Carl Cordoni bid good morning to his relief, clocked out and ambled out to the parking lot in front of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
building, where he worked. He folded himself into the driver's seat of his car, then flicked on the car's radio and started to pull out. But something the disk jockey said caused him to wheel around and tear back into the building.
"He said there was a fire on the launch pad and the astronauts were dead," Cordoni said.
Jan. 27, 1967, had started as a typical morning at NASA. Three astronauts from the Apollo program Roger Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom
and Ed White were conducting preflight tests for a mission scheduled to launch in several weeks. But a fire broke out in the capsule and the three astronauts died, unable to escape through the hatch in time.
Cordoni, an IBM
employee contracted to NASA, helped keep the computer and audio data. When he returned, his fellow workers were listening to the mission's tapes.
"It was pretty blood-curdling, realizing what was going on," Cordoni said. The
tapes, which recorded the astronauts' final moments, were confiscated by NASA officials and never released to the public.
It was the first memorable failure in the space program and a difficult lesson for an American public
that idolized the men chosen to carry the country's dreams into outer space: Astronauts were mortal.
At the time, astronauts were the darlings of the nation, champions among men. They stepped into the abyss of outer space,
taking chances the rest of the country couldn't take. And the NASA press machine turned these flesh and blood men into demigods, humans without sin, fault or prejudice a very different sort of creature than the ones Cordoni and
the rest of NASA's early employees knew.
The times were conducive to myth-building: John F. Kennedy, the president whose death scarred the nation over three years earlier, was a strong proponent of the space program, daring
Americans to put a man on the moon within the decade. The Soviets were deeply committed to their own program, bidding competitively for the "firsts." Added to the mix was the omnipresent fear of atomic warfare and encroaching
communism it was clear the country needed someone to look up to, someone to help the faithful keep that faith. The job fell to the seven men chosen to blaze a path to the stars.
"The whole country was involved in hero building
we were willing to believe these men were supermen," Cordoni said.
They weren't, of course. Cordoni, who knew the original Mercury Seven astronauts: Grissom, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton, John Glenn, Wally Schirra
and Scott Carpenter, says they were a curious mix of perfectionism and devil-may-care attitude. Men who took their leisure pursuits to the same extremes as they did their profession.
The original astronauts were former test
pilots, the best of the best. Each wanted to be the man in the heavy silver space suit, defying gravity, gazing at the big blue ball below from heights never before reached by mankind. Cordoni would hitch a ride with them in his
dreams.
Now a Jacksonville resident and the psychological services director for Behavioral Healthcare Services of Onslow County, Cordoni was fresh out of the Air Force when he was first hired and trained by IBM. As part of a
special team working on a top secret project in Washington, D.C., he and his fellow IBM employees were rewarded by company management with postings to the IBM employment site of their choice. For Cordoni there was never any
question: He went to NASA.
While the Florida weather provided one incentive for moving, it was the space program that drew him. A rangy, soft-spoken man, Cordoni admits to being besotted with the idea of going into space. But for
someone used to being asked "how is the weather up there," space travel wasn't a consideration. Space modules were tiny, cramped affairs and tall men need not apply. That's why the astronauts were on the short side.
"They were never photographed standing next to a guy like me," Cordoni said.
The American public were led to believe the astronauts were much larger a fiction NASA helped perpetuate. The public wanted heroes, and heroes, like
Schirra, shouldn't be able to walk under Cordoni's outstretched arm. But these heroes didonly not in front of the camera.
Short of stature compared to men like Cordoni, the astronauts were, nonetheless, golden boys,
painstakingly groomed for their journeys into outer space.
"How we envied the astronauts, but we had bad eyes, were too heavy, too slow
but oh how we wanted to go up there," Cordoni says of himself and his fellow NASA employees.
The astronauts were incredibly brave men, according to Cordoni. They never stopped dreaming, were never put off by the setbacks, even though there were many early equipment failures.
"What's really scary is how many times the
astronauts stood there and watched the thing that was supposed to bring them back explode on the launch pad and still say 'I'll go' it was either some kind of incredible dedication or madness," he said
The astronauts lived on
the edge in their personal, as well as professional, lives. Many were womanizers, hard drinkers and connoisseurs of speed the car kind, not the drugs.
Cordoni says a local automobile dealer loaned the Mercury astronauts
Corvettes and it wasn't unusual to find one of the seven hitting the gate at 110 miles per hour with a state trooper hot on his trail.
In Cordoni's opinion, the one who fell furthest from that generalization was John Glenn, a
future U.S. Senator who would make a return trip to space as a septuagenarian. Cordoni says Glenn was always a straight arrow, out running on the beach, taking care of himself, even when he knew he probably wouldn't be going up
again.
Schirra was the most driven and professional of the group, Cordoni says, spending countless extra hours at NASA, always asking questions, learning the system from the inside out. Schirra made it his business to know
everyone and everything about his business.
Cordoni originally worked in a cinderblock building near the launch pad. Later, NASA would build a huge 52-story concrete building without any windows. Cordoni says employees had to
call security on the first floor to find out if it was raining.
The building a unique structure designed by engineers accustomed to building bridges had one "two-holer" bathroom on each floor to serve 20,000
employees: the men's room and ladies' rooms alternated floors. Cordoni laughs when he tells what happened the first time someone flushed the commode on the 52nd floor.
They didn't calculate what happens when water
reaches terminal velocity, Cordoni said. The flushed water went straight down 52 floors. The results were memorable.
"That flush blew up six yards of concrete," Cordoni said.
Cordoni also remembers when the roofers, who were
putting the typical Florida roof consisting of rocks and waterproofing on top of the building, ended up with a couple of extra pallets of rocks. Rather than carry their heavy cargo all the way down from the top of the building,
they decided to simply drop them into the back of their pick-up truck.
"The first two they dropped missed, but the third one hit dead center and folded that truck in half," Cordoni says. The "rocket scientists" ended up burying
the totaled truck in an orange grove.
NASA winged much of what it did back then. Although the agency enjoyed a huge budget, much of what it did was experimental. The Apollo I accident set the agency back in spirit and time,
according to Cordoni.
"Up until that point it had been a 'go' mentality no mater happened, we just kept pushing," he said. But the tragic loss of the Apollo I crew served to make those in charge think about safety issues.
It
took a year to get the program back on track. Things progressed without notable incident up until the flight of Apollo XIII. That was the flight that kept the entire world glued to their television screens, later being turned into
a gripping movie starring Tom Hanks.
Cordoni remembers the tense mood at NASA as everyone on the ground worked to find a way to bring the crew of three back alive.
"There were hundreds of mechanical and electrical engineers
walking around helpless, trying desperately to find something to bring these guys home," Cordoni said.
At one point the oxygen levels aboard the spacecraft dropped so low no one could believe the three men were still alive.
Cordoni said the big worry once the immediate problem was resolved was getting them back down. He calls their successful reentry a miracle.
"Look at pictures of the damage to that vehicle and you'll wonder how the heat shield
wasn't damaged amazing!" he said. Cordoni believes the Hanks movie stuck pretty close to the facts.
"I don't think they had to stretch anything to make it dramatic it was pretty dramatic the way it was," Cordoni said.
Since
Cordoni left NASA, the texture of the agency's operation has changed, moving from a focus on space exploration to a more commercial slant. NASA, which once boosted men to the moon and brought them back safely, now spends much of
its time launching satellites for private companies. Cordoni says the new focus is sad, but not entirely without justification.
"The money dried up, Congress became bored with them; we were amazed, but once we landed on the moon,
all interest evaporated," he said.
But his never has. Cordoni left NASA and IBM after nine years, when IBM pulled its employees out. Rather than be posted elsewhere, he decided to go back to school, eventually obtaining his
doctorate. He and his wife, Carol parents of six children moved to Jacksonville (NC) in 1981. Originally from Rhode Island, Cordoni loves his adopted home. But his heart is still at NASA and he's saddened by the agency's
decline.
Cordoni says even if NASA wanted to fly to the moon now, the agency probably doesn't possess the equipment it would take to do so. One vehicle from the old space program that could go the distance lies forgotten on its
side in the vehicle assembly building. Cordoni estimates it would take 15 years to prepare for another lunar landing.
"In that respect it almost follows the colonization of Columbus stagnation, with people sitting around doing
nothing year after year," he said.
Like most of NASA's employees, Cordoni would have given just about anything for a chance to go up.
"If anyone had said 'you can go but you're going to die,' they would have had 24, 000
employees standing in that line," he said.
Cordoni says, in the long run, the men who made it up that ladder to the stars really were made of 'the right stuff.' He says that dreams come true for those who prepare themselves
properly. The early astronauts worked hard and partied hard, but didn't get where they were simply by chance.
Not too long ago, Cordoni and his wife went back to their old stomping grounds. They toured NASA and saw the place that
was such a big part of their lives, a place that still draws Cordoni like human catnip. And, he says, although it was hard to equate his time there with who he is today, the memories came flooding back.
"If I could have stuffed
my 6-foot 6-inches into a capsule and someone would have let me go, I'd have cut off my feet to make myself fit," he said.
