Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

“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.”