The Last Man on the Moon Read online

  Stafford shook his head. “They’re dead,” he said. “Gus, Ed and Roger are dead”

  2

  Taps

  A NORTH AMERICAN HELICOPTER ferried us to LAX, and without much of a pre-flight inspection we took off in our T-38s, Tom and I flying lead and John on our wing. In the air, we still knew nothing more than we had learned at the Downey plant. “Torn, what did they tell you?” I asked on the intercom as we roared through the late afternoon sky, the Pacific coast and the sprawl of Los Angeles giving way to the broad, empty deserts that stretch across California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The sun was setting behind us, the sky darkening ahead. Below, pinpoints of light blinked on as the edge of nightfall crept over the desert communities. Tom tried to recall the exact words, searching for some new clue, for some meaning in the terse call he had received. All he knew, all he could tell me, was that our guys were dead. Fire on the pad. Until now, such a thing had been inconceivable. It was an hour and twenty minutes to El Paso, where we refueled and flew on, cruising near the speed of sound at 45,000 feet in a zone of stony silence.

  We found it difficult to say anything at all. Silently, I harbored a sense of disgust at the way they had died. Others had been killed in the program, but they had gone down in airplane crashes, and everyone figured that someday an astronaut might perish in space. It never crossed our minds that we would lose somebody in a spacecraft on the ground. As pilots, we willingly accepted risks, relying on our training and confidence when climbing into a new plane. If I was going to bust my ass on this job, at least I wanted to be flying, not sitting helplessly on the pad, waiting for something to happen!

  These three guys didn’t even have a chance to light the engines on that monster rocket. Hell, the thing wasn’t even fueled. If it had exploded after liftoff, they would still be dead, and it would still have been a tragedy, but somehow more palatable. Gus, Ed, Roger and the rest of us had chosen to become astronauts in order to take our chances going to the Moon, not to die sitting on the pad. Challenge me to react to a problem, to make a decision, be it right or wrong, but at least give me the fighting chance they didn’t get. We always knew we were vulnerable to a host of unknown problems, but a fire on the pad? That was a waste, and something for which we were unprepared.

  I didn’t know where to take my anger. I couldn’t blame anyone, because I didn’t know exactly what had happened, and blame wouldn’t have done any good anyway. They were dead.

  The glow of San Antonio faded behind us as Houston’s bright lights rose on the night horizon and we began our descent.

  ROGER CHAFFEE HAD BEEN a year behind me in the Naval ROTC program at Purdue, and I really didn’t know him during our early years as naval aviators. But when we were both among the fourteen astronauts announced in October, 1963, our lives became linked. When all else fails, line up alphabetically: Cernan, then Chaffee. In the official group photo and on many other occasions, he was right there beside me.

  We all arrived in Houston in January, 1964. Roger and his wife Martha, a beautiful young woman who had been homecoming queen at Purdue in her freshman year, had taken a little tan duplex apartment in Clear Lake, southeast of Houston, with their two kids, Sheryl and Steve. My wife, Barbara, our nine-month-old daughter Tracy, and I moved into a rented house on nearby Huntress Lane. As young lieutenants, we barely made 10,000 dollars a year, but soon used a windfall of cash from a publication agreement with Life magazine to buy a couple of lots in a new subdivision where we built homes, side by side, a thin wooden fence separating our yards on Barbuda Lane. We moved in within ten days of each other. Roger had the first swimming pool on the block, and I built a walk-in bar in my family room, so we became a gathering place for many parties. Almost everybody in the neighborhood was involved in the space program, and several astronauts were only a stone’s throw away. Mike Collins, Jim McDivitt and Dick Gordon were just down the street, and Alan Bean, Buzz Aldrin and Dave Scott were right around the corner.

  Roger was a workaholic, and I guess we all were, but off-duty, he had a great sense of humor. We often hunted together, and I always used one of his handcrafted rifles because I never had one of my own. Martha would later give me that .243 Magnum, and it is now one of my most cherished possessions. Only six weeks had passed since our families shared Thanksgiving dinner at their place next door. That same weekend, Roger and I had gone hunting with golfing legend Jimmy Demaret, and I had gotten airsick in Jimmy’s little Beechcraft Debonair on the flight to west Texas. Roger never let me forget it. An airsick space hero? “You gonna barf on the way to the Moon, too, Geno?” As it turned out, some guys actually did. I knew Roger wouldn’t, because he had a iron stomach that let him eat a banana-sized jalapeno pepper in two big bites.

  At parties, Roger would challenge others to do the “broom trick.” He held a broom out in front of him horizontally, stepped over it, wiggled it up behind him and over his head, coming back to the starting position without ever releasing either hand. It was easy if you were sober and somewhat double-jointed, and an embarrassing catastrophe if you weren’t. He particularly liked the way it would rile Buzz Aldrin, a natural athlete who was stymied by the simple parlor game. Roger and I had bonded. We shared a dream. We were, in a special way, brothers. And now he was dead.

  From the day we reported to NASA, our space careers grew in parallel paths. We shared rental cars, hotel rooms, and often the same airplane. In fact, we were both learning to fill the lunar pilot slot in Apollo. It was a peculiar honor, for the Block One spacecraft did not have the docking capability needed to pair up with the lunar modules that we were to fly to the Moon’s surface, and Grumman had not finished building the LEM anyway. So on that January day of 1967, Roger and I were lunar module pilots aboard a pair of spacecraft that didn’t even have lunar modules.

  On many a Friday night, coming home from a week-long training mission in a T-38 just like the one I was in now, Roger and I would buzz our houses just before turning sharply left, dropping the gear and landing at Ellington Air Force Base. From as far as San Antonio, we would point the needle nose of our plane directly at the driveway separating our houses and roar over Barbuda Lane, shaking the shingles and rattling the dishes at 600 knots. The noisy message let our wives (and neighbors) know that we would be home soon. We would land, jump into our cars, and race down the two-lane Old Galveston Highway, through the single stoplight in the town of Webster at eighty miles per hour and screech up to our houses in less than ten minutes. It was all somewhat illegal, but what the hell, we were astronauts!

  Those flybys were in my thoughts as Tom and I started our descent, but this time we avoided the neighborhood as we swept in for a landing and quietly parked the plane on the ramp. It was always a long trip home from California, but this time I was reluctant to see it end. Finally alone, I drove home slowly, overwhelmed by a feeling of inadequacy.

  OUR NARROW STREET LOOKED like a parking lot as I arrived, stopped in my driveway, and turned off the ignition. Still wearing my sweat-stained yellow flight suit, I crossed the lawn, thirty-six steps from my front door to Roger’s, nodding to a security guard who had taken position to keep away the growing crowd and the press. There was no reason for me to go into my own house, for I knew Barbara would be next door with Martha. The wives in the space program were a special breed and knew what they had to do, for they had been through this sort of tragedy before. All of them shared the same nightmare, that their husbands someday might not come home, and that a somber official would knock on their door with horrible news.

  I gave Barbara a big hug as soon as I saw her, clinging for a long moment to prove to both of us that we were still alive. Then I found Martha and held her tightly in a hug that we both needed so badly. Emotionally empty, I tried to convey physically what I could not put into words. What could I say? I’m sorry that your husband just burned alive? Fortunately, I was not the one who had to explain the accident to Martha. That duty had fallen to Mike Collins.

  Martha had been in the kitchen, f
ixing hot dogs for dinner, when Alan Bean’s wife, Sue, dropped by unexpectedly. She wasn’t alarmed, because it was normal for wives to visit, and Barbara probably would be over in a little while, as soon as she got back from the movies. Yes, traffic seemed to be getting heavy outside, but that was normal, too, since everybody was getting off work for the weekend. Her kids, Steve, five, and Sheryl, eight, were watching TV in the den. As Sue chatted on nervously, Martha wasn’t worried about her husband. Roger was in Florida, and wasn’t even flying today.

  But then Mike appeared at the front door. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He didn’t fit into the normal routine. When she saw his eyes, Martha realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. It was written all over his face. She knew.

  As Mike gave her the awful news, another friend walked into the den and turned off the television set, which would start broadcasting news bulletins soon, and kept the kids entertained by folding the foil wrapper from a cigarette pack into the shape of a duck. After her initial shock, Martha took her son and daughter into a bedroom and haltingly told them that their daddy wouldn’t be coming home again. Sheryl at first thought her mother was talking about a divorce, but when she realized that her father was dead, the little girl was overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment. Martha removed a double gold-heart locket she always wore, a present from Roger many years ago, and linked it around the neck of their daughter, to keep her daddy’s memory close. Sheryl still wears that necklace today.

  I watched the sisterhood go about this awful task of sharing grief, the women showing through their actions that Martha was loved, even as she roamed the rooms in a trance, like the hostess of a party, staying busy to keep from thinking that Roger would not be coming home that night, or ever again. It had to be so damned hard, but I saw her shrug her shoulders, lift her face, wipe away the tears and do her duty, denying reality. She was the wife of an astronaut, and an astronaut’s wife kept the faith. She was not allowed to be less than perfect, even in the time of darkest grief. At one point, Martha crossed over through the backyards and made a private telephone call from our house. When she returned by the front, the security guard stopped her, demanding to know who she was before letting her enter her own home.

  Deke Slayton, our boss, soon told me to put everything else aside and help take care of Martha. It made sense, because there was not much else to do in a space program that had suddenly come to a screeching halt. Other astronauts were assigned to shepherd Pat White and Betty Grissom through the bewildering maze of adjusting to the highly publicized deaths.

  I found there was a down side to Roger’s determination to do everything perfectly. He ruled his household, wrote all the checks, made all the decisions. Now that he was gone, his wife and children were adrift in a strange sea. Martha didn’t even know if there was insurance. Roger had always taken care of those things.

  The next few days passed in a blur as I attempted to put my friend’s affairs in order and give his family a sense of security. Barbara was at my side every step of the way.

  A private memorial service was held at the tiny Webster Presbyterian Church, just off Old Galveston Highway, the white chapel jammed with a shocked community of friends and neighbors. A civilian minister delivered a homily and, as we gathered outside, a flight of T-38s piloted by astronauts zoomed overhead in the Missing Man formation, one peeling away from the pack as they swept over the steeple. This service was just for the home folks, the people who best knew the three astronauts, those who had spent the most important years of their lives working for NASA. Not only did we feel sorrow, but each individual carried a sense of personal guilt, as if we might have done something, anything, to prevent the tragedy that now so impacted our lives.

  IT WAS COLD IN the Arlington National Cemetery on the last day of January, particularly for those of us who had come up from Texas. A bitter wind whipped the manes of six dark horses that beat a slow clip-clop tattoo on the winding pathway between the tombstones, pulling the caisson that held the flag-draped coffin of Roger Chaffee. The three horses on the left were ridden by solemn young soldiers, and the three on the right bore empty saddles to symbolize the missing riders. Not one, but three. Gus had been buried at few hours earlier in Arlington, and Ed was buried at the U.S. Military Academy cemetery at West Point. A winter sun shone above banks of high clouds overhead, but this was a black and mournful day, the worst ever in America’s space program.

  I was in my Navy dress blues and my polished shoes crunched through the frost as we took our places for the brief ceremony. My heart thumped as I studied the grim scene. It seemed all wrong.

  Martha squeezed my hand so tightly that it seemed as if our gloves would melt together. The widow was in shock. So was I. So were her children, eight and five, barely aware of what was happening as they sat on cold metal chairs beside their mother. So was Barbara, who had been in bed at the hotel with exhaustion. So were Roger’s parents, who had come from Grand Rapids, Michigan. So was Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, standing beside the open grave. So was the entire country, because what happened simply should not have happened.

  The awful details had emerged over the previous few days. Apparently a spark ignited somewhere in that labyrinth of wiring, and the pure oxygen environment within the spacecraft created a holocaust. The guys fought for their lives, trying to open that goddamned heavy hatch, but died in a matter of seconds, asphyxiated in their suits.

  The space program was ill prepared for such a disaster, and now we gathered in Arlington not as space heroes, but as mere mortals, shorn of our cloaks of invincibility, with failure at our feet.

  THE CAISSON RUMBLED ALONG, the brisk wind rippling the red, white, and blue flag. The horses walked the twisting mile from where a brief memorial service had been held near the administration building toward the waiting grave, number 2502-F, on the crown of a cold hill, where Roger would rest for eternity next to Gus. The creak of the leather saddles, the rattle of metal fasteners, and the soft hoofbeats provided accompaniment as a military band, marching to muffled drums, played “Onward Christian Soldiers” as a slow dirge. Astronauts were the pallbearers.

  The weather was thirty degrees colder on that bleak Virginia hillside than in Houston as full military honors were rendered for Lieutenant Commander Roger B. Chaffee, who lost his life only a few weeks before he was to become the twentieth American to fly in space.

  Martha dried the tears of her daughter, Sheryl, and Roger’s father, visibly shaken, laid his hand on his son’s cold, steel coffin. President Johnson personally expressed the thanks of the nation, although Martha wouldn’t remember it. Lady Bird Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey were performing the same ceremonial task at West Point. Members of Congress, NASA officials, and several hundred more people were gathered at a discreet distance as the flag was removed from the casket, folded into a triangle by a detail of Navy enlisted men, and presented to Martha.

  There was a sudden crack of noise as three rifle volleys sounded, and the mournful notes of “Taps” seemed to last forever. Looking up, through the arthritic, winter-bare trees, we saw a flight of Phantom jet fighters thunder by in salute, one peeling up and away from the formation. Now, it was final.

  An overwhelming question lay just beyond our circle of grief. Were we here to mourn our loved ones and friends, or were we actually at Arlington to bury the manned space program? From this point on, the dream of sending men into orbit and beyond would be viewed through the prism of the sacrifice demanded. It was a dangerous enterprise and we all now clearly understood what President Kennedy meant when he said our country had accepted this challenge not because it was easy, but because it was hard. He had wanted us to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and now, in the first months of 1967, the first spacecraft that could move us toward that goal lay in ruin. The clock was ticking and we had a long way to go. Maybe what JFK had asked really was impossible.

  As I watched my friend being buried, I began to wonder if the deaths of
Gus, Ed, and Roger had cost us the chance to walk on the Moon. Was this the end of Apollo?

  3

  Sold by the Nuns

  IT WAS THE NATURE of the early astronauts to be cocky and bold, for you cannot strap into a canvas seat atop a monster rocket and be ready, even eager, to ride it into space without having total confidence in yourself and your ability. A bit of arrogance seemed in order. I can do anything. We were competitive to a fault, whether racing our Corvettes around the Cape, pulling elaborate pranks, or tearing across the skies in our T-38s, turning a milk-run flight into an aerial dogfight.

  It took a special person to overwhelm us, and Wernher von Braun was just such a man. To the American public, we were shining and daring heroes, but in the presence of Herr Doktor, we were mere schoolboys with dreams to fly in space. We were smart. He was brilliant, the man who was creating those magnificent rockets that would take us to the Moon. We furnished the bodies and he furnished the brains.

  In a Houston restaurant one evening, where he had gathered four rookie astronauts before any of us had flown, I realized that the big German—almost movie-star handsome, with thick dark hair carefully oiled into place and the burning eyes of a true believer—was much more than a scientist. He was a visionary and a philosopher, perhaps the Jules Verne of our time, able to peer into the future. German scientists usually were regarded as “square corner” people in the extreme: engineers and technicians who strove for straight-line perfection above all things. Von Braun reached beyond that, out to the realm of ideas where the lines are loopy and there are no fences, and he considered rigid formulae to be important only insofar as they could advance his lust for space travel. He was the ultimate engineer, but he was also a dreamer, just what the space program needed, far out in front of what was going on at the moment. Von Braun was the alchemist who could turn science fiction into science fact.