NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with R. Walter Cunningham, NASA astronaut who served as Lunar Module Pilot during Apollo 7, part 2 of 2

Where were you the night of the fire, height of your bed? Well, Wally Don and I were the backup crew for Apollo 1. And we were down to the last month of the schedule. We know now would never have made it to that last month on time. But nevertheless, we had to pretend like it was. I mean, we had to operate on that schedule. The night before we had performed exactly the same test called plugs in, which meant we had the cables running in through the hatch. The hatch was open and we did all the same test. But since the hatch was open, we couldn't pressurize and didn't have 100% oxygen in there. The next morning was when Gus was having his test. And it was hard to get started, a lot of delays. And it was going to be plugs in.

They had to close the hatch. They were going to pressurize it and put 100% oxygen. All the things that proved to be, you know, so dangerous in retrospect and so stupid as we look back on it. We thought of ourselves as engineers, I mean, it is pitiful. So we had stayed around because we were going to fly back together. We, we, three T-38s would have handled all six of us. And as the day went on and they never did get the test started and they'd start and stop and start and stop, we finally decided that since it was the weekend that the three of us would head on back and try to get back by seven o'clock, which we did. We hopped in T-38s. We flew back to Ellington. And as we pulled into the line there in the T-38s, Bud Dream was out there to meet us. We never had a reception like that. We had somebody that would park the airplane and we'd go inside and head home. Bud Dream met us and wouldn't tell us why, took us upstairs and proceeded to tell us they'd been an accident, which we thought, well, that's, that's bad.

When he said that the crew had been killed, the entire crew had been killed, it was almost unbelievable to us. And as you know, pilots are used to hearing about their friends getting killed one way or another. So it didn't take us too long. I mean, it wasn't unbelievable in the sense that we didn't believe him. It just seemed that's amazing. I mean, it just couldn't happen like that on the ground. Short time later, all of us figured it must have had something to do with the spacecraft because we knew the spacecraft was not as good as we were making out it was as we went along on these tests. So it was a pretty, it was a pretty tough time. We also hoped that it would not stop the space program. We immediately, of course, we hoped that we'd get on with it and, of course, we expected to fly again if they go on with it. Tell me about Go fever, Walt. You said a little bit earlier, describe Go fever, the audience doesn't get it, and yet

Gus, while he was all over Go fever, you know. Well, Go fever is something that you get late in the preparation phase, I guess. It's probably not fair to call Go fever when you're back at the contractors and you're trying to get through these tests. What you do at that time is when something doesn't check out, you'd like to have it not hold everything up so you kind of re-schedule that. You set it aside and you start doing things in parallel, and before long you keep building up this backlog of things that still have to be checked out, well, eventually you pay the piper because you've got to get rid of all those things. And under the pressure of time, then you have a tendency to move through them quicker or maybe accepting a resolution that you wouldn't accept otherwise, not just the flight crew, but the engineers, the responsible technical people at NASA as well. But we all thought we could do it.

As it gets down to the cape and you're doing these tests, you get very impatient about it because there are a lot of things that can hold up a flight. The flight crew would like to go fly, but they know that they have to get a certain number of re-entries into the simulator, the simulator is not working. Deak Slayton, who was the head of our flight crew operations, would be saying, yeah, the flight crew is going to be ready, and the people on the spacecraft testing would say, hey, the spacecraft is going to be ready. Everybody knew that there was going to be some kind of a delay, but nobody wanted to do what we called hold up the umbrella. So whoever raised his hand first and says, hey, I can't make it, I need a hold. And of course, everybody else would come in under this umbrella and get all their things done. So it was holding up the umbrella. As it gets close, the flight crew is trying to get off the ground because we realize at some point, some place, you've got to bite the bullet and you've got to go. And there is no better decision maker in the loop that I can think of than the flight crew themselves.

As a matter of fact, as it gets close to launch day, a lot of the technical people, the engineers, you'd be amazed at how many phone calls we get or visit the guide stop by and say, you know that funny little thing that happened so and so and so. Maybe you ought to be careful about this, this and this. I mean, everybody want to have a clear conscious as we approach launch day and get off and go. What did the fire have on Wally as the commander of seven? Well the fire had a huge impact on Wally in more ways than one. Up until the fire, Wally had been commander of a MeToo mission, an unimportant mission if you will, that was going to follow on the heels of Apollo one. Gus, who had the same kind of attitude about science as Wally did, had worked diligently to throw off anything having to do with science experiments on Apollo one.

He wanted to concentrate on what he called an engineering test flight purely and simply. Well, when he threw it off of Apollo one, it ended up on Apollo two. Wally was settled with two rookies on Apollo two. I believe that the flight had originally been intended for Deak's flight and he had originally hoped to fly Apollo two. When he couldn't get ungrounded, then Wally had been put in there to fill his spot until he could get ungrounded. In the end, it turns out that Deak couldn't fly so Wally was stuck with this mission that did not really excite him. He was thinking about leaving the program. Those were back in the days when we thought people over forty probably weren't going to fly anyway. So Wally was kind of at that stage in his career when they had the fire and Wally lost one of his very best friends and his next door neighbor, Gus and the fire. We all realized that we shared some responsibility in that because of what we had put up with.

And all of a sudden, when we got assigned a couple of weeks later, we got assigned to fly the first Apollo mission. Wally knew that it was a very important mission, that a lot of reputation of NASA was writing on it that we couldn't afford to have another mistake. Maybe they would cancel the entire man space program. And Wally then had a renewed interest. He also, I think, had his mortality brought out in front of him to see Gus, who he thought highly of, was gone. And Wally didn't want to end up that same way. So Wally was kind of a jekylline hide from here on. One, he really wanted to do the mission now, I believe, wanted to do a good job. He always liked that. But I think that also, he felt that the challenge was something that he was not going to take casually.

It became a problem at different times, things that he would insist on, because he was going to make dog unsure that when this spacecraft flew, it was going to work. Good. Put it in about a minute. How did you get that spacecraft to fly? Well, it was a 21 month hiatus after the fire. We didn't know what caused the fire, but we knew that a lot of things had to be fixed because we knew that the fire was caused by some spark, some place. So under that umbrella, now holding up the umbrella, fixing it so it wouldn't burn. Again, we were able to go in and get a lot of operational changes made. Changes in the stabilization and control system. Changes in the environmental control system and the electric power system. All of these things that we've been turned down before, since they would hold up the program, now we were able to get a lot of those things done. So that's where I ended up concentrating tremendously on the engineering and developing procedures for fixing malfunctions when they happened.

And probably my principal contribution to the Apollo spacecraft was during those 21 months. Terrific. Good. Okay, got it. Did they try to stick a lot of science on seven? Yes, they did. They did try to put a lot of science on seven as much as they could, considering that we had to go back and prove the spacecraft. Wally's attitude basically is that we didn't need any of it. He now wanted to fly that engineering test flight that Gus had not flown. We, Wally and Don and I were probably a little bit different in there because Don and I had not flown. We were willing to put up with some things that Wally would not have. Although all of us operational fighter pilots are not very much interested in just doing something out of curiosity, to doing it for curiosity's sake. So we always insisted on whatever the experiment was that they wanted to propose.

We'd sit down, we'd listen to the scientists, we'd let them try to sell it to us and we'd try to find out what it would really accomplish. Many times we were successful in avoiding doing those experiments because it was just collecting data. Sometimes we didn't win and we ended up living with some pretty awkward experiments for Apollo, things that were better prepared for flying on Skylab, for example. Metabolic studies, calcium balance studies. Other things that they wanted to go on the spacecraft never did fly. There was an airlock that was supposed to go in the hatch, for example. It got thrown off of Apollo 1, we had it on Apollo 2. It couldn't get it off. When we flew Apollo 7, we had enough leverage that we were able to insist that we weren't going to be trying airlock experiments on Apollo 7. Good, I rolled that out. Perfect. Good. I'm going to get to what Wally referred to it as, junk. What did Wally refer to the science as in data effect you had done?

It only affected us in the sense that we knew that many things were going to fly in spite of what Wally thought. Therefore we had to live with them, we had to work with them, we had to fly to various places for briefings and we had to do the reviews on them and things like that. Wally was perfectly willing to let us be the ones that had to do it, but I think he resented the time that it took away from other things. We looked at it as all of equal importance. We had to be prepared to do all these things and we knew that we would be measured during the flight by how much we accomplished. And I recall that the headline when we came back was that we were 101 percent successful, which really meant that we just accomplished a few more mission objectives than had originally been planned. They'd added a few later on and we'd gotten those things done. But my thought at the time was really that we could have done a whole lot more.

We spent 11 days in that first Apollo mission. No spacecraft before or since or maybe ever is going to go 11 days, the very first time it's out of the packing box. So we were very pleased with that because we wanted to be an orbit long enough to accomplish what was then conceived to be as the longest lunar landing mission. Well, to do that, we end up spending the last four or five days with very little to do. We only had, we could take like 20 pictures a day because we couldn't carry enough film. We were worried about that. We ran out of experiments other than the calcium balance and the metabolic stuff, the things you really didn't like, these biological experiments. So we ended up with time on our hands for the last four or five days that we could have done something more productive with. But what did Wally, how did Wally refer to the science? Well, most of science in those days, I think it's not unfair to say that Wally thought that science sucked, that these were not times and places to be doing science.

He was partially right. All right, so you're up there. When did the ship start to hit the fan when, once you got up there? What we're talking about. When did you set the flight during the flight? Yeah, but we were talking about engineering stuff. What were we talking about? When Wally started to inject to what was coming up, the stuff that was going on. There was no, there was no new stuff that was coming up there. There was a television show to do, there was television cameras set up. This is not consistent with what you're trying to do on the storyline. No, I'm talking about the science and so forth. Wally started to say that. Science didn't have an impact on it. We didn't have that much science. Science caused Wally no problem in orbit. Oh, I thought it did. No. No. Only two things.

Go off camera. Sure. Yeah. When they started to introduce the concept, the idea of the science, I think you're the one who used the coin, the phrase, hyphenated astronauts, which I think was pretty fun. What was your attitude about scientists coming into the progeologists and scientists coming? Well, we felt like basically they were taking up space. They didn't have the qualifications that we felt were essential, and that was to be a fighter pilot, you know, living, breathing, gungho, fighter jock. A couple of them had some training, had jet training experience. Others had not. First thing we did was we sent them to pilot training. One of them quit right away. Jack Schmidt, who eventually flew, Jack took a long time to get through flight training. I remember at the time saying that if God had met man to fly, wouldn't have made him

Jack Schmidt. When Jack came back, it took a while before they let him be safe for solo. He ended up flying helicopters, jets, unlike some of our guys. He went through his whole career without an accident. I mean, so these guys, they were good. I mean, they were sharp people, but they were cut from a different mold. We also felt like they would kind of undermine the office on our official positions, which was kind of like anti-doctor, anti-scientist, you know, you're going to have to just put up with us. I mean, we're the ones that are doing the real work. Well, you got some scientists in there. One of them started working over in the scientific area of Johnson Space Center, and that wasn't very well received. On the other hand, others of them became just like the rest of us. I mean, Joe Kerwin was a medical doctor and a flight surgeon.

He'd also been a Navy pilot. And I don't remember Joe ever acting like a doctor the whole time he was there. I brought Callie Mover one time right after Apollo 7, because we went out to the contractors at Rockwell and came back with what later proved to be Hong Kong flu. We had to leave right away and go on up to do a meat-to-press segment. And I had a temperature. I called Joe over to my house. He came over and he opened his little kid up and took out a rusty stethoscope. That was his personal medical kid. So some of them, they just joined the team. The other thing that I remember thinking at the time, there were about three or four of us at the time before the scientists astronauts showed up who had been a couple of guys at PhDs, a couple of us were on doctoral programs. And we felt like that might have been a little bit of an edge that might help us someplace

along the way. But when some real scientists showed up, all of a sudden that was gone as well. So we were kind of uncovered as pseudo guys. What was the term you used to describe these guys coming in? Well, when these guys showed up, of course, up until that time we'd all been astronauts. And now we had a bunch of scientist astronauts. So I started calling them hyphenated astronauts. Okay, big picture. What do Apollo mean to you? I don't think it's very important what Apollo meant to me. It is important, probably, for what those of us who flew Apollo think that Apollo meant to the world.

And in that respect, Apollo, which is characterized by man's first landing on the moon, is going to be looked at in history different than anything else in our lifetime. But that's trivial. It's not only the event of the 20th century, the one that will be remembered, long after they don't remember World War II or World War I. They probably remember man landed on the moon. They probably remember the Einstein's theory of relativity. They'll remember nuclear, fission, and fusion. But those are the big things about it. I personally believe that man landing on the moon was the greatest technical, technological achievement in mankind so far. And it'll be a long, long time before its equivalent is going to happen again.

Because it won't be the same just when we go to Mars even. Because for the first time with Apollo, man stepped out from this small planet and set foot on another body in the universe, escaped the pull of Earth's gravity and set foot on another body in the universe. There's no reason why we can't do the same thing today on Mars. Had we been willing to pay the price, we could have done it 15 or 20 years ago. It's a matter of cost, certainly. But it's mostly a matter of the will to do it. Should we go back to the moon? You'll get a lot of different opinions from people about going back to the moon or not. I'm one of those that sees nothing to gain by going back to the moon. It's as if you don't have the nerve to set foot and go on and move the boundaries back farther and go to Mars.

It's like a poor man's way to get back out into exploration. A case is made for finding materials and using water that they now seem reasonably certain as at some places on the moon, manufacturing things on the moon. What a ridiculously difficult way to do it. I cannot imagine it being in any way cost effective compared to other ways of spending money that will get us out from here to the other planets. So I'm not a fan of it. That's it.