“Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes;

“Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;

“Heaven’s morning breaks, and Earth’s vain shadows flee;

“In life, in death, o Lord, abide with me.”

And from the crews of Apollo and Soyuz, we close with good night, good luck, and God bless all of you.

The image of Earth faded out.

Tim Josephson found his eyes welling over with tears. He bent over his paperwork, embarrassed, glad he was alone.

Monday, December 15, 1980

Bert Seger set up camp at Hangar “O” at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The hangar had been loaned to NASA by the USAF as a site to run the checking-out of the Apollo-N Command Module, since it had been recovered and brought to the Cape.

The Command Module itself was a victim, rather than a cause, of the accident, of course. But nevertheless the CM was the only portion of the Apollo-N stack that the investigators were going to be able to get their hands on, and it was expected that it would contain a lot of clues about how the accident had come about. So the spacecraft was going to have to be disassembled piece by piece.

When he first got to Hangar “O” Seger found things moving slowly. Nobody had touched anything in the interior of Apollo — except for the medical team on the recovery ship, who, in their radiationproof protective clothing, had removed the suited bodies of the astronauts — and the investigating teams at Canaveral were in a paralysis of indecision on how to proceed, for fear of fouling up this highly public operation.

So Seger made some calls, and looked up some old records, and radioed up to Muldoon a recommendation on how to proceed. Muldoon, still on his way home from the Moon, agreed.

The first task was to put together a cantilevered Lucite platform, hinged so that it could fit inside the hatch of the Command Module and then be unfolded to cover the interior of the craft. That way the investigators, hampered by radiationproof gear, could crawl on hands and knees around the interior, looking and photographing and disassembling, but without touching anything they didn’t need to.

Next Seger initiated the disciplines he wanted in the disassembly process itself.

For example he watched as a crew checklist — doused by seawater, pathetic and battered — was lifted out of the spacecraft. The disassembly team had prepared a TPS, a Test Preparation Sheet, for this, and every other action in the disassembly. The TPS detailed the physical action required, the part number of the checklist, its location. Before the checklist was touched the presiding engineer read out an instruction from the TPS. A Rockwell quality inspector moved into place to see, and a NASA inspector got ready. A photographer was called over. A Rockwell technician got carefully into the craft and then, using the specified procedure, took the checklist from its Velcro holder. The technician had to record the effort it took to get the checklist free, and any other anomalous observations he made.

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.