The legacy of the Apollo fire of 1967 is preserved in history books and lengthy documentaries. The Apollo 1 Fire Heritage Images/Getty Images Apollo 1 command module The Apollo mission was slated to launch on February 21, 1967. Edit: forgot to reread, changed a few words. Hence the introduction of beta cloth into the Apollo program. I will be back there in the fall, and I'm going to request the file myself just to see if they are actually in there or whether they are still restricted, as I really hope they are. The more likely problem is that once the hoses became separated from the spacesuits, they could have distributed additional oxygen into the cabin to help keep the fire alive. The Apollo 1 fire was a difficult time for NASA and its astronauts, but the improvements in astronaut safety allowed the agency to complete the rest of the program with no further fatalities. Nasa flight director Chris Kraft was listening in when the fire broke out, and recalled the chilling moment in graphic detail in a recent interview. They were used to seeing machines under development and dealing with delays, and assessing the airplanes' readiness for flight. Same goes with the photographs and black channel tapes that were eventually retrieved by the National Archives. The "fallen astronaut" plaque and statue, as photographed on the lunar surface. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. America honored the fallen heroes in funerals with full military honors. Although a rookie in space, he had spent years supporting the Gemini program, most publicly as CapCom on Gemini 4. This may sound like an obvious mistake, but as Cox and Murray point out in their chronicle of the Apollo program, pure oxygen is necessary in orbit. At 6:20 PM, the decision was made to take a 10 minute break to try to sort out the communications issues before the emergency evacuation simulation. After years of war tours, Henry was in a stopover in Detroit, sometime around 1943. We pay for your stories! Video: Apollo 1 Remembered Report from the Archives. As for someday displaying Apollo 1 I really don't think it should be restored. Well it's hard to really hard to distinguish anything in those pics. All three astronauts were gone long before they sustained burns. The initial version of the spacecraft contained more than 600 switches, indicators, and computers, all of which had to be connected and powered by an extensive amount of wiring. If the fire reached it, it could ignite and explode. Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Apollo 1 was the first - and more would follow over the years. Years later, many at NASA believed their deaths were the one thing that saved the program, but in the wake of tragedy, the future of the fledgling Apollo program became uncertain. Veteran astronaut Gus Grissom, first American spacewalker Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee (left-to-right). Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. The real condition of the astronauts was not known to the public until later that evening and even then, no details were given other than the three astronauts were killed in a fire on Pad 34. Yet even amid this hectic schedule, engineers with the agency confidently conducted final design reviews on the Apollo capsule. The Apollo astronauts, most of them confident or even cocky test pilots, were accustomed to risk. While it has been last year since I last perused the Apollo 1 material, and it is possible that additional photos are now available, in the past the crew photos have been very well protected from release. THE doomed Apollo 1 crew's chilling last moments have been revealed by a renowned flight director who was listening in from Mission Control. New York, And before I'm asked, no, Spacecraft Films won't be releasing it in its entirety when we do Apollo 1. All had gone well, and no one thought the next days test, when the capsule would rely on its own internal power for the first time, would prove fatal. CNMN Collection The night of the fire, Henry was on his way up to the white room to assist on the final simulation, an emergency escape. The interior components could be stored as they are now with the spacecraft in the equipment room, but out of sight from everyone. We were sitting there, waiting for them to say what we knew they were going to say.". After inspection of the craft Nasa concluded that the fire broke out under astronautGus Grissom's seat. Happier days: in June 1966, the Apollo 1 crew practices water egress procedures with a full scale boilerplate model of the spacecraft. This is where the tangled bodies of Grissom and White were found still reaching for the hatch and fused together to the floor of the spacecraft and fused to the mattress pad. It would be nice, in my opinion, to get the first manned Apollo ship out of Langley's storage and somehow display the craft in the most delicate, tasteful, and appropriate means that could make everyone happy. For other inquiries, Contact Us. Image: NASA. Meanwhile, Don Babbitt, the pad leader for North American Aviationthe company that made the Apollo spacecraftmoved to pick up the phone and call for help. I feel that the Apollo 1 capsule (or what is left of it) could and should be tastefully displayed. To reach it, you had to take an elevator up 200 feet to level A8, where an open air platform connected the control tower to the white room. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. On his last visit home in Texas, Jan. 22, 1967, Grissomgrabbed a lemon off a citrus tree in the backyard. The Apollo 1 Command Module capsule 012 was impounded and studied after the accident and was then locked away in a storage facility at NASA Langley Research Center. NASA was forced to ship everything back to Langley. Source: This document taken from the Report of Apollo 204 Review Board. I don't agree that the inner pressure hull should be left out. Registered: Feb 2000. posted 10-25-2005 07:54 AM. When we removed the inner hatch, it would only go so far as it was lodged against Ed's body. Despite the best efforts of the ground crew, the three men inside perished. profile | register | preferences | faq | search. Kraft was asked by Grissom's widow to carry his coffin as one of the pallbearers at his funeral. Apollo Spacecraft 12 Command/Service Module is moved from H-134 to east stokes for mating to the Saturn Lunar Module Adapter No. The most glaring was that the atmosphere inside the cabin was pure oxygen. The hatch was closed at about 2:42pm andat6:30:54pm a volt anomaly was recorded. Regarding CM 014 being scrapped, when Spacecraft 014 was brought to the PIB, it was used to develop removal procedures to disassemble Spacecraft 012. All rights reserved. The ambitious human spaceflight program had been launched in response to President John F. Kennedy's goal, set in 1961, of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade. "He would talk with a fake lisp to try to make people feel sorry for him to sell more peanuts," my father, his oldest son Randy, told me recently. The investigation photographs were mostly in color and of better quality than any version of the "corpse" photos I could find. "Instead he made his way through the smoke and fire and began to help any way he could. January 27, 1967, was a Friday, the end of another grueling week ramping up to the Apollo I launch date, mere weeks away: February 21, 1967. The Apollo 1 Crew Training via nasa.gov A few weeks later, the Apollo disaster occurred and Baron began work on turning his 55-page report into a 500-page report excoriating NASA and NAA for the failures that led to the tragedy. Roger Chaffeewas a seasoned Navy lieutenant commander who joined the program in 1963. Then, in March of 1965, the first Gemini crewed mission launched, beginninga series of tests in low Earth orbit that would prove the technologies needed to go to the Moon. Theres an identifying patch on the left suit. However, I do find myself doubting that the hoses acted as blow torches, as it appears from photos that the hoses were largely un-burned. I always thought these were photos of the burned suits. There were also some design flaws that enabled the initial spark to ignite, and go unnoticed, and to incinerate nearby, highly-flammable materials, causing the fire to grow out of control in mere seconds. The flag draped coffin of Astronaut Virgil I. Grissom is escorted at Arlington Cemetery, Va., by his fellow astronauts, following the Apollo 1 fire that claimed his life. Once you have access to the archives, you can request any part of the fire file you want, even the most grim of grim, photos, which I have no interest in viewing. Posts: 2458From: U.K.Registered: Jul 2009. The condition of the suits could not be determined that night during the rescue attempts because of the short times that we were in the spacecraft. His wife, Betty, asked what he was going to do with it. That doesn't tell us where these pics came from tho. Needless to say they were just as upset with NASA as I was. Manufactured by North American Aviation, the Apollo 1 command module arrives at Kennedy Space Center in August 1966. Six rescuers tried to save the Apollo 1 astronauts from a suffocating, fiery death. Further,anexhibit honoring the Apollo 1 crew was opened at the Kennedy Space Center in 2017,displaying the hatchesthat were on the spacecraft. In other words as you walk under the launch pedestal dead center below you would be Apollo 1. This could have come from the fact that Gus was under his seat and Ed had slipped off the center seat and was down in the open space between the seat and airframe where he had slumped over. View our online Press Pack. When looking for the pictures of the Apollo 1 disaster, one tends to come up a lot (can be disturbing): http://i.imgur.com/KaYsb2h.jpg . The Apollo 1 crew commander,Virgil "Gus" Grissom, was an Air Force veteran of the Korean War. This is one thing, of all my years of reading and studying, I have never heard anything about. It was a memorial to the astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of space exploration, who paved the way for crews like Apollo 15 to visit the moon, and return safely back home. That having been said, I also (once) had something brought to me by mistake that was restricted. "He could have gotten back on the elevator and escaped to safety, knowing the dangers involved, but he didn't hesitate," the late Stephen Clemmons, a spacecraft mechanical technician who was also there that night, wrote in a 2004 essay. Does that mean the inner and outer shells were crushed like a junk automobile and sent to a smelter? As a matter of fact Ed White's handprint can clearly be seen permanently etched into the hatch. I've been through all the Apollo 1 photos at College Park. Heard that all of them pretty much looked like that Cosmonaut did. Any thoughts? And I heard a couple months ago that the Langley storage had being cleaned out, and everything shipped down to the Cape to be stored with the Challenger debris in the LC34 silos? The interior parts would not need to be installed. To see all content on The Sun, please use the Site Map. SpaceX Crew-6 astronaut launch: Live updates, Watch SpaceX launch 51 Starlink satellites to orbit on Tuesday, China's Zhurong rover reveals complex layers beneath the surface of Mars, We need more rules for space junk and moon bases, NASA and US officials say, NASA's SWOT water satellite suffers instrument shutdown in orbit, NASA's IBEX spacecraft not responding to commands after computer glitch during 15-year mission to study interstellar border, Your monthly guide to stargazing & space science, Subscribe today and save an extra 5% with code 'LOVE5', Issues delivered straight to your door or device. But that may be an impossibility -- at this time -- as some family members would not approve any such action, and not to mention mixed reactions within NASA/NASM as well. Any chance of finding its origin? Posts: 1405From: Huntington BeachRegistered: Feb 2000, Posts: 649From: Sacramento, CARegistered: Jun 2001. High angle view of Apollo Spacecraft 012 Command Module looking toward +Z axis during pre-shipping operations in south air lock of Systems Integration and Checkout Facility. I don't believe that it would have been scrapped at KSC because of the materials involved. This white spacesuit material can also be seen in the gutted interior cockpit shots right after the fire in the seat area. I also think your idea of putting it on display under the launch pedestal is worthy of consideration but I think preserving it outdoors in the Florida climate would take its toll. Henry Rogers, with wife Doreen and sons Randy and Tim (in arms), circa 1951. 679215 Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF. Exterior of Apollo/Saturn 204 spacecraft at White Room of Complex 34, Cape Kennedy, Fla. Most notably, the door was completely redesigned so that it would open in mere seconds when the crew needed to get out in a hurry. What I was told is that some of 014's parts were used as spares for the simulators, but most of the CM was scrapped. Remembering the Apollo 1 Crew NASA The prime crew members of NASA's first manned Apollo Space Flight are pictured during training in Florida on March 21, 1966. He joined the Navy in 1941 after graduating from high school, and binged on bananas in order to gain enough weight to enlist. There is still remnants of the spacesuits in the form of white powdered flakes on the spacecraft floor below the hatch. In the hurly burly world of NASA at the time, however, such a problem hardly stood out with the imperfect vehicle. The USS Arizona is on display, so why not the complete Apollo 1 spacecraft? After leaving NASA at the conclusion of the Apollo program in 1975, he enjoyed just four years of retirement before he died from pancreatic cancer. The limo was reconfigured by the Secret Service before it was retired. As for the spacecraft and related components being shipped to the Cape and buried in the silos, this was attempted once (and blocked). Engineering changes were still in progress as NASA prepared for the countdown test. But in my family home, in Canada, there's a memorial of our own: to Henry, and to the men he tried to save. Copyright 2020 collectSPACE.com All rights reserved. Heres how it works. "The hatch was loose but they couldn't get it out," Henry said in his testimony as part of the year-long investigation into the fire. When it was all over, spacecraft 014 was just a pile of parts, with the main shell intact. I think the same could be said for the conditions of LC-19 and LC-14 as well. Image: NASA "What I remember is that they were really. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! I find it unlikely that their bodies were not removed before these photos were taken, but its possible their faces could have imprinted on the glass somehowresting on the glass while ash accumulated around it, or something of that naturein a way that would have left an impression even after the remains were removed. In some places it was hot enough to melt stainless steel, and yet in other places blue velcro (Grissom's and Chaffee's side) was not damaged at all. Now getting a chance to fly after five years in the program, he said, "I think it will be a lot of fun.". I believe the entire spacecraft should be reassembled with the hatch on or off. Posts: 1292From: Rochester, NY, USARegistered: Mar 2002, Posts: 953From: South Bend, INRegistered: Apr 2002, Posts: 30From: Orlando, FloridaRegistered: Oct 2005. In the 51 years since, NASA has flown just one other crewed spacecraft: the Space Shuttle. He marched forward stoically, the way so many from that generation seemed to do, and continued to work on the Apollo program until its conclusion, in 1975. By signing up to the VICE newsletter you agree to receive electronic communications from VICE that may sometimes include advertisements or sponsored content. profile | register | preferences | faq | search, Posts: 43576From: Houston, TXRegistered: Nov 1999, Posts: 1332From: Staten Island, NYRegistered: Jun 2007, Posts: 1624From: Bethpage, N.Y.Registered: Jul 2002, Posts: 168From: LondonRegistered: Jan 2007. Visit our corporate site (opens in new tab). Fellow astronauts (left to right) Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Gordon Cooper, and John Young serve as escorts. 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