IX, Aldrin worked tirelessly training himself in a tank of water before the mission to work at all the experimental tasks until he felt he was perfect. During his long space walk Aldrin moved to a panel where he plugged in electrical cables, turned bolts, snapped hooks through rings, peeled off velcro strips, while experimenting with foot holds and his tether cable. He was able to complete all the tasks and suffered none of the fogging, perspiring, and tiredness of some of the earlier missions, although he did complain of cold feet.

Aldrin described:

In the first EVA I mounted a telescoping hand rail that went from one end of the spacecraft to the other; then I did some night photography, pretty much just standing up and shooting for ultraviolet light. In the longest EVA I had activities with the docked Agena. I used the handrail to try to move up hand over hand to the Agena at the nose and there I tested a number of different fasteners and tethers and handholds, and attached a tether to the docking adapter. Then I went to the back of the spacecraft and did extensive evaluations of the foot restraints using one and two restraints that were excellent in their tight and positive control.

I used a lot of different connectors and fastenings and tried a lot of work tasks primarily to evaluate how well those foot restraints went. The last EVA was just doing a dump of things overboard.

I didn’t have trouble such as fogging up with my suit – it was a question of managing energy – I just didn’t fight the problem. I got good restraints and managed to get good control of inertia and balance so I was exerting myself less – I just didn’t fight the problem.

Gemini XII splashed down and was picked up by the aircraft carrier USS Wasp. As soon as it had left the launch pad demolition crews began to dismantle the launch complex for scrap. All the Gemini astronauts became Apollo astronauts.

Project Gemini had achieved its objectives: long duration flights, rendezvous and docking and some new ones. These included the ability to live and work inside and outside a spacecraft for the time period it took to get to the moon and back. The pool of expertise both on the ground and among the astronauts had grown rapidly.

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.