I was five years old in 1966, so I don’t remember much of those early days in Texas. Maybe my first memory is of hearing the news on the car radio about the Apollo 1 fire and the deaths of Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee. It was January 27, 1967. I recall not so much the news itself as the reaction it elicited from my mom and dad, who discussed the event in the front seat of the Jeep in shocked, hushed tones. The crew had been practicing for launch of Apollo 1 on the pad in Florida, fully suited and deployed in the command module as they would be at lift off, which was scheduled to take place just a few days later. The atmosphere in the cockpit was pure oxygen. When a short in the wiring caused sparking, the atmosphere fed flames that spread through the nylon netting and foam pads. The crew tried to get out, but the hatch was designed to open inward, which was made impossible by the sudden rise in air pressure in the cabin caused by the fire. All three men died. In my mind the event seems to take place on the same night my parents stopped on the side of NASA Road 1 to rescue a stray dog—a basset hound, I think. The Apollo 1 fire set the space program back, of course. It would be a year and a half before another American crew left earth. But more importantly it cast a large shadow over the men who were waiting to fly—and their wives. Just as many of us can remember where we were when we saw Challenger breaking apart in a brilliant blue sky in January of 1986, my parents always remembered that launch pad fire.
The dangers didn’t stop him, of course. They didn’t stop any of the men waiting to fly. Eventually the pall faded and the program started up again, this time with the oxygen content in the command module significantly reduced and the escape hatch modified to open outward instead of inward, so that the increased cabin pressure that would be generated in the event of a fire wouldn’t impede a rapid exit. In the meantime those involved shared the mounting excitement of being involved in the greatest engineering project in history. The astronauts trained for all sorts of contingencies. In June of 1967 many of them flew to Iceland for training in how to survive on the surface of the moon—central Iceland’s desolate terrain being adjudged the closest available stand-in for lunar conditions. In August of 1967 my dad traveled to Washington State for a United States Air Force Survival School training session focusing on desert conditions. The aim was to prepare for the aftermath of an emergency landing of a spacecraft somewhere between 45 degrees north latitude and 45 degrees south latitude. Fieldwork took place in an area northeast of Pasco, where, a schedule said, “the astronauts as a group will learn to make emergency clothing from the parachutes which lower their space vehicle to earth. Their knowledge of navigation will be reviewed. Emergency ground-to-air signals will be constructed and later evaluated by School personnel flying above the training site.” My dad also went on a survival trip to Panama that year, where, in typical fashion, he made a spectacle of himself by capturing and bringing back to the States a fer-de-lance, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world, in a gunny sack. He later donated it to the Houston Zoo.
I have a photograph of him in 1969, standing with Jim Irwin and Charlie Duke outside a Ramada Inn, lean and beautiful, an advertisement for adrenaline and aviator glasses. He wanted the world, and the world wanted him. He was five nine, slender, with dark hair and blue eyes, a fighter pilot and an astronaut, brilliant and dashing. In that bad, frenetic era, at a time when the nation seemed to be coming apart, torn by the hatreds engendered by Vietnam and racial inequality, the astronauts were establishment eye candy, rock-jawed, streamlined, and unafraid. It was a year of airplane hijackings and student protests. John married Yoko. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Richard Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and almost twelve thousand American servicemen would be killed that year in southeast Asia, fighting an elusive enemy in the service of an even more elusive cause. But NASA forged ahead. In July of that year Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins visited the Moon, as John F. Kennedy had promised they would, and the country had something to celebrate again. My dad was intimately involved with the mission, as one of three capsule communicators—“CAPCOMs,” in NASA-speak—along with Charlie Duke and Ron Evans. In the 2019 documentary Apollo 11 he shows up repeatedly, clad in a turtleneck sweater, looking intense and somehow glamorous, head down, gazing intently at whatever is on the screen in front of him, at one point scratching out calculations related to the flight. Serving as CAPCOM is sort of like being the back-up quarterback who relays plays in from the sidelines. You’re intimately involved in the action, but no one’s going to remember you after the game. On the other hand, he did gain one distinction from the service when he became the first human being ever to speak to someone on another celestial body—Neil Armstrong, of course.