MOVIETONE NEWS: One of the year's most graphic filmings. (explosion) the failure of this Atlas missile in California was discounted by many later US successes. No one ever questions that the exploration of space is a risky business. MOVIETONE NEWS: Watch as, just clearing the 20 feet from its sunken pad called a "coffin", the missile (explosion) is exploded. Human beings sit atop what are essentially huge Roman Candles. Giant tubes filled with highly combustible mixtures of gases ... designed to send them hurdling millions of miles. And everyone involved in the space program, at least in theory is always prepared for the worst. As space pioneer Verner Von Braun put it (Von Braun: This reminds one again that we are not in the business of making shoes.) (MOVIETONE NEWS ANNOUNCER: The Atlas which was to be the first of its type to be launched from the new test tunnel, was conceived to travel 4000 miles down the Pacific Missile Range. No one was injured. (Music) (McCurdy: The way an engineer learns is by making mistakes). American University space historian Howard McCurdy. (MCCURDY: They find out why they made the mistakes, they fix it and they fly again. They make more mistakes and they learn from that. (Launius: One caveat to that) NASA's chief historian Roger Launius. (LAUNIUS: mostly when they make mistakes they're not catastrophic failures.) Try as they might, though, in the early days NASA had its share of accidents. And its share of tragedy. Robert Seamans was the agency's deputy administrator in the Apollo years. (Seamans: The accidents that I can think of off-hand were when two astronauts were coming in and their jet. ... they weren't over the runway and ... and they didn't make it. They went into a building. And a near-accident we had was with Neil Armstrong on Gemini 8). That came in 1966 and gave Seamans -- and others -- lessons that would serve them well the following year. (TAPE FROM GEMINI/AGENA DOCKING ARMSTRONG: Dave this is easy SCOTT: Is it? GROUND: Uh-roger, how you doing? ARMSTRONG: Station keeping at about 150 feet) (SEAMANS: This is the first time that we're going to actually physically dock with another vehicle. An unmanned vehicle to be sure - an Agena. ) (TAPE FROM GEMINI/AGENA DOCKING GROUND: OK Gemini 8, you're lookin' good on the ground. Go ahead and dock.) (SEAMANS: I wanted to make sure that they were docked before leaving for going to a big, I guess the Wright Brothers Dinner or something ... one of these big, Washington, DC functions with I would guess 15-hundred people; black tie with the Vice President, Humphrey as a speaker. And I was sitting right next to him at the head table. ... (TAPE FROM GEMINI/AGENA DOCKING ARMSTRONG: It is really a smoothie. GROUND: Oh, roger! Hey congratulations. This is real good.) (SEAMANS: When I went to the dinner, everything was just fine. ... The docking took place on schedule it was going very well. ... I did not have a radio in the car to listen. Nobody called me on the telephone in the car. So when I drew up to the hotel, there was a sort of a gang of NASA people who descended on me and swept me into a room and briefed me on what was going on. ... I was told that we were in deep trouble.) GROUND #3: (garble) and blown 'em. But they can't seem to stop it or get a marking. GROUND #1: Did I hear: A stuck hand-controller? (SEAMANS: Neil and Dave Scott realized that they were starting to rotate in an uncontrolled way.) (TAPE FROM GEMINI/AGENA DOCKING ARMSTRONG: Uh we got serious problems here. We're tumblin' end- over-end. ) (SEAMANS: They disconnected the Gemini 8 from the Agena and then they started to really -- started to spin out very rapidly. And they got up to a spin rate of two complete cycles a second. (MORE TAPE FROM GEMINI/AGENA DOCKING GROUND #1: Gemini 8 we have some new rescue data for you. You ready to copy?) (SEAMANS: They had to figure out how to de-spin. And the only recourse they had was to go to the controls that were normally used for re-entry.) (ARMSTRONG: We can station here right a while and also had a suggestion we might put out our docking bar and go up and tap it) (Seamans: I felt I had to notify everyone at the dinner that we had this problem, 'cause I felt it would be leaking out because the networks were already carrying it. And so everybody there knew that we had this imminent disaster or potential disaster.) (SOUND IN THE BACKGROUND OF HUMPHREY GIVING A SPEECH) (SEAMANS: When Humphrey started to speak, he said, "Now I hope we'll have good news before I finish my speech" ... I was getting frequent information being brought to me from behind the podium. ... Vice President Humphrey started speaking and he was a very glib speaker as you know, but even HE was beginning to wind down a bit and he kept lookin' at me and I'd look at him and shake my head. And then I got message that it appeared that everything was under control. That they had de-spun the Gemini. And so I nodded to him to make an announcement which he did.) (MORE TAPE FROM GEMINI/AGENA DOCKING GROUND #1: Hawaii Cap Com to Houston flight? GROUND: 2: Go flight (Seamans: It was a good lesson in the problems you can get into when you have a potential disaster.) Though there was little about accident procedure that was written down at NASA, Bob Seamans and everyone at the agency had been clear about what to do. NASA Administrator James Webb called it "folding around" (Wilson: Well it's just the way you did things in those days.) Glen Wilson served 19 years as a staff member on the Senate Space Sciences Committee. (Wilson: It doesn't make sense many times to bring -- quote "Outside Experts" who may be experts in their field, but don't know what the heck it is that YOU'RE doin'.) This was the model NASA employed every time there was a problem. Circle the wagons. Appoint an INTERNAL accident review board. No outside interference. No public scrutiny. No press. (LAUNIUS: The normal procedure is that NASA would run the investigation. NASA's chief historian Roger Launius. (Launius: The military has that procedure for when they have accidents with airplanes or tanks or ships or something like that. ... Generally speaking, the entity involved the organization that is in charge of this would run the investigation to find out what went wrong and to fix it) (SEAMANS: A special ad hoc review board is established which is empowered to delve into all aspects of the accident) Bob Seamans. (SEAMANS: And only when they are finished with their accident review are the results made public.) That's the way they did it for years. But on January twenty- seventh, 1967 this cozy arrangement would be shaken to its core. (News Of The Day ANNOUNCER: Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee America's first 3-man space team prepare to make the pioneer Apollo flight schedules within the next few weeks.) Death and disaster would hit hard. And very close to home. And NASA's way of doing business would change forever. (News Of The Day ANNOUNCER: They spend hours each day in their training capsule here at Cape Kennedy until it is as familiar as their own homes. And working the complex mechanism becomes second-nature.) (Launius: It was a test day. It was a normal work day for the astronauts and the engineers and the people associated with Apollo.) (News Of The Day ANNOUNCER: Computers set up problems in celestial environment audio/visual tests and the like to give them the feeling of being in space long before they get there.) After a long day inside their Capsule numbered 204 -- the crew of Apollo One was running a test of their communications gear. It was just past 6:30 in the evening. (NBC NEWS: So to repeat again the tragedy at Cape Kennedy tonight has taken the lives of three of our astronauts the men who were to be the first to fly in Apollo 1 the maiden flight of the Apollo mission.) (Launius: A flash fire developed in the command module. In a very short period of time less than 25 seconds it had engulfed the capsule, the three men were killed in the process. Uh it was a terrible, devastating tragedy for everybody involved.) (NBC NEWS: The Astronauts apparently died instantly according to all reports we have been able to get so far. They were the first to be killed on the job and ironically, died while on the ground.) As the fire burned at the Cape, Bob Seamans was on his way from the White House ... where there'd just been a pep rally to kick- off the Apollo Program. He was coming home for a celebration dinner. (Seamans: I left the White House and went immediately home and I came in the door and as I opened the door, my wife called out, "Bobbie, there's been an accident." ) On the phone was the Deputy Director at the Cape. (SEAMANS: I could tell immediately was very, very upset. And his first words were something like, "They're all gone." And I said, you know, "Who's all gone?" And he named the three astronauts who were lost in the fire; Grissom, White and Chafee. ) (NBC NEWS: Killed in the blaze were Air Force Colonel Virgil I. Grissom, better known as Gus Grissom to most of the world ... He was one of the seven, original Mercury Astronauts. Along with him tonight killed in the tragedy were Air Force Colonel Edward White, the second the first American to walk in space. And Navy Lt. Commander Roger B. Chaffee a rookie, awaiting his first flight in space. He was to take his first ride in the Apollo flight.) Other NASA officials were at their own celebrations around Washington that night. George Mueller, the Director of Manned Space Flight was with the NASA Administrator Jim Webb. His recollections were recorded in 1988 by the National Air and Space Museum. (Mueller: We were just in the midst of dinner when the call came in saying that there had been a disaster down at the Cape) (NBC NEWS: The fire was reported during what they call a "plugs out test" of the booster and Apollo 1 craft. ... Three hours after the fire, the bodies were still in the spacecraft and as Jay Barbree reported to us from Cape Kennedy a short time ago, the men have not yet been removed or the bodies of the men.) (Mueller: We never did figure out what started the fire as such. The guess is that either somebody threw a switch that arced or pulled a wire out by mistake and it arced, and once an arc occurs in a pure oxygen environment, it's just amazing how fast those things burn.) (NBC NEWS: There are a lot of unanswered questions of course and those will only come with time and investigation.) (Launius: When you look at it in the aftermath, it seems fairly obvious what happened. NASA historian Roger Launius. (LAUNIUS: No one recognized it at the time and that's important to understand. They had a pure oxygen environment in the capsule. That was standard. ... Pure Oxygen is very flammable, of course. There had been ... a whole series of velcro strips. ... Which is to some extent flammable. Then they closed that hatch on the capsule, pressurized that capsule to the extent that it would be in orbit which meant ... It was essentially a pressure cooker, in that context. When you pressurize a pure oxygen environment, you have a spark, and you have these combustible materials like these velcro strips it essentially exploded.) (SEAMANS: About this same time, the capsule itself burst.) And while Seamans declined to speculate here about how much worse the fire might have been ... in an interview in 1988 with the National Air and Space Museum, he talked of a nearly- cataclysmic explosion. (SEAMANS: We could have killed everybody on the outside of the capsule. When that fire suddenly burst out, and you could see the scorching on the outside of the capsule, and there was the escape tower, you know, on top of the capsule, with the rockets in it, that were there for the purpose of taking the astronauts away in the capsule if something happened, just before or after lift-off, if that thing had ever exploded--I mean, my God, the whole damned pad would have gone! The drama of that would have been seen for miles around.) (NBC NEWS: Communication problems between the Apollo astronauts and the blockhouse developed and the flash-fire occurred. Sources close to the project say the accident took place inside of the spacecraft itself when something ignited and one of Apollo's rare metals caught fire and produced tremendous heat.) (News Of The Day ANNOUNCER: From this launch pad, they were supposed to have started a ride in space late in February. They take the elevator for the last time to the Apollo capsule for an afternoon of rehearsal. Five hours later, they are burned to death.) We have no trouble recalling the great tragedies of our day. We know exactly where we were when President Kennedy was assassinated. Or when the Challenger exploded. Strangely though, outside the aerospace community, you'd be hard-pressed to find people who remember the fire on-board Apollo One. That's probably because, unlike Challenger, the Apollo One fire wasn't on TV. Make no mistake, though. The loss, the tragedy and the impact of this fire were as bad if not WORSE than after Challenger. NASA chief historian Roger Launius. (Launius: It was an enormously devastating event for NASA. ... It destroyed the agency's self-confidence ... at a very fundamental level. How many things are we doing wrong if this is one thing that we did wrong?) (McCurdy: People thought that we were going to lose an astronaut. So people were prepared to lose astronauts on risky flights and missions. But this accident, frankly was really stupid.) American University Space historian, Howard McCurdy. (McCurdy: This was something that a good management system should have picked up and should have prevented. And that's why it was so devastating. How could they be so foolish as to put people in a test at sea level in an all oxygen environment? How could they be so foolish as to have no way of evacuating astronauts from a space capsule that had any kind of a difficulty at all? It's worth noting, by the way that the astronauts did not burn to death. They died of asphyxiation from the smoke. Which made it even more imperative that there be some system by which you could blow that capsule door and get people out. If they'd simply vented the oxygen that was inside the capsule, the folks inside would have coughed a little bit and probably been OK. There was just point, after point, after point. ... All sorts of things that shouldn't have gone wrong if you'd had proper engineering or proper management which we thought we had.) (LAUNIUS: The NASA people who were involved after the fact to the last person said they rack their brains even to this day ... what could I have done differently that would have prevented this from happening?) (SEAMANS: We tested all the rocket engines, we tested the stages, we tested everything up, down, and sideways and the one thing we never tested was a capsule on fire.) (News Of The Day ANNOUNCER: The burned-out capsule holds somewhere in its charred wreckage the answer to the flash fire that in one searing instant took the lives of the three heroes . And at the same time set back America's progress to the moon.) The stakes at this point were enormously high. The crew of Apollo One was dead. The capsule was a smoking ruin. At the same time, the cost of the Vietnam War was starting to exert pressure on the NASA budget. The White House looked to NASA as a source of budget cuts. And it was January of 1967. NASA had 23 months to go to make President Kennedy's deadline of reaching the moon before the end of the decade. With the agency's reputation hanging in the balance, there was one imperative. They had to be sure the investigation -- as it always had -- would remain in-house. Former NASA Deputy Administrator Bob Seamans. (SEAMANS: Things would go more smoothly if we carried out the investigation. But we recognized that the danger in doing that was that people would say: "Well the investigation is being carried out by the very people who ought to be investigated." And so the first step was to get in touch with the President and make sure that he was agreeable to having NASA take this responsibility.) (TAPE- WHITE HOUSE OPERATOR: Hello? NASA OPERATOR: Yes, Director Webb to see: Was the President calling him? WHITE HOUSE OPERATOR: Uh, he had called Mr. Webb had called and left word. ) While the flames were still being doused, NASA Administrator Jim Webb was on the phone to the President. His mission reassure Johnson that everything was OK. (LAUNIUS: Jim Webb as the NASA Administrator was probably one of the most unique people in the Washington of the 1960's. NASA historian, Roger Launius. (LAUNIUS: Here is a fella who is wired into the political establishment of the town like almost no one else. His roots go back to 1930's New Deal Washington ... He had been a senior person working in one of these legendary Washington law firms one of these backroom places where they do a lot of law, but they also do a lot of politics. ...He ... became Truman's budget director ... and then later an undersecretary of State. ... I mean, this fellow knew everyone in town! And he was a political master.) (TAPE OF WEBB ON THE PHONE WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON WEBB: I called Dean Rusk because we've been having a real problem here with the military uh which I've called you once or twice but you were either in a foreign country or flyin' from California to Texas and I knew that when the issue came up that we could get together) (LAUNIUS-9: It's in some respect a measure of the credibility that the agency had by the public ... and the credibility that Jim Webb had and the confidence that the President had in Jim Webb as the NASA Administrator that he was able to negotiate with the President on the very day of the fire that NASA would run the investigation) (MORE TAPE OF JOHNSON ON THE PHONE WITH WEBB) In addition to being as wired-in as any big-time operator could be in Washington, Jim Webb also had a legendary reputation as a manager. And he'd earned that reputation by showing NASA to be an agency that worked. Bob Seamans. (SEAMANS: People would say, "How do you manage something?" They'd say, "You do it the way Jim Webb did at NASA.") But the Apollo One fire had raised serious doubts about Webb's ability. (LAUNIUS: Jim Webb ... had talked about "Space Aged" management. He had developed all these principles that he was trying to employ in terms of creating the perfect organization. ... He talked about the application of NASA, Space Aged Management Techniques to other sorts of activities such as homelessness and poverty. I mean he thought that this was portable. And all of a sudden, in a very fundamental way, this great management system collapsed.) (McCurdy: This experience totally changed NASA. There are two NASAs. There's a NASA before the fire and there's a NASA after the fire) Howard McCurdy says the fire revealed huge flaws in a NASA corporate culture that Webb had constructed almost entirely on the basis of trust. (McCurdy: You have to understand, he was NOT an engineer. This was a person who couldn't fix a toaster. ... So he had no capability for knowing whether or not the people who WERE engineers at NASA were telling him the truth. He just had to trust them. And for the first few years of his administration, he was able to build that kind of trust. One of the problems with the fire was that it destroyed that trust between him and the engineers at the agency and no longer was he willing to pass along their recommendations simply because six of them agreed.) As the wreckage was sifted, the search for answers began ... And so did the search for someone to blame. Eyes began to shift and finger began to point to the company that built the Apollo One capsule North American Aviation -- later called North American Rockwell and then Rockwell International. Well before the fire according to former Deputy Administrator Bob Seamans There'd been some frightening allegation of mismanagement at the company. (Seamans: It was decided to put together what's sometimes called a Tiger Team to get in there and turn over all the stones and see what's goin' on. A Tiger Team to go to North American and take a look sort of behind the scenes.) Gen. Sam Phillips, Director of the Apollo Project for NASA headed the "Tiger Team." The confidential reports he brought back suggested that North American's work was dangerously slipshod. (SEAMANS: They did not like the workmanship. ... there were an excessive number of ... changes that had to be made inside of the capsule and various components. ... It was just felt that the management was much too loose ... that there was not as tight a control as there should be. ... All of the procedures had to be tightened up if this were to be a successful program that would finish on time.) As the Apollo Program had progressed through the 1960s, more and more work was -- what today we'd call "Out Sourced." Responsibility ... which before had been all NASA's ... was now being delegated to the contractors. They were on a longer and longer leash. And historian Howard MrCurdy says NASA engineers were beside themselves with frustration over North American. (MCCURDY: Members of von Braun's rocket team are complaining that North American is not following the procedures and specifications set down by the Marshall Space Flight Center. In fact, they had a tradition of taking apart the rockets that North American made after North American delivered them to the Cape and making sure that North American had put them together correctly. Webb heard about this and he says, "You gotta quit ... intervening into what's contractor responsibility." The next month one of the Germans showed up with a rag and showed it to Webb, waved it in his face, and he said, "Look, this is what we find inside the stuff that North American makes." As a way of reinforcing the old NASA tradition of very close supervision of contractors.) Those concerns were reinforced by the reports brought back by General Phillips' Tiger Team. They painted an ugly picture of life at North American. An unfocused management team with too many other irons in the fire to concentrate on their work building the Apollo capsule. Inadequate control of the production process. Workers meeting schedules by not completing their work. Deep concern was expressed over the company's President Lee Atwood and about Harrison Storms, head of the Space Division. Atwood was said to be out of touch .... Storms dismissive when problems were raised. And unwilling to admit that changes were ever needed. The reports were devastating. As NASA's Director of Manned Space Flight, George Mueller remembers. (Mueller: It was so comprehensive that it would have been very difficult not to explain why we were continuing to go on with Rockwell, when they were doing such a terrible job.) As the investigation of the fire moved ahead, Jim Webb had two concerns. First find and fix the problems in his perfect organization. Second, make sure NO one interfered from outside. (McCurdy: Webb was very concerned that it be done in-house because I think he understood how many enemies he had in the town by 1967 and how readily they would be able to seize upon this as an example of why NASA "Couldn't ever go to the moon" and the funds ought to be cut off.) As George Mueller remembers, (Mueller: We then immediately ... began the process of damage control in the press, because the people at the Cape were reluctant to begin disseminating knowledge that they didn't have, but of course the press was clamoring for attention, and you can never give the press enough information. There's no way that you can keep them satisfied.) It would turn out though, that the press was only part of NASA's problem. As January turned to February, it was becoming increasingly clear that Webb's hope for a thoroughly internal investigation would not stand. While NASA might be able to control the press, Jim Webb couldn't control the Congress. (TAPE from the opening of Senate hearing ACTOR PORTRAYING Chairman: The committee will be in order. This is the second meeting of the committee with NASA to review the Apollo 204 accident which occurred on January 27th, 1967.) Exactly 30 days after the fire, the Senate Aeronautical & Space Sciences Committee opened hearings into the accident. While NASA filmed the hearings, the sound recording on that film has been lost. Actors read here from the hearing transcript. (MORE TAPE from the opening of Senate hearing ACTOR PORTRAYING Chairman: Today, Mr. James E. Webb, Dr. Robert C. Seamans, Junior, and Dr. George E. Mueller will discuss with the committee the interim findings of the Apollo 204 Review Board and advise the committee on decisions which have been made with respect to the future of the Apollo program because of the accident.) (MONDALE: I was a new member of the Senate and a new member of that committee.) Former Vice President, Walter Mondale. (Mondale: I was starting to pick up comments from people in and around the program along two lines. They were having management problems there were risks that were not being fully dealt with . ... That they were having trouble with the private contracts that they were in a hurry and might be taking some chances all of this was pretty general but I was aware of it.) (LAUNIUS: All the members of this oversight committee were deeply concerned even if they were committed to Apollo -- about what had happened with the fire. Roger Launius. (LAUNIUS: And were looking for problems that might exist inside the agency.) On February 27th, Webb and his senior staff -- Deputy Director Bob Seamans and George Mueller, Director of Manned Space Flight -- were called before the Senate Space Committee. Paul Dembling was NASA's director of Congressional Affairs. (Paul Dembling: Since we'd had a series of hearings on the subject of the fire, we were expecting more of the same) But this was not to be the "same old" Congressional investigation. As George Mueller was to learn -- too late -- Senator Mondale had a surprise. (Mueller : Somebody at North American sent in a letter, anonymous letter saying, "There's this report that proves that this was sheerly the fault of the contractor, and it's a cover up by NASA to keep this thing from escalating.") Mondale knew about General Phillip's secret Tiger Team reports. (MONDALE: A reporter came to me and told me that there was a report called "the Philips Report" hidden in the NASA bureau there that had really ... criticized the management of the program for being haphazard for being risky and had been very critical of the private contractor who was in charge of the development of the space vehicle.) After a day of hard-hitting, though routine questions, it was Senator Mondale's turn to speak. Here an actor reads what he said. (TAPE FROM THE HEARING: ACTOR PORTRAYING MONDALE: "Let me preface this by saying that I have been told, and I would like to have this set straight if I am wrong, that there was a report prepared for NASA by General Phillips, completed in mid or late 1965 which very seriously criticized the operation of the Apollo program for multi-million dollar overruns and for what was regarded as very serious inadequacies in terms of quality control. This report, among other things, was so critical that it recommended the possibility of searching for a second source, and as I am told, recommended Douglas Aircraft. Following the receipt of this report, the top leadership of NASA was sufficiently concerned that they actually discussed this matter with Douglas and had serious discussions with the present general contractor to try to revise and strengthen their operation in the light of these complaints. Would you comment on that? Is there a Phillips report?") (WILSON: Webb was asked that question in the hearings he didn't know what Mondale was TALKING ABOUT!) Senate Space Committee Staff member Glen Wilson. (WILSON: It wasn't as though there was a report with (claps) "Phillips Report" stamped on it on top of it that Webb did not know about.) (MONDALE: He looked dazed and stunned) Vice President Mondale. (MONDALE: And I still don't know if he knew about it. I think he did.) It turns out he didn't. During the entire time that the Tiger Teams had been gathering information, Jim Webb the Administrator of NASA -- the man in charge of the agency -- had been kept almost completely in the dark about the specifics of the problems at North American. Bob Seamans. (Seamans: I can't believe that I didn't keep him informed, but he claimed after the fire that no one had ever told him about these problems. And I have never run a complete survey to see whether or not I didn't bring up and show him say those slides the view graphs that were used in the presentation to me. That's one of the things I feel badly about: that at least he felt that he'd been kept out of the loop) When Mondale Mueller: Was there a "Phillips Report?" the room fell silent. (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING SENATOR MONDALE: Is it your testimony that there was no such unusual General Phillips report? Is that rumor unfounded? ACTOR PORTRAYING DR. MUELLER: I know of no unusual General Phillips report. I do know that General Phillips has examined each of our contractors in the course of the program and, as a matter of fact, we have a yearly process of evaluating the contractors' structure, to be sure, and we do from time to time have special reviews of contractor problems. I don't know of a specific report such as that.) (Mueller: I guess I was surprised and Jim Webb was surprised when this Phillips Report began to surface, because we had thought, I had thought it was carefully buried and destroyed, not the knowledge but the report itself.) (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING SENATOR MONDALE: Was there a report in which General Phillips recommended looking for a second source? ACTOR PORTRAYING DR. MUELLER: I do not recall such a report.) (SEAMANS: He said, "Was there a report that had been written about North American that indicated that they were not doing an exemplary job?" And Mr. Webb referred that to George Mueller that question. George said, "No there was no such report." And "Isn't that right, Sam?" And Sam said, "No, no report." ) (MONDALE: (laughs) he didn't quite say "No." He said "We'll have to look into it" or something like that.) Vice President Mondale. (MONDALE: If you listen to Webb's answer ... (READING) What we would be very happy to do is to make it available to the Comptroller General under any request that the committee or you would make to him." (STOPS. LAUGHS) In other words, (laughs) he's trying to think of every way he can to prevent producing it. They didn't. They DID produce it.) (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING MR. WEBB: What we would be very happy to do is to make it available to the Comptroller General under any request that the committee or you would make to him. This provides a certain measure of control of these reports which I think permits you to get what you need but still under proper control. I just don't want to say yes until I see the full problem involved in that. ACTOR PORTRAYING DR. MUELLER: I am not even sure such a thing-- February 19 report--- ACTOR PORTRAYING The CHAIRMAN: I think it was November. ACTOR PORTRAYING MR. WEBB: Whatever reports are of interest to this committee we are prepared to establish the proper procedure for them.) (Mueller: Once you create a report like that, you can never really destroy it. Everybody has a secret copy.) (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING SENATOR MONDALE: What I am getting at is this allegation, this serious criticism made about this so-called Phillips report. ACTOR PORTRAYING MR. WEBB: Are you thinking of a report circulated by a former employee of the company recently, within the last 6 weeks? ACTOR PORTRAYING SENATOR MONDALE: No. The so-called Phillips' Report came out mid or late 1965, conducted by NASA on the Apollo program. ACTOR PORTRAYING MR. WEBB: Let us look it up.) Webb had been caught completely unprepared. As it turns out, NASA's Congressional liaison, Paul Dembling -- who also knew nothing about the Tiger Team reports -- COULD have known. And could have briefed his boss. If only his timing had been a little better. (Paul Dembling: Well, the morning of the hearing, we had prepared to go up to the Hill. ... At the last minute as I was walking out ... General Sam Phillips's assistant came in and said, "I have some documents here that I would like you to take a look at. I recognize you're on your way out, but when you get back, maybe we can talk about 'em.") Paul Dembling left the material sitting on his desk. (Dembling: I said, "OK, I'll take a look at it when I get back, I don't have now I'm packing up I'm leaving." It was maybe 2-3 minutes before I had to meet the Administrator Jim Webb to go up to the Hill.) The hearing is a public relations nightmare for NASA. Roger Launius. (LAUNIUS: As a result of this particular hearing, the N-A-S-A of NASA, appeared in the newspaper the next day to mean in response to Jim Webb's testimony, "Never A Straight Answer.") A member of the United States Senate has suggested that NASA was covering up. Mondale insinuated the agency knew all along about the problems at North American and was keeping it a secret from the American people. Serous questions were also raised about why North American was building the space craft in the first place. There were those who strongly suggested the stink of political influence. That the company was NOT the most qualified to be working on Apollo. Bob Seamans. (Seamans: At that point, I had the sense that Mondale wasn't just asking this on an exploratory basis that he knew about SOMETHING and the question was: What it was. I felt that it probably had to do with this Tiger Team effort we'd had a month or two before. And I introduced the thought that we did periodically carry out extensive reviews of our contractors and he might be referring to the results of one of those reviews (MORE TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING DR. SEAMANS: For a relationship to be effective between Government and contractor, there must be mutual confidence and if on every occasion that there is either a minor or a major review this is going to be exposed in all of its detail, it will soon erode the confidence that is so necessary. So I cannot sit here as a lawyer--I am not a lawyer--and give you the ramifications of this but I can tell you as one who has been involved in development that the release of this report would seriously impair our ability to prosecute work in the future.) (Seamans: I remember it so clearly as I left there Mr. Webb nailing me on the floor there of the hearing room saying: "I want you to come with me" and as soon as we got in the car ... it had a window in it that you could crank up between the driver and the back seat and he cranked that back window up and he really turned on me, he said, "There's really no excuse for you volunteering information at that hearing." He said, "We're dealing here with matters that can result in millions and millions of dollars of lawsuit and this is not like the kind of friendly hearing that you're used to.") (Dembling: I get back in my office and I pick up what his assistant had left with me, and clearly it's what Mondale was talking about.) NASA Congressional Liason, Paul Dembling. (DEMBLING: It's labeled -- only typed on it -- but it's labeled, "The Phillips Report". ... So I recognized that this must be what Mondale was talking about -- wondering how he had a copy, because there were probably only 3 or 4 copies around, and I go rushing down to the Administrator's office.) He stopped first in Bob Seamans' office and shared the news of his finding (Seamans: I said, well, "There's the report. Take it -- that's what I sort of suspected. Take it into the boss." ) It was only now according to NASA historian Roger Launius, after everything that had been said openly in front of a Senate Committee ... that Bob Seamans tells Jim Webb about what General Phillips and his Tiger Teams had found. (LAUNIUS: Bob Seamans tells him, "Well, there was an investigation in 1965 a couple of years ago in which there were these serious problems that were found at North American. And Sam Phillips conducted the investigation . He wrote a letter to Lee Atwood and "Stormy" Storms explaining what the problems were and how they had to be fixed and they'd been tracking it." And they didn't feel there was a necessity that this be brought to Webb's attention. And he said, "Oh my gosh, there IS a Phillips Report. I have lied to the Congress!") (Dembling: Well he was quite perturbed.) Paul Dembling. (DEMBLING: He got red in the face and he was fumin', but he didn't holler or cuss or anything, but you could tell it was boiling up inside of him. ... He was furious.) Over the next three months, Senator Mondale -- along with Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine -- would use the so-called Philips Reports to pummel NASA and North Americans about what they knew, what they didn't know, what they did and what they didn't do in the months and years leading up to the Apollo One fire. (Mondale: My recollection was that they really wanted to cover it up. They didn't want to get into it they didn't want to disclose it they didn't want a public discussion of the problems that the space program was into. And so I kept pressin' 'em. ... I don't want to take credit on myself but I think that by forcing a public confrontation about these heretofore secret and deep concerns about the safety and the management of the program, it forced NASA to restructure and reorganize the program in a way that was much safer.) Meanwhile, in the House, things were also looking bleak for NASA. In one of the more bizarre episodes to come out of the Apollo One fire, a House Oversight Subcommittee convened in Florida to talk with employees of North American. There is no known recording of this hearing. But the transcript which was thought to be lost turned up recently at the Library of Congress. Space historian, Howard McCurdy (McCurdy: There were 400,000 people working for NASA at the height of the Apollo program. And yes, somebody had written some materials that criticized practices at the contractor and after the accident, these materials came forth. And what had been before that a fairly low-level engineer suddenly became somebody with great foresight and was called ... to present the material that was contained in these memos.) There were all kinds of stories going around at the time about the Apollo program .... some of them are still alive today .... that fall into the realm of "Conspiracy Theory." Nonetheless, they had an impact on public opinion. One of them comes out of this House hearing. (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING Mr. Teague. Will you give your full name and you adders? ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON; Thomas Ronald Baron, 2856 Folsom Road, Mims, Fla. ACTOR PORTRAYING TEAGUE: Take just a few minute and tell us something about your background. ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: As far as my background goes, I have been in research and development for approximately the last 12 years. Four years of it in the Air Research Proving Ground in Eglin Field, Fla. Mostly in the research and development of subsystems of all the aircraft that we had up there which I think was mostly the U.S. Air Force inventory.) (McCurdy: It's not clear that he sent a report to the House committee. You see references throughout the literature on the Apollo program to a 500-page report. I have never seen such a report. It's not in the NASA history office files. Apparently, it's not in the congressional files, and that's part of the mythology that comes out of particular episode and give rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories.) Thomas Baron was a high-school educated inspector at Cape Kennedy with a reputation as a complainer. He'd written hundreds of memos about work and other employee's behavior that he considered sloppy. Some of it was nonsense. Much of it was not. (McCurdy: There were a lot of people that were worried about manufacturing practices at North American, including special assistants to Werner von Braun. Baron was reporting the same things that were appearing in these other memoranda and were being talked about inside NASA.) (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING TEAGUE: Mr. Baron, I have read your first report. I believe it was the 50-odd page report. I have listened to about 2 « hours of taped interviews of yours. One of the statements you made was that non-certified items were place in the spacecraft. The Review Board found that non certified equipment items were installed in the command module at the time of the test. It was testified in Washington that a number of those items were identified and known and were to be taken out before flight. Of the items that you spoke of, do you know whether these were the same items that would have been taken out before flight? ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: No, sir. I don't see how they could be actually taken out. Some of them were in the epoxy category and paint category and tape category. Possibly the tape could be removed. We use some tape for identification purposes in the Command Module which could be removed during flight. ACTOR PORTRAYING TEAGUE: Do you think the items you are speaking of are items which would have stayed in during flight if the capsule had flown? ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: Yes.) (McCurdy: They were talking to just an inspector who had for reasons of his own prepared memoranda at the time before the accident detailing what he thought to be shoddy practices and suddenly finds himself thrust into the national limelight in front of a major congressional investigating committee.) (TAPE FROM THE HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING FULTON: When did you start to take such a serious and active interest in what you felt was wrong and kept such detailed records? Why did you do it? Why didn't you refer it to someone else within your company who had responsibility to investigate? ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: This was done. I started working for this company in September, 1965. I started taking notes in November of 1965 when I was assigned to the pad 34 complex. All my daily notes and many, many more letters and reports I hade made out were sent up through my headman and through assistant supervision. If they did not get through to the top, then I don't know what happened to the notes and letters. But they were sent up.) (McCurdy-10: And they just wondered: What motivated him to keep these records that he did keep at the time. And I think they were suspicious.) (TAPE FROM HEARING ACTOR PORTRAYING WYDLER: You are saying you don't know anything about this personally, but you are indicating somebody might have said something to you about it; is that right? ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: Definitely. ACTOR PORTRAYING WYDLER: You don't feel that you want to discuss that with the committee at this time? ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: I would be more than happy to say it, if Mr. Hechler would take a more objective view of the statements. ACTOR PORTRAYING WYDLER: I can't answer for Mr. Hechler, but I would like to hear it. ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: yes, sir; I will be more than happy to. ACTOR PORTRAYING WYDLER: Please tell us. ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: I discussed it with another individual at his home, and he witnessed one evening when he was working three technicians who were supposed to flush out, this by purging the environmental control unit with an alcohol solution to apparently clean it and get it ready for proper use. He disclosed to me that a 55-gallon drum had been delivered to the site. (McCurdy: Baron is ... responsible for giving rise to a lot of urban legends if you will about the space program. One ... of the more widely circulated legends is that the workers at the pad were drinking on the job. Now he didn't see anybody drinking. But what would happen is that the cleaning fluid, which was ethyl alcohol distilled spirits would disappear after a cleaning episode so he concluded that somebody was making Jungle Juice with the ethyl alcohol. And then, of course that would help explain why the workmanship was shoddy.) ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: One of them took a 5-gallon jug of this stuff home and one other, or perhaps all three of them, I don't really recall right now, had mixed this stuff and cut it with water and were drinking it right here at the site, and they were carrying it around in plastic bags. ACTOR PORTRAYING WYDLER: Well, that doesn't have anything to do with this particular wire or this particular door. ACTOR PORTRAYING BARON: Possibly so, because they were working on that unit and the spacecraft, and this is the only link I could put between them, between what you have there and the drinking. Baron had a reputation for mental instability. Something members of the subcommittee were all too happy to make public. But nonetheless, his charges could not be dismissed out of hand. And then, days after the hearing ... (McCurdy: He died. He was killed in what was officially reported as a railway accident crossing a railway trestle and hit by a train. With I believe members of his family. And of course because he had been one of the leading critics before the House Committee, the conspiracy theorists immediately assumed that he had been picked out by the CIA or some other organization as someone who "knew too much.") It's difficult to imagine in our current media age, but Baron's story never really made it much outside of Florida. (McCurdy: His testimony gives rise to all kinds of legends and things that he, himself did not even say. And of course his eventual demise just adds to the conspiracy theory.) Nevertheless, when the congressional hearings finally ended, Jim Webb knew he had succeeded. He had kept public outcry -- and its consequent Congressional fury -- to a minimum. In fact, the Senate Committee in its final report said the findings of General Phillips' Tiger Teams, quote "Had no effect on the accident, did not lead to the accident, and were not related to the accident." But the same could not be said for the HANDLING of General Phillips findings. The aftermath of the hearings on people inside NASA the finger pointing ... back stabbing .. the self-doubt, recrimination ... ruined working relationships and ruined careers ... It did almost as much to damage the Apollo Project as the fire itself. (McCurdy: Oh gosh, it was just turbulent.) Howard McCurdy. (MCCURDY: First of all, the signal that came down to Jim Webb and everybody at the top was: "You can't fail again." Plus the fact that they're 18 months behind schedule. The only way they can make that up is by taking huge risks. ... And then there was the huge question: What do we do with North American? Do we fire them? And a lot of people in NASA wanted to fire them, but then they were told: If we start with a brand new contractor, there's no way they can be ready by the end of 1969.) (Launius: At that point, the problems between Jim Webb and Bob Seamans come to the fore. They had been present to some extent before that time but at that point, Webb came to the conclusion that he really couldn't trust some of his senior people around him and one of those was Bob Seamans.) (Seamans: Our relationship had been exemplary for about 6 years he'd been a just a wonderful boss. ... We worked together on several joint things. And all of a sudden I felt as though he had me sort of under the gun. ) (Mueller: Jim Webb had decided that Bob wasn't keeping him fully informed and really wasn't running things in a way Jim thought they ought to be run, although I don't know that Jim really understood how they ought to be run anyhow.) George Mueller found he wasn't faring much better. (Mueller: Jim began to lose confidence in Bob, and of course he lost confidence in me, and he lost confidence in all of the management team.) (LAUNIUS: He felt betrayed. I don't think there's any other way to say it: he felt like he had been betrayed by that leadership team. Led by Bob Seamans. His reaction to Bob Seamans thereafter was hostile to say the least ) (SEAMANS: At first he would bring up things about others George Mueller and others and say, "They've sort of let us down, haven't they?" And I'd say, "Well you've gotta realize what they've accomplished." ... But then, a few people came to me and said, "You've got to realize that up on The Hill, what he's saying about others, he's also saying about you." ... And so it just seemed to me that the situation was not too favorable for NASA if I stuck around. So sometime in the Fall ... I felt it was time to move on and do something else.) At least Seamans was able to make his own decision. (LAUNIUS: Joe Shea, who was the NASA person who was overseeing the command module was relieved of his responsibilities. ... At North American Harrison Storms was removed as the President of the division that was building the Apollo capsule another person was put in his place . There were a variety of individuals in lesser capacities who were also replaced at that particular time.) And an odd sidelight to the whole affair was the toll this took on the reputation of Senator Mondale. Though there's not a shred of evidence to prove it, there's an Urban Myth which has grown up -- and cannot be dislodged -- that Walter Mondale tried to destroy the Apollo Program. The story was placed even more firmly in America's mind by From The Earth To The Moon, Tom Hanks' saga of the Apollo program which aired on H-B-O in 1997. In the episode dealing with the fire on Apollo One Mondale is the villain. In this clip from the film, the actor playing Mondale talks with the actor portraying Jim Webb. (TAPE from Earth To The Moon: Actor portraying WEBB: Do you really want to kill Apollo? Actor portraying MONDALE: I'm sorry Mr. Webb, but I've got a job to do. And I'm going to do it. Actor portraying WEBB: With all due humility Senator, what did we do wrong? Actor portraying MONDALE: Well that's what I'm going to find out. Actor portraying WEBB: No, I mean, why are you so down on us? You and I are both Democrats. Going to the moon was Kennedy's dream. Actor portraying MONDALE: It was one of his dreams. Jack Kennedy had a lot of dreams.) (MONDALE: You know I was so hurt I didn't even look --- I didn't have the stomach to look at it. But somebody came up to me after they saw this Tom Hanks thing? And they said, "They just made a monster outta ya." And I just didn't have the heart to look at it. ... I don't know what explains the virulence of some of this. Here we are it's almost 30 years later. But I apparently touched some pretty raw nerves.) And, as for the man who'd hoped one day to make his management style the template for the entire Federal government ... the Apollo One fire claimed Jim Webb's career as its victim too. Howard McCurdy. (MCCURDY: He'd gone to The Ranch with Lyndon Johnson he said, "I need another 500 million dollars or I can't guarantee the safety of the landing" and the White House and the Congress didn't appropriate that money. He did the best he could I think he was tired from the budget battles and I think he probably inside his own mind -- worried that maybe they had gone too fast or cut too many corners.) (Alan Shepard: All of us here tonight jointly share the responsibilities for the human frailties which are now so apparent -- and for the insidious combination of materials and equipment which was so devastating in their behavior.) Alan Shepard. ... At a dinner marking the 6th anniversary of his flight as the first man in space. ... send the word forth. NASA is down, but not out. Apollo WILL reach the moon by the end of the decade. (Alan Shepard: The time for recrimination is over. We have digested enough historical evidence. There is much to be done. Morale is high. Vision is still clear. And I say, let's get on with the job.) And get down to it they did. Beginning first with a complete re-design of the Apollo capsule. George Mueller. (MUELLER: That whole capsule had to be rewired. ... and of course that took time and energy and effort. Just simply getting everybody going in the same direction at the same time was a major challenge.) (MrCurdy: Up to this point, NASA had tried to use what was called "Incremental Testing." that is, you tested each piece of the rocket and the spacecraft one piece at a time. George Mueller, after the accident said: We've got to go to "All Up Testing," in which you stack the Saturn 5 rocket with all three stages, you put the Apollo capsule on top of it and you fire the whole thing. No if anything goes wrong with the first or second stage, you don't get any test results on everything that's above it. People in NASA said, "This is crazy, this will never work, it's too risk" Mueller insisted they go ahead with it and on Nov. 9, 1967, they conducted the first "All Up" test of the Saturn 5 launch vehicle. And everything worked.) (ASTRONAUT: I can see the entire earth now out of the center window. I can see Florida ...) The clock was ticking and despite and even operating a new "no risk" environment, NASA forged ahead. (McCurdy: Think of what happened in 1968. In 1968 NASA conducted the 2nd test of the Saturn 5 rocket the second time they'd flown it. And it didn't work. There was a rupture in one of the fuel lines, there was a shut-down on the second stage engines the rocket ... vibrated uncontrollably. The next time we flew a Saturn 5 rocket, we sent three astronauts on a Christmas Eve voyage around the moon. That was a terrible risk. I really wonder if NASA would have taken that risk if they didn't have the compressed schedule and the deadline looming before them.) (TAPE - 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. Zero. All engine running. Lift off. We have a lift off. Thirty-two minutes past the hour.) (SEAMANS: I think you can say that as tragic as it was, if we had not had the accident then, we would not have gone to the moon in the decade.) (ARMSTRONG: Tranquility base, here. The Eagle has landed. GROUND: Roger Tranquility. We copy on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot. ARMSTRONG: Thank you.)