15

ABANDON IN PLACE

This was Arlington and here they all lay, formed up for the last time.
—James Salter

Gus Grissom and the crew of Apollo 1 were casualties of the Cold War, the ideological, technological, and military struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The decades-long competition came closer to destroying the planet at its zenith during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 than any previous war.

The US-Soviet race in space helped redefine the goals of the Cold War. Grissom had been a different kind of Cold Warrior during one of its key flash points, the Korean War. Cold War tensions soared again with the 1957 launch of Sputnik, fueling fears of Soviet domination of space. The US space program was hastily established on the principle that America would respond to Sputnik and compete for the high ground. By the spring of 1961, two months before Grissom’s first flight, the United States boldly declared it would land a man on the moon ahead of the Russians. For the winner, there would be international prestige, the opportunity to claim the superiority of its technology and—by extension—its political and economic systems. Grissom and his Mercury colleagues would serve as the vanguard of a new kind of Technological Cold Warrior competing in a new arena, one in which risk takers would seek to outdo each other in the deadly vacuum of space rather than over the contested skies of Central Europe or, later, Southeast Asia.

The Space Race, a competition cooked up in a matter of weeks, officially began on May 25, 1961, when a young president declared the United States would send men to the moon and return them safely home by the end of the decade. Stung by defeat and betrayal weeks earlier at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, another flashpoint in the Cold War, President John F. Kennedy sought a way to change the subject while channeling the pent-up energy and innovation of the richest nation in the history of the world. JFK’s trusted counselor, Theodore Sorensen, who helped lay the groundwork for Kennedy’s moon-landing speech to a joint session of Congress, recalled the existential threat posed by Moscow’s rocket capabilities and the very real prospect of Soviet military control of outer space. Kennedy and Sorensen quickly came around to the view that a manned lunar landing would help close the space gap while giving substance to the candidate’s New Frontier campaign slogan. Grissom saw himself as a pioneer. Along with the other Mercury astronauts, he was more than willing to answer Kennedy’s call. The costs would be high in lives and treasure.

Even politicians with the most to gain in terms of Cold War prestige understood that exploring space could quickly drain their coffers. In the late 1950s, the gulag survivor and Russian rocket designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev informed Nikita Khrushchev that each Soviet R-7 rocket installation would cost half a billion rubles. “What will we do?” Khrushchev responded. “We’ll be without our pants.”1

By 1963, the economic realities of the Space Race also were closing in on the American president. Kennedy was utterly enamored by the danger, risk, and scientific prestige of manned space exploration. He eventually understood a race to the moon could break the bank. To the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, no less, he downplayed the importance of a series of Russian and American orbital missions, dismissing them as “three-day wonders” that were “not that important”² and too costly in the long run. His post–Cuban Missile Crisis policies now aimed at détente with the Soviet Union while reining in his own trigger-happy generals. Hence, Kennedy was proposing a joint lunar mission with the Russians by the fall of 1963.³

The president fully understood the importance of national prestige as a Cold War tenet but also was concluding in autumn 1963 that the United States could no longer afford to go to the moon alone. Hence, he was feeling out the Russians about a joint lunar mission. JFK was in the midst of a fundamental reassessment of US-Soviet relations, one that reevaluated the wisdom of a “crash” lunar program. A year later, Kennedy was dead and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power.

In the last year of the Kennedy administration, the enormous costs of a manned lunar landing had finally hit home.4 Politicians were only considering the financial costs. There would be other sacrifices, which few could foresee. In his haste to secure the next flight, it is unlikely Grissom considered those costs; he and the rest of the astronaut corps were now firmly in the grip of forces they could no longer control. All wanted to beat the Russians to the moon. Every Soviet space success was grudgingly acknowledged while firing the competitive drive of the growing astronaut corps.

A week before his assassination in Dallas, Kennedy again visited Cape Canaveral to see for himself the mighty new Saturn rocket developed by Wernher von Braun’s team in Huntsville, Alabama. The Saturn rocket would at last give the Americans the lead in the Space Race. Accompanying the president on his tour of the Cape were Grissom and Gordon Cooper.

From the day of Kennedy’s moon landing declaration to Congress in 1961, the clock began ticking on a crash program. Once started, Apollo gathered momentum and moved fast, much faster than other government-funded technology programs. In the political parlance of Washington, the Apollo program had “legs.” The scale of development quickly outpaced the ability of engineers and managers to keep up with the details of arguably the largest technological endeavor since World War II.

The men and women of Apollo—overwhelmingly men—simply could not get their collective arms around all that they were undertaking, overlooking what the early, faulty machinery was revealing in the test data. The warnings signs were either overlooked or ignored. Apollo would become the very definition of a “crash” program. At the very top of this technological pyramid, hastily constructed on a foundation of sand, was Gus Grissom. NASA flight director Chris Kraft acknowledged the deadly consequences of “Go Fever,” the hell-bent drive to beat the Russians to the moon: “We were willing to put up with a lot of poor hardware and poor preparation in order to try to get on with the job. And a lot of us knew that we were doing that.”⁵

It is easy in hindsight to see the consequences of the technological train wreck6 that was Apollo in the mid-1960s. The fact remains that those inside the program, responsible for the lives of the astronauts, had simply lost sight of crew safety. Later, too late, many acknowledged their failures, finally understanding that the astronauts’ deaths were a direct result of their carelessness. Some never recovered.

A series of early US space successes bred complacency. Complacency kills. Grissom understood the risks. In return for embracing them, he had won the coveted slot as commander of the first Apollo mission. Had he decided against flying a flawed machine, Grissom understood others would quickly line up to replace him. Boxed in and blinded by the rewards, Grissom rolled the dice. He and the rest of the astronaut corps believed they could engineer the risks out of the faulty Apollo hardware. Grissom had inherited a mess but reckoned he could somehow beat the odds, even though he and his bosses were literally playing with fire.

The odds of failure in an all-out program like Apollo were high; the chances of an accident finally caught up with the American space program at a time and place no one could imagine: on the launchpad in a three-man spacecraft on top of an unfueled rocket during what was considered a routine test. The fire that killed Grissom, White, and Chaffee was a direct consequence of shortsighted engineering decisions made several years before: using a pure oxygen environment in a spaceship equipped with a heavy, inward-opening hatch and an outer hatch requiring at least ninety seconds to crank open.

Dedication, professionalism, and attention to every detail, especially crew safety, might have prevented a deadly fire, but human endeavors as complex as Apollo seldom work that way. Where technology is preeminent, lessons often must be learned the hard way. It turned out in January 1967 that the deaths of three astronauts were among the sacrifices required for humans to reach the moon.

After news of the disaster broke and the deaths of the astronauts spread like a shock wave across the nation, the NASA public affairs machine managed to release a terse three-paragraph statement confirming that Grissom, White, and Chaffee were “killed … in a flash fire.” The news release inaccurately stated that the crew entered the spacecraft at 3 p.m.EST (they were in the couches shortly after 1 p.m.), the hatches had been sealed, and “emergency crews were hampered by dense smoke in removing the hatches.” In reality, there were no “emergency crews” near the spacecraft, only pad technicians. And there was little or no effective fire-fighting equipment available. NASA’s statement was at least accurate in two respects: the crew was dead and “all data [had] been impounded pending an investigation.”

With that, any chance of an independent probe of what happened on Pad 34 was foreclosed as NASA management closed ranks in the hours after the tragedy. Little in the way of information was released beyond NASA Administrator James Webb’s telling remark: “Although everyone realized that someday space pilots would die, who would have thought the first tragedy would be on the ground?”

With the assembled media at Cape Kennedy clamoring for details, NASA relented, allowing the experienced yet friendly journalist George Alexander, accompanied by a news photographer, to examine the charred cockpit. As “pool” reporters, they would share their observations with colleagues at Cape Canaveral. Alexander accurately described the spacecraft interior as looking “like the cockpit of an aircraft in World War II that took a direct hit.”

NASA moved quickly to appoint an official board of inquiry chaired by Floyd Thompson, director of the Langley Research Center. The board consisted primarily of NASA, Air Force, and other government officials who quickly began interviewing witnesses and sifting through what was left of Grissom’s spacecraft in search of clues. With the in-house inquiry under way, the space agency said little else in the days and weeks after the fire. The American space program was now dead in the water, a moon landing now farther away than ever.

Despite months of finger-pointing and blame-laying in reaction to the Apollo 1 fire, most everyone at the space agency and its contractors understood immediately they dared not let down their fallen comrades. As Walter Cunningham of the backup crew wrote: “The accident would have been even more tragic if the work the crew started had not been allowed to continue and they had died for nothing.” In the tragic aftermath, he observed: “At least the evidence was right in front of us—on Pad 34.”

It was Cunningham who retrieved the Apollo commander’s air force uniform, hopping on a NASA T-38 trainer and delivering it to Cape Kennedy after the astronauts’ autopsy. Cunningham had earlier arrived at the Schirras’s and slipped through the hole cut into the backyard fence to the Grissoms’s. Schirra had removed Grissom’s uniform from a bedroom closet and handed it to Cunningham through the back door, out of Betty’s sight. It was the dress uniform in which Grissom would be buried.7 Cunningham was grateful that grim weekend to have something useful to do.

The astronauts immediately understood a launchpad fire meant there existed at least a chance the cause could be traced and the utterly flawed Block I Apollo command module fixed. In the ensuing months, such a machine was built. The Block II Apollo spacecraft represented a complete overhaul of the ship that killed Grissom and his crew. It included a hinged, outward-swinging hatch that could be opened in three seconds, a two-gas cabin atmosphere in the cockpit, protective floorboards, and vastly improved wiring and fireproofing. It would eventually take twenty-four humans to the moon and return them safely. A great machine would be forged from the flames of Apollo 1.

The sixth man to walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, who was among the astronauts who flew the “Missing Man” formation honoring the lost crew during the weekend memorial services near Houston, recalled later that those charged with fixing Apollo “would make certain that Gus, Roger and Ed did not die in vain.” The fire “would be transformed into a bitter blessing, a Pyrrhic victory that would one day quietly contribute to the success of the astronauts who followed.”⁸

Articulating the meaning of Apollo, Mitchell continued: “NASA and its individual members were a part of the evolutionary process of humankind, a significant cog in the machine that would take us to other worlds. The people around me would be the first of our species to explore these new landscapes; Ed, Roger, and Gus were a part of the process as well, even in death.”

Mitchell and the other astronauts realized and understood the following: “Our three compatriots would admonish us were we to abandon the larger project as a result of their death[s], because from the beginning it seemed unlikely that a project of this magnitude could be accomplished without loss of life.”9

For all its horror, the fire on Pad 34 proved to be the decisive turning point in the Space Race. The United States would not have reached the moon by the end of the decade had Apollo 1 not exploded. “I hesitate to say this, but I have to say it: I don’t think that we would have gotten to the moon in the Sixties if we had not had the fire,” said flight director Kraft, echoing the sentiments of many who worked on Apollo. “That’s a terrible thing to say, but I think it is true.”¹⁰

Other NASA veterans have over the decades expressed a decidedly different view, one that dismisses the notion that avoidable sacrifices teach valuable lessons. This interpretation of the fire on Pad 34 and fatal space shuttle accidents that followed instead stresses the visceral need to touch these tragedies, to imagine how the astronauts died, and to feel the inconsolable grief of parents, spouses, and children. Flight director Gene Kranz believed everyone at NASA needed to reexamine his or her role in Apollo and the fatal fire. Ultimately, each individual needed to take responsibility for what happened, acknowledge the consequences of creeping complacency and carelessness, and thereafter strive never again to repeat those deadly mistakes. All who worked on Apollo had to understand that lives were always at stake in human spaceflight, that no one in the space agency or its contractors could ever duck the “fearsome responsibility” described by the former NASA mission controller James Oberg: “We should have known already, and people should not have had to die to remind us.” Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia were not accidents, Oberg insisted. “They were consequences of complacency and carelessness.”¹¹

Grissom understood better than most that risk played no favorites. He nevertheless decided it was worth taking. That decision turned out to be his undoing. It also was his greatest contribution to the history of human space exploration. All who followed owed a debt to Grissom and his crew.

However high-minded the sacrifice, the senseless tragedy was a direct result of negligence on the part of Grissom’s bosses and the contractors NASA was obliged to oversee. Ultimately, NASA was culpable for the deaths of Grissom, White, and Chaffee after accepting delivery of a “dumb machine”12 in the summer of 1966 that should never have left the factory.

Critics soon filled the void created by official silence in the aftermath of the fire. They had watched along with the rest of the nation the televised burials of the three astronauts. Paul Conrad, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist of the Los Angeles Times, distilled the public’s sense of revulsion in the tragedy’s aftermath. About a week after the fire, as the Apollo review board’s investigation was ramping up, Conrad depicted in a way no official report ever could the deadly element of risk that hung always over the Space Race. In Conrad’s rendering, the specter of death is pictured in a spacesuit holding a Mercury spacecraft in one hand and a Gemini spacecraft in the other. Gus Grissom’s smoldering Apollo spacecraft is seen in the background. Conrad’s caption reads: “I thought you knew. I’ve been aboard on every flight.”¹³

The fatal fire and NASA’s knee-jerk response to it would signal a fundamental shift within the space agency and its army of contractors. The first sign was the predictable bureaucratic response in a crisis: circle the wagons and attempt to control the flow of information.¹⁴ NASA officials moved swiftly to lock down the Kennedy Space Center and mission control in Houston. It took just over two months for a swift in-house investigation to conclude that faulty wiring was the likely cause of the fire. For the record, investigators said they could not pin down the exact location of the ignition source. Perhaps no investigation could have in a machine as complex and flawed as the Block I Apollo command module.

The harsh reality was that political and engineering trade-offs made years earlier became the foundation for an inherently risky enterprise on an extremely tight schedule that ended up killing three men. Grissom was caught up in these powerful forces and surely concluded in the months before his death that he had little choice but to play the hand he had been dealt.

Investigators documented the spacecraft interior before the crew was removed early on the morning of January 28. Grissom’s and White’s nylon suits had been fused together by the tremendous heat. Following the military autopsies of Grissom, White, and Chaffee at Patrick Air Force Base just south of the Kennedy Space Center, their bodies were prepared for burial and transferred in civilian hearses with a military escort from the medical dispensary to the airfield. Their caskets were loaded onto military transports for a flight to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC. White’s body would be transferred to New York for burial at the US Military Academy at West Point.15

As the bodies of the crew members were being prepared for burial, a series of hastily planned memorial services were being held during the last weekend of January 1967 in the Houston suburb of Seabrook and elsewhere. Betty Grissom, wearing a light-colored dress and gloves, is seen in newsreel footage being escorted into a chapel by Marge Slayton and Michael Collins. Collins was standing in for Deke Slayton, who was already swept up in the fire investigation. Wernher von Braun also attended the memorial service for Grissom. The first of several “Missing Man” formations flew over the mourners. Betty steeled herself to bury her husband back in Virginia, where Grissom’s career as an astronaut began.

Virgil Ivan Grissom and Roger Bruce Chaffee were buried side by side on a rise overlooking the Capitol from the Virginia side of the Potomac River on January 31, 1967, a sharply cold, clear day. The grave sites are tucked away deep within the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery in out-of-the-way Section 3 reserved for aviation pioneers.

US Army First Lieutenant Thomas Etholen Selfridge was among the first to be buried in Section 3, not far from the spot where a plane in which he was a passenger crashed at Fort Myer near the western end of the military cemetery. Selfridge, a West Point graduate and ardent aviation supporter, was an associate of Alexander Graham Bell, himself an airplane inventor and rival of the Wright brothers. Selfridge became the first military air casualty while aboard a plane piloted by one of the world’s first two test pilots, Orville Wright. The younger of the Wright brothers had recently completed a series of record-setting endurance flights at Fort Myer. Selfridge had arranged to be assigned as a passenger on another of Orville’s test flights. The strapping Selfridge weighed 175 pounds, more than any previous passenger. (Even then, weight was a critical factor in aviation.) The pair took off in the late afternoon of September 17, 1908. On the fourth pass over the field, Orville Wright heard “a light tapping” followed by “a terrible shaking.”16 A propeller blade cracked, and the propeller began to vibrate, tearing loose a stay wire that wrapped around the blade. The blade snapped off, and the out-of-control aircraft dropped like a rock, about seventy-five feet before crashing.¹⁷ Selfridge died several hours later of a fractured skull at the age of twenty-six; Wright remained in critical condition for days with a fractured leg and hip and broken ribs. Selfridge was the first military casualty of powered flight, but he had at least gotten off the ground.

Grissom¹⁸ and Chaffee were buried a short distance from Selfridge’s grave. Other astronauts killed in plane crashes also were interred at Arlington, but Grissom and Chaffee were the first US astronauts killed in their spacecraft.

Grissom’s casket was delivered to Arlington by hearse at 9 a.m. A six-man Air Force honor guard transferred the casket to a caisson. The Air Force band led the procession to the gravesite, which had been covered with fake grass that stood out against the drab winter landscape.

A long line of limousines waited behind as Grissom’s flagged-draped coffin was transferred to the caisson drawn by a team of six horses, three riderless. Grissom’s fellow Mercury astronauts and his Gemini crewmate John Young served as pallbearers, marching alongside the caisson in military cadence: Glenn, Cooper, and Young on one side, Shepard, Carpenter, and the retired air force officer Slayton in civilian clothes on the other. Wally Schirra escorted Betty, her two sons, and Gus’s parents.

Behind the caisson walked Gilruth, Kraft, and other NASA administrators, who no doubt felt, Betty Grissom recalled, “the weight of diffused guilt and persistent self-questioning.”¹⁹ She also would remember hoof beats, the stiff caisson wheels creaking on the pavement, and the biting cold. The solemnity and formality of the military funeral summoned memories of JFK’s burial at Arlington just over three years earlier.

Newsmen and photographers flanked the funeral procession, dodging rows of headstones as they ran. A large crowd of mourners and onlookers had already gathered at the gravesite. Soon, the procession arrived and the casket was placed on the catafalque. Betty, Scott, and Mark, along with Dennis and Cecile, facing west, filled the seats to the right of the casket. Gus Grissom was briefly eulogized as the Missing Man formation thundered overhead for the last time. A bugler played “Taps.” After the flag on Grissom’s coffin was presented to Betty, who betrayed no emotion, President Lyndon B. Johnson, the driving force behind the manned space program after Sputnik, rose to grasp and hold the silent widow’s hand and offer condolences. Johnson then shook the hands of the two Grissom sons, who remained seated. Each was still trying to come to grips with the reality that their father was gone. Scott and Mark mostly stared at the ground, numbed by the events of the previous four days.

Unflinching, Betty glared at the honor guard as they folded the American flag over her husband’s casket. The realization was sinking in that she and the boys were now truly on their own. A Life magazine photographer captured the image. The magazine’s editors spread the photo over a page and a half of its funeral coverage.20 Betty’s expression—a combination of shock, pain, bitterness, and resignation—was among the earliest images to distill the human toll of risk taking during the Space Age. It was a reminder that death lingered always in the race to the moon. Betty, a widow at thirty-nine, would come to symbolize all the astronaut wives whose husbands were killed in training accidents during the 1960s and, eventually, the survivors of later space disasters.²¹

Finally, Dennis Grissom rose to accept the president’s condolences. Johnson exchanged a few words with Virgil’s parents. Cecile, in a beige cloth coat and white hat, remained seated as the president leaned over, held her hand, and whispered a few words. Johnson moved closer to hear Cecile’s reply. The president patted the mother’s hand one last time, straightened up, and walked back to the waiting presidential limousine. He would repeat these official duties several hours later at the same spot during the funeral of Roger Chaffee.

With that, the service ended. The mourners filed back to the waiting limousines, each filled with the emptiness and loss that accompanies tragedy. Only the January cold, the rustling of the oak trees, and the empty caisson remained. Betty, her sons, and the dead astronaut’s parents departed, and the cemetery workers arrived. Gus Grissom had always wanted to be buried at Arlington, believing he had earned the honor to be interred there among the other pioneers of flight. Indeed, this was the least his country could do for him, for his family. The far corner of Arlington again fell silent, and the exploits of the fearless astronaut who had risked everything over the previous decade would soon be forgotten. Others riding giant rockets would be the first to truly leave the planet, to see the whole circle of Earth from their spaceships. Grissom was now consigned to the earth.

The Grissom family displayed characteristic Midwest stoicism after their son, husband, father, and brother was killed. So too had the Chaffees of Michigan. Roger’s inconsolable mother, Blanche, summoned the strength and dignity to answer a reporter’s question during a memorial service for her son. Through her tears, Blanche recalled: “Roger was so energetic, so enthusiastic about the whole program. We’re sure that as long as he had to leave this world, he’s happy in his spaceship anyway.”

A reporter then asked Donald Chaffee if he harbored any ill will over his son’s death. “None whatsoever,” the father replied, recalling the promise he had made to his son on a Florida beach the previous summer. “The price of progress comes high at times.”22

Chaffee, the rookie astronaut who carried himself with a “bantam-rooster air of confident competence,”²³ never got his chance to fly in space, to fulfill his dream of walking on the moon. Chaffee had been a perfectionist, a trait that would have consequences for his family after his death. “He ruled his household, wrote all the checks, made all the decisions,” his friend, fellow astronaut, and Purdue graduate Eugene Cernan observed later. “Now that he was gone, his wife and children were adrift.” Lieutenant Commander Roger Chaffee was just thirty-one years old when he perished in the flames.

West of the main campus, at the end of Airport Road and Aviation Drive, off the main runway at the Purdue University Airport, sits Chaffee Hall. The modest building situated among the fluid dynamics, combustion research, and high-pressure research laboratories is in the thick of things, just as its namesake was from his first days as an astronaut.

As the crew of Apollo 1 was being buried, NASA investigators were scrambling to determine how the disaster could have occurred during a supposedly “routine” test. Still in denial about the fundamentally flawed machine NASA had designed, investigators were initially convinced that Pad 34 was a crime scene and someone must have done something wrong to cause the fire. The space agency simply could not acknowledge that its own mismanagement had killed the crew.

In the frantic hours and days after the fire, investigators instead focused on several potential causes that included faulty wiring harnesses, an exploding battery, and a cockpit switch providing power to a backup spacecraft guidance system called a body-mounted attitude gyro, or BMAG. They also zeroed in on the actions of the pad technicians on duty the night of the fire, specifically, Stephen B. Clemmons.

Clemmons, the North American Aviation spacecraft mechanical technician, was monitoring the panel supplying pure oxygen to the spacecraft’s environmental control system on the evening of the fire. “I had the misfortune of being next to Apollo 1, America’s newest spacecraft built by North American Aviation, at the crucial moment when it burst into flames,” Clemmons recalled decades later.24 Haunted by the Apollo fire, Clemmons recalled the smoke and flames, the shouting astronauts, and his colleagues’ shock on Pad 34 as they braved the inferno to open the hatches. Like the others, Clemmons had to live with the memory of the launchpad fire for the rest of his days, the toxic smoke perhaps shortening a life that ended on June 1, 2014.

Amid the flames, confusion, and the shouts for help, Clemmons immediately asked engineers in the blockhouse whether to stop the flow of oxygen that was surely fueling the fire. Or should he keep the oxygen flowing in case there was a slim chance the crew was still alive? Clemmons was driven from the White Room shortly after fire engulfed the spacecraft and, still waiting for instructions from the blockhouse, left the oxygen panel on. He then joined the perilous effort amid the “heavy biting black smoke” to open the heavy hatches. It took nearly five minutes; by then, the crew was dead.

Clemmons, the skilled technician who remained at his post throughout the minutes of maximum peril, was instead treated by investigators as a suspect. His boss informed him in the hours after the fire that he was a “person of interest” since he had been next to the spacecraft when the fire erupted. Clemmons was flabbergasted. Over the next few days, he was forced to go over his statement with investigators four more times before it became obvious that his actions were unrelated to the fire.

“NASA was determined that somebody had caused that fire,” Clemmons told researcher Mark Gray in a 2007 documentary on the Apollo 1 fire.25 “They could not believe that the spacecraft could burn on its own.” Investigators had looked at Clemmons “real heavy,” he said. “So we just kind of stayed hidden ‘til the investigation was over.”

Clemmons claimed to his dying day that he was told by investigators to keep quiet. Four decades later, he decided it was time to reveal what he saw on the night of the launchpad fire that killed Grissom and his crew.

Clemmons and the other pad workers were wary of the Apollo commander, a man not to be trifled with. Few were willing to go toe-to-toe with the irascible Grissom on a technical issue. Clemmons first met Grissom in 1959 while working at the Convair plant in San Diego, where the “go-or-blow” Atlas booster was being built.²⁶ Clemmons’s initial brush with the Mercury astronauts, by now national celebrities, left the distinct impression that they were a very “tight” group and never let outsiders get close. Grissom “was a very difficult person to understand,” Clemmons recalled. There were always two camps: Grissom was viewed either as an arrogant son of a bitch or a respected, uncompromising engineer who wanted to get the job done. Either way, “he held everyone’s nose to the grindstone,” Clemmons said.

Not surprisingly, Clemmons sided with his employer, North American Aviation, when it came to assigning blame for the deadly spacecraft design. He insisted it was NASA that was cutting corners on Apollo, running a crash program that was bound to kill someone sooner rather than later. Grissom “was pushing in the wrong direction, the contractors,” Clemmons argued. “He should have pushed against senior NASA officials,” not North American Aviation, to fix his spacecraft.

It was the space agency, Clemmons insisted, that tolerated exposed wiring and leaking coolant lines in the Block I spacecraft. The space agency insisted it did not need new fire-resistant beta cloth in the cockpit or a quick-opening hatch. Quality control at the Cape was practically nonexistent prior to the fire, the technician asserted.

Perhaps, but the contractor that had built great machines, including the X-15 rocket plane and the T-6 Texan training aircraft Grissom had flown as a young air force cadet, ultimately delivered a deathtrap of a spacecraft. Amid the finger-pointing that followed the fire, investigators would acknowledge “sloppy planning and supervision” by NASA while stressing “shamefully inadequate” design and test work by North American.27 There was, it turned out, more than enough blame to go around. But no one could fault the pad crew or their heroic actions on the night of the fire.

“After the fire, there was a big push from NASA to keep our mouths shut,” Clemmons alleged. There were threats, he continued. “You will not talk. Period. Nothing. If you do, you will be fired.”²⁸ Beyond their official statements to the Apollo review board, Clemmons and the others remained silent for decades about what happened on Pad 34. Clemmons stayed on after the fire, working to repair Pad 34 for the first Apollo flight in October 1968. He served as a pad worker through the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970.

In the aftermath of the disaster on Pad 34, NASA’s political decision to award the prime contract for the Apollo command module to North American Aviation looked like a tragic mistake. Even though Grissom had fallen in line to back the aerospace company over more experienced firms like McDonnell and Martin Company, it now looked as if Cecile Grissom’s instincts were correct about what she called “that plant in California.”

Doubts about North American’s ability to deliver grew as the Apollo astronauts worked more closely with company engineers in Downey. While other NASA contractors, like lunar module manufacturer Grumman Corporation, seemed committed to quality, “North American was positively schizophrenic,” Frank Borman noted. It was “populated by conscientious men who knew what they were doing and at least an equal number who didn’t know their butts from third base.”29

NASA eventually selected Borman to help oversee Apollo operations in Downey. Gilruth loyalist George Low in Houston replaced the broken Joseph Shea as Apollo program manager. Under intense pressure from NASA, North American brought in Bill Bergen from Martin, the runner-up for the Apollo contract, to straighten out the mess in Downey.³⁰ Among the first steps taken in direct response to the Apollo 1 fire was replacing the plug-type door with a single, outward-opening hatch. The days of sacrificing crew safety to save weight were over: the new hatch could be opened in seconds but would add about fifteen hundred pounds to the command module design. The added weight would have to be shed elsewhere on the huge Saturn V rocket. It took the deaths of three men before NASA figured out that crew safety trumped all other design considerations.

Then there was the curious case of the BMAG switch. In addition to the spacecraft inertial measurement unit (IMU) used to control liftoff and provide navigation data to the guidance computer, the Apollo command module also was equipped with a backup navigation system, the BMAG. The Daven Hermetic Division of Thomas Edison Industries supplied the airtight switches that provided power to the gyros, spacecraft wiring harnesses, and batteries.

The IMU was the central element of one of the great machines invented for Apollo, the Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System. While the IMU was installed on a rotating platform to provide its sensors with a fixed orientation in space, the “body-mounted” BMAG sensors rotated along with the Apollo spacecraft. Hence, these “rate gyros” served as another set of accelerometers used to measure how fast the spacecraft turned around its pitch, roll, and yaw axes. As such, the BMAG served as a backup to the IMU.

After the fire, investigators discovered that the BMAG switch on the cockpit panel was incorrectly set in the “off” position. In the rush to pinpoint the cause of the fire and assign blame, the sealed BMAG switch somehow became another prime suspect.

In the weeks before the fire, Grissom had complained about the operation of the BMAG switches. In a meeting with Deke Slayton and Herbert Kean, the division manager of the Edison Industries’ switch unit, Grissom insisted that the turning torque on the switches be increased. “He wanted to be absolutely positive that they could not ‘hang up’ between positions,” Kean remembered.31 The meeting concerning a relatively minor issue also demonstrated how finicky Grissom could be on a technical point and the lengths to which he would go as the first Apollo commander to get what he wanted in his spacecraft.

To Kean, it did not matter. “If Grissom wanted [heavier torque], that was it. You didn’t question it.” The rub was that the plugs-out test was fast approaching and a switch retrofit would cause further delays. Grissom relented, and the decision was made to replace the BMAG switches after the plugs-out test.

Kean’s assessment of Grissom in the tense weeks before the fire matched that of others who worked closely with the commander. “I respected him, even though he was a little grumpy towards me at that meeting,” Kean recalled.³²

Ultimately, the BMAG switch had nothing to do with the Apollo 1 fire. But in the early days of the fire investigation, the fact that the cockpit switch had been turned to the “off” position was enough to arouse suspicion. As in the case of the pad worker Clemmons, investigators were grasping at straws in their haste to come up with a cause for the fire. Kean later suspected someone might have gotten wind of his meeting with Grissom and Slayton to discuss a switch retrofit. Because one of the original switches was not properly set in the “on” position, Kean was summoned to Cape Kennedy on the night of the fire to answer to investigators on behalf of his employer. He was filled with anxiety, especially when he found two security guards outside his hotel room as he departed for the Kennedy Space Center the morning after the fire.

Kean now thinks that a pad technician probably turned off the BMAG switch as part of an effort to power down the smoldering spacecraft. Nevertheless, he was called onto the carpet by investigators who were searching for anyone or anything they considered physical evidence of faulty design.

Others intimately familiar with the Apollo hardware wonder to this day why NASA investigators would have wasted their time on the BMAG switch as a possible ignition source. “As a hermetic switch it seems odd the component was chased as a cause of the fire at all,” notes David Carey, a collector of Apollo hardware and professional engineer who tears apart and probes the innards of electronic devices for a living. “The hermeticity of the [BMAG] switch would imply to me that any arcing in the switch contacts would stay isolated from the oxygen atmosphere of the cabin and thus [would be] unable to spark the blaze.”33

Indeed, Clemmons and Kean had done their jobs to the best of their abilities. When Grissom asked for something, they delivered. Still, NASA treated each like a criminal suspect in their failed attempts to deflect blame away from the space agency and its prime contractor. NASA’s equivalent of Keystone Cops were not taken off the case until Floyd Thompson, director of the NASA Langley Research Center, was named chairman of the Apollo 204 Review Board, which was formed to probe the causes of the fire. It was not until Borman was appointed to effectively run the Apollo fire investigation that the real work of probing the actual causes of the fire began.

“Grumpy” Gus Grissom could surely be a pain in the neck to work with—surly, demanding, and detail oriented to a fault. But he also gained the respect of men like Clemmons and Kean, who understood what the Apollo commander was up against.

So, too, did Wally Schirra, the executor of Grissom’s estate. At the time of the Apollo fire, Schirra also stood near the top of the astronaut pecking order. He had distinguished himself during the Mercury and Gemini programs, flying a textbook orbital mission on his first flight while surviving his own brush with death on the launchpad during his second. Once in orbit, Schirra executed the world’s first rendezvous in space.

Apollo was different. The stakes were far higher; it was about life and death. “I was known as ‘Jolly Wally’ for a long time, until I got mad at Apollo,” Schirra admitted. “Why did I get mad? I lost my next-door neighbor, Gus Grissom, who was killed on the launchpad. And I didn’t feel very good about that.”34

Apollo 7, the October 1968 maiden flight of the overhauled command module, the mission that got the American space program back on track, was Schirra’s last. The cranky commander with a head cold argued with ground controllers throughout the nearly eleven-day flight. Some thought Schirra insubordinate. He viewed the long, tedious shakedown mission as the flight his friend and neighbor was no longer around to fly. For Schirra, it was the end of the line. Only one Mercury astronaut, Alan Shepard, would make it to the moon.

Months before Schirra’s flight, in the darkest days of Apollo, silent NASA footage shows spacecraft designer Maxime Faget, along with other NASA officials, picking over the carcass of the burnt-out Apollo 1 spacecraft. One wonders whether Faget was having second thoughts about his central role nearly five years earlier in NASA’s insistence on using pure oxygen in the Apollo spacecraft on the launchpad. Faget and the other spacecraft designers did have experience with pure oxygen under pressure,³⁵ thought they understood the dangers, and believed they could still ensure crew safety.

Others were not so sure. The outspoken John Young, Grissom’s protégé, considered Faget a “brilliant NASA aerodynamicist” but also recalled that he and others eventually concluded the engineer’s last name was an acronym for “Flat Ass Guess Every Time.”³⁶ Ultimately, the Apollo designers had risked the lives of astronauts for the sole purpose of shaving a few pounds off the spacecraft.

Borman, Grissom’s original Gemini copilot and commander of a later Gemini flight, was effectively in charge of investigating the Apollo fire. The fate of the lunar landing program was largely in the hands of Borman, whose ego would not fit in the same spacecraft with Grissom’s. NASA film of the hangar where the spacecraft was disassembled shows the aggressive, by-the-book Borman grilling technicians and searching the gutted spacecraft for clues. “Hour after hour, I’d sit in the charred cabin—for a long time, I was the only one allowed to enter,” Borman recalled.³⁷

It did not take the intuitive Borman long to figure out that a basic design premise of the Apollo program was fatally flawed, namely the mistaken belief that 100 percent pure oxygen under pressure could be used safely in a sealed spacecraft. That deadly assumption when combined with carelessness and complacency meant the Apollo 1 crew had been “sitting on a live bomb,” he concluded. An ignition source, a “bright arc” below Grissom’s couch, in the pure oxygen environment had consumed the flammable materials in the cabin, creating what Borman accurately described as “faucets of toxic fumes.” With no chance of escape, the astronauts were doomed.

Borman summed up months of investigating and soul-searching this way: “Sloppy planning and supervision on NASA’s part and some shamefully inadequate design and test work by North American” had killed the crew.38 Before a congressional committee investigating the causes of the fire, he acknowledged what was now clear: “The space program had overlooked the obvious hazard of putting a 100 percent oxygen environment into a spacecraft pressurized to more than 20 psi.”³⁹

All involved were at fault—the engineers, the technicians, the paper pushers, senior managers—the astronauts themselves. Someone, anyone, needed to step forward and demand a pause as the crash program went off the rails. Not the least among them was the commander of Apollo 1. No one dared speak up, and Grissom understood there would be a long line of volunteers eager to replace him if he faltered. So he carried on.

Michael Collins and William Anders were among the astronauts scanning the remains of Spacecraft 012 for clues. (Less than two years later, Anders would accompany Borman on man’s first flight to the moon.) Collins and Anders, both deeply involved in the Apollo design, arrived at the Cape Kennedy warehouse after the spacecraft was disassembled and made a beeline for the singed hatches. They understood far better than the engineers exactly what White and Grissom had been up against as the fire engulfed the cabin.

Recounting the disaster and the tumultuous early days of Apollo, Collins would later concede: “We were incredibly intelligent about some of the hazards we faced and we thought long and hard about them and we did everything we could to ward them off. But the business of a hundred percent oxygen environment inside the spacecraft, we really had not thought that through.”⁴⁰

The precise cause of the Apollo fire, the source of the spark that touched off the oxygen-fueled conflagration, was never officially determined and perhaps can never be known. But those closest to the investigation and the engineers who helped write the official history of the tragedy were convinced it started near a small door under Grissom’s couch on the left side of the spacecraft. The door located in the equipment bay provided access to lithium hydroxide canisters used to scrub carbon dioxide from the cabin atmosphere. Wire bundles ran below the door, which was opened repeatedly during months of training. The door had a sharp edge.

Directly underneath the access door was a DC power cable. The large wire bundles that filled the cabin wedged this cable against the bottom of the access door. Investigators reckoned that every time the door was opened and closed, the edge scraped against the cable. Over time, they believed, the repeated abrasions wore through the insulation, exposing wire sections of the cable.

Borman and others, including Scott Simpkinson, who helped disassemble the Apollo 204 spacecraft and edited the final NASA report on the fire, were persuaded the exposed section likely caused a brief electrical arc between the exposed wires. In a pure oxygen atmosphere with plenty of flammable material, this would have been sufficient to ignite a fire that would engulf the cockpit in seconds.

Lending further credence to this explanation about the fire’s source was a section of aluminum tubing just below the scuffed wiring that was bent at a ninety-degree angle. The joint, yet another example of shoddy engineering by North American Aviation that was tolerated by NASA, may have been leaking glycol coolant after repeated jostling. The liquid glycol was not flammable, but the fumes likely were.41

While NASA insisted the exact source of the fire was never found, Simpkinson and others believed the exposed wires under Grissom’s couch were the most likely point of ignition—the inevitable result of a series of design risks and inferior workmanship overlooked during construction of the first manned Apollo spacecraft.⁴² When investigators started digging, they soon discovered that Apollo had been moving so fast in the months before the fire that there was inadequate documentation about what had been installed in the spacecraft and when. Like the spacecraft testers who seldom found time to study the results of their simulations, the project engineers and spacecraft managers failed to adequately record the endless modifications to Grissom’s ship. All this would change as a direct result of the fire.

As details of the fire investigation leaked out during the spring of 1967, the space agency came in for withering criticism from a growing chorus of congressional opponents.43 Once the Apollo 204 Review Board released its findings and a series of embarrassing congressional hearings were staged to maximum effect, NASA began salvaging Apollo. Nearly 400,000 engineers and technicians would ensure Grissom, White, and Chaffee had not died in vain.

One of them, Jerry Goodman, an Apollo crew compartment project engineer, recalled the following after resumption of the Apollo program: “All of us were shocked with how easily things burned in oxygen, the high-pressure oxygen.” Still reeling from the horror of the astronauts’ deaths, the sleepless nights, and the agonizing realization that lives were at stake, Goodman pronounced himself rededicated. “I felt like a warrior. I think the team ended up like a lean and mean group of Trojan warriors.”⁴⁴

These words would have been music to the ears of the Cold Warrior Gus Grissom. This was precisely what the commander had been pushing for in the last, dispiriting days before the plugs-out test. Grissom’s unflagging dedication ultimately inspired engineers like Goodman to slough off carelessness and complacency, to learn the hard lessons paid for with the lives of the Apollo astronauts, eventually ensuring that the sacrifice of Grissom and his crew would indeed be “worth the risk.”

In the fire’s aftermath, a scathing critique of NASA, the Space Race, and Apollo was published in 1968 under the misleading title Murder on Pad 34. The diatribe by Erik Bergaust, “one of America’s foremost space age writers,” was not the murder mystery suggested by its sensational title. Rather, the book was a polemic aimed squarely at NASA administrator James Webb and the space agency’s senior management. NASA has long dismissed Bergaust’s ad hominem attack. Indeed, most of the author’s assertions about “the shocking story of the Apollo disaster—and why it may happen again”—proved unsettling but mostly unfounded. The book’s title was a marketing ploy rather than an accurate description of the author’s thesis.

Still, Murder on Pad 34 forced NASA to confront its deadly miscalculations and justify the huge risks inherent in a crash program to land men on the moon. Bergaust’s book also legitimized the views of critics like the atom bomb designer and eminent science advisor Vannevar Bush, who viewed Apollo as “folly, engendered by childish enthusiasm.”45 In a prescient letter published in the New York Times a week before JFK’s assassination, Bush warned of an inevitable accident in space, predicting that “things will go wrong, and we will be unable to do anything to get them down out of space. It is not just that this sort of thing may happen; it is bound to happen, especially in a crash program.”

Stung by its critics, NASA sought to pick up the pieces and move on. As the spacecraft was being fixed, the space agency shifted its focus to the gigantic rocket that would launch humans to the moon. Looking for a way to jumpstart Apollo, NASA embraced an aggressive approach called “all-up testing,” which involved stacking and launching a complete Saturn V rocket in November 1967. Having learned the lessons of the fire, NASA and its army of contractors who had built the mighty vehicle would closely scrutinize all test results. Astronaut Collins marveled later that no Saturn V ever blew up, as had the gigantic Soviet N1 moon rocket. When the unmanned Apollo 4 thundered off the pad and achieved orbit with barely a hiccup on November 9, 1967, NASA had at last emerged from the tragedy of Apollo 1. Twenty-one months after the fire, in October 1968, the American manned space program resumed, culminating in the first lunar landing on July 20, 1969. Among the many mementos left on the lunar surface was a plaque with the names of the fallen astronauts and cosmonauts. A crater on the far side of the moon is also named for Gus Grissom.⁴⁶

Fifty years later, raw emotions persist over the circumstances surrounding the Apollo 1 fire and the way in which NASA’s handled the investigation. Even the question of how best to remember and honor Grissom, White, and Chaffee has divided families and former colleagues over the decades, prompting lawsuits, controversy, anguish—even conspiracy theories. The controversy begins and ends with the Report of Apollo 204 Review Board to the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, released on April 5, 1967, about eight weeks after the Apollo 1 fire.47 Critics condemn the report as “a swift, in-house, self-serving investigation.”⁴⁸ The increasingly bureaucratic space agency moved swiftly to head off an outside investigation, asserting control over all physical evidence on Pad 34. In the case of eyewitnesses like Clemmons and perhaps other pad technicians, statements for the record were “gone over” for days before submission to the review board. These and other missteps served to undermine public confidence in many of the board’s conclusions. Still, the voluminous appendices to the review board’s report are sufficiently detailed to determine the actions of Grissom and his crew immediately before and during the fire. This supporting evidence confirms that the crew acted in accordance with all emergency procedures. The fatal error, of course, was that no one involved with Apollo, including the crew, considered the plugs-out test dangerous. A launchpad fire was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind in the headlong rush to beat the Russians to the moon.

The grim proceedings in the aftermath of the fire—the covering of backsides, the political posturing—obscured the reality that Betty Grissom and her sons had lost a husband and father. For Scott and Mark, the shock was leavened by a simple fact: “Dad was gone most of the time so, sad to say, [his death] wasn’t that big of a change,” Mark recalled a generation later. “I think that last year, 1966, he was home like fourteen, eighteen days that year.”⁴⁹

NASA would do little of substance to support the Apollo 1 astronauts’ families after the fire. The space agency was, after all, a goal-oriented technical agency seemingly insensitive to those who moved through it. Despite the frequent references to the “NASA family,” it proved unfeeling despite occasional, ham-handed displays of sympathy toward the Grissom family. Ultimately, posthumous awards, lunar craters, and similar gestures rung hollow. By contrast, Purdue University moved swiftly to dedicate an engineering building in Grissom’s name a year after the fire. It also arranged for Scott and Mark to attend their father’s alma mater for free. Betty was moved by these acts of kindness from her friends back in Indiana, realizing that they were among the most fitting ways to preserve her husband’s memory. Gus had been an eager, dedicated engineering student. Generations of Purdue engineering students would be inspired by his example.

The United States eventually sent twenty-four humans to the moon; twelve walked on its surface. It was a historic achievement, among the greatest feats of American ingenuity. Some moonwalkers wept when they gazed back at Earth. But as the lunar dust settled and the American moon landings faded from memory, so too did the sacrifice of the Apollo 1 crew. The Grissom family struggled to find an appropriate way to remember Gus. It became—and remains to the present—an emotional, complicated affair, equal parts resentment, bruised feelings and egos, misunderstandings, and, in the troubling case of Scott Grissom, unfounded conspiracy theories about the circumstances of his father’s death. Gus Grissom, the no-nonsense engineer, meticulous test pilot, and intrepid astronaut, could not have foreseen the bitter disputes over what he stood for, his place in the pantheon of space pioneers. He undoubtedly would have disapproved of all the fuss, preferring instead that everyone focus not on him but on pushing the bounds of space exploration.

A decision made eight years before his death to volunteer for a great human adventure had determined Grissom’s fate and that of his family. Few could have predicted the outcome: humans exploring another world two short years after Grissom, White, and Chaffee were killed.

Betty Grissom mostly kept her pain and resentment to herself during the glory days of Apollo from 1969 to 1972. For her, Apollo had amounted to “a half ton of rocks.”50 Scott and Mark were still too young to cope with any additional publicity after their father’s funeral. They spent their summers working as ball boys for the NFL Houston Oilers⁵¹ and hanging out with racecar drivers who had befriended their father.⁵² Pursuing legal action against North American Aviation remained out of the question. The success of the space program was paramount. Betty remained quiet. While Purdue had helped with her sons’ educations, Betty continued to rely on the Life and Field Enterprise contracts to make ends meet. At the height of the Apollo program, the question arose: How long should the widows of astronauts killed during the race to the moon continue receiving a share of the “publication money”?

As the astronaut corps swelled and documentaries were planned about the lives of the moonwalkers and their families, the issue of how to divide the proceeds came to a head. Betty balked at a proposed contract for the astronauts’ stories. Charles “Pete” Conrad, the Apollo 12 commander, seeking to settle the matter, summarily informed Betty, according to her account: “The newer fellows won’t want to share the money with the widows. They won’t even know who Gus Grissom was.” It was the last straw, the final insult. “If they don’t know who Gus Grissom was,” Betty shot back, “then they’d better find out.”53

There and then, Betty resolved to take her own calculated risk, a gamble that would eventually alienate her from the few friends she had left in the air force, the astronaut ranks, and the rest of NASA. Betty would spend the remainder of her life in isolation, deeply suspicious of NASA, ostracized by those who saw her as the aggrieved widow of a dead astronaut—a test pilot who, they never failed to mention, had volunteered for a dangerous job.

Increasingly bitter over what she viewed as NASA’s indifference, understandably resentful over North American Aviation’s slipshod workmanship and program management that led directly to the fire, Betty Grissom defied the Test Pilot Code: she sued the Apollo contractor in 1971 for negligence in the manufacturing of her husband’s spacecraft. The lawsuit alleged gross negligence on the part of North American Aviation in the design and manufacture of the Apollo spacecraft, resulting in the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew. Betty’s decision to sue was met with derision from most of her husband’s colleagues.

A federal judge in Florida initially dismissed her lawsuit based on a two-year statute of limitations. Betty’s attorney then asserted the children’s rights under Texas law in California, where Spacecraft 012 had been built. A date was set for trial. The legal issue eventually came down to how much the heirs of Gus Grissom could be compensated by putting a price tag on fifteen seconds of human pain and suffering. As the trial neared, Betty’s Houston attorney approached North American Aviation about an out-of-court settlement. After three days of negotiations, a settlement totaling $375,000 was reached. The American legal system had determined that the life of Virgil I. Grissom was worth about $25,000 for each second he struggled and suffered before losing consciousness and dying in his spacecraft. The widows of White and Chaffee declined to join Betty’s lawsuit against North American Aviation. They later accepted settlements for the same amount.

Betty had gained a measure of justice. It came at a steep price; she was now isolated from the other astronaut wives, “Togethersville,” as the support network had come to be known. The boys grew up and became pilots like their father, and Betty moved from the suburbs into Houston. Like her husband at the end of his life, Betty was now fending for herself.

A new way of describing events and interpreting their meaning emerged in the 1960s and flourished in the 1970s. It came to be called the New Journalism. Its earliest practitioner was the stylish writer with the nuanced ear, the provocateur Tom Wolfe. Among Wolfe’s early subjects were the Mercury astronauts. He mostly got their stories right, telling them in a completely new and compelling way that dispensed with traditional journalism conventions. When it came to Grissom, however, the dandy from Richmond, Virginia, got it mostly wrong.

Wolfe’s groundbreaking 1979 bestseller, The Right Stuff, managed to transform the competent engineer and fearless test pilot Gus Grissom into a cartoon character, all in the service of a New Journalism narrative. Wolfe’s research for his book was exhaustive, his insights about the early American manned space program profound. However, Wolfe simply ignored or failed to understand the character of the second American in space. The compelling story of the early Space Race required a protagonist: Shepard and Glenn each fit the bill. Cooper played the role of a renegade. Wolfe understood that Grissom was a central player in the drama that was the Space Race. He would emerge as the foil in the author’s Right Stuff narrative, contrasting with those who sought the limelight, those who did not lose their ships. Wolfe’s subplot, focusing on the loss of Liberty Bell 7, served as a counterpoint to the heroic flights of test pilot Chuck Yeager and the historic missions of Shepard and Glenn.

The film version of Wolfe’s book directed by Philip Kaufman and released in 1983 was worse, portraying Grissom as an inarticulate, boorish, beer-drinking fighter jock who “screwed the pooch,” panicking at the end of his flight, blowing the hatch on his Mercury spacecraft, sending it to the bottom of the ocean. The fundamental problem with Wolfe’s portrayal of Grissom and Kaufman’s schmaltzy film treatment is that it simply did not happen. So much for the New Journalism—a style of reporting that contributed to an era of profound narcissism in American culture. For all its flaws, however, The Right Stuff did rekindle appreciation for the exploits and sheer guts of the largely forgotten Mercury astronauts. Wolfe’s intentions were admirable, but he could not resist embellishing to provoke. Mostly, he provoked the family of Gus Grissom.

Lowell Grissom is an even-tempered, thoughtful man who is as steady as a compass pointing north, but mention the name Tom Wolfe and he comes out swinging. Of The Right Stuff, Gus’s younger brother declares: “I thought it was awful, I thought it was character assassination … so many things that were so wrong with it.” He continues for some time in this vein, and then adds a phrase reminiscent of his pugnacious older brother: “It’s a good thing I never met [Tom Wolfe]. He might have fallen down the stairs!”

Director Philip Kaufman has called Grissom “a fucking hero.” It is hard to square that observation with what amounts to Kaufman’s fictional account of Grissom panicking at the end of his Mercury flight. The essence of Hollywood’s version of Project Mercury and Grissom’s role in it was summed up best by the central character in Wolfe’s book, Chuck Yeager. A member of Kaufman’s film crew recalled movie consultant Yeager’s comment about a planned scene: “Well, that’s not exactly how it happened, but I know you fellas have to flower it up.”54

And “flower it up” they did. The film’s portrayal of the end of Grissom’s Mercury flight simply does not square with the facts. Kaufman’s film concludes with Grissom hanging from a horse collar, his shoelaces undone—something done completely for effect. Fred Ward, the actor who portrayed Grissom in the film, later said he felt a kinship with his character, Grissom as “almost totally defeated, like a dead fish on the end of a line, and then coming up toward the whirling helicopter blades, being pulled in.”

Back at Edwards Air Force Base, the Chuck Yeager character played by Sam Shepard watches on television as Grissom is hauled up to a rescue helicopter. Yeager’s bar mates have a good laugh at Gus’s expense. Yeager reminds them of the guts required to climb on top of a rocket and ride it into space. As if to apologize for the phony portrayal of the second American in space, Yeager/Shepard declares: “Good ol’ Gus. He did alright.”

At least one film critic spotted the fraudulent depiction. “The movie’s portrait of Grissom includes a scene showing the astronaut freaking out with claustrophobia after his capsule lands in the Pacific [sic],” observed movie reviewer Roger Ebert. “Kaufman cuts to an exterior shot to show the escape hatch being blown open with explosive bolts, but the implication is that Grissom panicked. Grissom always said the hatch blew on its own. Certainly the space program never lost confidence in him as one of their best men.”55 Ebert, like Yeager in the film, understood that Grissom had done far better than “alright.”

On a steaming Saturday morning in July 2011, the citizens of Mitchell, Indiana, gathered outside Masonic Lodge Number 228 in the shadow of its limestone sculpture of the Titan II rocket to remember “Brother” Gus Grissom, the second American in space. A plaque installed by the local Masons declares: “ONE OF US: In grateful tribute to Virgil I. Grissom, Master Mason, Explorer and trailblazer in the best of American traditions.” Amid buzzing cicadas, fussing children, and the clicks of the air force honor guards’ heels and rifle bolts, Reverend Eric Kersey began by praising the town’s hero whose “achievements literally stretch into space.”

Kersey thanked the Almighty for Gus’s “brave heart, whether in combat for his country or in our country’s space program.” All in attendance that day, fifty years after Grissom’s first space flight, would give thanks “for his quick wit, his inquisitive and probing mind, his loyalty to the mission, his love of flight and sense of adventure and exploration, and his willingness to give himself to expand human knowledge and increase human achievement for all mankind.”

Next to speak was Norman Grissom, a reserved man who unlike his siblings remained in Mitchell, was active in local politics, and edited the Mitchell newspaper. Norman described an older brother burning with ambition. “Growing up with brothers, as we all know, sometimes can be very contentious, with the usual squabbles and such. But it began to occur to me before too long that maybe the guy who was pulling weeds in the garden with me and mowing the yard and such was maybe somebody special. I think we all know that even back then I was right…. As he grew up and progressed [in] is career and took advantage of the things that were offered to him, he said, ‘You have to be ready when the opportunity comes.’ Gus was ready when his opportunity arrived.”56

Norman had previously traveled to the space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, to see his brother’s restored Liberty Bell 7. Betty preferred the ship be left at the bottom of the ocean. But Norman and Lowell were by contrast pleased to see that the spacecraft in remarkably good condition had at last been displayed. Both want the nation to remember their brother’s exploits.

Norman stared in silence at the restored ship for a long time, and then remarked: “I’m just imagining Gus sitting in there.”⁵⁷

Norman’s words in Mitchell during the fiftieth anniversary of his brother’s first space flight were the perfect expression of siblings’ complicated love for one another. Norman’s heartfelt recollections were juxtaposed with what followed: the next speaker was Scott Grissom, who has long alleged that NASA conspired to murder his father. Scott had come to Mitchell to repeat his conspiracy theories and demand a reopening of the Apollo fire investigation. Betty and Mark were not there to hear Scott’s tirade; they are estranged from the eldest son. Gus’s siblings cringed, suffering in silence.

Grissom’s first son had his say. “My father and the crew of Apollo 1 have never rested, their deaths have never received an independent investigation, their ship is still in disarray and was carried on a barge from Cape Canaveral to a resting hangar for permanent storage under a veil of secrecy. In fact, NASA and the US government have classified much of the materials that we have sought,” Scott asserted.

The son then called for “an independent investigation and full access to NASA personnel and materials in the event that we discover espionage or sabotage. We intend to seek criminal prosecution. And finally, we want a professional and public display of the Apollo 1 spacecraft.” A few in the audience applauded Scott’s remarks. Others were puzzled. His aunt and uncles were deeply dismayed.

Later, inside the Masonic Lodge, Scott distributed copies of his statement in hopes the local papers would reprint his allegations. Lowell advised the mayor of Mitchell to toss the statement in the trash. Informed of his allegations, Scott’s peers, the children of the other Mercury astronauts, expressed sadness that a celebration of Grissom’s life and career could be marred by the repetition of unfounded conspiracy claims. NASA’s negligence certainly contributed to the fatal fire, and it had in fact moved to head off any outside investigations that might embarrass the American space program. The agency would do little of substance to help the dead astronaut’s family, but surely it did not “murder” Gus Grissom.

Scott Grissom’s troubling accusations succeeded in stirring painful memories while spoiling an otherwise dignified ceremony celebrating his father’s accomplishments. The eldest son’s quixotic attempt to reopen the Apollo 1 fire investigation is at best highly unlikely.

The consequences of the catastrophe on Pad 34 reverberate still across the decades. Noting that Scott was sixteen years old when his father died, a former NASA official concedes, “I cut him a couple of light years of slack.”

In contrast to the simple observance in Mitchell, NASA marked the historic flights of Alan Shepard and John Glenn fifty years earlier with great fanfare. NASA’s administrator and his deputy both attended a two-day conference at Ohio State University in February 2012 celebrating Glenn’s historic orbital flight. Each space pioneer was deserving of those honors. So, too, was Gus Grissom, but no one from NASA attended the fiftieth anniversary observance of the flight of Liberty Bell 7 in Mitchell. Nor did the space agency send a congratulatory message to his family.

The monolithic concrete base of the launch structure, a steel ring it supports, and flame deflectors are all that remains of Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Until recently,58 the Kennedy Space Center tour bus delivered sightseers to Pad 34. The overgrown remnants of the blockhouse remain off to one side of what is officially known as Launch Complex 34. Several private memorials have over the decades been placed at the site. Among them is one reminding visitors: “Ad astra per aspera” (“A rough road leads to the stars”).

“Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived,” exhorts another.

For decades, the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire has been observed at this stark place—a concrete pedestal anchored in the coastal Florida scrub. What most visitors to the pad invariably notice are the ironic words stenciled on the massive base of the old launchpad: “ABANDON IN PLACE.”

For the families of the dead astronauts, the bureaucratese serves as a painful, fitting metaphor for how Betty, Scott, and Mark Grissom feel about the treatment they have received at the hands of NASA in the fifty years since the fire. Resentment over the deaths of Gus Grissom and his crew lingers like a dark cloud over the question of how best to honor the crew of Apollo 1. Betty insists the space agency did little to help her family after her husband’s death. The astronaut’s wife eventually declined the many invitations to attend official NASA ceremonies. The medals she was to accept in her husband’s name meant nothing.

One thing the government got right was loaning Grissom’s Gemini spacecraft to a museum just outside Mitchell, Indiana. Two days before the Liberty Bell 7 observances in the astronaut’s hometown, admirers gathered at the Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom Memorial Museum at Spring Mill State Park to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Gus’s suborbital flight. Betty and Mark were there to answer the same questions they have been asked for decades: What was Gus like? What made him want to fly? Did he think it was dangerous work? Why did he risk his life to fly in space? Betty dutifully provided the television crews with a guided tour of her husband’s museum. Along with Molly Brown, the Gemini spacecraft Gus and John Young flew in March 1965, the museum collection includes mementoes from Gus’s youth, his years at Purdue, and the air force throughout his career as an astronaut. A display case from his college days contains a leather case embossed with the Purdue logo: Gus Grissom’s slide rule.

The local TV stations used footage of Betty’s museum tour to set up an interview in which she vented about NASA, its failings, and the future of manned spaceflight. Betty is decidedly unenthusiastic. Things are different now, not like the supercharged days of the 1960s when anything was a possibility, when Grissom and the others risked everything. NASA is adrift, Betty insisted, and the American space program is a waste of money—money, she notes, we do not have. She may have harbored similar thoughts when her husband was at the top of the astronaut pyramid, but she held her tongue. A half a century later, unconstrained, she asserts the American space program is going nowhere.

After the TV interviews, Betty agreed to sit with Mark in a small conference room to answer a few written questions from admirers, the curious, fans of her husband, those with a vague idea of what the mother and son had endured. Betty and Mark submitted to this because they know Gus is beloved, that many still suspect he got the short end of the stick. Grissom, the icon, is to these admirers a kind of working-class hero, who if he had lived would have flown to the moon. Grissom risked everything, which is something rare, something to be honored. It was Mark’s task to sort through the three-by-five cards, select questions, and read them aloud, Betty’s hearing being not what it once was. Many of the queries were of the “What was it like?” variety.

What was it like to be married to a test pilot, an astronaut? “I didn’t know anything else,” Betty replied. Laughter. “He always had to have more flying hours, and I think he was very qualified to be an astronaut. Fifty years ago I think he felt that he was as well qualified as anybody. I think that somebody asked him that question and he said, ‘No one knows anything’ about spaceflight or how to get to the moon.” This was true. Mark found it hard to remember much about his father: “He was always gone,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Someone asked which NASA program Gus enjoyed the most. “Gemminy,” Betty replied, the southern Indiana twang returning, her way of pronouncing the two-man spacecraft Gus had done so much to design, test, and fly: “The Gus Mobile.” Exhausted after a long day, Betty’s responses were increasingly laced with disdain for NASA. The decades of resentment over her husband’s death simmered just below the surface in most of her responses.

Someone asked whether the space agency had supported the astronauts’ families. This was the crux of the matter, the subtext of Betty’s existence fifty years after her husband’s first flight. Piqued, Betty’s simple reply was, “No.” She turned to Mark and asked, “You backing me up on that?” “Not in our day they didn’t,” the son agreed. “Do what you’re told and other than that [NASA was] kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’” The resentment spilled out amid the display cases filled with the remnants of Gus Grissom’s life in Mitchell, his studies at Purdue, the Korean War, the rest of his air force career, and his two successful spaceflights.

Gus was long gone, taken from his family by the thing he cared most about. “I knew that he had always wanted to fly, and I was never going to disagree with anything,” Betty told another questioner. “He knew he did not have to have my approval to do what he wanted to do, even though it was considered a very dangerous job…. I’m not so sure he really considered it dangerous.”

It was indeed dangerous, among the riskiest of professions. Betty had little time to ponder her husband’s death, to indulge in self-pity. “I had other things to think about, like raising a family.”

It had been a long, sweltering day at Spring Mill, so hot that some of the Liberty Bell 7 anniversary festivities scheduled for that weekend in Mitchell were canceled. Betty was weary and was having trouble hearing the questions Mark read off the cards. Both did their best to answer them all.

A question from a child was completely out of context, but it somehow brought to the surface a side of Gus Grissom’s wife seldom if ever seen in public. Betty has many reasons to feel aggrieved. After all, she lost her husband and the father of her children in a tragedy, enduring the consequences in front of the entire nation.

Mark read the child’s innocent query: “Do you like animals?” Betty was confused, so she asked Mark to repeat the question. A more experienced moderator would have set it aside and left it at that. “Do you like animals?” Mark repeated.

At last comprehending the child’s meaning, Betty’s entire demeanor suddenly changed, softened. This was a subject she cared deeply about. She loved animals, always had! Sam, the loyal family hound, had waited in vain for his master to return home in January 1967. Unlike most humans, animals are faithful. For a brief moment, Betty let down her guard. Fifty years of anger and grief melted away. “Do I like animals? I think so,” Gus Grissom’s wife replied. “I feed the birds every day, and they miss me. They’re waiting by the house.”59

Lowell Grissom understands why his sister-in-law remains aggrieved fifty years after Gus was killed. “Betty has a big grudge against NASA, doesn’t feel like she was ever treated properly. There’s some validity to some of her feelings because when the accident first happened [NASA] didn’t want to admit it at all, that there was anything wrong. It was years before they would even call [the mission] Apollo 1.” Betty “does have some valid points,” he continued, “but I can’t agree with all the stuff she’s into and has done.”

Betty’s disillusionment began with the media spectacle she and her husband endured after his Mercury flight. A decade later, Betty concluded that NASA and the manufacturer of the Apollo spacecraft that killed her husband and his crew owed her. In fact, if not in law, they did. This time she exacted her pound of flesh. In poor health at the time of this writing, Betty struggles each year to attend the anniversary observance of the Apollo 1 fire, seated next to Mark at what is left of Pad 34, below the stenciled words “ABANDON IN PLACE.”

What remains of Grissom’s charred ship languishes in cold storage at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. For a time, it was sealed in an airtight container filled with nitrogen designed to preserve the spacecraft and its components. The use of a nitrogen atmosphere has long since ended. NASA announced in February 2007, forty years after the Apollo 1 fire, that it was moving the spacecraft from the storage container60 to an “environmentally controlled warehouse.” The transfer was said to provide better protection for the spacecraft. Fifty years after the fire, Spacecraft 012 is slowly deteriorating, and NASA has so far resisted all attempts to display the spacecraft. “When the NASA Administrator was faced with making a decision about doing something with this spacecraft, his response was that he saw no way to avoid a difficult political situation should he choose either to place it on display, no matter the tastefulness of the exhibitry, or choose to entomb it anywhere,” the National Air and Space Museum historian and curator Roger Launius has noted.⁶¹

Only a few private citizens, including Scott Grissom, have been permitted by NASA to examine the spacecraft since it was moved to Virginia from Cape Canaveral. In 1990, the space agency proposed burying it in an old missile silo at the Cape. NASA’s plan to entomb the spacecraft was blocked by a group led by preservationist David Alberg, who later as a member of the National Marine Sanctuary Program helped raise and display the Civil War ironclad Monitor. Alberg cites the Monitor and the USS Arizona as examples of how a ship in which humans perished could be publicly displayed in a dignified, historically significant way. “How long was Ford’s Theater closed?” Alberg correctly asks.

Just as the Monitor and the Arizona have been displayed with dignity, so too, Alberg insists, should Spacecraft 012. The other ships have brought the history of the American Civil War and World War II into stark relief. A public display of the Apollo 1 command module “could help bring back to life the history of the glory days of Apollo,” Alberg argues, as well as reminding us of the huge risks.

Indeed, a central premise of the American space program is that it should be conducted in full view of the world. That tenet applies to disasters as well as successes. Official reluctance to display Grissom’s ship is part of a “cultural failure,” the NASA veteran James Oberg observes. Rather than owning up to its failures, argues Oberg, NASA gives us phony official “remembrances.” Four decades after the Apollo 1 fire, Oberg wrote: “Space workers need to touch the wreckage of Apollo-204 and the lost shuttles, not have the fragments stashed away underground, out of sight and mind.”62

The Grissom family is of several minds about how and where Gus’s ship should be displayed. Before the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, Betty sought to have the spacecraft moved to the US Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin declined to release the ship, promised an alternate exhibit honoring the Apollo 1 crew that never materialized, and then essentially waited for the political storm to fade. For Betty, it was just another in a long list of slights by NASA.

Lowell prefers that the ship be removed from cold storage and entombed at Pad 34. “I don’t think it should be publicly displayed but I think it should be encapsulated some way and put in a place where people can pay their respects. And I can’t think of a better place than Launch Pad 34.”

It is probably true, as Lowell suspects, that Spacecraft 012 will remain locked away until the immediate families of the crew are gone. Presently, NASA continues to resist efforts to display the spacecraft, arguing it would tarnish the memory of the astronauts.

Someday, somewhere, Grissom’s ship must be displayed if for no other reason than to confirm that those who insist we have mastered technology are mistaken. As Rudyard Kipling observed in his 1935 poem “Hymn of Breaking Strain”:

We hold all Earth to plunder—

All Time and Space as well—

Too wonder-stale to wonder

At each new miracle;

Till, in the mid-illusion

Of Godhead ‘neath our hand,

Falls multiple confusion

On all we did or planned—

The mighty works we planned.63

The controversy over whether and how to exhibit the gutted spacecraft along with the other indignities have only served to prolong the families’ anguish. Lowell presses on, explaining that he supports any effort that will give meaning to his brother’s life and sacrifice. “I’ve told [Betty] and Scott that if I can do something that honors Gus and keeps his memory alive, I’m going to do it.” Lowell has served on the Astronaut Memorial Foundation board and remains a trustee. He has but one regret. “Unfortunately, I think, a lot of the things that I’ve done and am doing [for Gus], his boys should have done. It shouldn’t have been me.”⁶⁴

Lowell was there again in 1999 when a salvage expert named Curt Newport figured out a way to recover Gus Grissom’s Mercury spacecraft from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Newport devoted a third of his life to studying every design detail of Grissom’s ship, the ballistic trajectory of the astronaut’s fifteen-minute suborbital flight, NASA and air force radar tracks, weather conditions on July 21, 1961, the sea state on the day of the launch—anything he could lay his hands on to help locate the sunken ship. Newport’s obsession struck many as quixotic. However, the salvage expert pressed on, eventually coming up with the funds to hire an experienced crew, secure a recovery vessel, and obtain the latest sonar and submersible technologies. Thirty-eight years after the loss of Liberty Bell 7, these technologies along with Newport’s intimate knowledge of Grissom’s first flight would be applied in a search nearly three miles below the surface of the Atlantic.

Newport and his crew began a systematic survey of the ocean floor in the spring of 1999, documenting and logging a list of promising targets that had reflected his sonar pings. Deep-water salvage operations take time, planning, lots of money, and luck. Newport quickly ran out of each. Exhausting sponsorship funding from the Discovery Channel, Newport briefly considered abandoning his quest at the end of April 1999. He instead concluded it was time to narrow his search to the most promising sonar targets and make one last sweep.

By May 1, under growing pressure from his financial backers, Newport winnowed his list of targets to sixteen. Among them was a dark-colored object extending roughly nine feet above the ocean floor designated Target 71. It had previously been logged into Newport’s contact list as a “hard target across ravine.”65 The metal object had reflected a sonar ping as a man-made object should.

The remaining targets were grouped in three areas. One contained six targets, including Target 71. They were clustered around tracking radar locations compiled on the day of Grissom’s flight by NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center, the builder of the Redstone booster. “Those six contacts were closest to my best guess as to where Liberty Bell 7 now lay,” Newport later wrote.⁶⁶

Newport, a pioneer in the use of remotely operated vehicles, lowered his submersible nicknamed Magellan to the bottom of the Atlantic for the last time, telling the operator, “Let’s start with this one, number 71.”

In the pitch-black of the ocean floor, with water pressure in excess of 7,100 pounds per square inch, the robotic vehicle equipped with intensely bright lights and a video camera began making its way up a small rise. Soon, a debris trail appeared. It was bright. Newport figured it might be crumpled aluminum or a wing from an aircraft known to have crashed north of the search area. Based on years of experience, Newport understood the first target seldom if ever panned out. He was prepared to cover all sixteen targets, hoping something might turn up, some clue as to where Grissom’s ship had settled thirty-eight years before. If the salvage operation came up empty again, Newport would find new backers and keep trying, as he always had.

Then, just ahead in the inky blackness, a distinct tall shape came into the video camera’s view. “It looked dark and ominous,” Newport recalled.

On the flat ocean floor, Newport noticed the shape had “some height to it.” To himself, he thought, the object was about the right size and shape as the object that had obsessed him for decades.

As the submersible slowly approached, Newport and his operator could clearly see a conical shape just ahead on the ocean floor. Finally, the bright lights of the submersible illuminated these words on one side of the object: “UNITED STATES.” On the other: “LIBERTY BELL 7.” Topside, Newport and his crew were stunned. “I don’t believe it! The first target! This never happens!” At least not to Curt Newport.

After years of searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, Newport had at long last found Grissom’s spacecraft in 16,000 feet of water resting on a pile of disintegrated beryllium heat shield. Other than a missing hatch, Liberty Bell 7 was in remarkably good condition.

There were back slaps and high fives all around as crew members stuck their heads into the control room to catch a glimpse of what they had sought. Then, celebration ended and the work resumed; Newport noted the coordinates. The euphoria was short-lived when the expensive submersible was lost after its cable snapped. Newport would again have to hustle to find another underwater robot that could be used to connect the spacecraft to the heavy cables that would lift it to the surface.

Ashore, Newport announced the find during a triumphant press conference at Port Canaveral. The press corps audibly gasped when it viewed the video of Liberty Bell 7 suddenly appearing on the sea floor. The news of the discovery shot around the world. It was as if a part of Grissom had been recovered, his ship no longer lost, the myth of the “lost astronaut” at last vanquished. All that was left now was to find a way to pull Liberty Bell 7 up from the bottom of the Atlantic. Newport understood the sea would not give up Grissom’s spacecraft without a fight.

The salvage expert quickly set about acquiring a bigger, more stable ship, along with other equipment he would need to raise the fragile spacecraft. In studying Liberty Bell 7’s blueprints, Newport knew there were several strong structural points on the spacecraft’s escape-tower mounting ring. These would serve as attachment points for a custom-made, clamp-style recovery tool. It would make the connection between the top of the spacecraft and the reinforced cables that would be used to winch it to the surface and onto the recovery ship.

When Newport returned in July 1999 to the spot about three hundred miles east of Cape Canaveral to haul Liberty Bell 7 to the surface, he initially could not relocate it. He had been certain of the spacecraft’s position, taking a satellite navigation fix before departing in May. Weeks later, Target 71 was nowhere to be found on the ocean floor.

Newport referred to his sonar records from the May recovery. The side-scan sonar used for the salvage operation painted a picture of the sea floor by measuring the strength of a return echo. Rocks and objects reflect more sound; sand less. Armed with the hard sonar data, Newport’s crew eventually determined they were searching the Blake Basin five hundred meters to the east of the known location of Grissom’s ship. Three days after arriving, Newport and his crew again found Liberty Bell 7. The delay had cost the salvage expert the slim chance of also locating the spacecraft’s blown hatch, which may have provided valuable clues about why it prematurely exploded. To this day, the hatch remains somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic.67

Next, Newport’s team used a new robot to connect custom recovery tools to the spacecraft and then lowered 25,000 feet of three-eighths-inch Kevlar cable to the ocean floor. The line was attached to a three-point lifting sling. Once the submersible made the attachment, a nerve-racking three-mile lift began.

There was one final obstacle: the recovery ship’s diesel engine, which powered the hydraulic winches, coughed and quit near the end of the lift. Liberty Bell 7 was now hanging from a very long line more than a mile below the surface. The question now was whether the line would snap before the engine was restarted.

It held. At 2:10 a.m. on July 30, 1999, Newport’s fourteen-year obsession ended when Liberty Bell 7 was finally pulled from the Atlantic Ocean onto the wooden deck of his ship. McDonnell Douglas Capsule Number 11 had at last returned from the deep after nearly four decades. Demolition experts onboard cleared the decks and disarmed a sound fixing and ranging (SOFAR) bomb installed to fix the spacecraft’s position during or after splashdown. Only then could Newport peer inside Grissom’s ship, already pondering how it could be restored and properly displayed.

When Liberty Bell 7 was delivered to Port Canaveral, Lowell Grissom was waiting to meet the triumphant recovery crew. The sea had given up something significant: Gus Grissom’s ship. It was no longer lost, nor was its pilot.

When things looked bleakest, the indefatigable Newport had drawn inspiration from the example of the tenacious Grissom. Liberty Bell 7 was faithfully restored and is displayed today at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Kansas. Among the many items recovered from the ship is a reel of magnetic tape containing the recorded conversations between Grissom and recovery forces after splashdown. The tape may contain important clues as to precisely what occurred before the spacecraft hatch unexpectedly blew off, nearly drowning the astronaut. Estimates of the cost of restoring the tape run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Hence, the recording remains submerged in water at the Kansas space museum. Newport’s expedition to locate and recover Liberty Bell 7 remains among the deepest commercial salvage operations in history.

Among the last known words of Gus Grissom’s brief life was his stern admonition to the engineers and technocrats: How will we leave the earth and reach another world if we cannot make ourselves understood between a machine carrying three spacemen and those charged with monitoring its vital systems? How, indeed! The impatient, hard-nosed flyer from southern Indiana pushed with everything he had in his last days to solve this and all the other problems. The answer to Grissom’s question, of course, was to roll up one’s sleeves, redouble the effort, keep eyes on the ball, and—in hindsight—make damned sure you looked before you leapt, resisting the temptation to be in such a hell-bent hurry to reach the goal.

Given the opportunity, that is precisely what Grissom would have done. Circumstances, perhaps fate, the course of history itself, ensured he never got that chance. Once the American goal was achieved with the six manned lunar landings between July 1969 and December 1972, Grissom and his pioneering efforts to reach another world mostly faded from memory in the decade after Apollo. If remembered at all, he was the tight-lipped fellow with the buzz cut, the engineering test pilot who handled the unglamorous but essential tasks, flying the shakedown missions, shunning the limelight. The others—Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong—names we remember and cherish, would not have achieved the goals the nation set for itself without the selfless efforts of men like Grissom.

“We did what we said we were going to do,” one of the moonwalkers noted with obvious pride decades later. It was a declaration made before the entire world. Men like Grissom turned mere words into deeds.

Grissom, a son of middle America, the striver who burned to break away, unwilling to sit still, yearning to go higher and faster—to go—was the authentic American risk taker who would put everything on the line for the cause of space exploration. Grissom believed the risks he embraced were fundamental to humanity’s destiny. Despite the steep odds, he pressed on when others quit. Worker, engineer, test pilot, astronaut, pioneer, he spit in fate’s eye and pushed ahead. Some thought him brash, boorish, enigmatic, thin-skinned, selfish, unfaithful. He was all of these things. He also was an original, a product of time and place, sufficiently bright and ambitious to recognize an opportunity and to seize it.

Some still view Grissom as the “hard luck” or “lost” astronaut. He was not lost. He knew exactly where he was going and how he would get there. He would do whatever was required to succeed. That commitment cost him his life and his family untold sorrow.

First and foremost, Grissom was a product of an unprecedented period of technological upheaval in American history, a small-town boy who came of age in the middle of the violent twentieth century. Everything was moving faster, beyond the speed of sound, fast enough to break the bonds of Earth itself. The sheer velocity of technological change engendered by global war would paradoxically provide the means by which a young man and his bride could escape a small Indiana town. Gus seized the opportunity to master engineering, and later flight, fighting in Korea and then realizing his dream of becoming a test pilot and ultimately riding rockets. Once in space, he marveled at the sight of a curving blue world from space. The astronaut gazed down at Earth and was amazed to see that it looked just like the maps he had studied as a boy in Mitchell.

Grissom, like his astronaut brethren, was determined to act while others stood passively on the sidelines and watched. The young man refused to settle for a life installing doors on school buses in the middle of nowhere. This was no way to live. There were opportunities if one worked hard, sacrificed, and in his case, hit the books while flipping burgers. Grissom’s would be a life of action, of calculated risks, and, he fervently hoped, of reward—perhaps he would be his generation’s Lindbergh! For better or worse, his uncomplaining family followed him to each new duty station. They too would be swept up in historic events they could not control, only endure.

In the end, the odds, such as they were, caught up with the risk taker, his wife, and their two sons. But better in the end to have embraced the risk, to know that one had lived, done something worthwhile, to have gone somewhere. To have advanced the human race in the short time each of us has. That is why we are here. And that is undoubtedly how Gus Grissom would have wished to be remembered.