Wally Schirra prepares to take Apollo 7 into space.

Sitting on the Edge

Neil Cole
Neil Cole
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

By Neil Renfrew Cole

On October 11th 1968, astronaut Wally Schirra and his crew of Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham were at the top of the launch tower, ready to go to space. As technicians led Schirra towards the open hatch of Apollo 7, his thoughts were not excited or celebratory, but deeply solemn. The last crew to climb into an Apollo Command Module didn’t climb out again.

For Schirra and those who served the space program at the time, they remember the night of January 27th 1967 simply as “The Fire”.

That night, it was Gus Grissom climbing into the commander’s seat of his spaceship, the Apollo 1. He and his crew of Ed White, the first American to walk in space, and Roger Chaffee, a new but very promising astronaut, were about a month away from launch. On this night, wearing spacesuits, with the cabin pressurised, and the spacecraft operating under its own power, they were conducting a “dress rehearsal” of the launch.

Ten minutes away from their simulated liftoff, there was a spark.

In the 15psi 100% pure oxygen environment of the cabin, even the aluminium the spaceship was made of began to burn. Ed White, a dedicated athlete, tried with all his enormous power to pull the hatch open. But by the time Grissom unlocked it for him, the air pressure inside Apollo 1 was so high that, strong as White was, there was just no way he could ever pull it hard enough. For astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, their spaceship on the ground, surrounded by safety crews trying desperately to reach them, it was over in just thirty seconds.

The burnt out wreck of Apollo I. The highly flammable spacecraft components hadn’t just burned: they had actually exploded.

Two years later Schirra was sitting on the edge of the hatch of Apollo 7, finally ready to fulfil the mission of his fallen comrades. He looked around the empty cockpit. In an emergency, they could now push a button and blow the hatch open in a heartbeat. He and his crew could be standing outside the capsule in ten seconds. In a very serious emergency, they could use a zipline and be a mile away in under two minutes. All this he knew, but the simple truth was that Gus Grissom’s capsule caught fire, and Wally Schirra’s didn’t. That’s just the way it was, and Schirra knew that too.

As he sat in the hatch, for an instant (he admitted years later) he was gripped by sudden rush of fear for his own life and that of his crew, mixed with deep sorrow for the loss of his friends. He hesitated for a moment, and looked up between the steel girders of the launch tower, towards heaven. Poking out between the clouds, was a daytime moon.

Eyeing the goal for which they had all sacrificed so much, Wally Schirra swallowed his fear and sorrow, and slid down into his command seat. After nearly two years in limbo, Apollo 7 roared into heaven, and got the moon program flying again. Their successful mission was another step towards the giant leap.

Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham ride to space on Apollo 7. October 11 1968.
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