That link with the fatal Apollo-N mishap showed Udet clearly which way the report was shaping.
It was ludicrous, of course; anyone who understood anything of the complexity of a ship like a Saturn — with its millions of moving parts — would recognize the impossibility of adjusting the design to counter every possible problem that could be conjured up. There was never the time, or the resources; the realistic way was to balance the risks, and exercise judgment as to what is acceptable, and what must be changed. Why, if one waited for the perfect rocket, one would never fly at all!
Udet felt enormously tired. He was sixty-eight years old. And sometimes — especially since the death of von Braun — he wondered whether the battle was still worth the effort, whether he still had the strength for the endless struggle to convince the Americans to accept the great rockets he was building for them.
Udet had donned something of the mantle of von Braun, since Wernher’s retirement a decade earlier. He had even inherited Wernher’s office, there on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building. But Udet had no pretensions; he knew that he was no substitute for Wernher. The Americans had adored von Braun: they responded to him, Udet thought ungraciously, as they did to evangelists, and the salesmen of cars. And, it seemed, questions about the Germans’ past — possible complicity in “war crimes” during the Peenemьnde period — were irrelevant for Wernher.
Well, Wernher was dead. And it was different for Udet. He knew that, try as he might, he could not help but project an aloofness, an aura of the disdainful Prussian aristocrat. The Americans did not trust Udet; and they appeared to find it much easier to believe ill of him than ever they had of von Braun.
And meanwhile, he had been forced to watch as Gregory Dana had risen in status and power within the organization. His fatherhood of the lost hero James, and the fact that his once-vilified mission mode had been chosen as the basis for the new Mars program, had raised Dana’s status almost to national celebrity.
And Dana continued to pronounce his damning testimony on Udet’s life-work, his tone dry, level, like a soulless prosecutor.
Udet’s dark, dwarfish twin.
“Beginning at about 78 seconds, a series of events occurred extremely rapidly that terminated the flight. Telemetered data indicate a wide variety of flight system actions that support the visual evidence of the photos, as the Saturn struggled against the forces that were destroying it.
“At 78.9 seconds the lower strut linking Solid Rocket Booster Number Four and the MS-IC was severed or pulled away. This failure was evidently caused by the abnormal stresses placed on the structure by the failure of the main engines. SRB Four rotated around its upper attachment strut. This rotation is indicated by divergent yaw and pitch rates between the Solid Rocket Boosters.
“At 79.14 seconds a circumferential white vapor pattern was observed blooming from the side of the MS-IC. This was the beginning of the structural failure of the MS-IC’s propellant tank, which culminated in the separation of the aft dome of the tank. This released massive amounts of RP-1 from the tank and created a sudden forward thrust of about 2.8 million pounds, pushing the propellant tank upward through the motor casing toward the S-II. At about the same time the rotating SRB Four impacted the lower part of the MS-IC’s liquid oxygen tank. This structure failed at 78.137 seconds, as evidenced by the white vapors appearing in this area…”
The images on the screen continued to unroll, frame by frame, their pace matching Dana’s dry, analytical delivery. The pictures were blurred and shrouded by the haze of distance, and a fog of escaping vapor, but it was just possible to see how the Solid Rocket Booster was swiveling around, and its conical tip was puncturing the flank of the central first stage.
Then brilliance erupted, within the space of one frame, engulfing the image.
“Within milliseconds there was a massive, almost explosive, burning of the propellant streaming from the bottom of the failed tank. At this point in its trajectory, while traveling at Mach 1.92 at an altitude of 46,000 feet, the Saturn was totally enveloped in the explosive burn. The Apollo spacecraft’s reaction control system also ruptured, and a hypergolic burn of its propellants occurred; the reddish brown colors of this burn are visible on the edge of the main fireball. As you see here. The second stage also ruptured at this point, adding one million pounds of propellant and oxidizer to the fireball. The stack, under severe dynamic loads, had by now disintegrated into several large sections, which emerged from the fireball; separate sections which can be identified from film include the instrumentation module, trailing a mass of umbilical lines, and the first stage’s main engine section with the engines still trailing vapor…”
The upper sections of the Saturn didn’t explode. They had fallen out of the disintegrating stack and hit air, which, at such velocities, was like a wall. The Saturn was simply smashed to pieces by the air.
The screen showed the image which had filled TV screens for days: a huge orange-and-gray fireball of the explosion, hovering in the Florida air; the four Solid Rocket Boosters emerging from the explosion, still burning, veering crazily across the sky and trailing their frozen lightning, plumes of white smoke.
Dana was still talking. “At 110 seconds after launch, the Range Safety Officer caused the destruction of the Solid Rocket Boosters. Had this been a manned flight the emergency escape tower should have hauled the Apollo Command Module free on the loss of the main engines. Had the launch escape system failed, however, and arguing from the evidence of some system components later recovered from the Atlantic, it is possible that the crew capsule might have been thrown clear of the fireball intact. There is no reason to suppose that such a module might suffer an internal explosion, or significant heat or fire damage. The most severe damage would probably have come from the high forces generated by impact with the water, rather than by the explosion itself…”
Then, for the first time, there were rumblings of complaint from the audience.
Udet found himself on his feet.
“I must protest at the tone of this last section. This is entirely speculative. AS-5B04 was not manned, thank God, and if it had been we have no reason to believe the launch escape system might have failed, and I see no purpose in hypothesizing in such detail, and in public, about the fate of the crew of a manned flight.” He was aware of the orange light of the fireball — still frame-frozen on the big screen — gleaming on his glasses, his cheekbones.
Joe Muldoon, at his moderator’s desk, said, “Will you let me take that, Gregory?”
Dana shrugged his compliance.
Muldoon turned to the audience, his lean face underlit by the lamp on his desk. “Now, Hans, I don’t think we’re in a position where we’re going to be able to hide on this. We have to discuss the implications for the manned program. And we have to face the fact that there was evidence of potential problems on earlier VB tests, with solid fuel burns inducing destabilizing oscillations…”
Udet found himself shouting. “But the AS-5B04 loss was not caused by a Solid Rocket Booster failure!”
“But Solid Rocket Booster problems contributed,” Muldoon said. “We’ve seen that. And it seems to me that the whole design is inherently more risky than the old liquid-fuel configurations. Remember we survived Saturn V launches in which we lost whole engines. But if you’re sitting on top of those damn unstoppable Solid Rocket Boosters, it’s not a question of if you go, just which direction. None of us is arguing that we should stop flying the upgraded Saturns; it’s just that we have to be honest about the consequences of the compromises we’ve made in its design. Because if we don’t come clean now, the folks on the Hill are going to hang our hides out to dry.”