 reports of all 21 panels; (E) a brief summary of management and organization; and (F) a schedule of visible evidence.
But even before the board issued its report, its conclusions were essentially already public. For instance, a month after the fire Mueller had admitted to Congress that, after six safe years of manned flight experience, it was now obvious that NASA's approach to fire prevention had been wrong. Minimizing the possibility of ignition had not been enough. Safeguards against the spreading of any fire must also be developed. Since it would be nearly impossible to design equipment that would protect the crews both on the ground and in space,* any nonmetallic, and perhaps flammable, materials would have to be carefully screened. In particular, the "four Fs"-- fabrics, fasteners, film, and foams--required further investigation. Wiring, plumbing, and packaging must be reevaluated, even if it meant reviving the old debate about a one- versus two-gas environmental control system. " (21)
As they delved deeper into the reasons behind the tragedy, NASA officials were confronted by some "skeletons in their closet." Senator Walter F. Mondale raised the question of negligence on the part of management and the prime contractor by introducing the "Phillips report" of 1965-1966. The implication was that NASA had been thinking of replacing North American. But 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. (See Chapter 8.) Mondale also alluded to a document (The Baron Report) by a North American employee, Thomas R. Baron, that was critical of the contractor's operations at the Cape.
Baron was a rank and file inspector at Kennedy from September 1965 until November 1966, when he asked for and received a leave of absence. He had made observations; had collected gossip, rumor, and critical comments from his fellow employees; and had written a set of condemnatory notes. He had detailed, but not documented, difficulties with persons, parts, equipment, and procedures. Baron had observed the faults of a large-scale organization and apparently had performed his job as a quality inspector with a vengeance. He noted poor workmanship, spacecraft 012 contamination, discrepancies with installations, problems in the environmental control system, and many infractions of cleanliness and safety rules.
Baron passed on these and other criticisms to his superiors and friends; then he deliberately let his findings leak out to newsmen. North American considered his actions irresponsible and discharged him on 5 January 1967. The company then analyzed and refuted each of Baron's charges and allegations. In the rebuttal, North American denied anything but partial validity to Baron's wide-ranging accusations, although some company officials later testified before Congress that about half of the charges were well-grounded. When the tragedy occurred, Baron was apparently in the process of expanding his 55-page paper into a 500-page report.
When his indictments were finally aired before Teague's subcommittee, during a meeting at the Cape on 21 April, Baron's credibility was impaired by one of his alleged informants, a fellow North American employee named Mervin Holmburg. Holmburg denied knowing anything about the cause of the accident, although Baron had told the committee that Holmburg "knew exactly what caused the fire." Holmburg testified 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." Ironically, Baron and all his family died in a car-train crash only a week after this exposure to congressional questioning. (22)
Beyond the Phillips and Baron reports, however, recollections of events and warnings during the past six years made each Apollo manager wonder if he had really done all in his power to prevent the tragedy. It, March 1965, for instance, Shea and the crew systems people in Houston had wrestled with the questio