_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [55]
The team was overloaded with retired military, with colonels and other high-ranking officers doing little more than flying on North American’s travel vouchers to military reunions and such.
The whole thing smelled of military paybacks for aviation and aerospace contracts, and in the coming months while review boards were investigating, while others were pointing fingers and covering their own asses, while engineers in the Downey plant were redesigning and rebuilding Apollo, T. J. O’Malley put on his boots, shined their toes, and began kicking ass and taking names.
On October 11, 1968, a Saturn 1B rocket roared to life on the same launch pad where Apollo 1’s Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had died. The heavyweight rose toward Earth orbit on 1.3 million pounds of thrust with Apollo 1’s backups, astronauts Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Don Eisele.
Schirra was the first, and would be the only, astronaut to fly all three capsule-type spacecraft of the era—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and he radioed a Mission Control holding its breath, “Apollo is riding like a dream.”
Saturn 1B took Schirra and crew into an orbit 140 by 183 miles high for a mission of eleven days. Apollo 7’s new rebuilt systems and its millions of new parts performed superbly. For the first time, live television from the spacecraft itself fascinated audiences around the world, and our radio and television coverage was suddenly easier. We could monitor the television pictures and describe to our radio listeners what we were seeing, and for television viewers, even though they were black-and-white, the pictures and words spoke for themselves.
The astronauts’ mission was to fly the new ship farther and longer than it would have to fly to the moon and back. The crew was impressed with the size of Apollo 7. Mercury and Gemini had been cramped, but in Apollo, the astronauts could unhook their safety harness and move about the cabin. If they wanted privacy, they could float into a closet-size area beneath the seats, which on later flights to the moon would serve as sleeping quarters.
The eleven-day mission encountered only minor, easily resolved problems. The biggest proved to be with the crew. All three had nasty colds and were orbiting Earth with stuffy noses and headaches. When the mission neared its end, the astronauts were in something less than the best of moods.
The astronauts’ irritability reached its boiling point on the ninth day, when Mission Control decided to try some unplanned systems checks. Apollo 7’s crew rejected the changes in the flight plan immediately, calling them “Mickey Mouse tasks.” Schirra was quick to point out three colleagues had been lost because of lack of attention to plans, called the engineer who thought up one of the tests an “idiot.” Wally Schirra refused to accept any more changes.
I knew from conversations I had had with Wally over coffee that he was flying his last mission. As Gus’s backup, he was picking up the reins dropped tragically by his friend, and after he had proved Apollo was safe to fly, as soon as the debriefings were over he was getting the hell out of Dodge. He’d had it with the space program, and he had made promises to his wife, Jo. He believed the Apollo contract had gone to political cronies instead of experienced, capable people, and because of that, his friend and two colleagues had died.
So, as far as Wally Schirra was concerned, his crew was going to fly the well-thought-out mission and no ad libs, thank you. As commander, he wasn’t going to put his flight in danger. He owed the Apollo 1 crew good results, and he owed his country. He knew NASA had some solid intelligence the Russians were getting ready to try a flight around the backside of the moon. Now, if Apollo 7 could turn in a grade-A performance, the Apollo 8 crew would feel comfortable about beating the Russians there. In spite of his stuffed-up nose and aching head, Wally smiled. The first lunar Christmas could be just around