Five hours and thirty-one minutes. That’s how long astronauts Gus Grissom,
Ed White and Roger Chaffee had been inside the command module of Apollo Saturn-204
at Cape Kennedy Air Force Launch Complex 34 - or Pad 34 for short.
Five hours and thirty-one minutes, virtually lying down as they made
essential tests of the craft’s systems ahead of the launch that would make them the first
spacebound crew of a mission in the Apollo program - the program that would take man to the Moon.
Five hours and thirty-one minutes before the unthinkable happened.
Before one of the three crew uttered the terrifying words: “Fire in the cockpit”.
Thirty seconds. That’s all the time it took for Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, to die.
And it all could have been avoided,
but for several small ironies that led to this tragic moment.
218 feet above the ground, the three astronauts climbed into the command module at 18:00 hours
GMT on 27th January, 1967. They were less than a month away from their scheduled launch into space.
It would have been the first manned mission in the Apollo program, NASA’s final attempt to fulfil
President John F. Kennedy’s ambitious pledge to land an American on the Moon before 1970.
Crew commander Virgil "Gus" Grissom was a giant of the NASA space program.
As one of NASA’s first ever astronauts, the Mercury Seven, he became the second American
to enter space, and the second American to fly in space twice. He then successfully commanded
the first flight of the Gemini program, and was chosen to do the same for the Apollo program.
The mission’s senior pilot, Ed White, was the first American to make a spacewalk,
and this would have been his second journey into space.
Roger Chaffee had been part of the space program for five years,
and this would have been his first time in outer space.
The test itself was an essential but ordinary
“plugs-out” test - a dress rehearsal to see if the command module systems would
perform on internal power in simulated conditions of flight in outer space.
Every component of every subsystem had already been tested whilst the command module was being
assembled. Then, once constructed, all spacecraft subsystems had been tested multiple times.
Then alignment, subsystems and system verification and functional tests were all carried out when
the module was attached to the service module. Then the backup crew - the three men prepared
to replace Grissom, White and Chaffee if one or all of them fell ill or had an accident - tested
the module again, several times. Throughout all these months of checks, malfunctions were noted
and fixed until engineers and astronauts alike were satisfied the spacecraft was ready to fly.
January 21st, 1967 was the final and most important test. But, to a certain extent,
it was a formality.
Above all, it was considered safe. Although it was taking place high up on Pad 34,
there was no fuel in the rockets and no pyrotechnics. And they’d done this check
for every spacecraft NASA had ever launched, it was routine. Nothing was expected to go wrong.
Yet there were problems immediately. After climbing inside, Gus connected his suit to
the craft’s oxygen supply, and noticed what he described as a “sour smell”. They had to
stop the test to sample the oxygen and figure out the problem. It took an hour to fix. During
this pause, the astronauts discussed stopping the test altogether, but decided to continue.
Next, the master alarm kept going off.
It kept being triggered by high oxygen flow, but the exact reason was never resolved.
Then the communication problems began. At first, Grissom was unable to clearly
speak to the control room on the ground. The crew made adjustments and seemed to fix it.
But then the faulty comms extended to include the operations building and the blockhouse at Pad 34.
At one point Grissom shouted:
"How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?"
They were forced to stop the test at 22:40 GMT to troubleshoot the problem. It turned out to
be a live microphone in the cabin that couldn’t be turned off by the crew. They resumed the test but
the comms issue resurfaced and they stopped again at 23:20 GMT to fix it. Eleven minutes later,
out of nowhere, one of the crew, probably Chaffee, calmly said “Fire, I smell fire.”
Two seconds later, Ed White declared, “Fire in the cockpit.”
Those were the last words heard from the crew. We don’t know what happened next,
but data from the electrocardiogram, the navigation controls’ motion sensors,
and some brushing noises from the pilot’s microphone, show that from 23:30:21 GMT, the
crew started moving around, their activity getting more intense until they suddenly stopped moving.
Then at 23:31:19 GMT, the command module ruptured.
Three seconds later, at 23:31:22, all voice and data transmission ended. The
external camera pointed at the window of the hatch revealed flames spread through
the module and burst out of the rupture, spewing thick black smoke into the tower.
This intense cloud of smoke and flame prevented personnel getting close to put out the fire
or let the astronauts out. Fire crews arrived in 8 minutes, and Gus Grissom,
Ed White and Roger Chaffee’s bodies were found, utterly lifeless.
The flash fire raised the temperature inside to over 537 degrees Celsius - as hot as the
industrial ovens used to create the parts that go into the craft. But the toxic fumes from
the combusting materials knocked out the crew within seconds. The autopsies concluded that
once unconscious, resuscitation was impossible. Death came quickly, from carbon monoxide asphyxia.
The position of the bodies suggest that during those frantic few seconds of movement picked
up by the sensor, the crew were carrying out the standard procedure for emergency escape.
In ideal conditions, this procedure took at least
90 seconds, but in truth this time was never achieved in any practice.
Grissom had to lower White's headrest so White could reach up and behind his left shoulder
to actuate a ratchet-type device for egress.
The problem was the hatch. Or rather, the hatches.
Though there was one escape point, it consisted of three hatches.
The middle and innermost hatches could only open inwards and were held closed by around 28
latches which had to be operated by ratchets. The outermost hatch was part of the ship’s shield and
was designed to be jettisoned after launch before entering Earth’s orbital operation.
It took the emergency crews five minutes to open the hatches from the outside.
Their job was made harder because the pressure difference between
the atmosphere outside and inside the module, intended to mimic the pressure differential in
outer space, sealed the door tight and made it virtually impossible to open.
But why was the hatch so difficult to open?
After all, the original Mercury spacecraft had a simple hatch with explosive bolts
that could be triggered to shoot off the door for an emergency evacuation.
So why didn’t Apollo have the same type of hatch?
The answer is because of Gus Grissom.
The Space Race began after the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in
1957. The following year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was established
and Project Mercury began - its goal to put the first Americans into outer space.
In 1959, seven men were chosen for this special task, including Gus Grissom.
The first Project Mercury capsules required the pilot to exit through the top hatch
by squeezing through the antenna compartment after manually removing a small pressure bulkhead.
The astronauts quite rightly felt this wasn’t sufficient for a speedy exit in case of emergency.
So they insisted on a side hatch fitted with explosive bolts
that could be triggered from both inside and outside the capsule.
On July 21st, 1961, the first craft with an explosive hatch was launched - its pilot,
Gus Grissom. The mission was a total success until after splashdown.
Liberty Bell 7 touched down in the North Atlantic Ocean as planned, but before the
recovery helicopter could secure the capsule, the hatch blew open and Grissom swiftly climbed out.
The capsule sank to the bottom of the sea - the only craft lost by NASA on a successful mission.
Grissom himself barely avoided drowning, but the damage was done.
The loss of the capsule was an embarrassment to the nation, and speculation ran rampant that
Grissom had blown the hatch in a fit of panic after his first taste of the great unknown.
Naturally, Grissom insisted that the hatch had blown on its own and his fellow astronauts
believed him. But despite an investigation and even the recovery of the capsule in 1999,
there is no way of knowing exactly what happened.
Regardless, the incident was enough to persuade NASA to redesign the hatch yet
again to remove the explosive bolts and make the pilot open it manually.
This manual hatch was never used on a Mercury craft because by the time it was ready,
Project Gemini was underway. This two-man capsule took inspiration from fighter jets and installed
ejection seats for an emergency exit. But, as NASA’s Director of Engineering and Development,
Maxime Faget, said, “The best thing about Gemini was that they never had to make an escape.”
The ejection seats were deeply flawed. They could only be used for the first 40 seconds after
liftoff, after which the rocket was travelling too fast for the pilots to safely eject.
More than that, NASA never tested the ejection seats under flight conditions. In particular,
they never tested the rocket-propelled seats while the cabin was filled with pure oxygen,
as it was during every Gemini space flight.
Pyrotechnics and oxygen? As astronaut Wally Schirra put it, had they had to
eject during a mission, you wouldn’t have seen two astronauts, you would have seen two Roman candles.
And brings us onto the biggest mistake made on
Apollo 1. The capsule was filled with a high pressure, 100% oxygen atmosphere. After over
five hours of testing, everything inside the craft was soaked with oxygen molecules,
almost ensuring a fatal flash fire would occur at the slightest spark.
And that’s what NASA’s special review board concluded caused the fire. Their report,
finished in April 1967, said the accident most probably happened because of a stray
spark from a faulty wire - but the deadly fire only happened because of
“A sealed cabin, pressurized with an oxygen atmosphere…
an extensive distribution of combustible materials in the cabin… inadequate provisions
for the crew to escape… [and] inadequate provisions for rescue or medical assistance.”
NASA thought it was a perfectly safe, routine test.
But the report unsurprisingly concluded that, “The test conditions were extremely hazardous...
Adequate safety precautions were neither established nor observed for this test.”
Moreover, “No procedures for this type of emergency had been
established either for the crew or for the spacecraft pad work team.”
In short, NASA never even considered the possibility of a fire in the capsule.
How had NASA, the best-funded and most advanced collection of engineering minds ever assembled,
made such a huge mistake?
The inevitable Senate Hearings reported that “No single person bears all of the responsibility for
the Apollo 204 accident. It happened because many people made the mistake of failing to recognize a
hazardous situation…. [NASA’s] long history of successes in testing and launching space
vehicles with pure oxygen environments... led to overconfidence and complacency.”
NASA had fallen victim to “perceptual blindness”.
According to cognitive scientists, this is the phenomenon where we can fail to
see the startlingly obvious even though we’re doing our utmost to focus on the task at hand.
In this case, the scientists and engineers behind the space program
were so distracted by the unprecedented challenges of travelling through space,
they forgot the age-old risk of a fire on the ground.
It was a long 18 months of investigation,
analysis and redesigning before the next manned mission to space.
The wiring was made safer, combustible materials inside the capsule were removed,
and those fewer flammable materials were placed further apart from each other,
and from potential sources of ignition. They stopped using a pure oxygen atmosphere,
mixing the gas with nitrogen to reduce the amount of fuel for a fire.
Most importantly, the hatch was drastically redesigned. The inner and middle hatches
were combined into one. Instead of opening inwards, it opened outwards.
Instead of requiring a manual ratchet to open the latches, the pilot would pump a handle to
activate a pressurized nitrogen cylinder that unlocked the door. It didn’t have explosive bolts,
but it could be opened in five seconds, allowing the astronauts to get out within 30 seconds.
History shows that, although the journey to the Moon had more bumps along the way,
no more astronauts were lost to the Apollo program. On July 20th,
1969 - two and a half years after the tragic fire and exactly 8 years after Gus Grissom
nearly drowned in the Atlantic - NASA delivered on JFK’s promise to land a man on the Moon.
Yet it’s quite possible that - even though the program was
delayed to allow for redesigning the Apollo craft and safety procedures - if Gus Grissom,
Ed White and Roger Chaffee hadn’t died, JFK’s promise would have been broken.
The Senate report stated that, “...had there been no disaster, important shortcomings in management,
scheduling, design, production, and quality control might never have come to light… Three
courageous men lost their lives in this tragic accident. They died in the service of their
country. Because of their deaths, manned space flight will be safer for those who follow them.”
In his autobiography, chief astronaut Deke Slayton wrote that
his first choice for the first man on the Moon was not Neil Armstrong,
but Gus Grissom. “Had Gus been alive, as a Mercury astronaut he would have taken the step.”
We will never know exactly why the fire started.
It was probably a stray spark in the wiring near Gus Grissom. He was the first to burn,
and may have been the first to die. He was one of the men who insisted on a fast release explosive
hatch on the first manned space flights. He was a major reason those hatches were abandoned.
And that may be why he, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were unable to escape.
But ironically, by giving their lives to the lofty goal of putting men on the Moon,
they may have inadvertently guaranteed that NASA achieved that goal not once,
but twice, before the end of 1969. NASA got its act together, overcame its perceptual blindness.
America won the Space Race. The tragedy of 1967 may be why.
Thanks for sticking with me throughout this rather depressing story and especially to
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