The entry says that two warnings about North American Aviation had been written down before the fire and that neither mentioned oxygen. This piece gives them in more detail: what the Phillips team found at Downey in December 1965, what Thomas Baron wrote at the Cape in the winter of 1966, and how both surfaced in the hearings of 1967 and in the Senate’s report.

Downey, December 1965

In the autumn of 1965 both of North American’s Apollo contracts were late. The company’s Space and Information Systems Division at Downey, California, was building the command and service modules and the S-II, the second stage of the Saturn V, and George Mueller, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, asked the Apollo Program Director, Major General Samuel Phillips, to find out why. Phillips took a team of NASA people who knew the division to Downey from 22 November to 6 December 1965, with sub-teams on planning and control, contracting, engineering, manufacturing, and reliability and quality assurance, and presented their findings to the company’s management on 19 December. The same day he sent J. Leland Atwood, North American’s president, ten copies of the team’s notes with a letter.

“I am definitely not satisfied with the progress and outlook of either program,” Phillips wrote, “and am convinced that the right actions now can result in substantial improvement of position in both programs in the relatively near future.” The notes were critical, and he said so: “Even with due consideration of hopeful signs, I could not find a substantive basis for confidence in future performance.” He asked for Atwood’s proposed actions by the end of January.

The notes themselves were blunter. On the record: “NAA performance on both programs is characterized by continued failure to meet committed schedule dates with required technical performance and within costs. There is no evidence of current improvement in NAA’s management of these programs of the magnitude required to give confidence that NAA performance will improve at the rate required to meet established Apollo program objectives.” On the spacecraft: the first manned spacecraft and the key ground-test spacecraft had each slipped more than a year, seven test articles had been cut from the programme, and “NAA has not been able to forecast costs with any reasonable degree of accuracy.” On the division: “Frankly stated—we firmly believe that S&ID is overmaned and that the S-II and CSM Programs can be done, and done better, with fewer people.” On control: “Effective planning and control from a program standpoint does not exist. Each organization defines its own job, its own schedules, and its own budget, all of which may not be compatible or developed in a manner required to achieve program objectives.” On engineering, the team found “Fragmentation of the Engineering function throughout the S&ID organization, with the result that it is difficult to identify and place accountability for program-required Engineering outputs.” The review did not consider fire, the cabin atmosphere, or the hazards of ground tests. It was about schedules, money and management.

Mueller’s covering letter of the same date went further than Phillips’s. He listed the subsystems omitted, the flights rescheduled and the spacecraft deleted since 1963, and went on: “It is hard for me to understand how a company with the background and demonstrated competence of NAA could have spent 4 1/2 years and more than half a billion dollars on the S-II Project and not yet have fired a stage with flight systems in operation.” He wrote that “Based on what I see going on currently, I have absolutely no confidence that future commitments will be met”, that he considered “the present situation to be intolerable”, and that he had “instructed Sam Phillips to keep his team together so that they can visit S&ID again in March to see if progress is consistent with that required to achieve program objectives.” In the fourteen months that followed, by NASA’s later testimony, the company responded and the situation improved. Spacecraft 012 was on the Downey production line throughout.

The Cape, December 1966

The second warning came from the bottom of the same company. Thomas R. Baron of Mims, Florida, was a North American quality inspector at the Kennedy Space Center from September 1965. He kept notes of what he saw: poor workmanship, dirt in the spacecraft, equipment wrongly installed, tests done out of order, rules broken. In December 1966, from a hospital bed in Titusville, he told his fears to a room-mate who happened to be a NASA technical writer, and the writer took them to NASA’s quality control office on 16 December. That evening Rocco Petrone, the Kennedy Space Center’s Director of Launch Operations, had a NASA inspector, John Brooks, find and interview Baron, and Brooks briefed Debus and Petrone on the complaints. The matter was passed to North American as the company’s business. The company interviewed Baron, and on 5 January 1967 announced that it was ending his employment. On 24 January, with his pass to the Cape withdrawn, Baron invited Brooks to his home and gave him a report of 57 pages to copy. Petrone had a copy on 26 January, the day before the fire. Baron had also given his story to a Titusville newspaper, whose reporter spent an hour and a half with the company’s public relations office going over it.

John Hansel, North American’s head of quality control at the Cape and the man Baron had wanted to reach, told the reporter that Baron was one of the most conscientious inspectors he had ever had, that his work was always good, and that “If anything, Baron was too much of a perfectionist. He couldn’t bend and allow deviations from test procedures—and anyone knows that when you’re working in a field like this, there is constant change and improvement.” The reporter wrote that Hansel “readily agreed that Baron’s alleged discrepancies were, for the most part, true.” The Kennedy historians, who went through the file, concluded that none of the discrepancies, true as they were, was serious enough to cause a disaster, and that Baron’s “forebodings were to prove correct, but not for any reason he could document.” At the Cape he was known as “D. R. Baron”, for Discrepancy Report. His notes did not mention the atmosphere either.

The hearings, 1967

In the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences’ hearings that spring, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota asked about the Phillips report, and the NASA historians record what followed: “the charges were vague; and, for the next several weeks, no one seemed to know exactly what the Phillips report was. In fact, Webb at first denied that there was such a report.” Mondale also raised Baron’s document. When the Senate committee published its report in January 1968, it set the history out dryly. The review “is considered to be a proper management action on the part of NASA and the committee was impressed by its professionalism and thoroughness. However, it was not made clear why the responsible NASA centers permitted the situation to deteriorate as far as it apparently had before initiating appropriate remedial action.” NASA’s witnesses had testified, the committee recorded, “(a) the contractor has been responsive to the recommendations and that NASA has confidence that the contractor will be able to perform to the level of managerial and technical performance required and expected in the Apollo program; (b) that the results of such review were supplied to the Apollo 204 Review Board for its consideration; and (c) that the findings of the task force had no effect on the accident, did not lead to the accident, and were not related to the accident.”

Two members of the committee, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Charles Percy of Illinois, added their own views. They accepted that the Phillips findings were not related to the fire, and then wrote: “Two facts remain, however: it is not possible to pinpoint the precise ignition source of the fire; and the Apollo Spacecraft 012 was on the production line at Downey during the period of the Phillips team inspection. We do not mean to conclude here that there was a causal connection. But these circumstances, together with the similarity between certain of the Phillips report conclusions and those of the Apollo Review Board, made the Phillips report of more than incidental interest to the work of the committee.” On NASA’s handling of the committee: “This initial lack of candor as to the existence and then the status of the Phillips report threatened one of the essential assets of the space program—the confidence of the American public and their elected representatives.” The committee as a whole put the lesson in its recommendations: “the committee urges that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration keep the appropriate congressional committees informed on significant problems arising in its programs.”

Baron testified to the House subcommittee at the Cape on 21 April 1967. One of the men he named as a source, a fellow North American employee named Mervin Holmburg, told the subcommittee he knew nothing about the cause of the fire and that Baron “gets all his information from anonymous phone calls, people calling him and people dropping him a word here and there. That is what he tells me.” The chairman, Olin Teague, thanked Baron anyway: “What you have done has caused North American to search their procedures.” A week later Baron and his family died when a train struck their car.

On 10 May, the last day of the House hearings, Congressman John Wydler of New York, who called himself one of the committee’s most critical members, said to Webb: “I feel right now that you got less criticism than you deserved [in the past, but now] you are getting more criticism than you deserve. I don’t intend to add to it for that reason.” The hearings wound down. The Phillips report had not caused the fire. What it had shown was that the organisation which failed to see the hazard in a pure-oxygen test was one in which a general could write “I could not find a substantive basis for confidence” to a contractor, and the Administrator could at first deny that any such report existed.

Sources

• Samuel C. Phillips, letter to J. L. Atwood, 19 December 1965, with the notes of NASA’s management review of North American Aviation’s management of the S-II and CSM programmes; George E. Mueller, letter to J. L. Atwood, 19 December 1965. NASA History Office. nasa.gov
• US Senate, Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Apollo 204 Accident, Report No. 956, 30 January 1968, “NASA-Spacecraft Contractor Relations”, the recommendations, and the additional views of Senators Brooke and Percy. nasa.gov
• Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty, Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations, NASA SP-4204, 1978, chapter 18, “The Hunches of Tom Baron” and “Congress Investigates”. nasa.gov
• Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood and Loyd S. Swenson, Chariots for Apollo, NASA SP-4205, 1979, chapter 9, for Mondale, Webb’s denial, Holmburg, Wydler and Baron’s death. nasa.gov