Martha Chaffee was in her kitchen, making hot dogs for the kids’ dinner, when she saw Michael Collins at the front door; in that moment she realized she was a widow. The astronauts and their families formed a small, tight group in the neighborhood—“Togethersville,” they called it—and that evening a few of the wives were already gathering in the living room of the Chaffees’ yellow-brick house on Barbuda Lane. Someone had mentioned an accident, but at first there seemed no reason for Martha to worry: the cars pulling up on the street outside could be part of the routine Friday-evening exodus from work. Besides, although Martha’s husband, Roger, was away, training down at Cape Canaveral, he wasn’t even scheduled to fly. Yet now Collins was standing on her doorstep, solemn and alone. There could be only one explanation.
“I know, Mike,” she said. “But you’ve got to tell me.”
She turned, and Collins followed her silently down the narrow hallway. In the den where her two children were watching the TV, someone reached over to turn it off before the news bulletins began. It was January 27, 1967.
At thirty-one, Roger Chaffee was the youngest and most inexperienced of the three astronauts assigned to the crew of Apollo 1—NASA’s first manned test flight in the new rocket program intended to eventually land men on the moon. Dark-haired and good-looking, Chaffee had been an astronaut for a little more than three years, and had yet to fly in space. His rookie status was exaggerated by his baby face, his slight stature, and his archetypal straight-arrow background: a Boy Scout whose obsession with flight started early, building model planes with his barnstorming pilot father; a punctilious Navy aviator with a degree in aeronautical engineering from Purdue, where he had met Martha, the college homecoming queen; a devoted husband who drew up the blueprints for their home in Houston, and liked to relax by building his own rifles and making ammunition, which he carried on weekend hunting trips. The mission commander, veteran astronaut Gus Grissom—the second American in space, a short, plainspoken forty-year-old test pilot with a reputation for drinking and skirt-chasing—told reporters that Chaffee was “a great boy”; over the months they spent training together, the younger man showed his admiration for his commander by adopting parts of Grissom’s distinctive body language and salty vocabulary, an affectation so incongruous that Chaffee’s friends often teased him about it. The final member of the crew was the senior pilot, Ed White, another veteran astronaut and a lithe athlete whose image had been stamped on the consciousness of the nation when he became the first American to make a space walk, leaving the capsule of Gemini IV to drift high over the Pacific Ocean, tethered only by a gilded umbilical cord feeding him oxygen.
By the time Chaffee, White, and Grissom learned of their assignment to fly Apollo 1—in which they planned to spend up to fourteen days in Earth orbit, giving them time to check out the many complex new systems developed to take later missions to the moon and back—the space race with the Soviet Union was entering a white-knuckle phase. At the moment in May 1961 when President Kennedy had committed the country to land an American on the moon before the end of the decade, the recently established National Aeronautics and Space Administration had not yet managed to put a human being into Earth orbit, but instead suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of the Soviets. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space just the month before.
But over the next five years, a growing team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, engaged in a project of experimental engineering on a scale nearly unprecedented in history, achieved a series of developmental leaps that enabled NASA to close the gap with the Soviet program: in February 1962 John Glenn became the first American in orbit, helping to make him and the other six astronauts of the Mercury program into national heroes; in June 1965, Ed White embarked on his spectacular space walk, and later that year the crews of Gemini VI and Gemini VII made the first successful orbital rendezvous. In June 1966, Surveyor 1, a three-legged robot spacecraft, made the first American controlled landing on the lunar surface and transmitted more than eleven thousand photographs back to Mission Control in Houston. The prospect of eventually following Surveyor with a manned mission no longer seemed entirely out of reach. Even so, the obstacles to sending men to walk on the moon and then returning them safely to Earth remained daunting. Although Kennedy’s final deadline to do so lay just three years away, the technology necessary to accomplish the task—the massive Saturn V rockets, the Apollo capsules that would carry the three-man crew across 250,000 miles of deep space to their destination, and the delicate, insect-like lander intended to deliver two of them to the lunar surface—was still being designed and built. And the process was proving fraught with problems.
As the summer of 1966 drew to a close, Chaffee, Grissom, and White flew to California to attend a conference with senior NASA engineers and North American Aviation, the contractor responsible for building their spacecraft—and one of thousands of private corporations hired by the government to design and manufacture the hardware for the lunar program. The meeting was held in a low fieldstone building amid the sprawling complex of hangars and industrial spaces at the company’s Downey plant, ten miles east of Los Angeles International Airport. Formally known as the Customer Acceptance Readiness Review, the conference was intended to be the final step before North American shipped the crew’s Apollo capsule to Florida for handover to NASA. Work had been slow, and the contractor’s final testing of the capsule wasn’t complete. But Joe Shea, who ran the Apollo spacecraft program, told everyone that he intended to go through with the review anyway. Shea—arrogant, charismatic, and a gifted systems engineer—had been hired years earlier as an enforcer to help integrate the numerous moving parts of the moon program, someone who could both handle the demands of its management and understand the finest details of its experimental technology. With his compulsion for puns, his trademark red socks, and his relentless dedication to the job, Shea had won the admiration of his staff and built a public profile as a spokesman for NASA that would soon approach that of the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, father of the US space program.
The list of enduring problems with Chaffee, Grissom, and White’s capsule, known as Spacecraft 012, was long, and the crew had become intimately familiar with its deficiencies during previous visits to the Downey plant. Many of the astronauts were not merely skilled pilots, but technicians with expertise and advanced qualifications in aeronautical engineering and celestial mechanics. From the very beginning, they recognized that they were placing their lives in the hands of government contractors who were often inventing the technology of space travel as they went along. When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”
Now all of the Apollo astronauts were involved in helping devise design changes and revisions to the equipment that would carry them toward the moon. Gus Grissom rarely let Spacecraft 012 out of his sight: during all of 1966, Grissom’s son Mark reckoned he spent no more than eighteen days at home with his family. And, in private, the Apollo 1 commander was deeply concerned by what he saw at Downey: poor design and shoddy workmanship plagued the capsule. To the astronauts, half the staff at the California plant seemed diligent and careful—but the other half were clueless and incompetent. Roger Chaffee challenged the North American engineers over the faults he found, and sketched out possible solutions on the factory floor. But some of the most serious failings of the spacecraft were persistent and intractable. The environmental control system—which supplied oxygen and maintained the temperature inside the capsule—was prone to leaks of ethylene glycol solution, and had already caught fire in one test. The thick bundles of electrical wiring that snaked through the interior of the spacecraft were badly installed, and their insulation often frayed, increasing the risk of sparks and short circuits in the cabin. The main hatch was a clumsy, three-layer design that opened inward into the cramped cockpit, and—unlike those on the earlier Mercury and Gemini capsules—could not be jettisoned in an emergency by explosive charges. Instead, it required Ed White, lying prone in the middle of the three crew couches, to reach behind his head and use a ratchet handle to operate a mechanism securing the six latches holding it shut. Even under ideal circumstances, it would take three men between forty and seventy seconds to open the hatches and get out of the spacecraft. Almost without exception, the Apollo astronauts detested the hatch design, and had lobbied to have it replaced with one that could be quickly and easily opened from the inside. Joe Shea refused. “Too much money and not enough time,” he told them.
Leading the Acceptance Readiness Review meeting for Spacecraft 012—surrounded at the conference table by the crew, the North American executives, and colleagues from NASA including spacecraft designer Max Faget, Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft, and more than a dozen officials from Houston—Shea was upbeat and lighthearted. Talk was punctuated by laughter and wisecracks. The major faults with the spacecraft were not on the agenda, and the discussion focused mainly on a succession of minor glitches or issues that had been discussed before. Nevertheless, the meeting wound on for six hours. At one point late in the day, their attention turned to the question of flammable materials in the cockpit. Since the beginning of the space program, astronauts had used nylon netting and strips of Velcro glued to the walls of the spacecraft to corral checklists and pieces of equipment that might otherwise fall beneath their couches during tests, or float around in zero gravity. And the cabin of Spacecraft 012 was no exception: it was festooned with Velcro installed at the request of Grissom, White, and Chaffee. But all of it was flammable. This was a long-standing concern for the NASA engineers not just because of the risks of a fire breaking out in space—they still had no idea how flames might behave in zero gravity, and attempts to develop a workable fire extinguisher for use in orbit had come to nothing—but because the cockpit atmosphere was composed of pure oxygen, pressurized at launch to more than sixteen pounds per square inch.
Pure oxygen—rather than a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen similar to air—had been used in space capsules by NASA since the Mercury days, for both engineering and medical reasons. The designers regarded the equipment necessary to create a mixed-gas environment as too heavy and complex to carry into space, and flight surgeons feared that an astronaut breathing nitrogen and oxygen might suffer decompression sickness—the “bends”—if the capsule lost cabin pressure in orbit. And although in pure oxygen, fire spreads more quickly and burns more fiercely than in air, at first the risks seemed manageable. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that the one-man Mercury capsules were so small that any fire starting inside would burn up the available oxygen supply in a few seconds and then extinguish itself. But the three-man Apollo cabin was almost six times larger than the Mercury capsule, with a corresponding increase in the danger of fire. So, at first, the contractors at North American planned to use a mixed-gas atmosphere. However, NASA’s then head of the spacecraft program disagreed, insisting once again on pure oxygen, leading to a heated meeting in which he confronted his opposite number at North American. The two managers began shouting at each other until, at last, the NASA official ended the argument. “You are the contractor,” he said. “You do as you’re told. Period.”
The agency understood the potential consequences of this decision. In July 1963, an internal NASA document reported that, in tests of the pure-oxygen atmosphere, “[i]t has been observed that a number of otherwise nonflammable materials, even human skin, will burst into flame.” But in the complex web of engineering compromises necessary to build a capsule light and practical enough to carry three men to the moon, on an almost impossible deadline, but without unduly endangering the lives of the crew, this was deemed an “acceptable risk.” The contingency plan outlined in the 1963 document was simple: “Fires in the spacecraft must be precluded at all costs.”
The regulations governing flammable materials in the cockpit of Apollo 1 were strict: none were permitted within four inches of any potential source of ignition, including the approximately fifteen miles of problematic wiring, 640 switches, indicators, computer controls, and circuit breakers that filled the capsule. So when the Readiness Review meeting in Downey considered the question, Joe Shea engaged in a few minutes of back-and-forth with the North American engineers before repeating the rules and issuing an instruction: “Walk through the goddamned spacecraft,” he said—and clean up all the Velcro and anything else that might feed a potential fire. A minor issue, easily addressed.
Finally, as the review wound down, Gus Grissom asked for the floor, and from a large envelope pulled two prints of a photograph. It showed him, Chaffee, and White sitting at a small table on which rested a scale model of the Apollo capsule. Facing it, the three astronauts had bowed their heads and pressed their hands together, as if in prayer, offering supplication to a higher power. Grissom handed one print as a souvenir to the executive in charge of North American’s Space Division. “We have one for Joe Shea also,” Grissom said. “Joe advised us to practice our backup procedures religiously, so here we are practicing.”
Laughter filled the room. Grissom handed the picture down the table to Shea, who saw that the three astronauts had each signed the print, and added a personal inscription: “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”
At the outset of 1967, Joe Shea was on the verge of becoming a celebrity. He was already in demand as a public speaker, and hobnobbing with CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite. Now the editors of Time magazine were preparing a cover story on him timed to coincide with the launch of the first manned Apollo mission. But the spacecraft was still far from ready. It had arrived in Cape Canaveral from the North American plant in Downey on schedule, but half finished: accompanied by spare parts and uninstalled hardware, and a roster of tests that should have been conducted in California, but remained incomplete. The environmental control system continued to cause problems, threatening a major launch delay. The service module, which contained the spacecraft’s main engine, was damaged during testing. And the Velcro and nylon netting added to the cabin by the astronauts had not been removed as Shea had instructed; instead, there was more of it than ever in the cockpit.
In early October, Shea had received a letter from Hilliard Paige, a senior executive at the Missile and Space Division of General Electric, advising NASA on spacecraft safety issues. Paige had recently witnessed a combustion test conducted by one of his staff on samples of Velcro in a pure-oxygen environment. He had watched, aghast, as the material ignited in a flash and was abruptly consumed by flames. The technician told Paige that he had tried bringing the issue to NASA, but had found it hard to get their attention. Paige made his fears explicit: “I do not think it technically prudent to be unduly influenced by the ground and flight success history of Mercury and Gemini under a 100 percent oxygen environment,” he wrote. “The first fire in a spacecraft may well be fatal.”
In response, Shea delegated the issue to a deputy, who, held up by the thicket of other problems with the program, took seven weeks to respond, but finally assured his boss that newly completed risk assessments indicated they had little to worry about. Shea sent Paige a letter reassuring the GE executive that NASA engineers were working on the issue, and enclosed a copy of the new assessment. But in a handwritten postscript Shea revealed his own concerns. “The problem is sticky,” he wrote. “We think we have enough margin to keep fire from starting—if one ever does, we do have problems.”
At the same time, Gus Grissom had become increasingly angry about the condition of Spacecraft 012—and the flight simulator on which he and the crew were supposed to be training—as the launch date neared. He worried that both his crew and the technicians were distracted, in too much of a hurry to get off the ground, and that fundamental safety issues were being neglected. And it was growing obvious to almost everyone involved that the Apollo 1 vehicle was simply not in a state to fly: if Spacecraft 012 were a horse, one former NASA official observed, it would have been shot. Yet Grissom felt his warnings were going unheard. The NASA managers and astronauts alike were in the grip of what they would later recognize as “ ‘Go’ Fever”—the desperate drive to push on toward a launch and keep to the schedule, regardless of the problems, in the belief that if they just kept going they could fix all the faults along the way. This seat-of-the-pants approach had worked so far, with the triumphs of the Mercury and Gemini programs, which—despite some close calls—had progressed without a single serious accident. And now, with the deadline for a successful moon landing so close, “ ‘Go’ Fever” was more virulent than ever. When Grissom’s friend and fellow astronaut John Young asked the mission commander why he didn’t complain more stridently about the poor wiring inside the Apollo capsule, Grissom was blunt: “If I say anything about it, they’ll fire me.”
At the end of November 1966, the persistent problems with the spacecraft pushed back the expected launch date of Apollo 1 into the new year, and NASA announced that the schedule of subsequent flights was sliding back; one mission was canceled altogether. But in public, Grissom stifled his worries about Apollo’s first manned flight. In a round of end-of-year TV interviews intended by NASA to help build public support for the space program, he projected confidence that the mission was on track; only when answering a question about what would constitute a successful flight did he hint at his true feelings: “As far as we’re concerned, it’s success if all three of us get back,” he said. Most of those listening assumed he was joking.
With Christmas approaching, the three men returned to their families in Houston. Roger Chaffee learned that the ingenious illuminated display he had created in his front yard—topped with Santa and his reindeer galloping over the roof of the house—had won first prize in the Nassau Bay Garden Club competition for holiday decorations. On Christmas Day, he gave Martha a special Apollo pin he and his crewmates had designed to commemorate their flight. The astronauts had intended to take the pins on their mission and hand one over to each of their wives as a surprise on their return from space. But the three men had grown impatient, and made them Christmas gifts instead. By the new year, they had devised new mementos to carry into orbit for their wives: three gold charms, tiny replicas of the Apollo 1 spacecraft, each made unique by the setting of a single diamond representing the position the astronauts would occupy in the capsule: Grissom on the left; White in the center; and Chaffee on the right.
It was shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon on January 27 when the three astronauts stepped out of the elevator onto the scarlet-painted gantry of Pad 34 for a practice countdown, the full dress rehearsal of the launch of Apollo 1 known as the “plugs-out test.” Almost two hundred feet below them, the newly completed access roads of the sprawling Cape Canaveral Launch Complex stretched back toward the domed concrete Launch Control Blockhouse and, beyond that, to the ocean. The Atlantic glittered turquoise in the hard Florida light.
NASA officials had chosen the site as their gateway to the moon less than six years earlier, and since then the Kennedy Space Center had risen from the wilderness with prodigious speed. While the launch gantries were isolated on the Cape that gave the area its nickname—a narrow finger of sandy beaches and windblown scrub extending south into the ocean for thirty-four miles—most of the Kennedy facilities lay to the west, between the Banana and Indian Rivers, on the salt marshes of Merritt Island. The buildings from which the Apollo astronauts and their spacecraft would prepare to leave on the lunar voyage—the Operations and Checkout Building, with its crew dormitory and suiting-up room; the Vehicle Assembly Building in which the Saturn rockets would be stacked together; and the angular, modernist Launch Control Center in its shadow—had been constructed amid eighty-eight thousand acres of mosquito-infested wetland and alligator-filled lagoons. Remote and inhospitable, the location had been selected with care by agency engineers: from the coastal launchpads, their spacecraft would fly east out over the Atlantic, away from populated areas; and its proximity to the equator meant that the rotation of the Earth would give the massive rockets a boost to escape gravity. But nature had surrendered only reluctantly to the advance of the Space Age: it took the Army Corps of Engineers three years and stupendous quantities of insecticide to render the area “biologically unfit” for the mosquito; the foundations of the monumental Vehicle Assembly Building, which was large enough to contain the Great Pyramid of Cheops, were anchored by thousands of steel tubes driven into bedrock 160 feet beneath the surface of the island, to stabilize the boxlike structure in high winds. And the subtropical weather could be unpredictable, bringing violent thunderstorms in the summer, occasional hurricanes, and banks of fog that shut down launchpads and runways with little warning in the winter. But today, the weather was perfect for the test: clear, warm, and bright, with unlimited visibility.
Sealed in white nylon pressure suits, Grissom, White, and Chaffee breathed pure oxygen from the environmental control packs they carried in their hands like luggage, connected to their helmets by flexible hoses. As they had suited up that morning, the astronauts had seemed tense and reserved. Grissom was preoccupied with failures in the spacecraft communications system, and had suggested that Joe Shea join them inside the capsule for the duration of the test so he could experience for himself how bad things had become. But the North American Aviation technicians had proved unable to add an extra audio headset inside Spacecraft 012, and there was no way Shea was prepared to spend the entire afternoon crouched in the cramped space at Grissom’s feet without being able to hear what was going on. So he planned to fly back to Houston that afternoon instead, promising to go over the issue with Grissom later, in the simulator. Having completed one more interview with a reporter working on the Time story, Shea headed to the Melbourne airport.
The plugs-out test was a demanding and complex rehearsal, conducted on a huge scale. It would involve not just the astronauts and the pad support staff at Cape Canaveral, but the coordinated work of thousands of engineers and contractors behind the consoles there and almost nine hundred miles away, back at Mission Control in Houston. A full simulation of the launch of Apollo 1—from the initial powering up of its computers and guidance systems to the moment it reached orbit—the test was designed to check that each one of the systems of the spacecraft and its booster worked as intended. It would be as close to the experience of the real mission as possible without actually igniting the engines. In the weeks preceding the simulation, the booster—the giant Saturn 1B rocket—had been rolled slowly out to the launchpad, and the spacecraft lifted on top of it by crane. Once the astronauts were inside the capsule, the countdown would proceed through the moment their vehicle began running under its own power and, a few minutes later, as the clock reached zero, the pad crew would pull out the final umbilical lines connecting Apollo 1 to the gantry, just as the automatic systems would do at the instant of launch. Then, at the moment the rocket would clear the tower, Mission Control would take over to continue the simulated flight to orbit. To conclude the simulation, Gus Grissom planned to practice an emergency escape from the capsule: there was so much still needed to do if they were to meet the February launch date that the commander had to squeeze in as much preparation as possible. Despite its complexity, few at NASA regarded the test as dangerous. The Saturn booster would not be fueled with any of its volatile propellant, and the same routine had been a landmark in the progress of all previous manned launches—and had always passed off without incident. The fire rescue team that would be stationed near the pad for the real launch would not be part of the simulation.
It took more than an hour for the pad crew to seal the awkward hatches of Spacecraft 012, and, eventually, the technicians had to pound one of them closed. Inside, the cabin formed a truncated cube within the conical command module. The astronauts’ adjustable couches were crammed into an eight-foot square, hemmed in on three sides by instrument panels and bulkhead equipment bays. The canvas couches allowed the men to lie on their backs for launch, gazing upward at the banks of switches and dials within easy reach above them, but which created a low, angled ceiling that made it impossible to stand; the hatch lay behind their heads. At around 2:45 p.m., the pad team reported that Grissom, White, and Chaffee were locked inside the capsule. The atmosphere was purged with pure oxygen and increased to a pressure of 16.7 pounds per square inch, forcing the inner hatch against its sills like the cork in a champagne bottle.
Almost immediately, things began to go wrong. There were more problems with the environmental control system, triggering the master alarm, and, just as Grissom had feared, radio communication between the capsule and the ground controllers continued to break down. As the astronauts ran though their checklists and threw switches, they struggled to hear the controllers’ instructions. Hours went by, and the three men began to troubleshoot the radio interference, but the countdown continued even as the problems grew worse. At one point, local air traffic control chatter began to bleed into the exchanges the three men were having with the ground. At 6:20 p.m., with just ten minutes to go before the simulated launch time, the controllers put the countdown on hold, and Grissom began swapping out pieces of equipment to isolate the fault. By 6:30 p.m., the astronauts had spent more than five hours in the malfunctioning capsule, and launch control was preparing to resume the countdown. But Grissom was seething. “How are we going to get to the moon,” he asked over the static, “if we can’t talk between three buildings?”
From the seat beside him, Ed White cut in to tell him the controllers couldn’t hear a thing he was saying.
“Jee-sus Christ!” Grissom said in exasperation.
For the next thirty seconds, there was silence. From inside the spacecraft, the instruments detected signs of motion, and scratching noises came from Grissom’s open microphone as he apparently moved around on his couch. Then the telemetry registered a sudden voltage surge within the capsule, and the sensors attached to Ed White’s chest recorded a rise in his pulse and respiration rates. At a few seconds after 6:31 p.m., ground controllers in Cape Canaveral and Houston were startled by a single, clipped exclamation coming over the VHF channel named Black-3. Grissom, or perhaps Chaffee, shouted, “Hey!”
Two seconds later, Chaffee—whose responsibility it was to maintain contact with the ground in an emergency—said, in a calm, disciplined voice, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.”
A few miles away, inside a control room on Merritt Island, one of the North American engineers monitoring the test looked up from his notes. He turned to the man at the next console.
“Did he say, ‘Fire’?” he asked. “What the hell are they talking about?”
Inside the launchpad blockhouse, an RCA technician watching the bank of monitors carrying TV images of the test heard Chaffee’s voice, and turned to the feed from Camera 24. Trained on the White Room—the clean space on Level A8 of the launch gantry enclosing the side of the spacecraft—Camera 24 could be zoomed in to show a partial view through the cockpit window of the capsule. At first he saw only a bright glow inside, but then made out flames flickering across the porthole, and saw Ed White’s hands reaching above his head, toward the hatch dog bolts.
Only a few seconds had passed since Chaffee’s first report, but now every one of the men listening to channel Black-3—in the blockhouse, on Merritt Island, all the way over in Houston—heard the rookie astronaut again, the words garbled, but unmistakably agitated.
“We’ve got a bad fire—let’s get out…” Chaffee said. “We’re burning up!”
On his TV monitor, the RCA technician saw a flurry of movement inside Spacecraft 012. Ed White’s arms reached out, then drew back, and reached up again. Then a second pair of arms joined White’s as the blaze spread from inside the far left of the cockpit toward the porthole, before the technician’s view was obscured by flames.
Channel Black-3 carried a brief, terrible sound that sounded to some like a scream of agony. Then silence. Eighteen seconds had passed since the first message of alarm.
Up on Level A8 of the launch gantry, the pad leader was standing at his desk on the swing arm, just twelve feet away from the spacecraft, when he heard the crew’s first shout over his communications box. He made out only the word “fire,” but that was enough: “Get them out of there!” he shouted at his chief technician. Then, as he turned back to the box to notify the blockhouse below of the emergency, he heard a loud whoosh, and a sheet of flame leapt over his head, singeing the papers on his desk. The chief technician, already heading toward the capsule, was thrown back against the gantry door by the explosion, and showered with fire and debris. Smoke and flames billowed through the swing arm walkway, driving the men back toward the tower elevator, where they found gas masks, and returned with three colleagues to fight the blaze, using the only fire extinguisher they could find.
It took the five men some five minutes, crawling in relay through the heat and choking smoke so thick they could barely see, to prize the heavy hatches off Spacecraft 012. The inside of the cabin was smoldering and blackened, lit from within by amber warning lamps still glowing on the instrument panels. Gus Grissom and Ed White lay at the foot of the hatch, their pressure suits fused together by the fire. Roger Chaffee remained strapped to his couch, where he had kept communications open until the end. Melted into the Teflon surface of the cockpit window was a single handprint, outlined in soot.
The pad leader retreated from the stricken spacecraft and picked up the headset connecting him to the blockhouse below. He thought hard about what to report, unwilling to reveal the truth over an open channel.
“I can’t describe what I see,” he said.