Lee was nonplussed. “I don’t know. The flights—”
“Tonight would be fine. I’d like to see you. Come to my office at JSC.”
Maybe Muldoon thought it would be kinder to tell Lee in person, even if it meant dragging him all the way out to Houston.
Lee thought of Bert and his ball game. That seemed a more attractive option.
He called Bella to ask her to fix up a flight to Houston.
He got to JSC in the late afternoon. He’d spent the flight, and the ride from the airport, bracing himself for the axe.
Muldoon took him into his office and closed the door. He stuck out his hand and grinned. “Congratulations. I wanted to tell you in person. You’ve won the MEM.”
Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.
“Can I tell my people?”
Muldoon checked his watch, an astronaut’s heavy Rolex. “We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets on the West Coast close… Well, what the hell.”
He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.
Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.
He called Art Cane.
And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure in commiserating with him.
Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled and had a hell of a time.
But by 5 A.M. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.
He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. “By God,” he said aloud. “I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.”
Then the TV news item broke into his awareness.
A Saturn VB had blown up. There was an image of a white cloud, tinged with orange, with Solid Rocket Boosters veering crazily out of it, trailing smoke.
The commentators said the accident would set the Ares program back years.
My God. Lee knotted his tie, his fingers frantic, fumbling, and hurried from the room. New York Times, Tuesday, December 15, 1981
…Today the last remains of the tragic Apollo-N space mission have been buried, in an underground storage facility at NASA’s Cape Kennedy launch site in Florida.
I spoke to Aaron Raab at the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center about the problems involved. Raab was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1946. He joined NASA in July 1967, just a few months after another tragedy, the Apollo 1 pad fire which claimed the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
In the immediate aftermath of the Apollo-N disaster, Raab shouldered the heavy burden of “Debris Manager.”
After being off-loaded from its recovery vessel at Port Canaveral, the Apollo-N Command Module — the 11,000-pound capsule which returned NASA astronauts Dana, Jones, and Priest to Earth — was painstakingly disassembled and laid out for investigation purposes in temporary storage areas by a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team. Under Raab’s supervision, and under the watchful eye of the investigating commission appointed by President Reagan, the components of the Command Module were arranged in their original configuration relative to one another, to assist the investigators. The components remained in this “footprint” for almost a full year, because once the investigations were over and the reports written, NASA got down to its own internal engineering evaluation and data retrieval.
Surprisingly little equipment was used to move the components about, including a light crane, a forklift, and two flatbed trucks.
Because the Command Module had been recovered from the saltwater ocean, some of it required corrosion-proofing to preserve it. In addition, special measures were taken to protect Apollo-N’s voice recorders. Soon after recovery the recorders had been sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for restoration by IBM and analysis by a team led by woman astronaut Natalie York.
The Command Module’s final resting place is perhaps bizarre, but practical. The spacecraft now lies deep underground in a disused Minuteman missile silo complex in a quiet corner of Cape Canaveral. The chosen site consists of one silo (Complex 31) and four vaultlike underground equipment rooms.
The operation to prepare the silo as a final resting place was a tricky one. The silo complex had deteriorated badly after some ten years of neglect. The equipment rooms still housed a considerable amount of electronic equipment associated with missile operations, which Raab’s team had to remove before the Apollo-N debris could be transported in. Other modifications were made to transform the underground equipment rooms, which were in a bad state of repair, into permanent storage vaults. Although there was to be no environmental control, the underground facilities had to be made at least watertight; it turned out that back in the late 1960s a burst pipe had immersed the floor of Complex 31 under several feet of water, and so the water lines were all capped off before the Apollo-N debris was moved in.
There was extensive photo-documentation by NASA cameramen, and the whole operation was conducted under a tight security cordon, with round-the-clock surveillance to deter morbid souvenir hunters.
“We got the components in the vault in a very organized manner,” Aaron Raab told me. “We compartmentalized the components according to function and storage requirements. Primarily, we put the larger components in first, and anything we felt would be of any significance in the future was left in an accessible area. It was all logged in by our quality control personnel here at the Cape, in official logbooks. These record precisely where each component is stored.”
It would be a fairly involved operation for anyone to get back into the vault, but future investigators could go in and retrieve components after a few days of clearing work. But, says Raab, there are no plans for the periodic opening up of the vaults to check the condition of the stored wreckage.
Today, I watched as Aaron Raab personally laid the last few poignant components of the Command Module in position. A huge 10-ton concrete cap was secured with long steel rods and welded down over the underground vault.
A year after the accident, Apollo-N is at last laid to rest…
January 1982
At first Bert Seger had been enthusiastic about his new post in Washington. He was, after all, given the rank of associate administrator, and, as a senior manager in the Office of Manned Spaceflight, he still expected to have a strong hands-on involvement in the manned program. But when he studied the new organization charts, and he saw just how far away from him were the reporting lines of the major players, like Joe Muldoon, he started to realize he’d been had. He’d been handed a sinecure, something to get him decently out of the way during the investigations into Apollo-N.
He never became comfortable at Headquarters. He had a few assignments, and some pet projects of his own to pursue, and they filled his time, but not his attention. He would find himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, waiting for the telephone to ring, reading newspapers.
He took long walks around Washington.
He found favored benches in the big public gardens and floated through the museums. He liked the serenity, the timelessness of the museums.
The evenings weren’t any better.
Fay was still in Houston, with the boys, and Seger would fly back there every Friday. Fay didn’t want to move, because of the boys’ schooling, and Seger accepted that, reluctantly.
Every Sunday or Monday, when he had to get ready to fly back to DC, Fay prepared him a little bouquet of carnations. Each day he’d take one for his buttonhole, but they’d be pretty faded by the end of the week, and it just wasn’t the same.