Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

He pulled on his cigarette, trying to decide how to explain it to an outsider, then took out a pen and sketched the floor plan of the Apollo spacecraft on a napkin. “The commander was on the left,” he began. “On the pad he would be lying on his back. And right here”—the pen etched a delicate ´ —“in the side of the spacecraft beside him was a compartment for lithium hydroxide, which takes out the CO2 so the crew can rebreathe the oxygen. It had a metal door with a sharp edge . . . .” The door opened into the Environmental Control Unit (E.C.U.). Just underneath it was a cable, part of the E.C.U.’s instrumentation harness. The cable was wedged against the bottom of the door by other bundles of wires beneath it. Each time the door was pushed shut, the edge of the metal door scraped against the cable. The slight but repeated abrasion had exposed two tiny sections of wire in the cable. Something—maybe Grissom opened the door—caused a brief electrical arc between the exposed portions of wire. Even with the pure oxygen environment, the spark from the short would not have caused a conflagration. But it also happened that, just below the two scuffs in the cable, a length of aluminum tubing took a ninety-degree turn. This particular ninety-degree corner joint, one of hundreds in the tubing that interlaced the spacecraft, probably had sprung a leak. The joint had passed redundant inspections, but it had been subject to “creep” from stress at remote points in the system—the spacecraft ...