It was a bad day. Worst I ever had.
—Donald K. Slayton
Everything was wrong; everything was wrong.
—Walter M. Schirra
The plan was for the Apollo 1 crew to fly back to Houston during the last weekend in January 1967 to attend a party for the astronauts and their wives on Saturday evening, January 28. Field Enterprises, the publisher that had also contracted for the astronauts’ stories, was throwing the bash.1 It would be a chance to blow off some steam after another trying week of launchpad simulations culminating on January 27 in a crucial plugs-out test of Spacecraft 012’s internal power, communications, and environmental control systems. The countdown rehearsal would be among the last opportunities for Gus Grissom and his crew to get their flawed machine to work after five months of troubleshooting.
Gus had called Betty from the Cape the night before the Friday test to check in, see how the boys were doing, and let her know that a countdown simulation with the spacecraft plugged into external power went okay. Perhaps, at last, the Apollo 1 mission would actually get off the ground as scheduled on February 21. For a while, then, the pressure would be off until Gus’s next flight, he assumed, to the moon.
“We’ll see you Saturday then,” Betty said before signing off.2 It had been just another day at the office. There would be another test tomorrow. No sweat. Foremost on Betty’s mind was the phone call itself, the primary connection to her absentee husband, commander of the first Apollo flight. Together since high school, married for more than twenty-one years, it would be Gus and Betty’s last phone call.
Despite a mounting list of unresolved technical problems, the Apollo command and service modules had been hoisted and stacked on top of its Saturn 1B booster at Pad 34 during the first week of January. The “uprated” rocket was a scaled-down version of the gigantic Saturn V moon rocket. Nevertheless, Wally Schirra referred to it as “the Big Maumoo” since it was at the time among the largest boosters designed to launch humans.3 Once the vehicle was stacked, the command module and its launch escape tower were enclosed in a White Room at the eighth level, 218 feet high, near the top of the thirty-one-story orange service structure at Pad 34.4 The movable tower along with the other launchpads and the gigantic new Vehicle Assembly Building now dominated the Florida coastline. From here, the Kennedy Space Center, humans would for the first time leave the earth to explore another world.
A team of North American Aviation technicians set up shop on Level 8A to support the launch simulations that would culminate in the plugs-out test designed to demonstrate that all spacecraft systems worked and that NASA’s operational procedures were sound. The launch simulation would be as close to the actual flight configuration as possible on the pad, meaning the crew would be in pressure suits, the hatches sealed, and the spacecraft pressurized with pure oxygen.
In the weeks before the tests, Gus Grissom was becoming increasingly irritable, pessimistic—perhaps fatalistic—about the prospects of his next flight and the condition of his spacecraft and its all-important simulator. If Spacecraft 012 “had been a horse they would have shot it sometime in 1966, perhaps as early as 1965,” observed Walt Williams, the aerospace pioneer and NASA’s director of operations during the Mercury program. “Surely, no machine suffered so many ailments, not even one that was the first of its kind.”5
“Grumpy” Gus Grissom, as Williams dubbed the Apollo 1 commander, also concluded that the Apollo managers had lost control of the program. Williams, deeply concerned about crew safety and the unrelenting pace of the Apollo program, left NASA in 1964. Painted into a corner, Grissom was increasingly operating on his own initiative, driving his crew but not asking them to do anything he wouldn’t undertake himself. “I feel like a wolf howling in the wilderness,” NASA technicians recalled Grissom complaining in the weeks before the tests.6
Jay Barbree, NBC’s reporter at Cape Kennedy, claimed decades later that Grissom had approached him in late 1966 at a Cocoa Beach watering hole to complain about the miserable condition of his spacecraft. Barbree asserted that Grissom pulled him aside, asked for his help, and described Spacecraft 012 as a “piece of crap.” “You guys in the press, well, shit Jay, you guys have to help us. Apollo is not ready.” Barbree’s recollection was written some forty years after a nose-to-nose conversation with Grissom as they listened to a local folk singer referred to only as “Trish.” (Barbree said Grissom enjoyed Trish’s singing and her company, but there was nothing between them. “I knew she was involved with an astronaut, but it wasn’t Gus Grissom,” Barbree claimed.7)
Given Grissom’s adversarial relationship with the press, it seems a stretch to imagine he would enlist the help of Barbree or other journalists to help expose serious technical problems with his ship and inattentive management at NASA and North American Aviation. On the other hand, the “lone wolf” may have been sufficiently desperate for help from any source. Whatever he said to the reporter at the Cocoa Beach nightspot, it was clear that Grissom had profound misgivings about his ship and the preparations for his upcoming mission. Schirra was among the few involved who fully understood the hazards of a launchpad simulation conducted with sealed hatches in a pure oxygen atmosphere, “an environment that’s not very forgiving,” he said. “We didn’t realize how unforgiving it was at that point.” Schirra and his crew performed a “full-up system test” of the Apollo-Saturn 204, the spacecraft and the booster, using external power on Thursday, January 26. This was the test Gus and Betty had discussed during their final phone conversation. Spacecraft hatches were left open, and the crew breathed sea-level air. After the test, Schirra met with Grissom and Joe Shea, the Apollo program manager. The debriefing took place in the “ready room” of the crew quarters at Cape Kennedy. Schirra pulled no punches.
“Frankly, Gus, I don’t like it,” Schirra warned. “You’re going to be in there with full oxygen tomorrow, and if you have the same feeling I do, I suggest you get out.”8 Named the backup commander in September 1966 after a reshuffling of crew assignments, Schirra described the fall of 1966 as a period of intense struggle to stay on schedule, akin to “riding a locomotive down a track with ten more locomotives bearing down [from] behind.”9
Grissom duly noted Schirra’s warning during the debriefing, but he appeared more concerned about the reliably unreliable spacecraft communications. He suggested that either Shea or Deke Slayton crawl into the spacecraft during the Friday test so they could hear for themselves just how bad the communications were between the spacecraft and the test conductors and ground controllers. The suggestion was considered but soon dropped as impractical. Slayton decided to observe the plugs-out test from the blockhouse. Shea planned to fly back to Houston the next day after finishing an interview with a Time magazine reporter for a cover story timed to coincide with the first Apollo mission. Both men, especially Shea, would be tormented for the rest of their lives, knowing they could have been inside the sealed spacecraft when the fire broke out.
The relentless schedule continued nonstop until the day of the plugs-out test. In between were rounds of network interviews and a press conference focused on the objectives and length of the first Apollo flight. Grissom was repeatedly asked in the weeks before the scheduled flight whether he had misgivings about the mission, particularly the dangers inherent in a maiden flight. Those questions undoubtedly stemmed from the knowledge that the command pilot was extremely unhappy, even resentful, about the mess he had inherited. Grissom mostly kept his worries to himself, assuring reporters he had things under control. The outwardly confident commander revealed his concerns only in an off-the-cuff remark during a preflight press conference. After Slayton punted a reporter’s question about what constituted a successful first Apollo mission, Grissom chimed in, “As far as we’re concerned, it’s success if all three of us get back” alive.10
Nearly everyone thought he was joking. Rather, the commander was hinting that launch preparations were going badly and the prospects for a successful shakedown flight were slim. Grissom had concluded by the end of 1966 that he had a poorly designed, even dangerous spacecraft on his hands. But the arc of human space exploration had brought him to this time and place, and he was determined to play the hand he’d been dealt.
Dennis and Cecile Grissom visited their son at the Cape in the weeks before the scheduled launch. Gus “didn’t have much faith in [the spacecraft],” Cecile recalled. After her eldest son’s death, Cecile nursed a grudge against NASA for awarding the Apollo contract to North American Aviation rather than sticking with McDonnell, where Lowell had worked during the Mercury program. NASA took manned spacecraft production “away from McDonnell and gave it to that plant in California.” It was as if Cecile could not bring herself to utter the Apollo contractor’s name.
The Apollo 1 prime and backup crews along with Slayton met with reporters in Houston at the end of 1966, completing a series of year-end interviews. Seeking to put the best possible face on the crews’ training and the condition of his ship, Grissom summarized the list of problems he was up against, highlighting the slow progress toward fixing the Spacecraft 012’s environmental control system and the balky mission simulator.
Much of the crew training was taking place on a navigation and guidance “evaluator” in Downey, he acknowledged, concealing his anguish with the primary trainer at Cape Canaveral. Grissom insisted the Cape simulator was “getting in real good shape” and the prime crew would start using it “as our primary trainer after the first of the year.” As the lemon-hanging incident illustrated, this was wishful thinking—and Grissom probably knew it.
Continuing problems with the spacecraft environmental controls were also acknowledged, but Grissom asserted they had at last been fixed. Altitude chamber testing would resume in January 1967. Yet, Grissom must have realized that retesting a critical spacecraft system so close to his scheduled February launch date was cutting it close.
The Apollo 1 backup crews had been shuffled; Schirra was the new backup commander. The press conference also served as the introduction of Schirra’s backup crew, which included Cunningham and Eisele. Rookie astronauts had been assigned “dog work” in support of the prime crew, Grissom added. He then narrated a short film showing the prime crew practicing its egress procedures, including White dealing with the heavy inner and outer hatches.11
Grissom would be more expansive in broadcast network interviews, particularly with Jules Bergman of ABC News, whom he trusted. Grissom also understood these tedious interviews were part of the NASA public relations drill. In this case, he also appreciated Bergman’s reputation as a straight shooter. With others, he remained circumspect. When another TV reporter stuck a microphone in his face and asked Grissom about his Apollo prospects, he curtly replied, “I expect to be around for most of the Apollo program.” How about a moon landing? “I’m planning on it.” And that was the end of the interview.
Spacecraft 012 remained a mess at the beginning of 1967, as did overall management of the Apollo program. Technicians who worked on Pad 34 as launch day approached claimed quality control in the White Room was beyond lax. They recalled NASA and contractor brass bringing friends and girlfriends up to Level 8A to see—even climb into—the spacecraft. Each time this happened, the technicians had to interrupt their work until the tour ended. Among other things, each one of these lapses increased the chances that flammable contaminants were being introduced into the cabin that would be pressurized with pure oxygen.
There were other lapses, including some that occurred in the crews’ presence. The North American Aviation engineer overseeing the crew compartment admitted later: “Lights would come on when they weren’t supposed to.” Worse, North American technicians twice dropped coins in the cabin, even though their pockets were supposed to be empty. After one incident, Grissom blew his stack when he and Roger Chaffee heard coins jingling in technicians’ pockets.
“Ed White complained to me,” the project engineer said. He took the matter all the way up the line to Harrison Storms, who was running the Apollo program for North American. Storms offered to fire the technician, but the Apollo cabin chief saved the worker’s job. After the coin incident, North American assigned a Spacecraft 012 manager, Joseph Cuzzupoli, who later became program manager for the space shuttle orbiter project.
“I was in charge of checking [Spacecraft 012] out prior to shipping it” to Cape Kennedy, Cuzzupoli told an interviewer. “It was a tough job, again, because of the changes in the system, and we had a considerable amount of rework that we had to do to the vehicle. And we had a lot of pressure on this schedule, but it did not get us away from the fact that we didn’t do a good quality job. But when the vehicle left Downey, California, it was not complete at all, and we shipped it under the understanding that it [would] be complete in the field. There was a considerable amount of changes yet to be done.”12
The spacecraft unfit for flight was nevertheless shipped to Cape Kennedy in the hope that it could be fixed in time for the first Apollo mission. The schedule now took precedence over everything, apparently even crew safety. The machine was unmistakable evidence that NASA, after sixteen manned spaceflights with no loss of life, had lost its moorings.
In the months before the fire, an irresistible force had taken hold of Gus Grissom along with nearly all involved in the Apollo 1 mission, obscuring the ample warnings of a potential disaster. North American Aviation manager John Moore remembered: “We were going very fast—NASA, we were behind schedule as always, and we were running tests without taking time to really look at the data.”
The test data that no one had time to evaluate was telling the space agency that its prime contractor had built a deathtrap based on NASA’s specifications. The embittered Schirra later defined “Go Fever” as “We’ve got to keep going, got to keep going, got to keep going!” The spacecraft should never have been shipped from the factory. “It was not finished,” Schirra could see. “It was what they called a lot of uncompleted work or incomplete tests…. So it was shipped to the Cape with a bunch of spare parts and things to finish it out.”13
Jim Lovell, who had just completed his second spaceflight in the run-up to the Apollo 1 mission, later claimed he could see in hindsight what Grissom could not in early 1967: “Gus was a charger, he was a very macho type. He was really the typical test pilot. But he also had ‘Go Fever,’ you know, he wanted to get it going; he wanted to get up there and do the job.”
Schirra’s concerns about crew safety, the inability to fix problems, and the tight schedule were escalating into anger. “I was no longer annoyed, I was really pretty goddamn mad! There were glitches, electronic things that just didn’t come out right. That evening I debriefed with Joe Shea and Gus, and I said: ‘If there are any things that go wrong, like a glitch in the electronic circuits and bad sounds, scrub the test!’”14 Schirra and those who bothered to pay attention could now see that Grissom, despite his complaints, had embraced a deadly form of “group think.” There simply was no time to reflect, to take a step back and recognize the danger.
Apollo managers had fallen “into a pattern of group think, where the number of people involved in the decision-making process gets smaller and smaller, and they decide to perceive something in a certain way,” Donn Eisele of the Apollo backup crew recalled years later. “From then on, all information that doesn’t jibe with the mind-set of the group is rejected.”15 As for the rush to complete the plugs-out test, Schirra insisted Grissom “should have scrubbed. He didn’t.”16
Eisele agreed. “I asked the Apollo managers before the fire, ‘What’s the hurry?’ We had until 1970 to land on the moon. They had it worked out that they were going to do it in 1968, two years early. The trouble was they were forcing the pace.”17
Eisele died in December 1987 of a heart attack while on a business trip in Tokyo. The retired air force colonel who was assigned to the original Apollo 1 crew before reinjuring his shoulder is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, a few plots away from Virgil I. Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee.
Eisele was correct. There was another glaring institutional problem compounding the myriad technical issues with the spacecraft: Joe Shea was not keeping his boss, Robert Gilruth, fully informed of the mounting problems with Spacecraft 012. Moreover, NASA administrator James Webb never saw scathing reports about North American Aviation’s shoddy work on the command module. Flight Director Chris Kraft acknowledged later: “We were all getting too compartmentalized.”18
Kraft remembered reports from Cape Canaveral that “described the quality of the hardware being delivered as a disaster waiting to happen.” He continued, “I could see it myself, because I’d been spending some time at the contractor’s in California.” Still, no one at NASA in a position to do so was willing to stick his neck out to slow the program.
John Bailey, a trusted confidante of Gilruth and Kraft, was instead dispatched to the Cape after the spacecraft was shipped from California to keep an eye on things. In a memo to Gilruth distributed among senior management in Houston, Bailey warned: “This hardware is not very good. The people are really not very good at checking this thing out. They’re not very good at trying to maintain some semblance of the fact that a human being is going to be in this machine. I’m telling you, it’s not good.”19
Nevertheless, Apollo program managers allowed the contractor to ship Spacecraft 012 to the Kennedy Space Center despite unresolved problems with the command module’s electrical systems and a leaking environmental control unit. It arrived on August 26. Not only should the spacecraft never have been shipped to the Cape in that condition, NASA should never have accepted delivery. But it did. Now it was Gus Grissom’s burden.
Slipshod engineering, distracted management, poor quality control, inattention to test data, the “Go Fever” schedule, and plain old hubris after the success of Gemini combined to create a lethal situation as the crew prepared for a full dress rehearsal three weeks before the scheduled launch on February 21, 1967. The Saturn rocket would not be fueled, and no pyrotechnics were installed—just a sealed spacecraft powered up for a simulated launch. As a result, NASA did not classify the test as hazardous. Schirra suspected “everything was wrong,” but no one else seemed particularly worried about the test, including Grissom, who was now fixated on nonlethal but maddening communications problems.
The last day of the lives of Gus Grissom and his crew began as it would have on launch day: breakfast with Deke Slayton in the crew quarters. Shea had joined them. Grissom continued to lobby Shea to squeeze into the spacecraft that afternoon so he could observe firsthand just how bad the communications were and why spacecraft subsystems were not checking out. Over steak and eggs, Grissom pleaded his case to Shea: “It’s really messy. We want you to go fix it.”20 The communications technicians shortly reported they could not rig another headset into the communications loop in time for the test. Shea ruled out observing the proceedings from the spacecraft’s lower equipment bay, promising Grissom he would return the following Monday to run the test again, this time in the faulty Apollo simulator.
As the crew ate breakfast, the pad technicians were making the connections to power up the spacecraft for the plugs-out test. The pad technicians and the test conductors spent the next few hours running initial verification tests on the spacecraft to ensure it was ready for what was to follow. No one had any inkling of what was about to transpire.
Grissom, Chaffee, and White were fitted with biosensors and suited up at 10 a.m. Cape time. They appeared much more reserved than in previous NASA promotional films released to the press in the days before the critical test. Lola Morrow, the astronauts’ secretary and “den mother”—who claimed to know Grissom’s state of mind—felt the tension that Friday morning. “I don’t [know] what it was that I sensed, but I picked up something from all three of them. There was a quietness about them, instead of being ready for a test where they usually just get up and bounce out the door, it was something they didn’t want to do. Their attitude was one eighty [degrees] from anything I’d ever seen before.”21
The consequences of the mounting problems with the spacecraft and the first mission were visibly weighing on the crew: it could now be seen in their body language. Friday, January 27, 1967, was going to be a long day. But as Grissom’s fellow midwesterner, Slayton, remarked on such occasions: “Let’s get on with it.”
Despite the fact that the spacecraft hatches would be sealed, the air forced out, and the spacecraft pressurized with pure oxygen, few besides Schirra considered the plugs-out test to be dangerous. The rocket would not be fueled, and the exploding bolts used to separate the rocket stages were not yet installed. Hence, the test was officially considered “routine” despite a pure oxygen cabin environment, several score potential ignition points, and more than seventy pounds of flammable material sealed inside. “That’s really hard to explain,” concluded Dr. Fred Kelly, the NASA flight surgeon who helped investigate the fire.22
It was time to head out to the pad, ride the elevator to the White Room, climb into the spacecraft, seal the hatches, pump up the cabin pressure, and see what the spacecraft could and could not do. Or as Schirra observed, the six astronauts—his and Grissom’s crews—had resolved to gang tackle the spacecraft’s problems and “make [the] machine work.”23
After donning their suits, the astronauts boarded a van to ride out to Pad 34 around midday, entering the spacecraft at approximately 1 p.m. local time. The appearance of the Apollo 1 prime crew buttoned up in their pressure suits always drew the full attention of the pad workers, who dared not question the prerogatives of the spacecraft commander. The irascible Grissom maintained his commanding presence. There was no question as to who was in charge. Nevertheless, some of the workers appreciated what he was up against. The plugs-out test would be the closest thing to an actual launch the technicians would experience without actually lighting the new rocket’s engines. Each worker was on his toes as the crew entered the cabin: Grissom first, and then Chaffee, and then White in the center couch last. It took more than an hour to get the two inner hatches closed and sealed. The heavy, inward-opening hatch was secured by a series of clamps. The NASA technician who installed the hatches that day, Charles Stevenson, recalled that one had to be pounded into place. Since this was a simulation, the boost protective cover that was part of the escape rocket system was not secured as it would be on launch day. Still, the launch escape system, which included solid rocket motors more powerful than the Mercury-Redstone Grissom had ridden into space in 1961, would pose a major hazard to the North American Aviation pad crew later in the day.
Grissom settled into his couch, connected his suit to the cabin oxygen supply, and immediately reported a sour milk odor in his suit loop. Donald Babbitt, the North American Aviation pad leader who arrived in the White Room for his normal shift about 3:30 p.m., later told investigators the smell “reminded [him] of a potting compound” used in spacecraft assemblies for waterproofing and to withstand shock and vibrations.24
An air sample was taken by the “watermelon gang,” so named for the device they used to take samples through a port in the spacecraft. After talking it over with test conductors, Grissom decided to press on.
Soon, another problem surfaced with the troublesome environmental control system. A high oxygen flow indicator was periodically triggering a master alarm. There was more back and forth with technicians responsible for the system, but outside of concluding that the high flow was the result of crew movements, the problem was never resolved.
The test dragged along with the crew throwing switches and monitoring systems while straining to hear the test conductors’ instructions. Persistent, maddening communications breakdowns between the spacecraft and test conductors plagued the entire simulation, just as Grissom had predicted during breakfast with Shea and Slayton. Some of the commander’s last known words would bemoan the fact that the crew often could not hear the controllers and the controllers could not hear the crew.
Among the most graphic displays of the commander’s seething anger came in the minutes before the first report of a fire as the crew struggled with yet another communications glitch between the spacecraft and the blockhouse. Initially, controllers believed the problem was solely between Grissom and the blockhouse. Later, it extended to communications between the blockhouse and the operations checkout building a few miles from the pad, where test conductors were monitoring spacecraft systems. The plugs-out test conductor later told investigators that the overall communications problems were so bad that his engineers could barely understand what the crew was saying.
At times, local air traffic control chatter could even be heard bleeding over to the same RF communications channel being used for the test. As the afternoon turned to evening, Grissom was fuming. His widely quoted remark “How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between three buildings?” was followed by an even more telling display of frayed nerves and absolute frustration.
White chimed in over the static that the test controllers, who had asked the commander if he wanted to use the phone to communicate, “can’t hear a thing you’re saying.” Grissom shot back in a sarcastic tone reminiscent of a father scolding a wayward son, “Jee-sus Christ!” A less well-known act of defiance that also underscored growing frustration occurred several weeks earlier as the crew prepared for an altitude chamber test designed to check out the spacecraft in a simulated vacuum. The requirement for a pretest medical examination had somehow been omitted from the schedule. It mattered little since the bullheaded Grissom, never trusting the flight surgeons, adamantly refused to submit to the exam. It was determined that the chamber test could not begin without the flight surgeons’ approval. A flurry of calls ensued as Grissom pleaded with Slayton to keep the doctors off his back.
“Deke and [NASA chief flight surgeon Dr. Charles Berry] would have to work it out at the directors’ level before Gus would submit to a five-minute physical examination,” recalled Fred Kelly, another NASA flight surgeon who had been summoned by Berry to help mediate the dispute. Kelly, an aviator and astronaut candidate, had earned the crew’s respect despite his stethoscope. “I asked to speak with Gus in private and was able to restore some degree of peace,” Kelly wrote decades later. “Gus could be reasonable if you used the right words.”25 Kelly, who several weeks later would be assigned to head the Apollo 204 Accident Review Board’s medical panel, never revealed what words he used to convince Grissom to submit to the exam.
The Apollo 1 crew, flight controllers, test conductors, and flight surgeons, all monitoring the plugs-out test, used multiple channels to communicate. As far as can be determined, only one channel has ever been released, and it contains the frustrating minutes and horrible last seconds of the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The unexpected alerts of a fire in the spacecraft and the terrifying last shouts would drive some who worked on Apollo to nervous breakdowns or suicide.
At 6:28 p.m., two minutes and forty-three seconds before the first report of a fire, Grissom uttered a puzzling phrase that made little sense, particularly given the horrendous events that would soon follow. Only a fragment of what was said could be heard when the command pilot stated, “It’s good for you.” What Grissom meant, to what he was referring, remains a mystery. It is possible that he was speaking on a different communications channel used by the crew and that the transmission may have bled over from the adjacent channel. Whether other communications channels were being recorded on the night of the fire has never been revealed.
Things had been going from bad to worse when the countdown was held at T minus ten minutes beginning at 6:20 p.m. The crew and controllers continued to troubleshoot the nagging communications problems that stopped the simulated countdown at 5:40 p.m. The crew began swapping out communications equipment in an attempt to isolate the problems. The troubleshooting resulted in even more communications problems among ground controllers and the crew. At least part of the problem was eventually traced to a microphone somewhere in the faulty communications network stuck in the “on” position that the crew could not turn off. The final steps in the countdown designed to transfer the spacecraft to internal power, including a switch over to simulated fuel cell power, were completed before controllers held the count pending resolution of the communications problems. At T minus zero, the pad crew would pull the spacecraft umbilical just as it would be released during an actual launch.
As the plugs-out test dragged on into the evening, the hope was that the countdown could be resumed once the communications problems were either resolved or bypassed. After the power transfer was completed and the plugs-out test was finally over, Grissom wanted to test the Apollo emergency escape procedures. His old buddy Sam Beddingfield would serve as the supervising engineer. Beddingfield was just then returning to the Kennedy Space Center from dinner in Cocoa Beach to prepare for the test. Grissom knew he had to complete these steps if he was going to make his February 21 launch date. He was prepared to work himself, his crew, and the pad technicians all night if that was what it took to gain some peace of mind.
During the countdown hold, Grissom was changing a cable used to connect his suit to the communications loop. Motion and biosensors detected movement inside the cabin at least thirty seconds before the first report of a fire, maybe more if in fact Grissom had been out of his couch trying to change out his “cobra” communications cable. Scratching sounds could be heard over Grissom’s open microphone, indicating movement. In the moments before the initial fire report, another possible explanation for the movement was that Grissom and White were attempting to trace the source of an acrid smell as a spark under Grissom’s couch grew into a conflagration that would soon spread across the cabin.
Spacecraft 012 had been equipped with a gas chromatograph that could be used to monitor the cabin atmosphere for possible trace contaminants. The instrument was not installed on the day of the fatal test. When the gas chromatograph was disconnected, the unit unexpectedly acted as an antenna. The signal output from the gas chromatograph cable presently detected a variation in signal output about fourteen seconds before the first report of a fire. This indicated either voltage transients as equipment was switched off or, more likely, crew movement. These and other bits of hard engineering data such as the dropout of communications signals were, as one engineer graphically noted, indications that Apollo 1 was “dutifully reporting its own demise.”26
Some of the test conductors had pressed to scrub the launch simulation. They were overruled, and supervisors prepared to resume the countdown after a lengthy hold at T minus ten minutes. Grissom and the NASA managers decided to press on, to get the damned test out of the way before Beddingfield’s team showed up to complete the emergency egress drill. Only then would the long day on Pad 34 be over.
At five seconds after 6:30 p.m., the commander of Apollo 1 informed all who were listening of the inescapable fact that communications on a lunar mission would be impossible if the ground controllers could not figure out a way to “talk between two or three buildings.” It was less than a minute before the first sign of an impending disaster. The crew was preoccupied for the next minute. There were indications that something was happening inside the spacecraft. A voltage surge was recorded at just before 6:31 p.m. Then, suddenly, something utterly unanticipated shattered the radio silence.
Voices from inside the spacecraft called out with desperate warnings that echo still across the decades. What transpired over the next five minutes would alter the course of the Space Race and the course of human space exploration. Those agonizing minutes would call into question the wisdom of attempting a crash program to send humans to another world. And it would devastate three families.
Four ticks past 6:31 p.m. EST on January 27, 1967, a voice that sounded like either Grissom’s or Chaffee’s pierced the scratchy radio silence over the otherwise unreliable VHF retransmission communication link designated Channel Black-3. “Hey!” a crewman shouted.27 This was not something an experienced test pilot would shout over an open communications link. All who heard the exclamation—the test conductors, the ground controllers, the flight surgeons, the pad crew—immediately sensed that something lethal and completely unexpected was happening inside a spacecraft pumped full of pure oxygen. No one who heard the report initially considered the possibility of a fire.
The shocking alert coincided with motion in the spacecraft detected by sensitive gyroscopes. It was accompanied by a voltage surge in the spacecraft’s electrical system and a spike in oxygen flow as well as crew heart rates. Grissom had spotted a fire under his couch where an electrical arc had probably jumped between two exposed segments of wiring.
Grissom had by now jumped back onto his couch, probably banging the back of his helmet on the instrument panel in his haste. He would next try as best he could to suppress the flames and then help open the hatches directly above the senior pilot’s center couch.
One of the next transmissions came from Ed White approximately seven seconds later: “Fire! We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” Time now slowed to a crawl as the enormity of that confirmation sunk in.
As White and Grissom struggled to open the hatches, Chaffee remained on his couch, switched on the cabin lights, and continued reporting to the test conductors and the blockhouse in an increasingly agitated voice: “We have a bad fire!” he reported thirteen seconds after the first alert.
With Grissom’s help, the world-class athlete Ed White grabbed a torque wrench and commenced a death struggle to ratchet open the damned hatches, actually making progress toward retracting the dogleg locking bars that secured the inner hatch. Technology had catapulted humans into space. Its misapplication would now take the lives of three men who ultimately had no real chance of escape. Chaffee’s last words, which sounded like “We’re burning up!,” came eighteen seconds after the initial report. The inferno was consuming the Raschel netting used to stow gear along with every other oxygen-soaked and flammable item in the cabin. Next came a shout. Then, as quickly as the catastrophe began, there was only deathly silence. No response to the frantic calls from the blockhouse and the operations center.
Apollo 1’s pressure vessel had ruptured. Part of Grissom’s suit was blown out of the spacecraft by the force of the explosion. Investigators later found a fragment of material from the command pilot’s suit about five feet from the point of rupture, indicating that the suit had failed about fifteen seconds after the conflagration was first detected.
A fire likely touched off by an electrical arc in the miles of spacecraft wiring and fueled by pure oxygen had engulfed the spacecraft and its occupants, generating temperatures and pressures that would quickly breach the spacecraft’s pressure vessel. It was later estimated that the fire lasted just over twenty-five seconds. The cabin rupture and explosion rapidly depleted the oxygen in the spacecraft, replacing flames and steel-melting heat with thick, black smoke and deadly concentrations of carbon monoxide that would ultimately claim the three astronauts’ lives. In the seconds before being overcome, the crew fought a desperate but hopeless battle to get out. Commander, senior pilot, and pilot acted precisely as they were trained to do in an emergency. Their spacecraft was a death trap, and despite their heroic efforts there was never a realistic chance of escape or survival.
After years of playing with fire, NASA’s luck—the nation’s luck—had finally run out. The failure to comprehend the dangers of filling a spacecraft with pure oxygen and then sealing three men inside had at last caught up with the American space program. Just as he had told Betty—“If there ever is a serious accident in the space program, it’s likely to be me”28—Gus Grissom had remained on the flight line long enough for past miscalculations and unnecessary risks to take his life and the lives of his crewmates.
Instead of blazing a trail to the moon, Grissom and his crew would ultimately serve as an inspirational kick in the pants to those who eventually left the earth. They and the technicians who fixed the moon machines dared not let down their dead colleagues. The lunar explorers would walk on the Apollo 1 commander’s shoulders. Virgil Ivan Grissom would serve as a martyr to the sacred cause of leaving the earth and exploring a new world.
Those monitoring the test in the concrete blockhouse and the operations building could not at first comprehend what they were hearing. “Did he say ‘fire’?” an engineer asked the fellow at the next console, who replied that he had heard the same. “What the hell are they talking about?” they asked each other. A fire on the launchpad was the last thing anyone expected.
Indeed, no one foresaw the dangers of locking three astronauts inside a ship with miles of bad wiring, flammable material in abundance, corklike hatches, and pressurized with pure oxygen. How could the Apollo designers have overlooked the obvious dangers? The consequences of a series of engineering trade-offs made nearly six years earlier would effectively stop the American manned space program in its tracks. Many feared the Apollo program had died along with the astronauts on Pad 34. Those who had warned against a “crash program” had been proven correct.
While all three astronauts suffered serious but likely survivable burns, it was toxic smoke and carbon monoxide in the cabin and in the suit oxygen loops of Grissom and Chaffee that killed them. White had managed to disconnect his suit from the spacecraft oxygen supply and with his enormous lung capacity may have lived slightly longer. The official cause of death was asphyxiation from smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning. A contributing cause, according to NASA flight surgeon Fred Kelly, was hemorrhagic pulmonary edema—the astronauts’ lungs filled with body fluids and blood.29 Fifty years after the tragedy, a detailed version of the official autopsy reports has yet to be released.
Those closest to the spacecraft at the moment of maximum peril, the pad crew, were as stunned by what was happening as the controllers in the blockhouse and the operations building. It was relatively quiet in the White Room as the final hold in the countdown dragged on. Just past 6:31 p.m., Pad 34 erupted in flames, smoke, and shouts. Was this a drill, some of the technicians wondered?
All quickly realized this was no exercise when the spacecraft’s pressure vessel ruptured, generating enough force to throw several workers against the walls and door of the White Room enclosure. Pad Leader Donald Babbitt was at his desk near the White Room waiting for the simulated countdown to resume as planned after 6:30 p.m. His crew would pull the spacecraft connections at the end of the simulated countdown. In the interim, the pad crew was talking among themselves and listening to Grissom grouse as they waited for the countdown to resume.
“Gus was fussing a little bit,” Stephen Clemmons, the North American Aviation systems technician recalled. “Of course Gus always fussed. Sometimes we’d call him ‘The Nitpicker.’ He probably had a right ’cause he was very unhappy with the spacecraft and he didn’t bother to conceal his feelings on it.”30
After hearing the initial report of a fire on Channel Black-3, Babbitt yelled to his lead mechanical technician, James Gleaves: “Get them out of there!” Babbitt ran to his left toward the pad communications box to notify controllers. He recalled the following: “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw flame come out from under the boost near the steam duct. I almost completed my turn when I was hit by a concussion or sheet of flame.”31
The explosion knocked Babbitt against the communications box. His understandable reaction, he told investigators, was “to get out of there.” (Babbitt was not alone; later reports had workers on Pad 34 scrambling down the service structure, mostly out of fear that the fire would set off the solid rocket motors on the Apollo Launch Escape System atop the command module.)
Babbitt recovered, ran across the Level A8 swing arm catwalk, and told the elevator operator who was wearing a headset to inform test supervisor Clarence “Skip” Chauvin of the fire and explosion. Babbitt also pleaded for firefighting equipment and ambulances. The only fire extinguishers available were all but useless for fighting an electrical fire. Babbitt, Gleaves, Clemmons, and another White Room technician, Jerry Hawkins, found the sole carbon dioxide bottle available on the A8 level of the service structure with which to fight the fire. They then made their way back to the cauldron that was now the White Room to begin removing the hatches. L. D. Reece, the quality control inspector, also heard the report of a fire and immediately threw his headset down to search for the lone functioning fire extinguisher. As the tragedy unfolded, there was but a sliver of hope the pad workers could somehow act quickly enough to save the crew. They failed, but not for lack of trying.
Clemmons had been monitoring the spacecraft panel that was feeding oxygen through a hose connected to an access port on the command module. It turned out he was the person closest to Spacecraft 012 when the fire erupted. That fact greatly complicated Clemmons’s life for several days.
Recalling the nightmarish moments after the crew reported a fire, Clemmons observed the shocked expression on the face of Gleaves. Both men immediately understood the astronauts were probably doomed and the pad crew was in serious trouble. Like the astronauts, they did not abandon their stations. “Let’s get them out,” yelled Gleaves, who had been thrown against the swing arm door when the spacecraft ruptured. Gleaves realized he needed the T-handle Allen wrench used to open the hatches from the outside. The tool was inside Babbitt’s desk. No one figured it would be needed immediately. Either Gleaves or Hawkins—the record is unclear—ducked under the thick smoke to Babbitt’s scorched desk and began rifling through the drawers looking for the tool.
About thirty seconds after the first report of the fire, Babbitt and his crew were finally able to crawl to the smoldering spacecraft and begin working on the hatches in a swift succession of back-and-forth intervals, each lasting no more than two minutes. Using masks designed only to protect against noxious gas but useless against heavy smoke, they could hold their breath only so long. Gleaves eventually passed out and was ordered by Babbitt to stay out, but he soon returned. After repeated trips into the White Room and back out across the swing arm to gasp fresh air, Gleaves managed to remove the boost protective cover. He then gave the tool to Clemmons, Reece, or perhaps Hawkins, who together removed the outer, ablative hatch. The inner hatch was extremely hot to the touch when it was finally uncovered. The pad technicians could barely grab the heavy hatch by its handles.
“We attempted to both remove the inner hatch [and] lower the hatch down inside the command module,” Babbitt later told investigators,32 but they could only lower it partially into the spacecraft. The reason was the bodies of Grissom and White just below the foot of the hatch were blocking the way. Babbitt could make out the two crewmen but could not distinguish one from the other. “My observation at the time of hatch removal was that the flight crew were dead and that the destruction inside the command module was considerable.”
It had taken Babbitt’s crew about five minutes of herculean effort to remove the scorched hatches. Suffocating in the smoke and heat, a powerful escape rocket overhead, flames scorching the White Room ceiling, it was five minutes of maximum peril. There had been a desperate struggle on both sides of the hatches, but they could not be breached in time to save the crew.
It was quickly determined that saving the crew was impossible. Babbitt again walked across the swing arm at thirty seconds after 6:36 p.m. local time, found a working headset, and reported to test conductor Chauvin what he had seen amid the smoking ruins of the cockpit. The pad leader paused to consider all who were surely listening on the open communications line: “I can’t tell you what I see” was all he revealed. Only then did everyone monitoring the countdown simulation grasp the unthinkable: The crew of Apollo 1 was dead.
Grissom instinctively knew when the fire broke out that he had to dump the cabin pressure if there was any hope of extinguishing the flames. It required over a minute to release normal cabin pressure; the vent orifices in the relief valves were far too small for the enormous pressure building up in the spacecraft. Still, the commander understood this was his only option. There were no fire extinguishers aboard the spacecraft during the test. NASA had considered installing them prior to the launch but decided against it since they could only be used if the crew were in their pressure suits connected to a separate oxygen supply.
The likely ignition point was below Grissom’s couch. Oxygen-fed flames raced over his station, up and over White’s center couch, and around and under Chaffee’s, incinerating everything in their path. As the heat and internal cabin pressure grew, the inner shell of the spacecraft, the pressure vessel, was giving way.
The official accident report and at least one congressional investigation of the Apollo 204 fire concluded that a device located to the left of Grissom’s couch called a cabin pressure dump valve was “for reasons unknown” not activated to depressurize the cabin.33 However, technicians who independently examined the dump valve actuators after the fire concluded that Grissom had partially succeeded in opening them. To do this, he had to reach his gloved hand through a wall of flame in an attempt to activate the valves that operated much like a gearshift. In his extreme haste to activate them, Grissom may have broken one or both of the valves. Rick Boos, the researcher who years later gained access to the burned out Apollo command module, believes Grissom at least made an attempt to open the valves. “Were they engaged enough to dump [cabin pressure]? I cannot answer that because the cabin ruptured at the same time. The main point is that Gus made the effort and was following emergency egress procedures,” Boos concluded.34
Gleaves, the lead technician on Level A8, told investigators he heard a venting sound—the cabin relief valve opening and high-velocity gas escaping—as he ran to the White Room. “As we went up these two stairs we heard a loud shooooo, like maybe they had dumped cabin pressure,” Gleaves testified.35 Immediately after hearing the venting sound, the spacecraft heat shield ruptured under the tremendous internal pressure, covering Gleaves and Babbitt with flaming debris.
After reaching through the flames to activate the valves, emergency procedures required Grissom to help White open the hatches. This Grissom most certainly did. The commander removed the headrest on White’s center couch so the senior pilot could grab a torque wrench used to ratchet open the clumsy inner hatch. But even the muscular White was no match for the heavy, corklike hatch held in place by enormous pressure. White and Grissom fought to the death trying to crank it open. Contrary to the official accident report, burn marks on the outer hatch indicated that White might have succeeded in at least breaking the seal on the inner hatch before succumbing to smoke and flames. Charles Stevenson, the NASA technician who had locked the hatches with difficulty at the beginning of the plugs-out test, claimed he observed what he later described as “claw marks” on the inside of the ablative hatch. White and Grissom likely made more progress opening the inner and outer hatches than officially acknowledged.
In the few seconds he had, White cranked away on the wrench to retract the six dogleg locking bars that held the inner hatch in place. Under normal circumstances, cabin pressure also would have to be purged before White could pull a release mechanism unlocking the outer hatch. The crew simply ran out of time and breathable air. Despite the ferocious fire, Grissom and his crew performed exactly as they were trained under unimaginable conditions. The spacecraft had become an inferno, eventually reaching temperatures well in excess of one thousand degrees Fahrenheit.36 The astronauts were not incinerated; they were badly burned before flames consumed the spacecraft oxygen.
Throughout the death struggle, stunned controllers stared at their console screens as a video camera pointing at the hatch window showed flames engulfing the cockpit. The camera also showed White struggling with the hatch, and then another set of arms, Grissom’s, helping to open it. (Whether a video recording of the fire ever existed remains a mystery.) Speaking figuratively, a former NASA official recalled: “The window went white and you watched the paint peel.”
The fire raced across the cabin from Grissom’s side to Chaffee’s, likely penetrating Grissom’s suit along with his and Chaffee’s oxygen loops, filling them with toxic smoke and gases. As the temperature inside the cabin soared, cabin pressure split open the spacecraft seconds after the fire was first detected. The concussion knocked the pad workers off their feet and filled the immediate area of the White Room with dense, toxic smoke.
The precise time of death is unknown, and there were unsubstantiated claims that the crew may have remained alive and unconscious longer than what NASA has acknowledged. Doctors arrived at the White Room at 6:43 p.m.; by then, all three were certainly dead. What is known is that there were clear signs of a titanic struggle to get out, including White’s handprints burned into the Teflon coating of the hatch and perhaps, according to the earliest press reports attributed to unnamed NASA sources, human skin found on the inner hatch.
NASA immediately insisted that a “flash fire” had killed the astronauts within seconds. Without the autopsy reports, it is impossible to say with any precision how long they lived. It was a terrible way to die. The one statement everyone agreed on from the accident investigation was that “three gallant men lost their lives in the line of duty.”
What must be understood fifty years later is that the crew of Apollo 1 acted precisely as they were trained to act in an emergency. After detecting flames, Grissom attempted to release cabin pressure despite flames originating on his side of the cramped cabin, perhaps hitting the valves so hard that, according to one NASA inspector, he broke them. The commander then helped remove White’s headrest and assisted the senior pilot in the doomed effort to open the heavy inner hatch. Chaffee remained in his right-hand couch despite the terror of a fire fueled by pressurized oxygen, maintaining communications with the blockhouse before he too was overcome by smoke and toxic gases in his suit oxygen loop. Only eighteen seconds passed between the initial report of a fire and Chaffee’s final shout. So much was happening so fast that no one could take it all in.
In the control room at the Operations and Checkout Building about five miles from the launchpad, spacecraft test conductor Skip Chauvin, the only person in the room authorized to speak to the astronauts, kept trying to raise the crew on Channel Black-3. The test conductors in the operations building and other controllers in the blockhouse sat stunned and confused when they heard the initial reports of a fire in the cockpit. Unable to raise the crew and realizing something extraordinary had occurred, the normally unflappable Chauvin yelled across the control room to personnel monitoring the spacecraft electrical systems to immediately power down the spacecraft. When that happened, it was clear to all in the room there was a serious problem with the spacecraft and the crew was in mortal danger.37
The Pad 34 blockhouse was located about five hundred yards from the launchpad. Rookie astronaut Stuart Roosa, who four years later would fly to the moon, was serving as “Stoney,” the blockhouse Capcom. Deke Slayton was sitting next to Roosa at the Capcom’s console. Despite the earlier debate over whether Slayton or Shea should climb into the spacecraft during the test to listen to the faulty communications for themselves, the plan was dismissed as impractical. Slayton monitored the test from the blockhouse. Shea cut short an interview in Cocoa Beach with a Time magazine reporter when informed of the fire and raced to the Kennedy Space Center.
After hearing the reports of a fire, Roosa and Chauvin both tried to contact the crew. Since no one considered the test dangerous, Roosa remembered thinking, “Chaffee is gonna hate to hear this tape in the morning.” It soon dawned on Roosa, however, that a pure oxygen fire in a sealed spacecraft would be fatal.38
As Chauvin instructed his test conductors to power down the spacecraft, Roosa ran out of the blockhouse, straining to spot the command module through the service structure. After Slayton instructed emergency crews to get up to the A8 Level and contacted Houston to begin informing the families, he and Roosa headed for the launchpad. The hatches had been removed by the time they reached the White Room. The stench of death and an electrical fire permeated the enclosure. Slayton and Roosa looked inside the spacecraft and confirmed what the pad crew already knew: Grissom, White, and Chaffee were dead—asphyxiated and badly burned.
Like Pad Leader Babbitt, Slayton and Roosa also noted from the positions of the bodies that the crew had fought to open the hatches. All were unanimous that Grissom and White were found together, out of their couches, their melted pressure suits fused together at the base of the hatch.
Numerous accounts of the Apollo 1 fire published over the intervening fifty years have misstated the positions of the bodies after the hatches were finally opened. Why does this matter? It is important because their location at the time of death bears directly on the crew’s actions in the final seconds of their lives. In particular, the observations of those with the unenviable task of documenting the crew’s positions when the hatches were finally pried open shows that Grissom did not panic, as NASA and others have suggested, attempting to escape the flames. Instead, the commander fought to the end to save his crew, battling the hatches alongside White. For Grissom, Apollo had been a long series of losing battles; the struggle to open the hatches was his last.
Erroneous accounts of the crew’s actions asserted that Grissom’s body was found with feet on his own couch and face up on the floor of the spacecraft, the implication being he had crawled there to escape the flames. These accounts have White strewn across the couches after failing to open the inner hatch. In fact, the last place Grissom would have retreated was the aft bulkhead, where a highly flammable foam pad was placed.39 Given the path of the flames, the bulkhead would have been the most hellish spot in the cabin. In reality, the nylon pressure suits of White and Grissom were fused together by the intense cabin heat and pressure as they struggled to open the inner hatch.40
Likely the first NASA employee to inspect the gutted spacecraft and certainly the most senior official to view the carnage was Slayton. Grissom’s weekend flying companion back at Langley Field in Virginia found himself in the horrendous position of having to peer into the smoldering cockpit to observe the dead astronauts and note their positions for the record.
What Slayton saw was surreal: small fluorescent cabin lights still flickering, gauges continuing to glow on the panels amid the acrid smoke and heat of the charred ruins of the cockpit. “It was a bad day,” remembered Slayton. “Worst I ever had.”41
Chaffee had remained in his right-hand seat throughout the horror of the fire. Grissom and White were found together at the base of the hatch, their faceplates blackened by the toxic smoke and fumes. Slayton told investigators he could not tell one from the other. It is likely, however, the command pilot was on top of the senior pilot.
In a statement to investigators on February 8, 1967, and later to a congressional committee, Slayton was unequivocal in stating that Grissom and White were “jumbled together” and Grissom was not, as the official version of events misstated, “lying supine on the aft bulkhead or floor of the command module.”
“They were sort of jumbled together, and I couldn’t really tell which head even belonged to which body at that point. I guess the only thing that was real obvious is that both bodies were at the lower edge of the hatch. They were not in the seats. They were almost completely clear of the seat areas.”42 The inference that Grissom had abandoned his post at the instant of maximum danger, shirking his sacred duty to protect his crew, that he instead had attempted to escape the flames, was a fiction.
NASA moved swiftly to seal off Pad 34 and the Kennedy Space Center in the hours after the hatches were opened and the astronauts’ deaths confirmed. Several controllers managed to call home to inform their wives they would be working late. The phone lines were soon cut. Some of those wives called newspapers to find out what had happened at the Cape, tipping off editors and reporters that something was amiss on Pad 34 (no reporters had been allowed to observe the plugs-out test). NASA responded by circling the wagons, claiming nothing had happened in response to initial press queries, that there was nothing to report. It was a knee-jerk reaction and a futile attempt to control the flow of information, ostensibly as a way to shield the families of Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
Slayton and Jack King, the voice of NASA Mission Control, did not want the wives of the dead astronauts to find out what had happened in a radio or television news flash or a knock on the door from a reporter seeking comment. Slayton, the astronaut turned technocrat, was thinking only of Betty Grissom, Pat White, and Martha Chaffee, not the First Amendment, in the agonizing minutes after the fire that killed one of his closest friends. It was wrong to suppress bad news, but Slayton did what he thought was right, and there would be no further discussion.
King, the former Associated Press space writer, understood the reporters were doing their jobs by pursuing tips about something going wrong during the launchpad test. Still, King went along with the NASA brass. No one was prepared for what happened on January 27, 1967. NASA improvised, often badly.
The inferno on Pad 34 and the sudden deaths of the crew would ultimately send shock waves from the Kennedy Space Center to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, on to North American Aviation in California and eventually back to the White House. “It hit you tremendously,” recalled King, who was observing the plugs-out test from the blockhouse. “Of course there’s no way to explain how you felt in the blockhouse at Pad 34. I went in there probably at one o’clock in the afternoon and I didn’t get out there ’til about 12:30 the following morning.”43
No one was permitted to leave until the Apollo escape rocket with its 155,000-pound thrust, solid-propellant motors was disarmed. “We were locked in for quite a while, and you had an awful lot to think about,” King recalled.44 “Of course I had to think about my responsibilities.” Despite mounting pressure from the media for information, King made a deal with Slayton to withhold news of the tragedy until NASA had notified Betty Grissom, Pat White, and Martha Chaffee. He decided he “didn’t want to spend the rest of [his] life knowing that Betty Grissom heard about [the fire and her husband’s death] because of [his] announcement.”
Back in Houston, Alan Bean was the sole astronaut on duty that evening when the call came in from the Cape. “We’ve lost the crew,” Bean was told in the minutes after the fire. Bean initially thought the caller meant NASA couldn’t locate Grissom, White, and Chaffee. How odd. Then it dawned on Bean, on station to take the call because he always arrived for work early and left late, that the caller meant something other than what Bean thought he had meant. The realization was sinking in: Grissom, the hard-nosed veteran; White, the all-American astronaut; and the rookie Chaffee were all gone. American astronauts had finally died, as many involved in the Apollo program privately expected. The odds of a fatal accident were better than even, but for Christ’s sake, not on the launchpad! That was no way for astronauts to die.
Comprehending at last what the caller was telling him, Bean immediately began working the phones to track down Slayton and Alan Shepard, Slayton’s assistant in the Astronaut Office, who was at the time of the fire delivering a speech in Dallas. Bean got through to both on the first try. The rookie was amazed the Mercury veterans instinctively knew what to do. Send someone—a wife, another astronaut, anyone connected with NASA—as fast as possible to the crew members’ homes in Timber Cove. The knock on the door, the look in the neighbor’s eyes would immediately convey the enormity of what had just happened. Your husband, the father of your children, is dead. You are on your own.
Gene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director, called the fire “perhaps the defining moment in our race to get to the Moon. After this,” Kranz observed, “nothing would be quite the same, ever again.”45 Kranz, dressing for dinner out that Friday evening, learned about the fire from his neighbor, a fellow flight director who banged on Kranz’s door. When told that the crew was probably dead, Kranz figured the Saturn rocket had blown up.
When asked years later about the Apollo 1 fire, the first man to walk on the moon recalled the trauma. “Oh yes, I remember it very well,” Neil Armstrong told the historian Douglas Brinkley. “I’d known Gus for a long time. Ed White and I bought some property together and split it. I built my house on one half of it, and he built his house on the other. We were good friends, neighbors. Some very traumatic times. You know, I suppose you’re much more likely to accept loss of a friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose them in a ground test.” Armstrong continued, “That was an indictment of ourselves…. I mean, [it happened] because we didn’t do the right thing somehow. That’s doubly, doubly traumatic.”
Contemporaneous press accounts before NASA’s “flash fire” narrative took hold were graphic. A New York Times article on January 31 reported some of the first grim details about the seconds before and after the fire, attributing its report to “an engineer who spent most of the day listening to tape recordings of the fatal test and who heard reports from men on the launchpad at the time of the tragedy.” According to the newspaper, “At the hatch the technicians found fingerprints and the skin of fingers that stuck there. The astronauts were almost completely destroyed by the fire. Little more than their bones remained.”46
Despite these initial exaggerated reports, the reality was quickly sinking in that the decision to fill the Apollo spacecraft on the launchpad with pure oxygen at 16.7 pounds per square inch had been a fatal and unnecessary mistake. George Page, chief test conductor for Gemini and Apollo, told an interviewer decades later: “We put 100 percent oxygen into that vehicle and then pressurized it. Now we’d done that all through Gemini, all through Mercury. And we were doing that in Apollo. And nobody stood up and said, ‘Hey, [do] you guys know what you got when you pressurize a hundred percent oxygen? You got a bomb sittin’ there!’”
Across the swampy Florida peninsula, west beyond the Gulf of Mexico, far from the machinery of rockets and spaceships and launch simulations, it was the end of another week in the astronaut enclave of Timber Cove. Betty Grissom and sons Scott and Mark were looking forward to the weekend and seeing their husband and father for at least part of the weekend. They did not yet realize as the sun set over Houston that the husband and father was gone.
Betty was preparing dinner when the doorbell rang. It was her neighbor Adelin Hammack, the wife of Gus’s NASA buddy Jerry, who went out hot-rodding with Gus and Mark in Gus’s Corvette. It was Adelin who would help Betty through the hard months ahead. On the evening of the fire, Adelin was instructed without explanation to rush to the Grissom’s house. Betty immediately suspected something had happened, probably something serious. She later remembered “a certain numbness” after Adelin arrived. Friends did not just turn up unannounced on a Friday evening just before dinner.
Betty held it together and invited Adelin in for a drink. Then the doorbell rang again. It was Jo Schirra, Wally’s wife, the Grissoms’s next-door neighbor. She had ducked through a hole cut in the fence between their yards to reach the Grissom threshold. Betty saw Jo’s face and knew immediately it was bad. Jo told Betty there had been an accident and Gus had been injured, but she was not sure how badly.
Presently, the wife of Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts’ physician arrived, followed by the chief NASA flight surgeon himself. It was Dr. Berry who conveyed the news on behalf of NASA to Betty that her husband of twenty-one years was dead, killed in a cockpit fire along with his crew. It was a test on the launchpad. The Saturn rocket was not fueled. How, she must have thought, could such a thing happen?
Betty—the wife of a military test pilot, astronaut, and national hero who had spent the better part of the last decade on the flight line—immediately assumed the role of stoic NASA widow. She turned from Dr. Berry, walked to the back of the house, closed the bedroom door, and informed Scott and Mark their father was dead. The wide-eyed boys, inheritors of their parents’ Indiana stoicism, did not cry at the news. Scott idolized his father; Mark hardly knew him.
It would not seem much different for a while because Gus was “gone most of the time anyway,” Betty wrote in her recollection of the awful evening. “Now he was gone, period.”47 Among Betty’s first realizations was that she would miss her husband’s phone calls.
Wally Schirra arrived soon after the others. He would act as executor of Virgil I. Grissom’s estate, helping to guide Betty, Scott, and Mark through the coming darkness. Schirra and his backup crew had hightailed it out of Cape Kennedy as the plugs-out test dragged on. What was the point of sitting around listening to Gus bellyache about his ship? He, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele hopped into their T-38s and headed back to Houston for the weekend. As they taxied to a stop at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, Bud Ream, with NASA flight operations, met them on the tarmac. The crew could tell by his presence on a Friday night and the grim expression on his face that something bad had happened. The prime crew of Apollo 1 was dead, Ream informed the backup crew. “They’re dead. All of them.”48
Schirra raced down the Gulf Freeway to his next-door neighbor’s home, thinking all the way from the airfield about his warning the day before to the Apollo commander to get out if the launch simulation was going badly. The plugs-out test exposed one problem after another, which is the primary purpose of such an exercise. Grissom had persevered, however, resisting the calls of some of the test conductors to call it off and start over the next day or the following week.
It was now painfully obvious Grissom should have taken Schirra’s advice. Colleagues acknowledged later that Grissom should have known better. Al Worden, a member of the third group of astronauts, never worked on the Block I Apollo spacecraft, but he understood it was a dangerous ship. “A lot of things, a lot of things went wrong on Apollo 1. They were overpressurizing it with pure oxygen and all it took was a spark,” Worden noted. “And [Grissom] should have known that, a lot of people should have known that.”49
Meanwhile, Slayton’s call to Houston had set in motion a well-established astronaut ritual designed to shield the families in the event of a tragedy. Slayton cared not a whit for the reporters or their queries about what happened that evening on Pad 34; his sole concern was making certain that NASA employees or their wives got to the homes of the dead astronauts before the reporters. Meanwhile, the ham-handed NASA public affairs apparatus initially responded to the disaster by telling reporters to “go on home, nothing has happened.”
Stonewalling reporters doing their jobs was one thing. Purposely deceiving the press corps was another matter entirely. With the exception of Slayton, the NASA PR machine was utterly unprepared in the hours after the fire to deal with an unprecedented calamity.
And so the wake began. It fell to Betty to inform her in-laws in Mitchell that Gus was dead. Nearly simultaneously, the news of fatalities on Pad 34 arrived from the Kennedy Space Center over Dennis and Cecile’s television. Gus’s parents were home the entire evening, but Cecile recalled no one from NASA calling to notify them of their son’s death.50 The call from Betty was followed by a visit from the Grissoms’s pastor. After calling their sons and daughter, Dennis and Cecile pulled down their window shades and turned out the lights of the same modest home on Baker Street where their dead son had grown up. Later, Cecile would tell an interviewer, “My son had to give his life to make [the Apollo spacecraft] better.”51
Lowell Grissom was still at the office that Friday evening at the General Electric jet engine plant in Cincinnati. “My dad called and told me there had been an accident on the launchpad and they hadn’t survived. It was before 7 o’clock” in the evening eastern time. “They wanted to make sure that we were called before it hit the news.”
In Downey, where other Apollo crews had been training that day in another Block I spacecraft, it was late afternoon. Harrison Storms, president of North American Aviation’s Space and Information Division, was in a conference room thinking about his youngest son’s wedding rehearsal dinner that evening. He had promised to show up on time for a change despite the long technical meeting about the Apollo Block II spacecraft droning on in front of him. His secretary interrupted the meeting to inform Storms that someone from the Cape was on the phone and there had been a fire in the Apollo 1 spacecraft.
Storms had the call transferred to the speakerphone, where all in the room heard the shocking report. “There is no hope now,” an eyewitness told Storms and his stunned engineering staff.
Lee Atwood, Storms’s boss, was in Washington at that moment about to sit down to dinner at the International Club with NASA administrator James Webb, Wernher von Braun, and Robert Gilruth. All had attended a White House ceremony earlier in the day commemorating the signing of the Outer Space Treaty. Atwood was paged. It was Storms on the other end of the line when Atwood picked up. “There has been a bad fire at the Cape,” Storms reported. “How bad?” Atwood inquired. “All the astronauts are dead,” Storms replied.
Dumbstruck, Atwood asked Storms to repeat what he had just reported. Atwood spotted Gilruth with a drink in his hand. Handing the phone to the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, Atwood exclaimed: “Jesus, Bob, have you heard about this tragedy at the Cape?”52
The news was passed along to Webb, who immediately called the White House. Word soon spread around the dining room as dinner was being served. No one could eat.
When Rene Carpenter heard about the fire on the television, she raced through Glenn’s backyard, past the Hammacks, and crossed Pine Shadows Drive. The Grissoms’s front door at Number 211 was ajar. Rene entered and saw Betty already “stone-faced and composed.”53 The house on Pine Shadows was already full of NASA people when Rene arrived; Betty was putting on the brave face that was now her burden. Betty and Rene had been through much together, riding out Gus’s first flight, agonizing over the disastrous recovery when Gus nearly drowned. On the night of the fire, Rene remembered that no one could bring himself to speak of the “cataclysmic folly” that had killed three men.
The old test pilot ritual had begun, a wake in which friends and colleagues brought food no one could eat, the booze flowed with little effect, and few if anyone knew what to say, simply because there was nothing to be said. “They didn’t feel anything,” Betty repeated throughout the grim evening. It was over in ten seconds. To believe otherwise would have been unbearable. One had to keep going no matter what the knock on the door brought.
Later, to get him out of the house, Rene took thirteen-year-old Mark to the feed store in Seabrook to pick up sweet feed for the Carpenter girls’ horses. After a popsicle, they drove slowly back to Timber Cove. The bewildered boy returned to his home as the funeral arrangements were being made.
An Associated Press photographer camped out in front of the Grissom home snapped a series of pictures of the forlorn family hound, Sam, waiting on the front walk. Perhaps Sam was guarding the fort. The wire service decided Sam was “waiting for his master who will never return.”
Early on the morning of January 28, 1967, the bodies of Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Virgil I. Grissom, age 40, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Edward H. White Jr., age 36, and Navy Lieutenant Commander Roger B. Chaffee, just 31, were finally removed from their charred ship, the ill-fated Spacecraft 012. The bodies were transported by ambulance to nearby Patrick Air Force Base for an autopsy and preparation for burial.
The Apollo 1 crew had been expected back in Houston that Saturday to continue flight preparations and presumably review the results of the plugs-out test. Then the Grissoms would head to the Field Enterprises bash that evening in Houston. The party was of course cancelled, the entire city now in mourning over the dead astronauts. Funeral arrangements had to be made, memorial services planned, the details of somehow coming to grips with the enormity of sudden and violent death worked out. All this took place in an atmosphere of shock and national grief on a scale not seen since JFK’s assassination three years earlier. The nation cared deeply about these men, “pioneers,” Schirra later told a reporter, “who put themselves out on a limb.”54
Sam Beddingfield, who had joined NASA in 1959 at his buddy Gus Grissom’s urging, summed up the space agency’s failure to ensure the safety of the Apollo 1 crew. Beddingfield grimly concluded after the fire: “You couldn’t have built a better booby trap.”55