January 27, 2003
YET "OUR HOPES AND OUR JOURNEYS CONTINUE":
3 Apollo Astronauts Die in Fire; Grissom, White, Chaffee Caught in Capsule During a Test on Pad: Tragedy at Cape: Rescuers Are Blocked by Dense Smoke -- Cause is Studied (The Associated Press, January 27, 1967)The three-man crew of astronauts for the Apollo 1 mission were killed tonight in a flash fire aboard the huge spacecraft designed to take man to the moon.Those killed in the blaze on a launching pad were:
VIRGIL I. GRISSOM, 40 years old, Air Force lieutenant colonel, one of the seven original Mercury astronauts.
EDWARD H. WHITE 2d, 36, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, the first American to "walk" in space.
ROGER B. CHAFFEE, 31, a Navy lieutenant commander, who had been awaiting his first space flight.
The astronauts were the first American spacemen to be killed on the job and ironically, died while on the ground. The bodies were removed hours later and a space agency spokesman said death was "instantaneous."
Three other astronauts died in airplane crashes, in the line of duty, but today's tragedy involved the first "on premises" deaths in the American space program- the first time anyone was killed while in space hardware. [...]
The fire broke out at 6:31 P. M. while the three men were taking part in a full-scale simulation of the scheduled Feb. 21 launching that was to take
them into the heavens for 14 days of orbiting the earth.They were trapped behind closed hatches, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Tom Wolfe, naturally, said it best:
As to just what this ineffable quality was...well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life...any fool could do that... . No, the idea...seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment--and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day... . There was a seemingly infinite series of tests...a dizzy progression of steps and ledges...a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even--ultimately, God willing, one day--that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.Posted by Orrin Judd at January 27, 2003 1:07 PM
Thanks for remembering this. You know I don't normally do comments, much less two in one day, but this was such a big day in my life as a kid. I remember so vividly when they died -- the Apollo 1 fire. I have a scrap-book somewhere full of clippings from this event, with the Time magazine cover and so on.
By the way, if you can find it, Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox have a great book on the Apollo mission,
Apollo: the Race to the Moon, unfortunately it's out of print and very hard to find. I just checked Alibris
and the cheapest copy they have is $81.20!
You might also enjoy Carrying the Fire,
by Apollo 11 CMP Michael Collins.
Of course, the great irony is, that as a result of the malfunction that caused Gus Grissom's hatch to pre-maturely blow on his Mercury 2 flight (thus sinking the capsule and almost drowning Gus), NASA redesigned the doors on all spacecraft to open inward....When the Apollo capsule caught fire, the quickly building pressure from the smoke prevented the astronauts from pulling open (in) the door. They asphixiated. With the old hatch, all they would have had to do was unlock it, and the pressure from the fire would have pushed it open (out).
Posted by: Foos at January 27, 2003 6:45 PM