Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (28 page)

 

Page 149
By mid-April, only ten weeks after the fire, the review board completed its investigation. More interested in solving the problem than laying blame, they made several recommendations, all of which were quickly adopted.
The Apollo capsule hatch would be redesigned. The old design had actually been two hatches, an inner hatch and an outer one, removable only by laboriously unscrewing some lug nuts. No one could have opened it in less than ninety seconds. The new hatch could be opened in under ten.
The use of a pure oxygen atmosphere before reaching orbit would be abandoned. At sea level the capsule pressure was set at 16.7 pounds per square inch, slightly higher than atmospheric pressure. This positive pressure isolated the capsule environment from the outside environment. Once in orbit the capsule pressure was then reduced to 5.5 pounds per square inch. At 16.7 pounds per inch pressure, however, pure oxygen is a lethal incendiary. By introducing a mixed atmosphere of forty percent nitrogen on the ground, the oxygen was diluted. As the capsule pressure was lowered to 5.5 pounds per inch in orbit, the nitrogen would be purged.
The use of combustible materials inside the capsule was to be severely reduced. More than 2,500 different items were removed, replaced with nonflammable materials.
Finally, the investigation ordered a complete overhaul of the quality control systems used to supervise construction. They had discovered an amazing complacency and negligence in both NASA and the contractors, not from greed or maliciousness but from simple overconfidence. As Borman said to Congress, "Quite frankly, we did not think, and this is a failing on my part and on everyone associated with us, we did not recognize the fact that we had the three essentials, an ignition source, extensive fuel and, of course, we knew we had the oxygen."
Borman now flew to Downey, California to act as the head of a NASA team helping North American Aviation redesign the spacecraft. George Low, the new head of the Apollo spacecraft program in Houston, had asked Borman to act as his "alter-ego," to make sure the redesign at North American was done correctly.
Borman spent the next year helping to incorporate the investigation's recommendations into a newly designed Apollo capsule.

 

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Soyuz 1
Floating 125 miles above the earth, Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov announced that "on the eve of the glorious historic event, the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, I convey warm greetings to the peoples of our homeland who are blazing mankind's road to communism."
5
After more than two years, the Soviets had finally returned to space.
Komarov, who had piloted the October 1964 three man Voskhod mission, had blasted off early on the morning of April 23, 1967 in a brand new spacecraft, intended by the Soviets not only to take the first human to the moon, but to act as the foundation for their restructured long-term space program. With this spacecraft the Soviets hoped to build space stations and colonize the planets, establishing communism throughout the solar system.
Soyuz 1 was different from any previous spacecraft. Like the Gemini and Apollo capsules, it carried its retro-rockets and fuel tanks in a special equipment module attached to its rear. Unlike Gemini and Apollo, Soyuz actually had two separate habitable sections for the cosmonauts. The front section, called the orbital module and for use only in space, had a docking port for linking up with another Soyuz.
Attached to the orbital module was the crew module, bell-shaped with a flat heat shield at its base. When the time came to return to earth the cosmonauts would eject the round orbital module and return in the crew module.
Other innovations included the use of solar panels to provide energy rather than the fuel cells and batteries that American spacecraft used. When Soyuz reached orbit, the two winglike panels would unfold on each side of the equipment section.
Komarov's mission called for him to spend a day in orbit checking out the new Soyuz craft. Then another Soyuz with three cosmonauts aboard would blast off, chase him much as Gemini 6 had done with Gemini 7, and then dock. Because the docking port in this first Soyuz design contained no tunnel for crew transfers, two cosmonauts from Soyuz 2 would open the hatch and space walk across to Komarov's Soyuz 1. The three would then undock their craft from Soyuz 2 and return to earth, leaving the fourth cosmonaut to spend several more days in space.

 

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Though Soviet space flights were no longer scheduled merely to upstage the West (as they had been under Khrushchev), the desire to score political points nonetheless played a part in Komarov's flight. Despite serious life-threatening failures on all three previous unmanned Soyuz test flights (one exploded on the launchpad and the other two had attitude control failures causing serious damage during reentry), Brezhnev pressured his engineers to fly the fourth Soyuz flight manned. With the Apollo investigation just completed, he wanted a political triumph to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet technology.
6
Unfortunately, things began going wrong as soon as Komarov reached orbit. Only one of the two solar panels unfolded, cutting his electrical power in half. His main shortwave radio failed, forcing him to use his backup radio.
Then the system for keeping the spacecraft properly oriented began to fail. Unlike American space capsules, the Soyuz craft had been designed so that it could be automatically piloted from the ground. In fact, Soviet cosmonauts were intended to be merely backup observers, not pilots.
Hence, when the automatic control system broke down and Komarov was forced to manually pilot his craft, he was using thruster controls that were difficult to use and functioned only sporadically.
By now mission control had canceled the second Soyuz launch and were desperately trying to figure out how to get Komarov back to earth alive. Unfortunately, their ground-to-capsule communications network was not very complete, and from the seventh to thirteenth orbits, more than nine hours, they had no way to talk to Komarov. "Try to get some sleep," they told him as his tumbling capsule moved out of range.
When they finally regained contact nine hours later, Komarov reported an almost completely out of control spacecraft. Recognizing that he might not survive reentry, the flight director had Komarov's wife Valentina brought to mission control so she and Komarov could have a last few precious minutes of private conversation.
Finally, on the seventeenth orbit Komarov manually fired the retro-rockets. Now he had to hold the bucking spacecraft with the heat shield in front, protecting him for the searing fire of reentry.

 

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Miraculously, he succeeded. The crew module's drogue chute deployed as planned, and it looked like Komarov would survive.
But now the spacecraft's main parachute failed to release. In a last ditch attempt to save his life, Komarov deployed his reserve chute, only to have this tangle with the still attached drogue. Plummeting earthward at more than four hundred miles an hour, the Soyuz 1 craft smashed into the soil of Russia, south of the Ural mountains.
Komarov was killed instantly.
Decades would pass before the details of this tragedy became public knowledge, both in and out of the Soviet Union. Soviet officials merely announced that Komorov had ''completed the full and complex program of testing the systems of Soyuz 1" during his one day flight, that he had then been "asked to stop flying and land," and that his death occurred when his "parachute system did not work."
7
Hidden behind their tight-lipped secrecy, however, was an inconsolable sorrow and regret. Komorov's death was even more devastating to the Soviets than the Apollo launchpad fire was to the Americans. Never again would they fly a cosmonaut on a spacecraft that hadn't been tested thoroughly. Never again would they let their desire to be first allow them to take such chances.
Unbeknownst to the Americans, this newfound Soviet caution would have significant consequences on the outcome of the race to the moon.
Columbia
On April 9th, 1968, an overflow crowd gathered in a small chapel on the Columbia University campus in New York City and listened as Reverend D. Moran Weston read excerpts from the works of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Five days earlier King had been standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, chatting with some friends, when he was gunned down by an assassin's bullet. Almost immediately riots and looting broke out in New York, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston and several other cities. In Washington more than six hundred fires were set, with entire blocks burning

 

Page 153
to the ground. Twelve thousand federal troops were called out to patrol the city. In Chicago, the riots killed nine people and injured three hundred, requiring five thousand guardsmen to stop the violence.
8
The Columbia University community now gathered to mourn the death of the civil rights leader. Weston finished speaking, and then asked everyone to hold hands and sing "We Shall Overcome."
Then David Truman, university vice-president, stood up to say his own eulogy for Reverend King. Before he could reach the podium a twenty-year-old young man with scruffy black hair stepped up onto the stage. The student's name was Mark Rudd.
"Columbia's administration is morally corrupt, unjust and indulges in racist policies," Rudd shouted. He then reeled off a series of charges about the university's anti-union policy and its construction of a gym in a public park adjacent to the campus. "If we really want to honor this man's memory then we ought to stand together against this racist gym." Rudd then marched from the room, followed by about three dozen followers.
9
The tensions at Columbia had been fed and nurtured by a series of increasingly violent events in the last three years, both in America and in the jungles of Vietnam. Since 1965, riots in urban black neighborhoods had become an almost annual occurrence, with looting and bloodshed in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland in 1966 and Buffalo, Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit and Newark in 1967. Most required the National Guard to enforce peace.
In Vietnam, the Johnson Administration had increased the number of American troops to just under 550,000 men.
10
In the three years since the Tonkin Gulf resolution bombing missions over North Vietnam had become a daily routine. By the beginning of 1968, the war had claimed the lives of 16,000 Americans.
11
Then in late January, 1968, the war exploded. During the Lunar New Year holiday of Tet, the Vietcong unleashed their biggest offensive. Beginning in the central areas of South Vietnam, the assault soon spread across the entire country, from the northern city of Hue to parts of the Mekong delta, south of Saigon. More than half the country's provincial capitals were attacked. In Saigon guerrillas stormed the U.S. embassy, setting off mines and occupying

 

Page 154
part of the embassy grounds for over six hours before being killed. For a short while the Vietcong managed to close all roads into Saigon, as well as forcing the shutdown of the city's airport. Soon, parts of the city were evacuated so that U.S. combat jets could bomb Vietcong-held neighborhoods.
Though the North Vietnamese were driven back, unable to hold any of their gains and losing somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers, the offensive succeeded in planting in the United States widespread doubt of the country's ability to win the war as well as of the legitimacy of the South Vietnam government. In driving the North Vietnamese out of Saigon, Americans were witness to a public execution. The executioner, a South Vietnamese general, claimed that because the captured man had a handgun he was a Vietcong terrorist. With news cameras rolling, the general pulled out his pistol, put it to the prisoner's head, and shot him.
Within weeks politicians from both parties, including Eugene McCarthy, Edward Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Jacob Javits, were calling for an end to American involvement in Vietnam.
12
At the same time the two leading Republican candidates for President, Richard Nixon and George Romney, renewed their attacks on Johnson's policies.
13
By April 1968, when Mark Rudd stepped up to the podium to condemn the Columbia University administration, U.S. casualties in Vietnam had risen to almost 22,000 deaths and only eight days earlier had cost Lyndon Johnson the presidency.
14
Johnson, having never clearly defined the goals of that war and faced with a rising storm of protest within his own party, had bowed out of the race for reelection.
At Columbia University, the fury over this unwanted, badly-fought war barely simmered below the surface. At the center of that anger was Mark Rudd and his followers.
Rudd was the head of the Columbia University chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.). With about 30,000 members nationwide, the S.D.S. had for several years helped organize many of the earliest, most visible antiwar protests, such as the November 1968 rally in Washington.*
* See page 125

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