How Soon the Moon?

Since the flash fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee last January, the Apollo program has been at a mournful standstill. Eyes previously trained on the moon have turned during the past three months to minutely attentive investigation of what went wrong, and why. "The accident makes you take a good hard look at your strengths and weaknesses," explained a NASA man last week. "But there is no intention in all this to find fall guys."

Perhaps not, but next day NASA abruptly announced a top-level, "accident-related" shakeup. Brilliant, energetic Joe Shea, 40, the Apollo spacecraft program manager, was shifted from Houston to Washington, where he will become the deputy associate administrator for manned space flight. His job went to the deputy director of the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center, George Low. NASA insisted that Shea was not being demoted. But even Shea's friends were unsure what his appointment as aide to Manned Space Flight Chief Dr. George Mueller meant. As one of them put it, "If Joe stays in Washington, it'll be a promotion. If he leaves in three or four months, you'll know this move amounted to being fired."

Starting Point. Whichever it was, it came just before the release of the massive, nine-volume NASA report on the fire, due for delivery early this week to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. By all accounts, the report does not pinpoint the exact cause of the fire and suggests that no absolutely precise blame will ever be fixed. But it does list two or three possible causes--all of them involving electrical malfunctions--and states that the trouble almost certainly started in or near one of the wiring bundles located to the left and just in front of Grissom's seat on the left side of the cabin. It was a spot visible only to Chaffee in the right-hand seat.

To prove their thesis, NASA engineers took a test Apollo spacecraft in Houston and duplicated the conditions aboard Apollo 204 during the tragedy--without humans. The suspect bundles were put in place and made to malfunction. The fire started. It remained invisible for five or six seconds and then came into view from Chaffee's seat. During the real fire, it was at this moment that Chaffee sounded the alarm. From then on, the pattern and intensity of the test fire followed almost to the second the pattern and intensity of the fire aboard Apollo 204 as reconstructed by scientists.

As a result, the indicted parts have been painstakingly gone over. Procedures for dry-run checkouts will be drastically altered. The danger, NASA admits, was not properly estimated in advance, and the exercise that cost three lives was too routinely regarded. If the usual safety checks for an actual launch had been run on the day of the simulation, the accident probably would not have occurred. In future simulations, such checks will be run. Also, pure oxygen will not be used at 16 Ibs. per sq. in. during routine manned ground tests as it was that day: the higher pressure meant that the fire spread five times as fast as it would have in a normal atmosphere. A new quick-opening hatch is also being designed, and the surprising number of combustible items aboard--including the astronauts' own space suits and the craft's insulating foam--are being redesigned using materials that are more fire-resistant.

Eight Sites. The January fire blew NASA's schedule to bits. Before the ac cident, things were going so well that a tentative date and minute for the moon-probe lift-off had been set: February 1, 1968, at 10:35 a.m. Now it looks as if the first manned test flight will just be going up then, a full year late. That does not necessarily mean a year's delay in trying for the moon, however. Since spacecraft, rocket and other production will continue throughout the coming year despite the lack of manned missions, Apollo equipment will be all set and ready to go--even allowing for last-minute modifications--almost as soon as each previous flight is ended. And the moon bid could come as soon as the third manned Apollo mission.

NASA was showing signs of looking forward again by the end of last week. It announced that after analysis of the pictures taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 in February, eight "candidate" lunar landing sites have now been chosen.

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