His mother, wife, and son were in attendance at his death.
Source: Report of the Presidential Commission on the Apollo-N Malfunction, Vol. I: Testimony of Dr. I.S. Kirby to the Medical Analysis Panel (extract) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981)
January 1981
One of the back rooms behind the MOCR had been turned into the primary site for investigating the telemetry data received from Apollo-N in the moments leading up to the accident. The walls were papered with strips displaying the readouts from every sensor they’d had the crew and craft wired up to.
And it was there that Natalie York had to sit and listen to voice tapes from the Command Module cabin, and read through and annotate typed transcripts.
Everyone was clinical, of course. Even scientific. The point was to gather data. Had the astronauts had any earlier indication that some problem was developing with the NERVA? Perhaps a close enough analysis of the tapes could tease that out, provide further clues about the cause.
And York, as capcom on the day, was the best placed to interpret their words.
She had to listen to the tapes over and over.
Every time York went through the tapes it was like reliving the whole incident. Did it fail because of me? If only Mike hadn’t frozen. If only she’d had a little more intuition about what was going on — if she could have warned Ben that the core was getting out of control, he might have overridden the automatics from the Command Module and shut the damn thing down…
Eventually York reached a point where she felt that if she had to listen to Ben’s weakening voice one more time, her heart was going to burst.
I guess our business will stay unfinished, Ben. Oh, God.
They hadn’t even let her see him before he died.
“Mom?”
“I’m coming out there, Natalie.”
“No, Mom.”
“Now, don’t try to stop me. I know you need me right now.”
“For what?”
“I know how much Ben meant to you.”
York was silent, for long moments; she even considered hanging up. “What do you know, exactly?”
“You aren’t very experienced in this stuff, are you, dear? When I saw you at that party, when you first moved into the Portofino… It was obvious, Natalie. Even if I hadn’t been your mother, I would have known. I only had to see the way you two behaved toward each other. The way you were careful not to pay each other attention. And the way, when you did come together somehow, it was as if you knew each other so well you could anticipate the other’s needs…”
Jesus. Well, I guess I’m not much of an actress. So does everybody know?
There was a rattle of keys at the door.
“I’ll have to go, Mom.”
“I’ll come out there.”
“No.”
“Ben Priest was married, wasn’t he? I read in—”
“Good-bye, Mom.” She put the phone down.
Mike Conlig stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. He carried a bag, with airline stickers that betrayed he’d been out to Marshall.
It was the first time she’d seen him since the accident. More than a month.
“You froze,” York said without hesitation. “You froze. What the hell were you thinking of, Mike?”
Mike put his bag down and started to pace about the apartment, his coat heavy. His hair straggled out of an unkempt ponytail, and his beard had grown down over his neck. “I didn’t freeze,” Conlig said.
“If you knew you were going to choke up like that, you should have just gotten out of that goddamn chair,” York said. She felt her throat tighten up, a pressure behind her eyes; but, by God, she was going to see this through without falling apart. “You had a responsibility! Those men in orbit were relying on you…”
He stood over her, his face twisted in disgust. “First time I see you in a month, and it’s straight on the attack. Happy fucking New Year to you, Natalie. So I killed them. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“But the damn NERVA wasn’t ready to fly. Was it?”
“Natalie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Was it? You worked on the cooling systems for years, and in the end, with three men on board, the damn thing overheated and exploded—”
“I knew what I was doing, Natalie.”
“You knew you were letting the NERVA melt down?”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, damn it. Natalie, it’s the easiest thing in the world to abort. If I’d aborted, we’d have lost the mission—”
“But not three men.”
“ — and maybe,” he went on doggedly, “we’d never have known what went wrong. And we’d have had to risk throwing three more men up there to try all over again.” He pulled at his beard in quick, nervous gestures. “At the time — it happened so fast — I just wasn’t sure. I thought the situation might stabilize, that we might be able to salvage control of the NERVA. It might have happened that way, Natalie, and saved us risking more lives. As we’ll have to now. It’s a question of cost and benefit.”
She was appalled. “You did kill them.”
“But it isn’t like that.” He sounded querulous, hurt, misunderstood. “Look: NASA is too cautious. Every safety precaution increases the complexity and cost of the mission. With fewer safety precautions we could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a lot more exploring, learned more, and” — defiantly — “yes, and created a martyr or two—”
“How can you talk about martyrs? If you hadn’t screwed up, Ben might be alive now. And the others, damn it.”
“Oh, sure. Precious Ben. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” He was angry.
“What are you saying?”
He snorted. “I know all about you and Ben Fucking Priest, Natalie. Come on. I’ve known for years.”
You, too? She considered protesting, telling him he was mistaken. But Ben was dead. It would be beneath her.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to hear when, or how, or why. I don’t give a damn. And you know what? Right now, I don’t know if I ever did.”
She watched him pace around the room. He was like a stranger, an alien, there in her apartment. “No. You never did give a damn, did you? I can’t believe—”
“What?”
“I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you.”
That took him aback for a moment, and he looked at her; but then his face resumed its mask of anger. “Yeah, well, you can believe what you like.”
“How can you rake up all of this now? Ben’s dead, for God’s sake.”
“I know he’s dead!” he shouted. “As dead as my fucking career!”
“Is that all you care about?”
His anger was consuming him. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. That and the fact that this will probably kill off the nuke program.”
“Get out,” York said.
“Omelets and eggs, Natalie! You don’t get anywhere without taking a few risks! And with what we learned from this flight — if we’re allowed to fly again — we’ll get it right next time.” Under the anger in his voice, she thought she heard vulnerability, still, a plea for understanding. “Christ, Natalie, we could be on Mars by now. But fucking NASA—”
She turned away from him. “Get out. Go, Mike.”
She didn’t watch him leave.
Mike was right, in a way. He spoke a truth, as perceived by many within NASA. If only public sentiment would get out of the way, and let us move as fast as we know we can…
Lower reliability would mean lower development costs, and a faster schedule.