Usually in Beyond Apollo I devote most of my attention to technical documents and their historical context. I do not normally focus on press conference transcripts. The 26 January 1967 NASA Headquarters press conference led by George Mueller, Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, and Charles Mathews, Director of the Apollo Applications Program (AAP), is, however, significant enough to be given its own post.
AAP was mainly about modifying Apollo spacecraft – the Lunar Module (LM) and the Command and Service Module (CSM) – and Saturn rockets – the Saturn IB and giant Saturn V – to do things other than put men on the moon, though the program also promised to expand U.S. lunar exploration capabilities. AAP’s main stated aim was to gather scientific knowledge in space for the benefit of people on Earth.
Mueller did not say as much, but AAP’s roots went back nearly to the Apollo Program’s birth. In April 1963, for example, less than two years after President John F. Kennedy made a man on the moon a national priority, NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston contracted with Apollo CSM spacecraft prime contractor North American Aviation (NAA) to study turning the CSM into a six-man transport for Earth-orbital space station crew rotation and logistics resupply. The 1963 MSC study was not a part of AAP – that program would not be created for another two years – but it demonstrates that enthusiasm for reapplying Apollo lunar program hardware to new missions was not new in 1967.
The press conference followed NASA’s Fiscal Year (FY) 1968 budget briefing on 23 January, during which NASA Administrator James Webb and Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans told reporters that President Lyndon Baines Johnson had authorized NASA to seek a total of $454.7 million for AAP in FY 1968. Despite the fact that it had existed for nearly two years as a formal program, most reporters present at the budget briefing knew little of AAP, so they prevailed upon the space agency to provide more information. The 26 January AAP press conference was NASA’s response.
Among the few space-savvy members of the press corps, the Johnson Administration’s evident enthusiasm for the program was of interest. The White House had, after all, sought $270 million for AAP in FY 1967, only to see Congress appropriate just $80 million. Leaders in Congress had cited the escalating cost of war in Indochina when they slashed the President’s FY 1967 AAP request. That President Johnson would expend political capital on the program for a second year in a row – and ask for almost double the sum he had been refused the previous year – seemed to indicate strong Executive Branch support for AAP.
When reporters arrived for the press conference late in the afternoon on 26 January, they found on their seats a 10-page packet of detailed information on AAP. In this post, I will flesh out Mueller’s generalities by referring to the AAP press packet.
Mueller told the reporters that the time was ripe for starting AAP. “By the end of this year,” he said, “we will have flown men on at least two of the Saturn V launch vehicles, and we will have tested both the [LM] and the [CSM].” He did not have to mention that the first piloted flight of the Apollo Program, designated Apollo 1 or AS-204, was scheduled for launch on 21 February, a little more than three weeks after the AAP press conference. Apollo 1 was a 14-day Earth-orbital test of the Apollo CSM.
Mueller reminded his audience that NASA had ordered 12 Saturn IB rockets and 15 Saturn Vs for the Apollo lunar program. He expected that fewer than that would be needed to meet the goal of a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s decade. It was from the surplus that that the two-stage Saturn IB rockets needed for the first AAP missions would be drawn. As soon as the Apollo Program was finished with Earth-orbital tests launched on Saturn IBs, such as Apollo 1/AS-204, AAP missions could begin. In fact, Mueller saw no reason why AAP Saturn IB-based Earth-orbital missions and Apollo Saturn V-based moon missions could not occur simultaneously.
“Assuming that everything goes perfectly well on the Apollo Program,” Mueller stated, by late 1968 or early 1969 NASA would have in 275-nautical-mile-high Earth orbit “an embryonic space station or the first step toward a space station. . .with the capability of reuse and resupply.” The station might operate for more than three years before Earth’s thin upper atmosphere dragged it down from orbit. NASA did not have firm plans for using the station throughout that period, Mueller admitted. He declared, however, that the four missions required to establish the initial capability constituted “a program that is firm, and is proceeding.”
The first of the four “firm” missions, designated AAP-1, would begin with the launch of a Saturn IB rocket with a piloted CSM on top. Upon attaining orbit, the three-man crew would turn their craft end-for-end and dock with a prototype Mapping & Survey System (M&SS) stored in the segmented, streamlined shroud that during ascent to orbit linked the bottom of the CSM with the top of the Saturn IB’s S-IVB second stage. During an independent flight period lasting about a week, they would use the M&SS to record data on the oceans, continents, and atmosphere for the benefit of people on Earth.
Four or five days after the AAP-1 astronauts began their program of Earth studies, NASA would launch the unmanned AAP-2 Saturn IB with a short aerodynamic shroud on top. The rocket would appear much like the one in the photograph at the top of this post. The shroud would cover an airlock and a docking adapter with five ports. Charles Mathews, who had headed up MSC’s Gemini Program Office before becoming AAP director at NASA Headquarters, noted that the airlock would include a Gemini spacecraft hatch for exiting the station to perform spacewalks.
The AAP-2 S-IVB stage would inject itself, the airlock, and the docking adapter into their operational orbit using a single J-2 engine, then flight controllers would command the spent stage to “passivate” itself. The stage would open vents in its tanks and engine to exhaust liquid hydrogen (LH) fuel and liquid oxygen (LO) oxidizer remaining on board into space. In answer to a reporter’s question, Mueller added that small spherical helium tanks inside the LH tank would also be vented – the inert helium was on board to pressurize the LH tank, driving propellants into the J-2 engine – and that the stage would automatically “disconnect the various electrical things that might cause a problem.”
The spent-stage station would also deploy electricity-generating solar arrays from two of its four folded-back shroud segments and a meteoroid shield that would stand several inches off the skin of the two-thirds of the S-IVB stage that contained the LH tank. The shield, a thin layer of metal, would break up any micrometeoroids that might hit it, preventing them from penetrating the stage skin and LH tank within.
The AAP-1 CSM would rendezvous with the AAP-2 station and dock the M&SS with one of the docking adapter’s four radial (“side”) ports. It would then undock from the M&SS and dock with the docking adapter’s axial (“front”) docking port.
The AAP-1 astronauts would next enter the 65-inch-diameter, 1000-cubic-foot docking module, where would be stored furnishings for the interior of the AAP-2 spent stage’s 21-foot-diameter, 10,000-cubic-foot LH tank. Before they could deploy the furnishings (a process that would need three or four days), they would use controls in the airlock to close vents in the LH tank and fill it with a mixture of three-fifths oxygen and two-fifths nitrogen at five pounds per square inch of pressure. Gaseous oxygen and nitrogen for pressurizing the LH tank would reach orbit in tanks around the airlock module.
Mueller likened putting inside the LH tank the furnishings packed in the docking adapter to “building a ship in a bottle.” The astronauts would open a 43-inch-diameter hatch leading into the LH tank. The tank’s interior would be modified during manufacture to include tie-downs and attachment points for installation of galley, hygiene, exercise, sleep, and experiment equipment, as well as lights and ventilation ducts and fans.
Though illustrations he displayed during the press conference showed pre-installed walls and grillwork floors, Mueller told a reporter that “I don’t know that we will want to put additional things [besides the tie-downs and attachment points] inside” the LH tank. If the decision were taken to minimize tank modifications, then the astronauts would “string” fabric floors and walls within it, he explained. A “rope” running the length of the LH tank would aid mobility. He added that he was “sure that we will use liberal amounts of velcro.”
Experiment packages during the AAP-1/AAP-2 mission would, among many other things, seek to “find out what happens to the flammability of materials, how they actually burn when you have a combination of oxygen and nitrogen and. . .zero gravity,” Mueller explained. In addition, the astronauts would continue to use the M&SS for Earth observations, and would test a combination sleep/space suit-donning station.
Mueller was quick to add that, except for the ATM and M&SS, few experiments had been officially manifested for any AAP flight; some of the $454.7 million the White House had requested for AAP in FY 1968 would go toward new experiment development. There were, for example, no biology experiments yet approved, though seven medical experiments were on track for flight. NASA also expected to include Department of Defense experiments that would focus on “how to work in space” and a “jet shoes” technology experiment that Mueller likened to “roller skates with gas jets on them.”
The AAP-1 astronauts’ stay on board the AAP-2 spent-stage station was scheduled to last for about 28 days, or twice as long as Gemini 7, which at the time of the 26 January press conference was the world record-holder for space endurance. As AAP-1/AAP-2 drew to a close, the crew would shut down experiments and station systems and undock in their CSM. They would then ignite the CSM’s Service Propulsion System main engine to deorbit, cast off the Service Module (SM), reenter the atmosphere, deploy parachutes, and splash down at sea in the Command Module (CM).
Between three and six months later – probably during early-to-mid 1969 – NASA would launch the AAP-3 mission, which would include a piloted Saturn IB with a CSM loaded up with supplies. Mueller told his audience that he favored putting supplies in a special module that would ride to orbit in the adapter between the CSM and the S-IVB stage, much as had the M&SS; however, the illustrations he showed the press did not include such a module.
One day after the AAP-3 launch, NASA would launch the unmanned AAP-4 Saturn IB bearing beneath its short shroud the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). The ATM was envisioned as a modified Apollo LM with solar arrays and solar observatory instruments in place of descent and ascent engines and landing legs.
The AAP-3 CSM would dock with the ATM and transport it to the AAP-2 station. An astronaut would then board the ATM, undock from the CSM, and pilot it to a docking at one of the docking module radial ports using the ascent stage attitude control thruster quads for propulsion. The CSM would stand by until ATM docking was completed, then would dock at the axial port.
Mueller explained that the ATM was scheduled for launch in 1969 because the Sun’s 11-year cycle of activity would peak in that year. The ATM would, he told the reporters, carry “the most comprehensive array of instruments that has ever been assembled for observing the Sun.” An astronaut at the ATM control panels in the modified LM ascent stage would keep a constant vigil on the Sun, and would rapidly direct the instruments toward interesting phenomena as they appeared. The ATM might operate at the end of a tether attached to the docking adapter to minimize the effects on the quality of the data it collected of astronaut movements inside the spent-stage station.
Of course, the chief benefit of the ATM would be scientifically important but abstract knowledge about the structure and behavior of the Sun. AAP was, however, meant to bring benefits of space to people on Earth, so Mueller opined that a better understanding of the Sun would “have marked benefits on our own understanding of how to generate and control energy here on Earth.”
The AAP-3 crew would seek to double the AAP-1 crew’s stay-time in space, so would attempt to live on board the AAP-2 station for 56 days. In addition to operating the ATM, they would continue many of the experiments begun by the AAP-1 astronauts.
Mueller then described APP payloads, missions, and capabilities that would begin to be developed if Congress voted to provide the funding for AAP that the White House had requested for FY 1968. In answer to a reporter’s question, he said that the AAP-2 spent-stage station would remain the hub of the program’s Earth-orbital activity “until something fails,” at which time NASA would launch a fresh spent-stage station. Reusability would be a hallmark of AAP, he explained.
The term “reusability” had at least two meanings in AAP. On the one hand, it meant that for as long as they could function, the AAP stations would host successive crews and new instrument payloads. On the other, it meant that certain hardware elements – in particular the Apollo CM – would be redesigned for refurbishment and multiple flights. Both approaches to reusability aimed to cut costs.
Mueller described for the reporters a CM that would reach space on later AAP flights. The uprated CM, which he called “one of the most expensive elements of the space vehicle,” would be designed for landing on land, not in water. “Since we don’t dunk it in salt water at the end of the flight,” he continued, “we don’t then have quite the same corrosion problem. . .that we do with those [CM]s that are water landed.” This would facilitate CM refurbishment.
Land landing would, Mueller noted, also help NASA to double the normal Apollo CM crew complement. Steerable parachutes and view screens would enable the crew to pilot their CM to a predetermined landing zone; then, five or 10 feet above the ground, retrorockets behind the heat shield would ignite, slowing the CM to a touchdown speed of three or four feet per second. Normal Apollo splashdown speed was, he said, 10 or 20 feet per second; reducing that velocity meant that shock-absorbing struts supporting the CM crew couches would not stroke much, so would not need as much empty space behind them. This would enable NAA contractor engineers to install a new row of three couches behind the existing Apollo CM couches.
Mueller then described a trio of “payload packages” that might be added to AAP stations if funding allowed. AAP-A was a “Meteorology Payload Package” with 14 experiments which would, it was hoped, reach orbit on a Saturn IB in mid 1969. AAP-B, the “Earth Resources Payload Package” with 12 experiments on board, would follow in mid 1970. By then, Mueller told his audience, a crew might live on board an AAP station for an entire year.
The “Manned Photographic Telescope,” an ultraviolet telescope with a meter-wide aperture, might be docked to an AAP station in a high Earth orbit, Mueller explained, in order to permit observation periods longer than were possible in the AAP-2 station’s low orbit. A station high over the Earth would need more time to complete an orbit, thus permitting continuous observation of an astronomical target over the space of hours. The AAP-2 station, by contrast, would circle Earth in about 90 minutes, limiting observations to 45 minutes or less before the target dropped out of sight below Earth’s horizon.
Placing an AAP station in high-Earth orbit would demand a more powerful launcher than the Saturn IB; specifically, the Saturn V. The S-IVB stage that formed the second stage of the Saturn IB served also as the Saturn V third stage, so could be put to use as an AAP spent-stage station in high-Earth orbit with only modest modifications.
The Manned Photographic Telescope was scheduled for launch in 1971-1972, so there was a chance that other Saturn V-launched AAP missions might precede it. AAP planners expected that, after a series of Early Apollo lunar landing missions starting around the end of 1968, AAP lunar missions would take over. Early Apollo missions would last up to 36 hours and support thousand-foot moonwalks; AAP lunar missions might last 14 days and support traverses up to 15 miles from base camp.
Mueller expected that each AAP lunar mission would need two Saturn Vs; one to launch a CSM/LM Shelter combination and one to launch a CSM/LM Taxi combination. The Shelter, which would land at the candidate landing site without a crew, would house the astronauts who arrived later in the Taxi.
The LM Shelter would also carry a heavy load of exploration equipment. This might include a “jeep” for surface mobility, a drill for boring 300-foot-deep holes, an instrumented “subsurface probe” for lowering down the bore hole, an astronaut-carried “survey system” for stereo imaging and precise post-flight location of sampling sites and traverse routes, and an elaborate suite of automated science instruments that would continue to operate long after the AAP lunar mission crew returned to Earth.
The AAP lunar landing missions, which would occur about a year apart, might be preceded by one or more AAP lunar-orbital mapping missions. These would see a CSM with an M&SS docked to its nose operate in lunar polar orbit for at least 14 days. The astronauts on board would map the moon in much greater detail than could the automated Lunar Orbiter series, which was on-going at the time of the AAP press conference. This would enable improved landing site selection and traverse planning for the AAP lunar landings. The advanced lunar missions would probably rely on Saturn V rockets built specifically for AAP; that is, not part of the original 15-rocket “buy” for the Apollo moon program.
Both Mueller and the assembled reporters seemed to downplay AAP lunar missions, as if all realized that they were the part of AAP least likely to receive funding from Congress. Though they would be fascinating and forward-looking missions, they ran against the grain of AAP. The people on Earth who would benefit most from the AAP lunar missions were, it seemed, the people hired to build the hardware. In general, the reporters assembled for the 26 January press conference looked with suspicion upon aspects of AAP that seemed mainly to mean continued pork for certain states and congressional districts.
Paradoxically, given their apparent distrust of NASA and White House motives for proposing AAP advanced lunar missions, the reporters focused on whether AAP was truly “post-Apollo.” They had, after all, been conditioned for several years to expect that, beyond Apollo, NASA would dive into another Apollo-style big program such as a large all-new, purpose-built space station, a manned Mars flyby or landing mission, or a permanent lunar surface base. AAP seemed to be part of none of these things.
Interestingly, it was Charles Mathews, former MSC Gemini director, who was most successful in explaining the potential role of AAP in NASA’s post-Apollo program. He told the reporters that “between Mercury and Apollo. . .we had a program called Gemini, where we learned to do many of the things. . .that we are going to [do] in [AAP] and in the Apollo Program.” Mathews argued that AAP could serve the next big NASA program, whatever it might be, as Gemini had served Apollo. “[Before] we go on to planetary operations or space station operations,” he said, “we need to develop experience in these long-duration operations. . . So [AAP] is a rather logical approach.”
The 26 January press conference drew to a close at 5:30 pm Eastern time. Twenty-four hours later, at Cape Kennedy, Florida, astronaut Gus Grissom, commander of the Apollo 1 mission, was growing frustrated. He had been strapped on his back inside CSM 012 on the pad at Launch Complex 34 for several hours with his shipmates Roger Chaffee, a spaceflight rookie, and Ed White, the first American to walk in space. Grissom had for more than a year worried that CSM 012 had more than its share of technical faults. The pre-flight test on 27 January encountered one glitch after another.
One problem was “ratty” communications – crackly static and voice drop-outs – between flight control and the spacecraft. Controllers put the test countdown on hold while they tried to correct the problem. Grissom raised his voice above the static: “How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings?”
At 6:31 p.m., flight controllers heard the word “fire” over their crackling headsets. A spark, possibly the result of faulty wiring, had set alight materials in the CM cabin that had not been adequately tested for fire resistance in a pure oxygen atmosphere. These included liberal quantities of velcro. Almost before they could react, Grissom and his crew were asphyxiated as flames burned up their air hoses and consumed the oxygen inside their capsule. Heat and pressure built up inside the CM until its pressure hull cracked.
The pad crew suffered smoke inhalation and burns as they fought to open the CM’s balky inward-opening hatch. All the while, they were conscious of the mortal dangers surrounding them: CSM 012’s SM contained propellants which, if the fire spread, might explode; the Launch Escape System tower atop the CM contained solid-propellant rockets that might ignite; and the AS-204 Saturn IB rocket atop which CSM 012 sat contained enough propellants to destroy Launch Complex 34 if it caught fire and exploded. They gave no thought, however, to abandoning their efforts to save Grissom, Chaffee, and White.
Through the hatch window they could see only dense smoke. When they finally succeeded in pushing back the hatch about five minutes after the fire began, the terrible truth was made plain. The United States had suffered the world’s first spaceflight fatalities, and they had happened on the launch pad, during what was supposed to be a routine pre-flight test, not in space or on the moon.
NASA and the Congress quickly went to work to investigate the fire. The NASA-appointed AS-204 Review Board displayed commendable impartiality; it found many hardware and procedural faults throughout the Apollo Program and evidence of rocky relations between CSM contractor NAA and NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight spanning years. NASA’s allies in Congress became angry because the space agency had not shared its concerns regarding NAA workmanship.
Congress could not “punish” NASA by cutting the Apollo budget; to do so would have imperiled achievement of the national goal of a man on the moon by 1970. It could, however, express its disquiet by attacking AAP. For a time in the summer of 1967, it appeared that AAP’s FY 1968 budget might be cut to $300 million, a figure which would, NASA officials declared, permit a reasonable amount of progress during the coming year. In the end, though, Congress slashed the FY 1968 AAP budget to only $122 million.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson was expected to fight for AAP; however, he instead acquiesced to the cuts, declaring that “some hard choices must be made between the necessary and the desirable. . .We dare not eliminate the necessary. Our task is to pare the desirable.” It appeared to some that NASA had lost its future.
Appearances could be deceiving, however. In a late November 1967 presentation to the American Astronautical Society’s Astronautics International Symposium in New York City, Charles Mathews outlined an AAP program only a little different from the one Mueller had described the day before the fire. In fact, it included two new missions: a CSM/M&SS-only mission called AAP-1A that would ease NASA into AAP-1/AAP-2, and an AAP-5 mission that would deliver a payload package to the AAP-1 station and extend astronaut orbital stay-time past 56 days. It also made mention of two undesignated missions; these would see launch of a CSM plus payload package and a new spent-stage AAP station.
It soon became clear that AAP retained high-level support; the Johnson White House requested $439 million for the program in FY 1969. This was about half the budget NASA had planned for AAP in FY 1969 before the fire, but would be sufficient to move forward with the program.
Events on the other side of the world soon intervened, however. The Tet Offensive, which saw Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces simultaneously attack U.S. and South Vietnamese bases, was the largest campaign of the Vietnam War. It began on 30 January 1968, on the eve of Tet, the Lunar New Year, and continued through much of February. Tet put the U.S. on the defensive and drove up dramatically the cost of waging war in Indochina.
AAP had been on shaky ground with Congress even before the Tet escalation. By the time it completed its deliberations, the Legislative Branch had cut Johnson’s FY 1969 request by nearly half, to $277 million. Other cuts in NASA funding caused NASA Administrator James Webb to put Saturn rocket production in mothballs. AAP entered a kind of limbo: capable of moving forward with near-term development, but with little prospect of accomplishing the more ambitious missions that gave that near-term development a purpose.
It is interesting to speculate about how AAP might have unfolded had the Apollo 1 fire not followed close on the heels of the 26 January 1967 AAP press conference. It seems likely that, had NAA delivered a better-quality CSM 012 spacecraft, a successful Apollo 1 mission would have boosted support for AAP. The program might have made a stronger start in FY 1968.
AAP, along with the nation as a whole, would still have run head-long into the catastrophe of Tet. Also, as happened in our timeline, the Apollo LM would probably have been delayed. The first LM reached Earth orbit unmanned as part of the Apollo 5 mission atop the AS-204 Saturn IB – the rocket that had been intended to launch Apollo 1. The image at the top of this post shows AS-204 as it neared launch on 23 January 1968. AAP’s budget would likely have been trimmed along with the NASA budget as a whole; the program would, however, have been further along in its development, and thus less vulnerable.
It seems probable that, had no Apollo 1 fire taken place, then NASA might have launched its first AAP spent-stage station in late 1968. When an astronaut – perhaps Grissom – became the first person to set foot on the moon late in 1968 or early in 1969, three astronauts might have watched his first footstep on a flickering small monitor on board an AAP station in low-Earth orbit.
Apollo Applications Briefing, NASA News, NASA Headquarters, 26 January 1967.
Apollo Applications – A Progress Report, Charles Mathews; presentation at the American Astronautical Society Astronautics International Symposium, 27-29 November 1969.
Living and Working in Space: A History of Skylab, NASA SP-4298, W. David Compton & Charles Benson, NASA, 1983.
“White House Stand Blocks NASA Budget Restoration,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, 28 August 1967, p. 32.
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