NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with R. Walter Cunningham, NASA astronaut who served as Lunar Module Pilot during Apollo 7, part 1 of 2

Well, I was a member of the third group of astronauts selected, and there was a kind of change in the general characteristics of the people along the way. I'd have to say that it tended to be less of a focus on pure flying background in skills and an increasing focus on the level of technical background in skills that the people had. In the beginning, they were all test pilots. By the time they got to our group, everybody was operational jet pilots, but they were only half of them that had actually been working as test pilots. So, it was kind of a slow change in there, not to mention the fact that as far as academic backgrounds go, they were able to get a kind of a broader base. By the time they got to

our group, they were 14. When they selected the second group, which was the Gemini group, they averaged, I think, about a year or a couple of months, more college education than the first group. And when they came to our group, then it was another year or more added to that average amount of background and experience. So, I would have to say that by the time they got to us, that we had a better grounding, at least, in engineering technical skills. Now, what difference does it make? Not what difference does it make? Let me ask you this question. How important was it that you guys were involved with the development of the spacecraft? How involved were you with the development of the spacecraft? Well, for the first eight or ten years of the amend space program, the astronauts were very much intimately involved in all of the details, because they were busy building a spacecraft that had never been built, a Mercury spacecraft. Gemini was started before

Mercury was complete, and we were still trying to design something to keep man alive in orbit. And when we came to Apollo, that, of course, had a tremendous technical challenge to go out and do something that will be remembered as the technical achievement of the 20th century, if not for the first 2,000 years. And that is to land a man on another body in the universe. So the technical challenge increased tremendously. We were building new spacecraft, doing things that had never been done before. And the flight crew had not overstayed their welcome in the sense that they were still anxious to get all of our input, all of the engineers, all the contractors knew that we were the end user, that we had a lot of experience, operational experience in jet aircraft, as well as technical background, and they were just hungry for our input. Sometimes that didn't work out all that great, but nevertheless, it was a very

receptive atmosphere for our skills. How hard did you work on the block two, block one, and then block two spacecraft? How many hours did you spend? How many months did you spend helping to get that thing built? Well, by the time, I think I'd been in the program almost 2 years, excuse me. Well, I'd been in the space program for almost 2 years when I was assigned as part of the crew for what was then called Apollo 2. Up until that time, I had spent general training, and I'd also worked on the power control systems, the environmental control systems, and various other subsystems on the Gemini program. But we did not have an opportunity to contribute to the design and the way they were going to be implemented and logic on switches and malfunction procedures and things. It was already well along, and we were dealing with problems and trying to keep things on schedule. When it came to Apollo, we were so early in

the program that while we were trying to train as a crew, there were no simulators. There were no place we could really train except at the contractor. So we were hungry for time in the spacecraft, what you would call cockpit time to be able to familiar ourselves with switches and switch functions, and just to see real hardware, which wouldn't be around for a long, long time. They also had certain engineering simulators at the contractors that could usually do small tasks, but not a fully integrated task. So we fought for time to get on those as well. So at the beginning, we lived at the contractors. I mean, I can recall when we were testing Apollo 2, it's funny as I look back, Apollo 2, which was subsequently canceled, which was the dynamical to Apollo 1. The atmosphere was not near as hectic or pressure-filled or hours of work spent per day as it eventually became on what was Apollo

7 after the fire. So we were out there doing whatever we could, taking part in tests, but we were still kind of new to the contractors. They didn't know whether to have confidence in us. They felt like we were a big slowdown for them because the points that we raised, they did not want to address some times, and they felt like we were wasting their time because we were slowing them down, and of course they had incentives to be on time, and they wanted to hold down the costs. I recall one time after one critical design review that the head of North American Rockwell Space Division at the time said to Bob Gilbert, who was the director of the Johnson Space Center, said, well, we would be doing a lot better on the schedule if you just didn't send the astronauts out here so much. And Dr. Gilruth blesses his heart, and he was a believer in us from the very beginning.

He says, that's okay, we're not charging you for their time. And I'm sure that Dr. Gilruth believed that our input was very, very important, very, very critical, and consequently, we had a lot of leverage. In some cases, some of the guys had too much leverage. I mean, we had young people sometimes very inexperienced. Roger Chaffey, who was on Apollo 1, for example, had a tendency to do microengineering. And it'd be one thing to point out a problem, and indicate even a possible solution if you're very careful about that. Roger had a tendency to sit down and take the switch and say, this is what he wanted on this switch and this position, and this one, that position. And it may or may not have been the best answer. But because Roger was going to ride that first one, the engineers go back, they would do that. It would show up at the next design review, and NASA might not really like it, and would just assume not have it. And Rockwell had a perfectly good excuse. They said, we

did it just like the crew told us to, and it wasn't necessarily always the best solution. So it was a lot of authority that didn't go with the responsibility. I mean, we were not responsible for the design of that machine. We were responsible for operating it and flying it and performing the mission. But because we were the flight crew, and we showed up out there every week, sometimes five days a week, sometimes seven days a week. We showed up out there, and our word was like a direct manifest from God. So it was a power and a responsibility, excuse me, a power and an authority that you had to be very careful with. Well, Gus Grissom commanded the Apollo one crew, and Wally Shirah was the commander of our crew, which was Apollo two. Both of

them were experienced astronauts from the Mercury program and the Gemini program. They had a lot to say on how it had been done before. We were influential in getting the flight crew accepted, as you will. I had worked with Wally for quite a while, but not near as close with Gus. And during this period of time, when we were the prime crew on Apollo two, and then subsequently the backup crew to Apollo one, I began to work with Gus for the first time, and I found that Gus to be very, very conscientious, very much involved with the details, and I developed a lot of increased respect for Gus trying to get ready for Apollo one. And Gus was like most of us at the time, that we recognized that there were great number of deficiencies in Apollo one. Those of us who were brand new, the rookies like myself, Don Isley, Roger Chaffey, we were so anxious to get any flight in space that

we would be willing to live with things that they knew better than living with. In spite of that, we all had this go fever that we call it, and we felt that we were such good aviators that well, maybe the machine isn't quite perfect. We've done our best, but it may not be perfect, but we're so good we can fly the crates they packed these things in. And it was a mistake because of that, and because of our anxious to go, anxiety to go fly, we ended up living with things that were totally intolerable. Gus recognized that. He recognized the simulator, it wasn't up to speed. Gus felt like we were just trying to get through this Apollo one and the Apollo two, which was kind of a me too like mission, very much like Apollo one. And then we could get on with the real business of developing the spacecraft even better. Unfortunately, that's not the way it turned out. Gus and his crew in January,

January 27, 1967, they were killed in a fire on the pad. By that time, they had canceled the Apollo two, Wally Schraw, Don Isley, and I were the backup crew to Gus and Roger and Ed. And we began to recognize immediately that until a lot of things were changing that spacecraft, we were not going to fly again. Good, okay, great. Changing fuel, just ran out right at the end of that. I'm going to go back and get that. You're doing a great job.