13 Minutes to the Moon: 4. Fire to the Phoenix

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

The Mercedes-Benz Dream Days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, C-LE Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com slash dream.

Ready to take advantage of an incredible deal at Mazda?

September is the final month of eligibility for federal $7,500 electric vehicle lease cash on the new Mazda CX70 and CX90 plug-in hybrid.

All Mazda current inventory is unaffected by new tariffs.

See your local Mazda dealer for details.

$7,500 electric vehicle lease cash offer expires at the end of September.

Don't miss out.

$7,500 lease customer cash good toward 2025 CX70 PHEV and CX90 PHEV when leasing through Mazda Financial Services.

Lease customer cash can be combined with other public offers, including lease incentive offers.

Lease customer cash cannot be combined with APR or other customer cash offers.

Lease customer cash is not redeemable as cash or cash back option.

Lease customer cash is only available on approved credit.

Not all customers will qualify for credit approval or offer.

Limit 1 discount per customer per vehicle.

Lease customer cash offer only available in the United States regardless of buyer's residency.

Void reprohibited.

Apply within the lease structure as a capital cost reduction.

Lease customer cash is only available on participating Mazda dealer's current inventory, which is subject to availability.

Offer ends 930-2025, and you must take delivery prior to the expiration of offer.

See participating Mazda dealer for complete details.

As they descend to the surface of the moon during the final 13 minutes before landing, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are in their spacesuits, visors down.

Surrounding them in their crammed cabin is an atmosphere of pure oxygen.

Attitude control is good.

Manual attitude control, boom.

The Apollo spacecraft's life support systems were a critical link in the chain of survival for the astronauts.

Failures here could lead to deadly consequences.

Something NASA discovered at terrible cost in January 1967.

Here's Neil Armstrong talking in 2001 with some emotion about the darkest moment in the Apollo program.

The disaster that struck Apollo 1.

A fire in pure oxygen during testing of the command module capsule on the ground at the launch pad in Florida.

A catastrophe that killed his astronaut colleagues Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White.

Ed White and I, we were good friends, neighbors.

Very traumatic times.

You're much more likely to accept the loss of a friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose him in a ground test.

That was indictment of ourselves.

I mean,

we didn't do the right thing somehow.

And that's doubly, doubly traumatic.

We choose to go to the moon.

Captain, we're go for landing.

Eagle Houston, you're go for landing.

Over 10 plus, two kills are reading on the 12-off through program alarm.

Holding

60, 60 seconds.

We've had shutdown.

We copy you down, Eagle.

Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

Eagle's touchdown in July 1969 was one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, perhaps even of all time.

But the spacecraft that carried the crew were made ready only barely in time to meet Kennedy's goal of getting to the moon before the decade's end.

And all of that spoke to the headlong rush for the finishing line that NASA was forced to indulge in a bid to beat the Soviet Union to the moon and for which there would be tragic consequences.

This crummy spacecraft that we're faced with at the beginning of 1967,

I mean crummy, shoddy workmanship, poorly designed, etc.

You heard something like, fire,

and it was like, fire, fire, fire, who said that?

And then you heard a scream.

Then it was over.

My reaction was first shock because these were three good friends.

And then it was kind of an anger, anger in ourselves.

That how did we let that happen?

In this episode, I'm going to investigate how, in 1967, the unthinkable happened.

We're talking here about the Command and Service Module, the vehicle that ultimately took the astronauts to lunar orbit and back to Earth.

And to piece this story together, I've recorded interviews with veterans of the Apollo program and I've sifted through NASA's vast oral history archive.

I'll also discover how the program recovered from a disaster that could have ended the United States' lunar ambitions.

Instead, the project was reborn for a make-or-break mission that was so crucial but is hardly remembered.

I'm Kevin Fong, and from the BBC World Service, this is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

Episode 4.

The Fire to the Phoenix.

The three astronauts lying in a spacecraft 200 feet above the launch pad did know in the final seconds that they faced disaster.

One of them was able to call over the intercom, fire in the spacecraft.

This news came from Major General Sam Phillips, the Apollo program.

The BBC's report of the Apollo 1 fire on the night of the 27th of January 1967.

It was shocking news for the world and a shattering national tragedy for the United States.

The country had lost three heroes.

31-year-old Roger Chaffee, a rookie astronaut whose first flight would have been on Apollo 1.

Ed White, the first American to walk in space during NASA's Gemini program, and Gus Grissom, who had two claims to fame.

He'd commanded the first crewed Gemini flight, and he'd been the United States' second astronaut to leave the Earth's atmosphere during its first space program, Project Mercury.

This is Gus Grissom in July 1961 at the moment of launch in his tiny Mercury capsule, the Liberty Bell.

Roger, this is Liberty Bell 7.

The clock is operating.

Loud and clear, Jose.

Don't cry too much.

Thank you, Doke.

Gus Grissom's 15-minute flight in space came less than a month after after President Kennedy set the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon.

And so in the early years of the Apollo program, NASA had a lot on its hands.

Between 1961 and 1966, there were seven Mercury flights and 12 Gemini missions.

During this period, the space agency was more heavily focused on those programs than it was on the design and planning of the hugely ambitious challenge of the lunar landing.

The seeds of the Apollo 1 disaster were sown at this this time.

We had a whole group of people in the Apollo program office who were inexperienced in manned spaceflight.

This is Chris Kraft, one of the giant figures in the history of America's human spaceflight operations.

He created the whole concept of mission control for NASA.

In an interview he recorded for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in 2008, he talked about the Apollo program's less-than-ideal start.

We had everybody working on Mercury and Gemini.

The president said we're going to the moon and we had about maybe

at that time maybe 350 to 400 people at most working on the program as far as government concerned.

At the height of the Apollo program we had 400,000 people working on Apollo.

and a tremendous number of unknowns.

Hell of a difference between

going from Alan Shepard,

which was a 15-minute flight,

to leaving Earth's gravity and landing on the moon.

So

there was a tremendous management challenge to build this monster program.

On a recent visit to Houston, I was told a story that graphically illustrates the difficulties the Apollo program was having in its first few years.

It came from George Abbey.

Well, my full name is George William Samuel Abbey.

During the Apollo program I was involved with system engineering in the program office and then I began.

George is another Titan in the world of spaceflight who for decades shaped NASA's human spaceflight strategy and its astronaut corps.

In late 1964 George joined the Apollo program from the US Air Force as an engineer aged 32.

For one of his first jobs he was told to visit the aircraft company North American which was building the command and service module for NASA.

It was the corporation's first spacecraft so NASA was also heavily involved in its design.

In fact North American was making two versions.

One, the so-called Block 1, was only designed for flight and testing in Earth orbit, while the second, Block II, would in theory fly all the way to the Moon.

George Abbey headed to Downey, California, where the spacecraft were in the first phases of manufacture, instructed by his bosses in Houston to talk to the guy in charge someone called Mr.

Johnson to get a progress report.

What he discovered was chaos.

I was in the midst of just getting to know him and

meet with him and two individuals came in and they started yelling and screaming at me and asking me what I was doing there.

I said, well, I'm here to find out about the Block II design and I'm meeting with Mr.

Johnson.

They said, what are you meeting with him for?

He doesn't know anything about it.

And so

I said, I turned to him and I said, do you know anything about the block two design?

He said, no, I don't know anything about it.

And this is someone who nominally should have been in charge of that whole design.

No, as it turned out, the people in Houston didn't know who was in charge.

So I said, well, who is in charge?

And they said, we are.

We're the people

you need to talk to.

And you're the first NASA person we've seen since September.

I said oh I said well what have you been doing on the design he said we haven't been able to do anything because we can't we have nobody coming out and agreeing with what we're supposed to do.

George this is 1964

how has that happened I mean it seem it seems amazing to me that NASA are blind in 1964 to what's going on the development of the command and service module in California.

How has that happened?

Well, the leadership of the program

at both North America and at NASA in the initial phases was not the best.

They didn't have the best leadership at NASA.

Really, all the great people were working Gemini.

This became something which was difficult to recover from.

And North American had its own problems.

Here's George Jeffs, a former senior engineer at the company who joined the Command and Service Module team in the middle of 1966.

Engineering forces weren't that well coordinated.

The engineering groups weren't that well coordinated.

The engineering planning was getting overrun.

There was no single focal point to try and pull all this together.

And so each design group was kind of doing its own thing in a fashion that was not well coordinated.

Let me put it that way.

Problems with the design and build of the command module were cropping up thick and fast.

But with time running out, NASA pressed on.

Here's Gene Kranz, the flight director for Apollo 11's landing, talking about this period in his interview with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

The race to the moon was very real to us that time.

We had the lunar challenge laid out in front of us, and we were three years from the end of the decade, so this did not allow too much procrastination in the directions that we were taking.

So we elected to

fly our first spacecraft, I mean first the Block 1 spacecraft in a manned fashion with Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

It always seemed that every time we'd turn a corner, there were things that were left undone, or answers that we didn't have, or we were moving down a wrong path.

But we had the confidence

that

we'd been through this before, we'd been through it in Mercury, we'd been through it in Gemini, so we had the confidence that by the time that we got to launch day, all the pieces would fit together.

Behind schedule and rife with problems, the first command and service module was nevertheless delivered to NASA in August 1966 to prepare for flight testing, with astronauts Gus Grism, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White as the prime crew.

Wally Shira would lead their backup crew.

Like Gus Grism, he had flown on Mercury and Gemini missions.

He'd also been a pilot for the US Navy and was well known for being outspoken.

This is Wally in 1998 on the haste to get the Apollo spacecraft ready for its first mission.

What became Apollo 1 was not finished.

It was what they call a lot of uncompleted work or incomplete tests and work done on it.

So it was shipped to the Cape with a bunch of spare parts and things to finish it out.

And that, of course, caused this whole atmosphere of developing.

I would almost call it a first case of bad go fever.

Go fever meaning we've got to keep going, got to keep going, got to keep going.

The problems with the spacecraft kept coming.

Pipes leaked water and coolant.

Tanks ruptured.

Faulty components were returned to the manufacturers only to reveal still further flaws.

The astronauts were privately concerned about the state and safety of the vehicle, particularly the large amount of flammable material, pads of nylon and pieces of velcro that lined the walls of the cabin.

Risk remained very much part of the equation, but they were nevertheless impatient to fly.

The crew were interviewed by America's CBS News just weeks before the fire.

First, Gus Grissom.

There's always a possibility that

you can have a catastrophic failure, of course.

This can happen on any fight.

It can happen on the last one as well as the first one.

You just plan as best you can to take care of all of these eventualities.

And you get a well-trained crew and you go fly.

Ed White.

You have to understand the feeling that a test pilot has that I look forward a great deal to the first flight.

There's a great deal of

pride involved in making a first flight.

Roger Chaffee.

There's a lot of unknowns, of course, and a lot of problems that could develop or might develop and they'll have to be solved.

And that's what we're there for.

This is our business business to find out if this thing will work for us

Kennedy Space Center in Florida Apollo's launch site January 26th 1967 With the command and service module finally perched on top of a Saturn rocket, NASA prepared to start tests with the crews aboard.

That day, it was the turn of backup crew Wally Shira, Don Isley and Walt Cunningham.

NASA was still hoping to launch Apollo 1 the following month.

In Houston, where he still lives, I got the chance to talk to Walt Cunningham about that test and NASA's apparent optimism.

None of us expected it to go in February of 1967, but we got to the point where we were going to test the power, how it was going to run the spacecraft inside.

Not a very long test, actually.

We did that test, but we didn't do it with the hatch closed.

We were operating on external power.

The hatch was open, and we didn't think of it as a really big deal.

But we were all aware of the spacecraft as it was coming along.

The wiring was not protected well enough, in our opinion.

Some of the switches, there was a variety of things that was not perfect.

In his NASA oral history interview, Wally Shira said that he'd been extremely concerned about how that test had gone, particularly for the crew that would follow his the next day under the command of Gus Grissom.

Grism's crew would have an added risk.

The door would be closed and the astronauts would be sitting in a cabin filled with an atmosphere of pure oxygen, a highly flammable environment.

All of this made Wally Shira feel distinctly uneasy.

When my crew did the test, we were in a sea-level atmosphere, no pure oxygen.

We were in shirt sleeves, and there were things going on I didn't like at all.

I was no longer annoyed.

I was really pretty goddamn mad.

There were glitches, electronic things that just didn't come out right.

That evening, I debriefed with Gus.

I said, if there are any things that go wrong, like a glitch in the electronic circuit, some bad sounds, scrub.

Because Gus and his guys were going to do it in pure oxygen in an environment that's not very forgiving.

We didn't realize how unforgiving it was at that point.

We'd gone through the same environment with Mercury and Gemini and made it through.

The next day at 1 p.m., Gus Grism's crew donned their spacesuits and climbed into the cramped command module.

The technicians on the launch pad finished their checks and sealed the astronauts in.

With the door firmly locked, the cabin was filled with oxygen and the astronauts prepared to run through their tests during a simulated countdown.

But again, there were glitches.

Nothing ran to plan and after more than four hours the astronauts were still in the capsule and becoming frustrated.

Meanwhile over a thousand miles away in mission control in Houston the room was filled with flight controllers manning their stations as they would for a real launch.

Among them was Jerry Griffin.

For the Apollo 1 fire I was in mission control.

It was a plugs out test.

It was essentially a demonstration that we were ready to go, which we weren't, but

it was a full-up countdown.

So we were playing it in the control center just like we were about to launch.

That was my first shift on the Apollo program was the night of the fire.

I was on the console substituting for a gentleman.

It had been a long day.

It wasn't supposed to have gone that long.

That's John Aaron, who back then was a fresh-faced flight controller, just 24 years old.

It had been a very tough day all day.

They were trying to do these tests and having tremendous problems.

They were having problems, the crew and the test conductors at two or three locations even communicating with each other.

The communication problems continued, as you can hear in this recording for the final few minutes of the test, immediately before the fire itself.

This is Ed White, senior pilot, trying to make himself heard.

Just senior pilot counting,

three, four, five,

five, four, three, two, one.

Senior pilot.

And this is Roger Chaffee testing the radio link.

Pilot hadn't talked to you yet.

I'll fit.

123454321.

The commander, Gus Grissom, got

extremely frustrated.

Hey, how are you going to get the moon if we can't talk between three buildings?

I can't hear that thing you're sleeping.

Alright.

How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?

asked Gus Grissom a second time.

This was one minute before disaster struck.

All of a sudden, I heard something that didn't sound right, much ecstatic first.

And then, all at once,

wow, you heard something like

fire.

And it was like, fire, fire, fire, who said that?

And then you heard a scream.

Then it was over.

Didn't take long to,

we got the report from the Cape that there had been a fire.

And

not too long after that, we got the word that they didn't make it.

Apollo Flight Director Gene Krantz heard the news at home and raced into mission control.

I've never seen a group of people, a group of men, so shaken in their entire lives.

The majority of the controllers were kids fresh out of college in their early 20s.

And

everyone had gone through this agony of listening to this crew over the 16 seconds while they,

at first, we thought they had burned to death, but actually they suffocated.

But it was very fresh, very real.

And there were many of the controllers who just couldn't seem to cope with this disaster that had occurred.

The first details of the disaster were headline news worldwide that same evening.

American reporter George Alexander, who was close to the Apollo program and trusted by NASA, was one of the few journalists allowed to see the devastated capsule in the immediate aftermath.

The minute you opened the door, there was a

bitter smell of smoke.

There's no other way to describe it.

And as we crouched at the entrance of the hatch to the command module, it became even

more pronounced.

It smelled like an electrical fire, too, by the way.

You could smell burned insulation.

It was just a gutted shell.

It looked like a bunker from World War II or the Korean War that had taken a direct hit.

NASA's investigation began immediately.

Ultimately, it would conclude that the fire was started by a spark from poorly protected wiring somewhere in the command module, which, in the pure oxygen environment, rapidly became an inferno.

To make matters worse, it's likely that one of the reasons the crew weren't able to escape was the complicated design of the command module's inner hatch.

It opened inward and took a minute and a half to fully unlock.

Walt Cunningham was one of three astronauts assigned to the investigation.

One of his first tasks was to listen carefully and repeatedly to the voice recording from the accident.

Don Isley and I and Frank Borman, we spent, oh, an hour, must have been around 11.30 at night that night, listening to the tape to make sure we get the words right on what they were saying.

They were still trying to determine the cause of the fire.

It must have been pretty harrowing because you're not just listening to that tape once, you're listening to it over and over again.

Yeah, we did.

Yeah.

It's not very nice to hear.

They've got a fire, I've got a fire in the cockpit, you know.

And to this day, we still don't know exactly where it started, but it was pretty obvious that it was wiring near the bottom.

But when that happened,

they couldn't get the hatch open because of the pressure.

When you had the fire, the pressure went up, 100% oxygen, and so the fire moved just immediately.

They were out of it very, very quickly.

So, actually,

I guess I can speak for myself, but I think others felt the same way.

We were glad they passed out before they got killed.

But Walt, may I ask?

Roger Schaffey selected with you.

He was in your selection class, and then you had worked closely with this crew.

You're their backups.

What was it like for you that your prime crew had been killed?

I would say that the general attitude amongst our crews working on Apollo,

I'd be surprised if anybody thought we were ever going to make all the flights and make the first landing on the moon without having lost a crew and a spacecraft.

But it was a shock to have the accident on the ground.

For NASA, it was a time to pause and take stock, to ask how and why this horrific accident had happened.

But for Flight Director Gene Krantz, the problem ran deeper than the design of the hatch or the wiring.

The root of the problem lay in the organization's attitudes and culture.

Three days after the fire, he assembled his flight controllers in the auditorium at Mission Control and delivered a speech.

A remarkable rallying call of searing honesty and conviction.

It's read for us by actor Kerry Shale.

Space flight is terribly unforgiving of carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.

I don't know what the Thompson committee will find as the cause of this accident, but I know what I find.

We were the cause.

The simulators weren't ready.

Our software and mission control didn't function.

Procedures weren't complete.

Nothing we did had any shelf life.

And no one stood up and said, damn it, stop.

Now from this day forward, mission control will be known by two words, tough and competent.

Tough, meaning we will never again shirk from our responsibility because we're forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do.

Competent.

We will never again take anything for granted.

We'll never stop learning.

When you leave here today, you will write these two words, tough and competent, on your blackboard, and they will never be erased.

They will serve as a constant reminder to the sacrifice of Grissom, White, and Chaffin.

The three astronauts were buried a day later on the 31st of January with full military honours.

After the fire and the investigation, there was no national clamor for the Apollo program to be shut down.

But NASA's reputation was damaged.

The space agency would have to reset its culture and intensify its efforts.

The accident had been an awful wake-up call.

If they still intended to get to the moon before the end of the decade, things were going to have to change.

Here, Chris Craft, Jerry Griffin, and George Abbey, all former center directors of NASA's Johnson Space Center, reflect on the impact of the Apollo 1 disaster.

I think it was

without question the turning point in the

lunar program

because

had we not

had that

event take place, I don't, I think it's a strong possibility we wouldn't have gotten there in the 60s.

And a strong possibility wouldn't have gotten there at all.

We found some flaws that we needed to fix.

If that had happened someplace out like the moon, And they went around the backside and when they came around there were nothing left except a hull going around.

I think it would have ended the program because we wouldn't even have known what happened.

It was a terrible price to pay to get to the moon but I don't know that we would have really been successful without the sacrifice of those three astronauts.

I think the people in the control center and the people in the engineering, the contractors, everyone sharpened their tools and said, we're not going to let that happen again.

There was much to fix in the command module to make it safe and spaceworthy.

The hatch would have to be completely redesigned to allow the astronauts to escape quickly in an emergency.

They'd reduce the amount of oxygen in the cabin while the capsule was on the launch pad.

New, fire-resistant materials would have to be found and tested.

Miles of electrical wiring was stripped out of the spacecraft, reinstalled and made safe.

At the same time, a series of flights without astronauts on board took place in Earth orbit.

Apollos 4, 5 and 6, which tested the Saturn V rocket, the new command module, its heat shield and the lunar module.

Apollo 2 had been cancelled.

And all of that had to happen before NASA was ready for its first flight of the Apollo command module with astronauts on board.

That flight was designated Apollo 7 and would launch 21 months after the fire and less than a year before Apollo 11.

I think that 21 months was NASA's finest hour.

Here's senior flight controller Jerry Bostick.

We went from, you know, having this horrible fire to total redesign of the command and service module, testing it, and then flying Apollo 7, which was the most jam-packed flight plan that we had ever flown.

That period seemed like it just flew by.

One thing was because we were so busy, I guess.

But all of a sudden we were ready for Apollo 7, and I had been named a flight director, and here I was getting ready for the first manned flight of the command and service module.

I think at that time we kind of had, by that time, we had come out of the doldrums.

The crew of Apollo 7 would be the backup crew for Apollo 1, Wally Shira, Don Isley, and Walt Cunningham.

And they wanted somehow to pay tribute to the friends and colleagues they'd lost.

Every mission had a patch or emblem designed by its crew to be worn on their spacesuits, and Walt Cunningham had the idea of featuring the image of a phoenix, the mythical bird born out of fire.

But as he told me, that proved controversial.

Yes.

Tell us that story.

I I could remember, I didn't have to do all the detailed drawing, but I can remember when we were going to get a patch for Apollo 7.

I wanted to point out the fact that we had risen from the fire.

Apollo 1 had burned up on the pad, and so I wanted to be like the flight of the Phoenix.

I wanted to show the spacecraft lifting out of the fire on the pad, which they do.

There's a huge fire on the pad that they lift out of, but they wouldn't let us do it and call it the Phoenix.

21 seconds and counting, we have completed our power transfer, the Saturn 1B launch vehicle.

Apollo 7 launched on the 11th of October, 1968.

Coming up on the 10-second mark.

10, 9, 8.

It was the first time astronauts had flown aboard any Apollo spacecraft.

3 and 2.

We have ignition.

Commit, liftoff.

If NASA was to get to the moon before the end of the decade, this mission had to succeed.

This is launch control.

We have cleared the tower.

Project are clear.

Apollo 7 was the longest,

most ambitious, most successful first flight of any new flying machine ever.

What we were trying to prove and trying to do with Apollo 7 was to have a spacecraft that looked like it was developed well enough that we could send it out around the moon.

Apollo 7 would spend 11 days in space exhaustively testing all of the spacecraft's systems from its main engine to its navigation.

They also practiced vital rendezvous techniques that would need to be perfected for a lunar mission.

In this brief clip, they're attempting a docking maneuver, trying to line up their vehicle with the discarded upper stage of their Saturn rocket now tumbling in space just 70 feet away.

Glenn Lunney was the lead flight director for the mission.

From a technical point of view, he told me Apollo 7 was a resounding success.

The spacecraft performed admirably.

I mean, I don't think we hardly have any problems with the spacecraft.

Probably a couple trivial things, but the flight showed that what was being done to the spacecraft was sound.

You know, there were a lot of changes made to the spacecraft.

We were flying a vehicle that had been resurrected sort of from the ashes.

And my wife makes the point that, you know, the crew that flew didn't get credit for the newness of the vehicle.

So, you know, here they were going out.

When they went out to fly the first flight, they were going out and the fire had to be on their mind.

So, you know, what have we missed?

What have we missed?

What have we not gotten done right?

On top of all the testing of the spacecraft's capabilities, another task for the crew was to film the first live television broadcasts from space.

The crew would get an Emmy award for their TV shows, but the scheduling of the first one marked the start of a less than happy relationship between Wally Shira and the team at Mission Control.

Here's Shirar talking about this in his interview with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

We launched on a Friday.

I remember this very specifically.

In orbit, our so-called Friday night,

Don Eisley's on watch and Cunningham and I are supposed to be sleeping.

And I hear Don saying, Wally won't like that.

What was that?

Putting on my mic and listening in.

Oh, I'm supposed to put on the television tomorrow morning.

Well, we didn't have that in the schedule, gentlemen.

That doesn't go on until Sunday morning.

I really was saying, we have not checked this system out.

It's in the flight plan to be checked at this point in time.

We'll check it at that point in time.

We did.

We did the Wally Walton-Don show Sunday.

But by then, everybody said these guys are getting testy up there.

They're not mutiny, but they're not going along with the flight controllers.

I have yet to meet a flight controller that ever died falling out of a chair like this.

That was my whole attitude from then on.

Don't mess with me, guys.

This is my command, and I wasn't kidding.

And I'll take all the advice, all the information you can give me, but don't push us around.

We're still worried about whether this is a safe spacecraft or not.

And

we hadn't even got to a point where they were going to shave all the hair off in case it was a fire.

Now, why am I going to start running a TV show for somebody if I haven't checked the camera out, all electrical circus, piece by piece?

Aha, it works.

Now I'll show you TV.

Walt Cunningham is the only surviving member of the Apollo 7 crew.

He admitted to me that he'd been perturbed sometimes by his commander's combative manner with the people on the ground in mission control, but that he understood it.

Wally was, of course, wanted to make sure we were safe and all that, and he was the most experienced one on board.

Wally

his dad was an admiral,

and Wally was at the time he was a captain,

and

he felt like he should be operating the command module

like the captains of the ships.

And so the ground would start working with us on schedules and they're doing some of these things.

And that imposed on Wally's thinking.

Now there's very little publicly available audio from the Apollo 7 mission.

So we can't hear the tense, sometimes angry exchanges between Wally Schirat and Mission Control.

But there were more than just a few.

Jerry Griffin.

We did load them up.

They started doing things per the flight plan and they were doing so well we just kept adding new things in.

And I think that frustrated them.

But we did have our problems with Wally

who

got a head cold and didn't feel real good and got pretty uppity with the ground.

That was not fun.

And the funny thing about all that is that Wally was

a good friend of ours, all of us.

funny guy.

But

he really got off on a, went down a funny track on that one.

We were kind of hurt by it, that he would publicly blast out like he did.

The lead flight director was Glenn Lunney, and

I'm not sure I had ever seen Glenn upset or mad before that, but he was plenty upset.

All of us were.

Yes, there were some issues, and I was somewhat surprised.

We had a long history with Wally.

He flew two missions before that, Gemini and Mercury, and he was always good.

He did what had to be done.

And in this case, something seemed to change him.

It was night and day, almost, in terms of attitude.

Head cold aside, the dramatic change in Wally Shira is hard to account for.

But I wondered if perhaps the specter of the Apollo 1 fire still haunted him.

Gus Grism and Wally Shira were good friends.

Perhaps Wally felt that he hadn't been firm enough in his warnings about the Apollo 1 capsule test and maybe that added to the pressure he felt during the flight of Apollo 7.

These are thoughts that I put to Jerry Griffin and George Abbey.

I'm sure the crew of Apollo 7 felt a lot of pressure.

First of all, pressure to succeed on their flight.

And then they did have the good friends that they lost on Apollo 1 that they were close.

Wally Sherar was Gus Grissom's neighbor.

He was the backup crew for the Apollo 1 test and he himself had not wanted that test to go ahead.

So do you think that all of those things together affected his perception of how Apollo 7 would run and thereby his performance on Apollo 7?

No question.

No question.

I'm sure that was in Wally's mind from that night on, particularly after the fire the next day.

I'm sure he felt that he should have been more adamant than he was.

Whatever the reason for Wally Shira's difficult behavior, I still find it strange that we don't celebrate the achievements of Apollo 7 and its crew more fully.

They returned to Earth on the 22nd of October 1968, having demonstrated the Command and Service Module was more than fit to fly.

The decade was fast running out, but incredibly, NASA was back on course.

Jerry Bostick and Jerry Griffin.

If we hadn't done that and it hadn't been that successful, we certainly wouldn't have gone to the moon on the next flight, or we wouldn't have met the president's goal of landing on the moon in 1969.

It was a good mission, very important mission.

It's funny because it's almost a forgotten mission.

People don't really, really see it the way that you've just described.

Well, you know, other national management people have said if it hadn't been for the fire, make us take a step back and look at what we were doing, we probably wouldn't have met the President's goal.

Well, that's true, but I say also if it hadn't been for the success of Apollo 7, we wouldn't have met the President's goal at all.

I tell you what, I believe if we'd had to board that flight or something like that, I think the program would have ended.

I really think it would have.

And those guys never got much credit because it was only

Earth orbit.

But they checked everything out on there that was going to be required to go to the moon back.

To get to the moon, you needed more than astronauts and rocket engines alone.

In episode 5, I'll be looking at the remarkable technology that guided the astronauts and their spacecraft to the moon and down to its surface.

A computer, designed and built at the dawn of the digital age, the cutting edge of all that engineering and science of the time had to offer, and something without which the first lunar landing would have been impossible.

Apollo was really the first true fly-by-wire spacecraft.

Back in those days, nobody trusted computers.

One of the astronauts, when given the tour of the computer, said, you know, the first thing we're going to do when we're up there is turn the sucker off.

How essential was that Apollo guidance computer?

Could you have done it without it?

It would have been difficult.

You hate to admit it, but they do a lot better job than you do.

I look at Apollo 11 as the first time man walked on the moon, and I know I say this too often, but that's the first time software ran on the moon.

13 Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service.

Roger, good morning to everyone in television

13 Minutes to the Moon is produced by Andrew Luck Baker.

Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer.

Additional research and production by Sue Norton and Madeleine Finley.

The series editor is Rami Zabar and the podcast editor is John Minnell.

Kerry Shale read Gene Krantz's tough and competent speech.

Many thanks to NASA for archive material and specially big thanks to the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for the clips of their interviews.

If you want to dig deep into Apollo history, check out that project's website.

There are transcripts of hundreds of interviews they've done with astronauts, mission control staff, engineers, and NASA managers over the years.

It's an amazing resource.

And let me say thanks to you too for your comments about the podcast.

All ratings and reviews are much appreciated.

On social media, our hashtag is 13 MinutesToThe Moon.

That's all one word.

Don't forget there are videos, photos, and documents to enjoy on our website.

That's at bbcworldservice.com slash 13 minutes.

I'm Kevin Fong.

Thanks for listening.

The Mercedes-Benz Dream Days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, CLE Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com/slash dream.

Sucks!

the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.