Today, in 1967 the Race to the Moon just about got red flagged. NASA’s manned spaceflight program had been building an ever-bigger head of steam since Alan Shepard was basically catapulted like a suborbital human cannonball several hundred miles downstream as America’s first human into space.
Forty five years ago today, during a full-up manned test on the launch pad, a quick fire inside the spacecraft killed three American astronauts. Spacecraft commander Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward White and pilot Roger B. Chaffee died in about 17 seconds.*
And it threatened to kill America’s space program. (It would have in today’s America, but that’s another story.) But, we were a stronger people of a stronger nation then. And JFK had thrown the gauntlet down in front of the country after Shepard’s suborbital lob in ’61. He challenged America to “before the decade [ws] out…of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”* before 1970. So, the timer was running – and running out.
After the fire, NASA buckled down, figured out its causes, fixed ‘em and got the program back on track. Some astronauts and NASA employees have stated and wrote publicly that the fire was a blessing in disguise in that without exposure of all the problems, the spacecraft design or the whole manned spaceflight program probably wouldn’t have made it to the moon by 1970.
After his 1965 Gemini spaceflight, Apollo 1 Spacecraft Commander Grissom had – in a way – prepared his country for his death, saying “If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”**
Forty five years ago today, astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee gave their lives in the conquest of space. They died in what – according to NASA insiders – ended up being the ultimate sacrifice to get the space program back on track to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by JFK’s deadline. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Collins fulfilled Kennedy’s challenge in July of 1969.
Rest in peace, crew of Apollo 1. Couldn’t have done it without you.
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| Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee |
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| The Apollo 1 Command Module after the fire. |
*Kennedy, J., (May, 1961), speech to joint session of Congress, as quoted by Wikipedia, Apollo Program. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program January 27, 2012.
**Grissom, V. (March, 1965), Gemini 3 post-flight NASA press conference, as quoted by Wikipedia, Gus Grissom, Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Grissom, January 27, 2012.
***Photos were taken by NASA – a U.S. Government agency - and are therefore in the public domain according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program.
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