Donn F. Eisele

• 1. Introduction

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  Donn Eisele spent the 27th of January 1966 recovering from shoulder surgery in a hospital. Exactly one year later, on the 27th of January 1967, three astronauts who had taken his place died in the Apollo 1 spacecraft fire. That pair of dates framed one of the stranger career trajectories in the history of American spaceflight. How does a man build the credentials to reach orbit, only to be grounded by injury before liftoff? What becomes of an astronaut when his moment finally arrives, years later than planned?

• 2. From Columbus to Edwards

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  West High School gave Donn Eisele his diploma in 1948. He had been an active Boy Scout, working up to the rank of Eagle Scout. Four years later, the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland awarded him a Bachelor of Science. Despite that Navy credential, he chose a commission in the United States Air Force.

  Flight training began at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, then continued at Williams in Arizona and Tyndall in Florida. He received his pilot wings in 1954 and spent the next four years as an interceptor pilot, serving in South Dakota and in Libya. By 1960, the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio had awarded him a Master of Science in Astronautics. He then attended the Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, graduating in Class 62A in 1962. Among his classmates were Charles Bassett and Theodore Freeman.

  After graduating from Edwards, Eisele took a posting at the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. There he served as a project engineer and experimental test pilot, flying in support of special weapons development programs. He accumulated more than 4,200 hours of total flying time, with 3,600 of those hours in jet aircraft. NASA selected him as part of its third astronaut group in October 1963.

• 3. Crew Politics and the Fire

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  In early 1966, Eisele was quietly named as pilot for the Apollo 1 crew. Gus Grissom was to serve as Command Pilot, with Ed White as Senior Pilot. Training dislocated his shoulder twice in January 1966. The Air Force removed him from the crew and replaced him with Roger B. Chaffee.

  Walter Schirra was assigned as Command Pilot for the second crewed Apollo flight, with Eisele as Senior Pilot and Walter Cunningham as Pilot. Then, in December 1966, that mission was canceled on the grounds that it would be an unnecessary repeat of the first flight. Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham shifted to backup roles for the Apollo 1 prime crew.

  Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham were named to fly the mission that would become Apollo 7 after the prime crew perished. Deke Slayton, who led the Astronaut Office, had left no ambiguity about the rules. Each crew member was expendable, and any extramarital affair that became public would cost him the seat. Eisele was conducting a relationship with a woman who would eventually become his second wife. He stayed on the crew, and by launch day his title had changed from Senior Pilot to Command Module Pilot.

• 4. Eleven Days in Orbit

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  On the 11th of October 1968, Apollo 7 lifted off on a Saturn IB rocket. It was the first crewed flight test of the third-generation American spacecraft. Schirra commanded; Cunningham took on the Lunar Module Pilot duties. Eisele's responsibilities included navigating by star sightings and aligning the spacecraft's guidance and navigation platform. The crew also performed simulated transposition and docking maneuvers using the Saturn IB's upper stage.

  The crew carried out eight successful test firings of the service module's propulsion engine. They also produced the first live television broadcast of crew activities from an American spacecraft. Apollo 7 circled Earth in a geocentric orbit with an apogee of 153.5 nautical miles and a perigee of 122.6 nautical miles. The 260-hour mission covered 4.5 million miles, roughly 7.25 million kilometers.

  Splashdown came on the 22nd of October 1968 in the Atlantic Ocean, just 8 miles from the aircraft carrier USS Essex. The crew landed only 0.3 miles from the predicted target point. Eisele logged 260 hours in space on that flight. He served as backup Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 10 mission the following year. After resigning from the Astronaut Office in 1970, he moved to a technical role at NASA Langley Research Center.

• 5. Life After Launch

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  In July 1972, Eisele retired from both NASA and the Air Force and became Country Director of the United States Peace Corps in Thailand. Two years later, he returned to American business. He became Sales Manager for Marion Power Shovel, a division of Dresser Industries. After that, he managed private and corporate accounts for the investment firm Oppenheimer & Company.

  By 1980, Eisele had settled in Wilton Manors, Florida. The following year he was appointed to a vacant seat on the Wilton Manors City Commission and served roughly one year in that role. In 1986, he acted as a guide for the Concorde Comet Chase flights departing from Miami and New York City.

  A business trip to Tokyo in late 1987 was to take him to the opening of a new Space Camp. That camp was modeled on the one at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. A heart attack there took his life on the 1st of December 1987, when Eisele was 57 years old. His ashes were returned from Japan and buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

• 6. Recognition and Memory

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  Among his career honors were the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross. He also received the Air Force Senior Pilot Astronaut Wings. In 1969, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave his crew a Special Trustees Award for the first live television broadcast of crew activities from orbit. He was also a co-recipient of the AIAA Haley Astronautics Award in 1969.

  In 1983, Eisele was part of a group of Apollo astronauts inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame. In 1997, he was one of 24 Apollo astronauts who joined the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. NASA made a posthumous addition in 2008, awarding the Distinguished Service Medal specifically for his work on Apollo 7.

  His memoir, titled Apollo Pilot, was published in 2017 by the University of Nebraska Press in its Outward Odyssey series. John Mese portrayed him in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Ryan Doom played him in the final three episodes of the 2015 ABC series The Astronaut Wives Club.

  The City of Wilton Manors named Donn Eisele Park in his memory after his death. Susan Eisele Black donated a Moon rock sample to Broward County Main Library on the 23rd of October 2007. The donation was made on behalf of her late husband. That library, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, became the only one in the United States to hold a lunar rock on display.