The technician handed the checklist to the Rockwell quality inspector, who made sure that it was the right part and the right part number, recording his results on his copy of the TPS. The NASA inspector took the list, and he recorded his independent observations. The photographer took a picture of the part. The engineer put the list into a plastic bag, sealed it up, labeled it, and took it off to the appropriate repository.
If the engineer hadn’t been able to get the checklist out, because of some unanticipated obstacle, everything would have come to a halt while a revised TPS was sent to a review panel for approval of the modification.
…And on, and on.
And, meanwhile, everybody working on the hot Command Module was in a white radiation suit, and they had to shower and get tested for dosage every few hours.
It was painstaking, agonizing, intense work, made all the more difficult by the fact that only two or three workers could get into the Command Module at any one time. But Seger insisted on adhering to the procedure, and Muldoon supported him. It was the way they had done it on Apollo 1, after the fire, and it was the way they were going to do it on Apollo-N. It was just the kind of detailed, meticulous job Seger enjoyed getting his teeth into.
Sometimes he thought back over the incidents surrounding the flight. He recalled the hostile faces of the protesters on launch day. That still returned to haunt him. And he was worried by the way the internal communication of his organization had fallen apart, even within Mission Control, on the day. Seger as Program Office head had been keeping up the pressure, of budgets and time frames, on his people for years, and they’d seemed to be responding well; but he wondered if there were greater problems under the surface than he’d been perceiving. Hell, maybe he hadn’t wanted to perceive them.
Well, if there were such issues, he would address them. You had to be rational, to overcome doubt, in order to go forward, to achieve things. The crew had known the risks when they climbed aboard the NERVA ship in the first place. They’d paid the ultimate price. Seger owed it to their sacrifice to ensure that their lives hadn’t been wasted, that NASA learned from this and moved forward.
Away from the hangar, Seger spent a lot of time on the phone lines arguing with Fred Michaels and Tim Josephson and others about the future shape of the program.
It couldn’t be denied that the incident was going to set the program back. But Seger wanted to make up time by putting the all-up testing approach to work. The next flight, Seger argued, should be another manned Saturn/NERVA launch. Maybe they should even be more ambitious, such as by taking an S-NB out of Earth orbit and sending it around the Moon.
But he found Michaels opposing him. Michaels said if they weren’t forced to discontinue the nuclear program altogether, they should run a few more unmanned tests and then repeat the Apollo-N mission profile. If Apollo-N had been a useful mission (and if it wasn’t, why had they lost three men to it?) they owed it to the program and to the memory of the crew to do the mission.
Seger thought that was just an emotional argument.
They chewed it over for hours. Sometimes it bothered Seger that his personal position was so different from that of Michaels and Josephson. He had to take care not to get himself isolated. But, since the first shock of the accident had passed, he felt confident once more, in command; the accident was a finite thing, within the ability of human beings to comprehend and resolve, and they shouldn’t let this tragedy get in the way of their greater ambitions.
He tried to catnap in his office, but he couldn’t sleep.
By seven each morning he would be back in “O,” or on the phone to the people at the Cape and Houston and Marshall who were working around the clock on the various facets of the investigation.
At the end of the first week he flew out to Houston and spent the evening with his family. And then the next day he drove with Fay around Timber Cove and El Lago, visiting the wives and families of Jones, Priest, and Dana.
Then it was back to the Cape on Sunday, where he threw himself into the investigation once more.
He was working with an intensity that eclipsed any effort he had made in his life. It was the only way he knew to deal with the way he felt about the incident: to burn it out of his system with work, to make damn sure nothing like this happened again. And he spent a lot of his spare time in church, alone, praying and contemplating. Coming to terms with it all.
In a way he was enjoying it. As he came to grips with the issues he felt suffused with strength, courage, certainty. He prayed every day, and he felt that God was helping him.
Sometimes he needed a little help to get to sleep. A couple of pills or a drink or two. He allowed himself that. He was on high blower, he told his wife; he was like a T-38 on afterburner. Thursday, January 8, 1981
…On admission, Colonel Priest was nauseated, chilled, and agitated, with glassy eyes. His temperature was 104 degrees. He had been cut from his pressure suit. He suffered repeated vomiting, and swelling of the face, neck, and upper extremities. His arms were so swollen, in fact, that his blood pressure could not be taken with the normal cuff, and the nurses had to enlarge it.
He was periodically conscious, and sometimes coherent and logical, but I judged he was not strong enough to contribute to any debriefпngs concerning the accident.
Priest’s difficulty in speaking and lapses into incoherence made his relatives in attendance, and some of my staff, feel uncomfortable.
Twenty-four hours after admission I ordered four samples of bone marrow to be taken from Priest’s sternum and iliac bones (both front and rear). Priest was very patient during the proceedings. The samples were used to determine the whole body dose.
During the fourth and fifth days after admission, Priest was in great pain from injuries to the mucous membranes of the mouth, esophagus, and stomach. The mucous membranes were coming off in layers. Priest lost both sleep and appetite. Starting on the sixth day his right shin, on which the skin was disintegrating, began to swell and feel as if it was bursting; it then became rigid and painful.
On the seventh day, on account of a profound agranulocytosis — that is, a drop in the number of granular forms of leucocytes, responsible for immunity — I ordered an administration of 750 milliliters of bone marrow with blood.
Priest was then moved to a room sterilized with ultraviolet light. A period of intestinal syndrome began: bowel movements occurred between twenty-five and thirty times every twenty-four hours, containing blood and mucus; there was tenesmus, rumbling, and movement of fluids in the region of the caecum.
Owing to the severe lesions in the mouth and esophagus, Priest did not eat for several days. We provided nutrient fluids intravenously. In the meantime, soft blisters appeared on the perineum and buttocks, and the right shin was bluish purple, swollen, shiny, and smooth to the touch.
On the fourteenth day Colonel Priest began to lose his hair, in a curious manner: all the hair on the back of his head and body fell out. He grew weaker, and his lapses into unconsciousness or incoherence grew more prolonged.
On Friday January 2, the thirtieth day after the accident, Priest’s blood pressure suddenly dropped.
Fifty-seven hours later, Colonel Priest died; I recorded the immediate cause of death as acute myocardial dystrophy.
Under the microscope, it was quite impossible to see Priest’s heart tissue. The cell nuclei were a mass of torn fibers. It is accurate to say that Priest died directly from the radiation itself, and not from secondary biological changes. Gentlemen, it is impossible to save such patients, once the heart tissue has been destroyed.
Of the three members of Apollo-N’s crew, only Colonel Priest was found to be alive when the capsule was recovered after reentry. The radiation from the ruptured NERVA core had hit Colonel Priest from behind, doing most harm to his back, his calves, his perineum, and buttocks.