12 Merry Christmas from the Moon On May 6, 1967, at a dinner to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the first American in space, Alan Shepard signaled that it was time to resume the race: Much has . been said about the cause and effects of the fire. In this case, perhaps too much. All of us here tonight jointly share the re- sponsibilities 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. The time for recrimination is over. We have digested enough his- torical evidence. There is much to be done. Morale is high. Vision is still clear. And I say, let’s get on with the job.1 The problem was not quite as simple as Shepard suggested. The fire put the space program seriously behind schedule. “The whole capsule had to be rewired,” George Mueller remembered. “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.”2 “We weren’t just looking for fire hazards,” Joe Gavin recalled. “We went back and looked at every single system.”3 Rebuilding the capsule was perhaps the easiest part. Rebuilding morale was much more difficult. “There was a whole year where nobody was willing to take any risk whatso- ever,” Mueller reflected. “I had to take the lead in convincing people that it was safe to fly and that we really couldn’t afford not to take some risks, that there wasn’t any way to fly any of these things without risk.”4 In the past, NASA had employed “incremental testing”—what Gene Kranz called “small, baby steps.”5 If going to the Moon was like climbing a ladder, each rung was meticulously tested before being used Copyright © 2006. New York University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. All © 2006. New York Copyright to advance to the next. But, after the fire and the inquiry, there wasn’t time for that. Mueller had earlier proposed “all-up testing,” or running 223 Degroot, Gerard. Dark Side of the Moon : The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Accessed March 26, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from washington on 2021-03-26 16:40:39. 224 MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE MOON up the ladder without bothering to test the rungs along the way. The idea, which once seemed madness, now seemed the only option. The Moon package—the Saturn V rocket, with all three stages, and the Apollo capsule on top—would be tested as a unit. If it worked, it meant that everything was fine, and tests which previously would have taken months, or years, could be achieved with one mission. But if it didn’t work, and, say, the second stage misfired, no one would have any idea whether the apparatus above that stage was sound. The accelerated ap- proach would eventually mean that NASA more than made up for the delay. “There was enough wrong with the spacecraft that, without the fire, we might not have made Kennedy’s deadline at all,” Kranz thought. “We’d have flown, found problems, taken months to fix them, flown again, found more problems, taken more months. We might not have landed on the Moon until 1970 or ‘71.”6 Robert Seamans agreed: “Tragic as it was, if we had not had the accident then, we would not have gone to the Moon in the decade.”7 On April 4, 1968, an unmanned Apollo 6 rose from the pad at Cape Kennedy on a voyage of woe. Everything seemed to go wrong. The cap- sule spent a short ten hours in space before plunging into the Pacific. During its absence, James Earl Ray gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, thus insuring that NASA’s travails were buried on the back pages of the newspapers. Jules Bergman, a reporter for ABC, nev- ertheless concluded: The troubles with Apollo 6 almost certainly mean another delay in America’s lunar landing plan. But even if this flight had been a full success, the space agency is still in deep basic trouble. It is searching for the future, and it hasn’t found it yet. Nor has it convinced Congress that it has a real future beyond the Moon. NASA now faces new budget cuts of up to half a billion dollars as part of the austerity drive. The great goals in conquering space are still just as great, but Congress feels there are greater, more immediate goals to be conquered here on Earth: rebuilding our cities, solving our transportation problems, ex- ploring the oceans. And even an end to the Vietnam War won’t solve NASA’s problems. The faith of Congress and the space agency’s cred- ibility remain shaken.8 Copyright © 2006. New York University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. All © 2006. New York Copyright Reginald Turnill, who covered the space program for the BBC, noticed a huge change. Every aspect of the program now seemed strictly regu- Degroot, Gerard. Dark Side of the Moon : The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Accessed March 26, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from washington on 2021-03-26 16:40:39. MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE MOON 225 lated, as if bureaucracy was the best answer to disaster. “That rigid dis- cipline illustrates the difference here at the Cape now, compared with ten years ago when I started coming,” he reported at the time. “Then everybody went about in the heat in shorts and open shirts, felt like a pioneer and was happy. Now, everybody wears suits—ties, jackets, the lot—and of course worries.”9 Thomas Paine was appointed deputy administrator of NASA on January 31, 1968. It seemed to him that the press was actively looking for disaster, since success no longer seemed newsworthy. “The air of an- imosity and the frank feeling I got from the reporters was that the best story they could possibly get would be to have the damn thing explode on the pad . in which case they would have credit lines on the front page, whereas if the damn thing went up, well there wasn’t much of a story in that.” Though the agency still had its journalist friends, the days when it could depend on positive reporting were over. Some jour- nalists, Paine remarked bitterly, “knew we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and that we were a bunch of bums and that it was all a great façade really.”10 Public support for the lunar program also suffered. A Harris poll taken in July 1967 found that 46 percent opposed the aim of landing a man on the Moon, while 43 percent favored it. Rather predictably, sup- port was highest among young men under 35 in the upper income bracket. As in previous polls, support fell drastically when pollsters re- ferred to the costs of the mission. When asked whether space explo- ration was worth the investment of $4 billion a year, only 34 percent agreed, with 54 percent disagreeing. While those figures were worrying enough, much more revealing were answers to the question: “If the Russians were not in space, and we were the only ones exploring space, would you favor or oppose continuing our space program at the pres- ent rate.” Opposition outnumbered support at a level of 60 to 30 per- cent.11 In other words, NASA had not managed to convince the Ameri- can people that the space program had any justification beyond that of beating the Russians. Apollo 7, the first manned mission, was crewed by Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham, and Donn Eisele. Launched on October 11, 1968, it stayed aloft for nearly eleven days and was the first full test of the com- bined command and service modules in orbit. For the public, it was a Copyright © 2006. New York University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. All © 2006. New York Copyright triumphant return, especially coming as it did after a year marred by the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King, race Degroot, Gerard. Dark Side of the Moon : The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Accessed March 26, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from washington on 2021-03-26 16:40:39. 226 MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE MOON riots, the Chicago convention, and widespread campus unrest. But, while the public delighted in seeing NASA again doing what it did best, the flight was not without trouble. Schirra developed a cold, which he quickly passed on to the rest of the crew. Sneezing in zero gravity is not nice. But much worse is the fact that the absence of gravity means that the nasal passages don’t drain without constant blowing of the nose. That’s uncomfortable, especially when the flight controllers were in- sisting that the astronauts had to keep their helmets on. To make mat- ters worse, the food was terrible, even by NASA standards. A few days into the flight, the crew started arguing with each other over the more desirable meals left in the store. Dehydrated food produces gas bubbles when reconstituted. In zero gravity, these do not escape to the surface, but are instead ingested, causing severe gas pains. The only solution was to fart, yet farting in a space capsule was not a good idea when three astronauts were desperately trying to remain civil to each other.