Historia

On October 11, 1968, three astronauts who had backed up the doomed Apollo 1 crew rode a Saturn IB into orbit to prove the redesigned spacecraft could fly; the commander spent the eleven days fighting a head cold and picking fights with Houston.

Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham did not just test a spacecraft; they tested how much backtalk NASA would tolerate from three men stuck in a very small room.

NASA had spent twenty-one months and its best engineers rebuilding a spacecraft that had killed three of its own astronauts. What it had not yet done, on the morning of October 11, 1968, was put a living crew inside it and find out whether the fix had worked.

What happened to Apollo 1

Twenty-one months earlier, a flash fire had swept through the Apollo 1 command module during a ground test at Cape Kennedy, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee before they ever left the pad. The investigation that followed tore the spacecraft apart: a pure-oxygen cabin, wiring that could spark, a hatch that took too long to open from the inside. Engineers spent the better part of two years rebuilding the Command and Service Module from that failure, and by the fall of 1968 the redesigned ship had never carried a person into orbit.

Apollo 7 was the mission that had to say whether the fix had worked.

Who flew Apollo 7

The three men strapped into the capsule on the morning of October 11, 1968, had trained for this specific job longer than almost anyone at NASA: Walter "Wally" Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham had served as the backup crew for Apollo 1, and they inherited the assignment after the fire took the primary crew. Schirra was flying his third mission, a veteran of Mercury and Gemini; Eisele and Cunningham had never left the ground. Their spacecraft carried no lunar module, since there was nothing yet to test it against, and the flight plan called for eleven days circling Earth, running engine burns and rendezvous practice on a ship nobody had ever trusted with a life before.

Why the launch almost got scrubbed

High-altitude wind shear over Cape Kennedy that morning violated NASA's own abort rule; if the mission had to bail out shortly after liftoff, the same winds could carry the capsule back over land instead of into the Atlantic. Launch managers waived the restriction anyway. Schirra objected on the spot, later saying the decision "pushed us to the wall in terms of risk," and flew the mission still irritated that ground controllers had moved a safety line to keep the schedule.

That irritation did not fade once Apollo 7 reached orbit. It got worse, and it had help.

What made Wally Schirra so angry

About fifteen hours into the flight, Schirra came down with a head cold, and Eisele and Cunningham soon caught runny noses of their own. On Earth a cold is an inconvenience; in weightlessness it is closer to a slow-motion emergency, because mucus has no gravity to drain it and simply pools in the sinuses. Cunningham later joked that the illness turned "our cozy little spacecraft into a used Kleenex container." Congested and flying a ship still shaking off a fatal accident, Schirra started saying no to Houston: no to a request to power up the onboard camera on the crew's own schedule, no to extra work squeezed into an already packed day. The food drew complaints too, and so did the spacesuits, which took thirty minutes to manage a bathroom break in orbit. Flight controllers on the ground, watching a mission run behind an increasingly blunt commander, began keeping their own private tally of what they saw as insubordination.

The dispute came to a head at reentry. Schirra refused to let the crew wear their helmets for splashdown, arguing that if his congested ears could not equalize pressure during descent, a sealed helmet would only trap the damage; NASA wanted the helmets on, full stop, for exactly the kind of impact a splashdown can deliver. Schirra held his ground, the crew landed bare-headed in the Atlantic on October 22, and nobody was hurt.

Did the "Wally, Walt, and Donn Show" work

For all the friction, Apollo 7 gave America something it had never had: a picture. On October 14, the crew switched on a small television camera and beamed back the first live broadcast from an American spacecraft in flight, holding up handwritten signs and giving viewers a tour of a cabin the size of a large closet. Seven of these telecasts went out over the following days, nicknamed at the time the "Wally, Walt, and Donn Show," and they were popular enough that the crew won a special Emmy Award the following year (an odd trophy for three men who spent much of the flight arguing with their bosses on the ground).

What the flight actually proved, and what it cost

Strip away the friction and the mission worked. It wrung out the Command and Service Module's engine through eight separate burns and rehearsed rendezvous with the spent second stage that had carried it into orbit. Along the way it turned up problems, from fogging windows to an overheating fuel cell, that engineers could fix before anyone flew farther than Earth orbit. Two months later, Apollo 8 rode the data straight to lunar orbit; seven months after that, Apollo 11 landed.

The bill fell on the crew who had earned it. None of the three astronauts of Apollo 7 ever flew in space again. Schirra had already announced he was leaving NASA and retired that July; Eisele and Cunningham's flight careers quietly ended as well, and biographers still argue over how much of that was punishment for the friction in orbit and how much was simply the ordinary attrition of a program moving on to younger crews. NASA's official histories are politer about it than the flight controllers who lived through it were at the time, and the honest answer is probably some of both.

Why it still gets called the forgotten mission

Apollo 7 has no flag on the Moon and no near-disaster to retell, so it rarely gets its own headline. It is the reason every mission after it flew as smoothly as it did: the redesigned spacecraft it proved out is the same basic machine that carried nine more crews to the Moon, and the fights over schedule and helmets are, in their way, the first record of astronauts insisting they had the final word on their own risk. That argument between the people strapped into a spacecraft and the people running the mission from a room in Houston never really ended; it just moved on to the next machine, and the next crew willing to make the case.

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