On the 27th of January, 1967, a disaster during a routine test launch at the Cape Kennedy
Air Force Station Launch Complex in Florida put America’s space program on hold.
Not only would the accident claim several lives, but it would also forever change the
way in which NASA operated, and attitudes towards space flight across the country.
Senator John F Kennedy became President of the United States in 1960.
A big part of his campaign had been focused on demonstrating America’s superiority over
the Soviet Union – including in the area of space exploration.
Now that he’d won the presidency, Kennedy had to deliver tangible results.
The drive to beat the Soviets became all the more urgent when, in 1961, Soviet astronaut
Yuri Gagarin became the first ever person to fly into space.
In that same year President Kennedy set out an ambitious goal: America would send a man
to the moon and return them safely to Earth… and all before the end of the 1960s.
It was down to NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – to figure out
exactly how this could be done.
From 1961 to 1966 the organisation worked hard to lay the groundwork for a moon landing.
The Mercury and Gemini series of missions tested how the human body would react in space,
developed technical procedures, and successfully launched several one- and two- person flights
into space.
By the beginning of 1967 NASA’s Apollo program was set to complete its first crewed mission.
At this point, there were only three years left until the deadline set by President Kennedy.
This mission, initially called Apollo Saturn-204, but later renamed to Apollo 1, was set to
orbit the Earth.
It was to be crewed by three of NASA’s astronauts: Commander Virgil “Gus” Grissom; Senior
Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B Chaffee.
Commander Gus Grissom had already made his mark as America’s second person in space
in 1960, as part of the earlier Mercury programme, and had also been the first NASA astronaut
to fly into space twice.
Pilot Ed White was also a veteran NASA crewmember.
Before joining the Apollo 1 project White had been the first American to walk in space
in 1965.
Apollo 1 was set be Pilot Roger Chaffee’s first space flight assignment.
However, he too had many years of experience supporting NASA’s space programs.
The Apollo 1 spacecraft was far larger and more complex than its predecessors, and in
the lead up to the planned launch on February 21st, 1967, there were several setbacks and
test failures.
The crew were painfully aware of these, and even joked about them by sending a photograph
of them praying to the mission’s office manager with the caption:
“It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your
head.”
Similarly, when Commander Grissom was asked about the possibility of failure on the mission
during an interview, he responded:
“You sort of have to put that out of your mind.
There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course; this
can happen on any flight; it can happen on the last one as well as the first one.
So, you just plan as best you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get
a well-trained crew and you go fly.”
On the morning of the 27th of January the three crewmembers set off to complete a routine
simulated launch test.
The men, fully clad in their spacesuits, made their way the tower at launch pad 34 and crossed
the catwalk to their command module.
The early stages of the launch test did not go smoothly.
At 1:00pm the three astronauts reported that their oxygen smelled foul – something which
put the countdown on hold whilst the issue was investigated.
In the end no cause for the smell could be found, and the test was resumed after a delay
of more than an hour.
As they would on launch day, the astronauts and their ground crew sealed the three hatch
locking system, and the craft was pressurised.
Once the crew were sealed inside, however, issues with the communication system became
evident.
At 5:40 pm the simulated countdown was put on hold again to investigate these issues.
Grissom could be heard saying, “How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk
between two or three buildings?"
By around 6:30 pm the countdown remained at t-minus 10 minutes.
The crew, exhausted after a long day of delays and communication failures, were running through
their checklists to pass the time when the module experienced a momentary power surge.
Seconds later, at 6:31pm, multiple calls of “fire” were heard from the three astronauts
on board.
Flames and smoke from the fire spilled over onto the launch pad as the rapidly rising
temperature and pressure within the module caused the outer hull to crack.
After just five seconds, the crew’s shouts of alarm became cries of pain.
Engineers watched as smoke filled the command module, obscuring the view offered by cameras
inside the module.
One of the last things they saw was White struggling to release the module’s complicated
hatch system from the inside.
Workers at the launch pad rushed to the scene to open the hatch from the outside, but were
forced back: the billowing smoke reduced visibility to zero… and when rescuers donned smoke
masks to help them breathe, they found that these vital pieces of equipment were faulty,
and didn’t fully exclude the toxic smoke.
Because of this, and because of the complexity of the locking mechanism, it took rescuers
five long minutes to access the capsule.
By the time they did, it was too late: all three astronauts within had passed away.
After the fire had been controlled, and the scene had been documented, Grissom, White,
and Chaffee’s remains were taken for examination by US Air Force pathologists.
All three men had died as a result of asphyxia.
Whilst their burns were thought to have been survivable, the fire had produced lethal amounts
of carbon monoxide and other toxic gases.
This catastrophic loss of life had a significant impact on the entire Apollo programme.
How could a routine, low-risk simulation have left three astronauts dead?
In the days following the fire, NASA’s flight director Gene Kranz told his control team:
“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 too ‘gung-ho’ about the
schedule, and we blocked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work.
Every element of the program was in trouble, and so were we.”
A review board, led by the director of NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Virginia, Floyd
L Thompson, was established to determine the cause of the fire.
After two months, they released a 3000-page report detailing their findings.
Whilst no definitive source of the fire was identified, it was determined that damaged
wiring underneath Grissom’s couch was a possible cause.
A spark from these wires in the pressurised, oxygen-rich environment of the command module
would have created a rapidly-spreading fire.
The fire was believed to have been further fuelled by the “larger-than-allowable”
amount of flammable materials covering the spacecraft’s interior: things like nylon
netting, foam pads and Velcro.
In addition to the possible cause of the fire, the review board found that the three-piece
hatch system used to seal the cabin was far too complex.
The innermost door took 90 seconds to open in ideal conditions, although the Apollo 1
crew had never managed to open it this quickly during their training.
With a fire in the module opening the hatch would have been all but impossible.
The fire placed the Apollo programme on pause, and the review’s findings led to many essential
changes to improve the programme’s safety.
The Block I spacecraft that had been used up until the fire was retired and replaced
with the improved Block II design.
This design included an outward-opening, quick release hatch to allow for easier exit in
an emergency.
The cabin’s atmosphere was also adjusted to be less oxygen-rich, and the flammable
materials were replaced with non-flammable and self-extinguishing alternatives.
Two years after the fire, on the 16th of July, 1969, the Apollo programme achieved the goal
of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
In reference to the Apollo 11 landing, Kranz, NASA’s flight director, would go on to say:
“The ultimate success of Apollo was made possible by the sacrifices of Grissom, White
and Chaffee.
The accident profoundly affected everyone in the program.
There was an unspoken promise on everyone’s part to the three astronauts that their deaths
would not be in vain.”
In memory of the men who lost their lives in the fire, the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left a mission patch marked with names of Grissom, White,
and Chaffee on the surface of the moon, where it remains to this day.