MEMORIES OF APOLLO BY EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN Photos courtesy of NASA
For those people involved in the lunar voyages of the Apollo era, memories of those epic events still remain vivid, wistful, and poignant. Here are firsthand accounts, gathered over the years, of some of Apollo’s most memorable missions.
APOLLO 1 “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” - Apollo 1 astronaut Roger Chaffee
It was a Friday night at 6:31 p.m. And all of a sudden you hear, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” And of course we jumped to attention without any question to see what was going on. And that was the horrible thing that happened. Now [Director Flight Crew Operations] Deke Slayton was in the blockhouse and Rocco Petrone was our launch director, and the first thing Rocco did was turn off all the phones. I told Rocco I had to have a phone, because I had to let our people know in Washington, and for our planning as far as handling the press was concerned. So he gave me back the phone. And we had to wait for an hour or so, before anybody was able to go up to open the hatch in the spacecraft. The reason for that was you had a 155,000-pound thrust escape rocket sitting on top of the Apollo spacecraft. Now of course what happened was you had that spark and pure oxygen in the spacecraft, pure oxygen at [over 14] psi [pounds per square inch]. Once that spark happened, the fire and explosion occurred. The spacecraft actually ruptured. Ed White made a move to try to open the hatch, but there was no way he could the way it was constructed at that time. That was changed later. We had to wait about an hour or so before anybody could go up there. Deke and I talked, and I made a deal with Deke that I wouldn’t say anything about the astronauts having perished,
which we assumed that they had at that point … I made a deal that I wouldn’t make any announcement until the three wives, now three widows, were informed. … I was criticized at that time because a number of the news guys said that the astronauts’ death was like a presidential assassination or a presidential death, so you had no reason not to announce that immediately. I have no regrets about that whatsoever. Betty Grissom as it turns out was my next-door neighbor, across the fence on the next street in Houston. … I could not live if I was the one, and my voice was the one that Betty Grissom heard that Gus had perished. So I stand by that without any question. Jack King, Public Information Officer It was something that shocked us all because we didn’t think of that as dangerous. We knew flying spaceships was dangerous, but we didn’t think the testing was. Which showed we didn’t know everything, and we were shortsighted. People just said, “We’re going to have to solve this problem and get on with the program.” This is not going to deter us, but it does let us know this is a dangerous business and we’ve got to try to correct this and try to foresee any others. And of course we did, and Apollo 13 – that could have been a huge tragedy, but it wasn’t. We were able to solve it. Humans are just humans. We do the best we can but we just aren’t perfect. … When we were taking crews, we took three extra crews – that’s nine astronauts. We built three extra command modules, three extra rockets, and all that other stuff, because we knew this wasn’t going to be easy and we were probably going to lose some people along the way. And of course we lost them in a different place than what we thought. But you know that’s life. And that’s exploration. Remember what happened to Magellan. So exploration is dangerous, and for us to lose a shuttle once every 57 flights, although it’s sad and you don’t want to be on that flight, that’s what it’s going to take. And when people go back to the Moon, you are going to lose people there, too. No doubt about it. Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot
APOLLO 7 “Keep those cards and letters coming in folks.” Handwritten sign shown by Apollo 7 Commander Wally Schirra during the first live television broadcast from space
Astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee pose in front of Launch Complex 34, which is housing their Saturn I launch vehicle. The astronauts later died in a fire on the pad.
54 APOLLO 11 I 50 YEARS
We had no illness in flight during the Mercury program and the Gemini program. Then the very first Apollo flight we were able to fly with Wally Schirra and his crew with the new
