(4 of 7)
The craft's fuel system was empty. Although the interior of the cabin was filled with pure oxygen, it could not have caught fire itself unless there was a source of ignition (a spark, an over-heated bearing, a short circuit) and some other substance to flare up first. The capsule itself was a total loss, charred and blackened both inside and out, its intricately sensitive instrumentation ruined beyond any further useful purpose—except in whatever clues to the cause it can offer. A top-level board of inquiry was appointed immediately, and space technicians were convinced that they would find an explanation with the help of tapes and films recorded during the disaster and a diode-by-diode dissection of the capsule itself. "There is no such thing as a random failure," snapped Joseph Shea, 40, the brilliant University of Michigan-trained engineer who brought the Apollo pro- gram from near-chaos to the brink of success in three years. "Every failure has a cause."
At week's end early expert guesswork came up with few plausible possibilities. The sealed plumbing system that keeps the cabin atmosphere livable employs a coolant, ethylene glycol (a dihydroxy alcohol akin to automobile antifreeze). One theory was that if this had leaked anywhere, it could have flamed up from a tiny spark and triggered the oxygen-fed explosion. In any case, it would have taken the astronauts five minutes, in the best of circumstances, to lug open the escape hatches.
"Valiant Young Men." Word of the tragedy was withheld from the public for nearly two hours. First hints that something had gone wrong at Cape Kennedy came around 7 p.m., when wives of Cape technicians received tense phone calls from their husbands, saying only that they would be home late. Sensing that something drastic had happened, the women besieged newspapers and radio stations with anxious questions. Reporters began calling the Cape to find out what was wrong. Not until 8:30 p.m. was the announcement made to the press. The orange-yellow lights on Pad 34 burned all night.
President Johnson got the news in the strangely coincidental company of space-administration officials and five of the dead astronauts' colleagues—all of whom were at the White House, celebrating the signing of the international space treaty. The President issued a somber statement, mourning the loss of "three valiant young men." A thick pall settled over the Cape Kennedy area too, for the men of the U.S. space program are held there in the same loving awe in which shipmasters were held by Elizabethan England. Indeed, the entire na- tion was stunned. By now, most Americans had come to believe that the cool, infinitely competent company of astronauts had the savvy, scientific support and blessed good fortune to survive any ordeal.
Their deaths were all the more shocking because two of the men—Gus Grissom and Ed White—had performed feats that made their names household words.