The operation to prepare the silo as a final resting place was a tricky one. The silo complex had deteriorated badly after some ten years of neglect. The equipment rooms still housed a considerable amount of electronic equipment associated with missile operations, which Raab’s team had to remove before the Apollo-N debris could be transported in. Other modifications were made to transform the underground equipment rooms, which were in a bad state of repair, into permanent storage vaults. Although there was to be no environmental control, the underground facilities had to be made at least watertight; it turned out that back in the late 1960s a burst pipe had immersed the floor of Complex 31 under several feet of water, and so the water lines were all capped off before the Apollo-N debris was moved in.

There was extensive photo-documentation by NASA cameramen, and the whole operation was conducted under a tight security cordon, with round-the-clock surveillance to deter morbid souvenir hunters.

“We got the components in the vault in a very organized manner,” Aaron Raab told me. “We compartmentalized the components according to function and storage requirements. Primarily, we put the larger components in first, and anything we felt would be of any significance in the future was left in an accessible area. It was all logged in by our quality control personnel here at the Cape, in official logbooks. These record precisely where each component is stored.”

It would be a fairly involved operation for anyone to get back into the vault, but future investigators could go in and retrieve components after a few days of clearing work. But, says Raab, there are no plans for the periodic opening up of the vaults to check the condition of the stored wreckage.

Today, I watched as Aaron Raab personally laid the last few poignant components of the Command Module in position. A huge 10-ton concrete cap was secured with long steel rods and welded down over the underground vault.

A year after the accident, Apollo-N is at last laid to rest…

At first Bert Seger had been enthusiastic about his new post in Washington. He was, after all, given the rank of associate administrator, and, as a senior manager in the Office of Manned Spaceflight, he still expected to have a strong hands-on involvement in the manned program. But when he studied the new organization charts, and he saw just how far away from him were the reporting lines of the major players, like Joe Muldoon, he started to realize he’d been had. He’d been handed a sinecure, something to get him decently out of the way during the investigations into Apollo-N.

He never became comfortable at Headquarters. He had a few assignments, and some pet projects of his own to pursue, and they filled his time, but not his attention. He would find himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, waiting for the telephone to ring, reading newspapers.

He took long walks around Washington.

He found favored benches in the big public gardens and floated through the museums. He liked the serenity, the timelessness of the museums.

The evenings weren’t any better.

Fay was still in Houston, with the boys, and Seger would fly back there every Friday. Fay didn’t want to move, because of the boys’ schooling, and Seger accepted that, reluctantly.

Every Sunday or Monday, when he had to get ready to fly back to DC, Fay prepared him a little bouquet of carnations. Each day he’d take one for his buttonhole, but they’d be pretty faded by the end of the week, and it just wasn’t the same.

He had too much time to think.

He kept on going over the events of that flight — in fact, over everything he’d done in all the years that had led up to Apollo-N.

Was there anything he should have done differently during the flight, anything he’d missed that might have saved Jones, Priest, and Dana? And during the long development, how far was he responsible for the shoddiness, the carelessness which had finally destroyed the nuclear rocket?

He didn’t come up with any answers. He could, in retrospect, think of a thousand things he might have done differently. But he wasn’t wallowing; he knew that anything is possible with the benefit of hindsight. He’d done the best he could, at every stage of his career.

But it was no comfort. It happened on my watch.

In the hall of his rented apartment he had hung a small brass-framed photograph. It showed three space-suited astronauts. To Bert — In Your Hands.

Seger didn’t go in or out of his apartment without looking at that photo and reading the inscription.

He found a run-down little Catholic church, tucked away just a few blocks from Headquarters, and took to spending time in there. He attended Mass three or four times a week. The ancient, gentle ritual took him back to his childhood and comforted him.

He was struck — shocked, even — by the poverty he saw around him in the neighborhood of the church, just blocks away from NASA Headquarters, here in the capital city of the richest nation on the planet.

He began to see that he’d been locked away inside NASA for too long, pursuing the organization’s single goal, the Mars landing, with blinkered obsessiveness. Perhaps they all had.

He remembered how shocked he’d been by the intrusion of those antinuke protesters at the Cape.

The world out here, beyond JSC, had continued to evolve, and Seger felt as if he was emerging into a new, harsh light, his NASA cocoon crumbling around him.

He went to the libraries and started going through back issues of newspapers — papers he’d barely scanned when they were printed, save for sports results and NASA coverage. Then, as he stared into grainy microfiche screens, he felt as if he was learning about some phase of ancient history. But this was the world in which he had lived, the story of the country which supported him.

The United States was falling apart, it seemed to Seger.

The country was deep in recession. Under Reagan, there was a kind of cheerful, simplistic optimism around. But the divisions in society seemed to Seger to be growing wider than ever. Two Americas were emerging: there was a grotesque, materialistic money-chase among the already affluent, and among the poor — particularly the nonwhites, in the inner cities — there was a tailspin of drugs, crime, decaying housing projects, and a failing educational system.

And meanwhile, Seger learned, in the middle of the recession, Reagan was vastly increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Nuclear weapons were a key part of that buildup. Next year, cruise missiles would be deployed in Western Europe, in the face of much protest from those countries. There’d been more protest at home, too, he read.

People were growing scared again. A DoD official had talked about how backyard shelters would save them all, when the bomb dropped. If there are enough shovels going around, everybody’s going to make it.

Seger read back as far as Three Mile Island. The similarities — administrative and technical — between that disaster and the Apollo-N incident chilled him.

The general press coverage of NASA, once he looked on that with his new perspective, startled him, too. He saw skepticism, anger, contempt, resentment, on the part of the people outside looking in. He remembered how Eisenhower had cautioned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex — against an expanded space program, in fact — because technocracy was foreign to the individualistic American spirit, and grafting it onto the nation was going to do a lot of harm. Well, Kennedy had accepted that risk. And it seemed to Seger that the country was paying the price.

The space program, he saw now, was a prime symptom of all this. What use was any of it? The much-lauded spin-offs were minimal and probably would have come about anyhow, if the need was there. NASA’s continuing obsession with manned flight had distorted the whole organization, the direction of other programs. Space initiatives which might have done some good down on Earth — science projects, Earth resources studies — had all been subordinated to the operational needs of the manned missions. An unmanned mission wouldn’t even be approved if it didn’t support the manned effort more or less directly — or worse, if it indicated that humans might not be necessary in space…