edgar-mitchell

40
The Way of the Explorer
But the excitement of the new job and the hectic schedule of indoctrination,
training, and technical duties was abruptly leavened by harsh
reality before a year had passed. One afternoon in January as I stood in
the concourse of LAX after a visit to North American Rockwell, maker of
the Apollo command module, I was paged over the intercom. I knew no
reason why anyone would need to get in touch with me at an airport.
When I got to a phone it was Deke Slayton’s office in Houston telling me
of a fire in the command module at the Cape. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and
Roger Chaffee were dead. A fire had swept through their capsule as it sat
on top of the stack on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy. Three of America’s
astronauts had burned to death.
Forever after, this would be known as The Fire. But beyond the realm
of personal loss, there was still a momentous task at hand. The price of
exploration, each of us knew, was not paid in the coin of sweat alone, but
in the ultimate currency of flesh and blood. The Fire took from us three of
the planet’s finest space explorers, but it also gave to us a much better
insight as to just how daunting each detail of this trip to the moon would
prove to be. And we were still on the ground.
There was a grim advantage to be had, because they did die on the
pad, not in some silent sarcophagus hurtling away at thousands of miles
per hour through the vacuum of space, forever unavailable to our engineers
here on Earth. The men involved in the investigation that followed
would make certain that Gus, Roger, and Ed did not die in vain. It would
be transformed into a bitter blessing, a Pyrrhic victory that would one day
quietly contribute to the success of the astronauts who followed. But for a
time there was only grief. A few days after The Fire, Fred Haise, Ken
Mattingly, Jerry Carr, and I would fly the four-plane missing angel formation
over the memorial services in Houston, while our comrades were
being laid to rest in the Arlington National Cemetery.
Because there was a political imperative involving the Soviet Union at
the time, the public was unusually prepared to accept the loss of life in the
interest of putting a man on the moon as soon as possible. This was the
Space Race, the Cold War’s more benign counterpart. Today the same
atmosphere doesn’t exist, and such a catastrophe—the Challenger explosion,
for example—would likely shut down a project indefinitely, no matter
how momentous. Even in the case of The Fire, there would be no
launches for a year and a half, as its underlying causes were systematically
corrected. For those who would follow in the footsteps of the Apollo 1
astronauts, we grieved our loss, then responded by turning our attention
with fresh vigor to each minute detail of the tasks for which we were given
responsibility. Accidents could happen, errors would be made, failures in
equipment would surely take place, because this was a program that’s lifeblood
was innovation, and even brilliant and dedicated humans miscalculate.