Apollo 7, part 2

"Deke [Slayton] said that we of the original seven are done, there's a whole new crew now. That I even got that Apollo flight was unusual. The second group was brought in to go to the Moon. We were supposed to be out of there by then. It just turned out they needed me, so I stayed for the Apollo 7 flight. That was unique."
-Wally Schirra

"By 1968, I saw a bureaucracy developing - the fun days were over."
-Wally Schirra

On February 26, 1966, six months to the day before a Command Module dubbed CM-012 arrived at the Kennedy Space Center and with five Gemini missions still to go, NASA launched its very first Apollo mission. Dubbed AS-201 (A for Apollo, S for Saturn), this launch consisted of the first flight of a Saturn IB and unmanned Apollo Command and Service Modules (CM and SM, respectively; CSM together).

On March 21, 1966, NASA announced the prime and backup crews for what was then designated AS-204, the first manned flight of the Apollo CSM. Mercury veteran Gus Grissom would command, with Jim McDivitt as his backup. On September 29, Wally Schirra was announced as the commander of a mission dubbed AS-205, which would largely be a repeat of AS-204. Schirra proceeded to lobby against this mission, feeling that it would be too repetitive to justify. NASA management agreed and scrubbed AS-205. Schirra and his crewmates, rookies Donn Eisle* and Walter Cunningham, were reassigned as Grissom's backup on AS-204, while Jim McDivitt and his crew (about whom more when we get to Apollo 9) were assigned a different flight.

*Deke Slayton had originally assigned Eisle (pronounced EYES-lee) to the prime crew of AS-204, but Eisle dislocated his shoulder prior to the official crew announcement and was replaced by Roger Chaffee.

"I had a prime flight scheduled, Apollo 2. Well, it could have been called Apollo 2. I'm not sure what the real number would have been, because the numbers were all changed later to honor Apollo 1. I convinced the NASA people it was a dumb flight, to do the same thing all over again, much like the second Mercury flight. We finally stopped doing that in Gemini, and I asked why we were doing it in Apollo, if we were in a hurry to get to the Moon and back. So they made us backups. I was furious. Having been a Mercury backup, then a Gemini backup - this was three backups, and that was too much. [Gordo] Cooper wasn't even a prime any more.* We were being pushed around a little bit, and I didn't like that very much."
-Wally Schirra**

*Cooper had fallen out of favor with the NASA higher-ups for his lax approach to training during Project Gemini. His only Apollo assignment would be as a backup commander for Apollo 10.

**Unless otherwise stated, all of Schirra's quotes in this post are taken from a 2002 interview available here.

NASA had toyed with the idea of having AS-204 fly in 1966 and rendezvous with one of the last Gemini flights, but manufacturing delays for the CM put an end to that idea, and AS-204 was rescheduled to fly on February 21, 1967. Meanwhile, NASA performed two more unmanned Saturn IB launches. By ordinary numbering, therefore, Grissom's mission should have been designated Apollo 4. But Grissom received permission to call his mission Apollo 1 and design a patch to that effect. (That's one version. The other, which Schirra's above quote alludes to, is that Grissom's mission was re-designated Apollo 1 only after he'd died.) Grissom was also given a largely free hand in designing the mission profile. All NASA really wanted was to prove that the Apollo CSM could fly for fourteen days, tying Gemini's record and demonstrating that the craft would function for the maximum-length planned lunar missions; how Grissom wanted to spend those fourteen days would be left largely up to him.

Project Gemini concluded on November 15, 1966, with the successful splashdown of Gemini 12. Now all eyes were on Apollo, and the Apollo CM was quickly becoming a source of frustration for the astronauts.

Apollo 1 crew portrait: White, Grissom, and Chaffee

In this parody of their official portrait, the crew express their concerns with the spacecraft.

Gus Grissom had had such an outsize role in designing the Gemini spacecraft that his fellow astronauts took to calling it "the Gusmobile." But Grissom was so frustrated by the Apollo CM that he hung a lemon on the training simulator. Wally Schirra and his crew were no more enamored of the new spacecraft.

"We knew that the spacecraft was, you know, in poor shape relative to what it ought to be. We felt like we could fly it, but let's face it, it just wasn't as good as it should have been for the job of flying the first manned Apollo mission."
-Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham

In October and December 1966, the prime and backup crews conducted tests inside the Apollo 1 command module, CM-012, with the hatch sealed and the cabin pressurized with 16 psi of pure oxygen. (For comparison's sake, Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level is 14 psi, of which only 3 psi is oxygen.) Neither crew found this irregular; the same thing had been done on Gemini.

On January 6, 1967, CM-012 was mated to the Saturn IB booster on Pad 34. Apollo 1 was now ready to fly. On January 26, Schirra's backup crew performed a simulated launch, running Apollo entirely on the vessel's internal power. Afterward, Grissom came out to the pad and spent some time inside the spacecraft with Schirra. After they climbed out, Schirra turned to Grissom and said "Something about this ship just doesn't ring right. If you have any problems, I'd get out."

Gus promised he would. Wally left for Houston. Gus stayed behind; he and his crew would run the same test the next day.

"The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
-Gus Grissom, 1966 

The last week of January is a grim time for NASA today, featuring a trio of tragic anniversaries. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after takeoff on January 28, 1986.* The Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry on February 1, 2003. And on January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died of asphyxiation when CM-012's atmosphere, a whopping 16.7 psi of pure oxygen, caught fire. In part because of Grissom's hatch misfire back in Mercury, the Apollo hatch was a much clunkier contraption, designed to open inwards. The astronauts had protested, and North American Aviation, the contractor for the CSM, promised that the second batch of CMs would have an outward-opening hatch. But that change came too late for Grissom; within moments of the fire starting, interior pressure had ballooned to 29 psi. Ed White was one of the strongest astronauts in the corps, but it didn't matter. With that much internal pressure, there was simply no way any human being could have opened an inward-opening hatch.

*In an absolutely bizarre twist, January 28, 1986 is also the day the USSR disclosed that they had suffered their own cosmonaut fatality due to a fire in a high-oxygen environment... in 1961.

In the wake of the fire, two astronauts were tasked with getting Apollo back on track. Frank Borman would investigate the cause of the fire, testify before Congress, and grapple with North American Aviation's higher-ups (more on him in December). Meanwhile, Wally Schirra prepared for the mission that should have been Grissom's, and stalked North American's factory floor, looking for anyone slipping up. When he tried to inspect a fresh-off-the-assembly-line Apollo CM, he went to kneel on a bundle of exposed wires. A worker quickly slapped his leg away (it was believed that frayed wiring caused the spark that started the Apollo 1 fire). Schirra's concerns were somewhat mollified.

As an additional measure, Schirra lobbied for - and got - North American to hire Mercury/Gemini pad leader (the man responsible for the condition of the spacecraft at launch) Guenter Wendt from McDonnell Aircraft, which had designed the previous spacecraft. While some NASA brass believed they were just indulging Schirra's request for a familiar face, Schirra felt differently. He wanted Wendt because he wanted the best, most professional, safety-conscious pad leader he could find, and Wendt fit the bill:

"I arranged for Guenter Wendt to be our pad leader. He essentially had been working for McDonnell Douglas for Mercury and Gemini. After the Apollo 1 disaster I asked North American Rockwell to hire him as our Apollo pad leader. They said, 'Do you want a Barbie doll too?', or something like that. I said, 'I don't think you fellows understand where I am coming from this time. You screwed up. I want a good man on the pad.' He did all the Apollo flights after that - North American hired him."
-Wally Schirra

(I should point out that I don't believe Wendt could have saved the Apollo 1 crew, and I don't think Wendt thought that either; the spacecraft was simply too defective, and nobody - nobody - imagined that the fire could have happened.)

"Maybe it was meant for me not to be there [for Apollo 1] because I would have taken it very hard."
-Guenter Wendt

Wendt and Schirra shake hands prior to Gemini 6A

So, to recap: Wally Schirra had helped cleared Grissom of any wrongdoing in the Mercury hatch incident, and gone on to be his backup (and next-door neighbor) in both Gemini and Apollo; Schirra and his crew had done the same tests in the same conditions that killed Grissom; and one of Schirra's crew, Donn Eisle, had originally been assigned to Grissom's. Now Grissom and his crew were dead, and it could just as easily have been Schirra's.

Oh yes, and Schirra's Apollo 7 would be launching from pad 34 - the very same pad on which Grissom died.

That "Jolly Wally" disappeared after the fire should have been a surprise to no-one. But Schirra also made one more decision that did come across as a surprise: he announced that he would retire from NASA - and the Navy - after Apollo 7. The HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon includes a scene where Schirra (played by Mark Harmon) hints to Deke Slayton that he would stick around if he was assigned a Moon landing, but the real Schirra called that scene an artistic license:

"That was overplayed, no. The rule had been established by then, that was a published rule, that he who commands an Apollo flight will not command a second one.* And it turned out to be true. The only one who [commanded] two was [Tom] Stafford, who had Apollo 10, and Apollo-Soyuz, which doesn't really count. There were a lot of guys waiting in line. I could see that I was out of line already. If Cooper was already out of line, how the heck could I get back in again?"
-Wally Schirra

*Unless, according to NASA Administrator Tom Paine, your name was Neil Armstrong and you had to abort your landing. We'll return to this in July 2019 and April 2020.

The Apollo 1 fire put America's manned spaceflight calendar on hold for eighteen months. The Soviets, meanwhile, faced their own setback when, after a disastrous flight, Soyuz 1's parachutes failed to deploy and the spacecraft slammed into the Earth at 400 miles an hour, killing its sole occupant, Vladimir Komarov. (This was the Soviets' first major failure, and the morale loss is what prompted Yuri Gagarin to apply for reinstatement.) The Soviets attempted to bounce back in March 1968 with Zond 4, their first computerized probe, which they looped around the Moon. Errors during reentry caused the probe to disintegrate off the coast of Africa, but NASA knew it was only a matter of time before the Soviets tried again.

In the interim, NASA performed one more unmanned Saturn IB launch and two unmanned Saturn V launches. Mindful of the fact that they had already done three unmanned launches as part of the Apollo Program, these missions were designated Apollos 4, 5, and 6. Schirra's flight would therefore be designated Apollo 7, although internal documentation would generally refer to it as the C-mission. This was in line with NASA's schedule of planned missions, as of September 1967 (the crews are listed in order of CDR, CMP, LMP):

A-missions: unmanned CSM/Saturn V tests
B-mission: unmanned LM/Saturn IB test
C-mission: Earth-orbit CSM test (Schirra, Eisle, Cunningham, backed up by Stafford, Young, Cernan)
D-mission: Earth-orbit LM test (McDivitt, Scott, Schweickart, backed up by Conrad, Gordon, Williams)
E-mission: high Earth-orbit LM test and lunar-speed reentry test (Borman, Collins, Anders, backed up by Armstrong, Lovell, Aldrin)
F-mission: lunar dress rehearsal
G-mission: first lunar landing
H-missions: subsequent short-stay landings with two EVAs
I-missions: lunar orbital surveys
J-missions: longer-stay landings with three EVAs and a rover

It is worth pointing out that of the four rookie astronauts given crew assignments at this point, three (Eisle, Cunningham, and Russell "Rusty" Schweickart) were assigned to prime crews of the first two missions. It does make sense, in that the backup crews for the first three missions would be the prime crews for the next three, which would - if everything went according to plan - include the first lunar landing, so you would want an experienced crew for that. (As it happened, the crew that made the first landing had less experience than the crew on either side of it, but we'll get to that.)

Eisle, Schirra, and Cunningham pose with their outward-opening hatch

Schirra would fly with two rookies for Apollo 7, Donn Eisle and Walter Cunningham. Both came to NASA as part of the third astronaut group - "the Fourteen" - in 1963, Eisle from the Air Force and Cunningham from the Marines. Although the group was primarily meant to fill out the crews on Gemini and Apollo, two of the Fourteen - Dave Scott and Gene Cernan - would ultimately command Apollo missions. Eisle, who was technically more senior to Cunningham, could very well have gotten a later Apollo mission of his own if not for two things: first, his behavior on Apollo 7, which we'll get to in the next post, and second, the fact that he was one of the first astronauts to be caught in an extramarital affair.*

*Although Eisle's problems with management cost him a lunar mission - which, going by the established crew rotation, would have been Apollo 13 - Slayton intended to put him on an Apollo Applications Program mission, until that project was cut down to only Skylab.

At the time, the astronaut image was still untarnished by marital strife, and NASA wanted to keep it that way. The fourth group of astronauts, selected in June 1965, contained one Duane Graveline, who resigned from NASA for "personal reasons" just two months later - those "personal reasons" being, specifically, "he was getting divorced and NASA didn't want to deal with the scandal." Eisle's affair was known to some people at NASA, including Wally Schirra and Deke Slayton, but he'd so far managed to keep the press from finding out.

"Donn Eisele was already entranced with a girl at the time of our flight, Susie, who was messing around with him in those days, and he later married her. I made note of it, not to a great degree, but I made note of it."
-Wally Schirra

Eisle, more so than Cunningham, picked up on his commander's grumpy attitude. During one preflight interview, Schirra and Eisle shocked the crowd by speaking very, very bluntly about their opinions:

SCHIRRA: "We've basically lived with Apollo 7 at the plant, we've lived with it at the Cape, and if somebody takes even a small component off it, we immediately become furious and say, 'Why did you remove it?' We expect answers immediately. In fact, I'm waiting for an answer, as an example, why someone took our hatch cover off and took it to Downey and we haven't got the answer on why."
EISLE: "Pardon me, I just went into shock."
SCHIRRA: "I know."
EISLE: "Oh boy."
-preflight interview, fall 1968

Schirra's irascibility wasn't the only problem NASA faced. On September 14, 1968, the Soviets launched Zond 5, another unmanned probe - albeit one with tortoises and several insects aboard - around the Moon and back to Earth. Unlike the Zond 4 mission that March, this one splashed down safely. NASA believed it was only a matter of time before the Soviets attempted a manned lunar mission.* (NASA had no way of knowing that, by this point, the Soviets' chief rocket designer had been dead for two and a half years, and that the Moon was quickly slipping out of their reach.)

*Some sources incorrectly cite Zond 5's success as the impetus for sending Frank Borman's crew into lunar orbit; while the threat of a manned Soviet lunar mission certainly played a role, the E-mission was cancelled and Borman was reassigned to Apollo 8 on August 10, 1968, more than a month before Zond 5's September 21 splashdown.

As the October launch date approached, Schirra grappled with his NASA bosses twice more. The first argument was over coffee:

"In the real world, most Naval officers live on coffee. At that time I was very much into coffee, much more so than even now. The spacecraft fuel cells made hot water, 150 degree water. So you could reconstitute freeze-dried coffee easily. In fact, you drink coffee at about 120 -125 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the psychologists said it's a stimulant, that's all you want it for, it has no caloric value. So I let them go without it for a day - I removed it from their meetings. That worked out very well! I got my point across, and we had coffee on the flight."
-Wally Schirra

Schirra's second argument was about wind conditions at launch. There was a tiny rocket attached to the top of the CM; if all went well, it would be jettisoned after lift-off. But if the Saturn booster blew up on the launchpad or failed a few seconds after lift-off, that tiny rocket would fire, taking the CM away from the exploding missile.

All well and good, but then the Apollo's parachutes would deploy, and the craft would come down wherever the wind put it. Schirra was concerned that strong winds would blow the spacecraft west, onto solid ground. Although Apollo 7 would have a Block II hatch, it would use the older Block I couch, which was not rated for ground impact. Schirra fought for - and believed he'd won - a mission rule change that would abort the launch in the event of strong winds. But on October 11, 1968, Schirra found himself strapped to the Block I couch while the wind roared around his spacecraft.

"They broke the mission rule that we had established, that said we were not to launch under those conditions. We were not to launch if the wind was to blow us back over the beach, which would then force a land landing if we had to abort. That would essentially have been a death penalty. The winds on launch day were such that they would have blown us back over the beach. There was no problem about which day we launched. It was really a case of, someone wanted to go. I fought that, until I became rather difficult, and I finally yielded, with great concern. I conceded when we got to about T minus an hour and counting, when I realized that this could be a hard one to redo."
-Wally Schirra

Look at this from Schirra's perspective. It wasn't the ground controllers who'd spend months doing tests inside what turned out to be a ticking time bomb; it was Schirra and his crew. NASA had misunderstood why Schirra had been so insistent on hiring Wendt. Now they ignored his concerns about the wind and barreled on with the countdown. Here we are, eighteen months out of Apollo 1, and once again "go fever" is threatening crew safety! It's not your neck on the line; it's mine. That means it's not your mission; it's mine.

"I said, okay, if you're going to be violating rules, guess what I'm going to be doing! We're going to judge these rules from now on. If you are going to break that rule and not give me a chance — then I am going to break some of the rules that you have given me problems with!"
-Wally Schirra

Apollo 7 lifts off

To be concluded...