Patterico's Pontifications

1/27/2017

Remembering Apollo 1, 50 Years Later

Filed under: General — JVW @ 4:01 pm



[guest post by JVW]

I want to draw everyone’s attention to a terrific comment from our fellow commenter DCSCA, who earlier today reminded us that we are observing the 50th anniversary of the tragic launchpad fire which killed the Apollo 1 crew: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Here is DCSCA’s comment in full:

If I may, some words this Friday, January 27th about another Friday, January 27th.

The Fire.

That’s all you have to say to anybody familiar with America’s space program. They know the rest. And if alive at the time, likely remember where they were and what they were doing when they got the word. The date, January 27, 1967. The place, Cape Canaveral’s launch complex 34. The time, 6:31 PM, EST. The astronauts lost: Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee– the crew of Apollo 1.

Today marks half a century since they were killed in that flash fire inside their command module, testing systems to be used only weeks later in what was planned to be the first flight of America’s three-man Apollo spacecraft. The nation was stunned and the accident brought America’s $24 billion moon program to a dead stop. And the chances of reaching the moon by 1970 appeared bleak that cold, winter evening.

Space enthusiasts still wince recalling it. I was eating dinner with my family when the phone rang; a classmate called to pass the word. He choked up. I did as well. Sounds a little hokey today. But the space race was very much a part of the lives of America’s youngsters back then and loomed large in the schools, the pop-culture and the hobbies we pursued in that era.

The initial TV bulletins were curt and cryptic. By late evening, the network news specials aired, some of which can be found on YouTube today. It still stings to view them; the discomfort evident in the faces of the reporters. In the immediate aftermath, the crew was memorialized across the country. Grissom, one of the ‘Original Seven’ Mercury astronauts, and Air Force space rookie Chaffee, were interred at Arlington. White, America’s first spacewalker, was buried at West Point. A board of inquiry was established and the scorched spacecraft itself was carted off and dismantled, bolt by bolt.

Months of Congressional testimony followed as investigators sought to determine what happened and why. A massive report was written uncovering design flaws and shoddy workmanship. The crew had suffered burns but died of asphyxiation. The hatch was complicated, opened inward and pressure made it impossible to open fast. The fire itself was likely caused by a spark from frayed wiring and fueled by the pure oxygen of the single gas system used in the spacecraft to breathe and flammable items in the cabin. It was ‘go fever’ — a disaster waiting to happen.

The rest is history. A redesigned hatch that opened outward was installed; a safer, two gas system using oxygen and nitrogen to breathe was added and wiring bundles, along with other components, were enhanced and fireproofed. So by October, 1968, Apollo 7 orbited Earth; at Christmas, Apollo 8 reached lunar orbit and by July, 1969, Apollo 11 placed Americans on the moon. But ask any of the technicians, engineers and managers at NASA and their contractors at the time, and they will tell you that without the Apollo 1 fire, the United States would likely have not succeeded in reaching the moon before the end of the 1960’s.

Over the decades since, thousands of pages have been written and hours of film have been aired about an accident which began and ended in about 12 seconds. Most of the eyewitness descriptions have been brief, terse and as it turns out, accurate. In recent years the audio of the accident has become available on wikipedia and YouTube. Google ‘Apollo 1 audio’ to find it. It still grits the teeth to hear and elicits a feeling I’ve only experienced twice since that day- when Challenger and Columbia were lost.

Today the Apollo 1 spacecraft remains disassembled, locked in a government warehouse in Langley, Virginia. It is rarely seen by the public. Only this month, NASA announced plans to display Apollo 1’s ill-fated hatch alongside Challenger and Columbia artifacts. What remains of the Florida launch pad pedestal is now a cement memorial, with the words ‘Abandon In Place’ stenciled across it.

But the crew is remembered. And among the mementos left by Armstrong and Aldrin at Tranquility Base, is an Apollo 1 flight patch. For they knew they’d never have gotten there without the sacrifice of their colleagues, Grissom, White and Chaffee, fifty years ago this day.

Ad Astra, guys.

Thanks, DCSCA, for that poingant reminder of American heroes.

[Cross-posted at the Jury Talks Back.]

– JVW

22 Responses to “Remembering Apollo 1, 50 Years Later”

  1. No, thank you, JVW. For them.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  2. What a spectacular comment, DCSCA. Very moving. Thanks, Gus, Ed, and Roger!

    felipe (023cc9)

  3. It’s heartbreaking to see that picture that NASA posted on Twitter and realize it represents that last few moments of these men’s lives.

    JVW (6e49ce)

  4. The father of one of my good friends years ago was a safety officer on the pad that day. Needless to say, his entire life was deeply affected by that day. As he agreed, they were all trying to do too much, too fast, and were facing the same pressure to get to a launch as caused the Challenger disaster 2 decades later. They had all been ordered to cut too many corners, and this was the result.

    The system that usually is given most of the blame is the pure oxygen atmosphere that the Apollo 1 capsule used. Non-technical people may not realize that the reason that was being used was because a pure oxygen capsule only needs to contain about 5 psi, rather than the 14.7 psi a capsule using an oxygen-nitrogen capsule has to withstand. In other words, it was a shortcut which allowed NASA to build a much cheaper, weaker capsule that they hoped they could “get away with”.

    The good part of this was that they learned their lessons well and corrected all of the flaws – at least that generation of engineers did. Sadly, the old bad shortcuts came back on the shuttle program.

    Tom Servo (4f4685)

  5. Jake Tapper on CNN had a segment on this. He devoted a moment to Chafee’s daughter, who went on to herself have a thirty year career at NASA.
    I was eight years old at the time, and don’t remember a thing about it. (The fact that I was near death with double pneumonia at the time probably contributed to that.) I do remember Armstrong’s walk on the moon, though, and my grandfather, product of 19th century Jewish Europe that he was,rebuking my excited mention of that, propounding to me that Scripture totally forbade space exploration….

    Kishnevi (1f8073)

  6. There really ought to be a plaque on the moon commemorating them.

    Bill Saracino (ad0096)

  7. @4. Right– weight was a critical factor as well. The 02 one gas system allowed for lighter components in design and it was used in Mercury and Gemini. ‘Go fever’ just got the better of them.

    @5. Good for Jake.

    @6. Their patch is there. And a plaque w/a small sculpted figure commemorating them and other fallen astronauts and cosmonauts was left on the moon by the Apollo 15 crew in July, 1971.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  8. cheaper, weaker

    The main driver was probably that it was lighter, which left a few pounds for other things that were also important. Hind sight is 20-20, but I doubt anyone thought “cheaper” was an overriding priority. They wouldn’t have built Stennis International if cost was a consideration. The design philosophy for the Space Shuttle is less defendable. They intentionally cut corners, designing for success, or something. And they didn’t seem to learn from their failures.

    BobStewartatHome (c24491)

  9. @8. Right. Weight was always key.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  10. “Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work.

    Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

    From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.

    When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

    – Gene Kranz

    Rusty Bill (93af8f)

  11. One hopes that if Gene Kranz were in Mission Control tomorrow -31 years, he would have called it off.

    I had just turned 3 when Apollo 1 happened so, for me, Challenger is the one I most remember.

    Captain Ned (d080c3)

  12. Too much weight is just as much a killer in space as too little. Every gram is incredibly expensive in terms of fuel–and carrying more fuel yields diminishing returns.(The Saturn V rockets’ mass at liftoff was mostly propellant.) Margins are unforgivably small.

    There’s a famous story, “The Cold Equations”, which illustrates the point. The example chosen is perhaps a bit flawed but it is easy enough to find alternative scenarios which lead to the same conclusion.

    Which always made me wonder what kind of societies would form if humans lived permanently in space.

    Gabriel Hanna (61adec)

  13. @11. He was- for Challenger, just not as a Flight Director.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  14. An oral history. With Alan Shepard. [YouTube] – runs 90 minutes.

    About the plaque, next best thing. What Does The Apollo 11 Moon Landing Site Look Like Today?
    Apollo 12, Apollo 14, and Apollo 17 sites in high detail. [all YouTube]

    papertiger (c8116c)

  15. The expanse tries to tackle that notion with some success, the beaters are very much a western paradigm.

    Heinlein’s or Bradbury for that matter, seems hard to envision in the near future.

    narciso (d1f714)

  16. An oral history. With Alan Shepard. [YouTube] – runs 90 minutes.

    About the plaque, next best thing. What Does The Apollo 11 Moon Landing Site Look Like Today?
    Apollo 12, Apollo 14, and Apollo 17 sites in high detail. [all YouTube]

    Very cool, but I wish they would zoom out so that we could see where the landing was in context, in relation to known landmarks on the Moon we can all see.

    Now I’m going to go Google that. The Internet will have it somewhere.

    Patterico (115b1f)

  17. @16. “Google Moon” does that pretty well.

    The LRO images referenced of the landing sites are quite good, especially when viewed from varying sun angles. The shadows highlighted instrumentation locales, footprints and rover tracks and verified five of the six flags remain standing.

    Google Moon produced a piece a few years ago which was presented at a conference in Australia. Neil Armstrong narrated it live as it was shown. It syncs up the on board film taken out the right window of the LM w/Google Moon imagery as seen from the left window producing superb record of the overall approach and landing, all the more enhanced with Armstrong narrating it. It’s an easy find on Google.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  18. Yes, thanks for that. They were all incredibly brave. A lot of people can summon courage once or twice if the going gets tough–but these men did their jobs year after year knowing the incredible risk.

    Amazing.

    Patricia (5fc097)

  19. I remember seeing a photo in the Los Angeles Times of a socket from a socket wrench found lodged in the innards of the capsule. Some technician knew he lost the socket but said nothing.

    LTMG (db4d8d)

  20. This was the low point for the US manned space program until the loss of Challenger in 1986. Two and a half years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had just returned from their successful walk on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 mission. A useful reminder that a lot can happen for the better in a short period of time when good people put their minds to it.

    M. Scott Eiland (046eb0)

  21. I was hardly aware of it. It doesn’t gte mentioned too much.

    I was not listening to the news on a daily basis at that timr. I only started the following April, on the Monday following the Friday of the military coup in Greece. Then, almost immmediately, theer started the buildup to the 1967 Arab Israeli war with Nasser making threats.

    Sammy Finkelman (dec35d)

  22. I remember that the AM radio top hits station I always listened to broke into the middle of a song to announce the news flash. They NEVER did that on that station–at least, not in my experience–until that evening. The song they interrupted was Ruby Tuesday by The Rolling Stones.

    CrankyBeach (736ed9)


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