Three men and a first Apollo flight
On 27 January 1967, astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside their Apollo command module during a ground test at Launch Complex 34, Cape Kennedy, Florida. The spacecraft was never launched. The mission, known at the time by its Saturn launch-vehicle number AS-204, was later given the name Apollo 1 at the request of the crew’s families and with NASA’s agreement. This account concentrates on the men themselves rather than the engineering.
The flight was meant to be the first crewed Apollo mission, a long Earth-orbit test of the new spacecraft, with a launch targeted for February 1967.
Who they were
Gus Grissom was the command pilot and the most experienced of the three. He had been one of the original Mercury astronauts and flew the second American crewed spaceflight, the short suborbital Liberty Bell 7 mission in July 1961. In March 1965 he commanded Gemini 3 with John Young, the first crewed Gemini flight, which made him the first person to fly in space twice.
Ed White was the senior pilot. A West Point graduate and Air Force test pilot, he flew on Gemini 4 in June 1965 with James McDivitt and became the first American to walk in space. That achievement made him one of the best-known astronauts in the country.
Roger Chaffee was the pilot and the only rookie. A Navy aviator, he was chosen as an astronaut in 1963, in NASA’s third group, and had not yet been to space. Apollo 1 would have been his first flight.
The backup crew was James McDivitt, David Scott and Russell Schweickart. Several of the men who trained alongside the prime crew went on to fly later Apollo missions.
Training for a new kind of spacecraft
Apollo was a far more complex machine than Mercury or Gemini. Its command and service module had to carry three people, support them for days and eventually fly to the Moon and back. The crew spent much of 1966 and early 1967 in simulators and at the spacecraft’s builder, North American Aviation, in California, and then at the Cape.
The crew and the contractor were working under pressure. The space race with the Soviet Union was at its height, and the schedule set by President Kennedy’s 1961 goal of a landing before the end of the decade left little slack. Accounts from the period suggest the astronauts, Grissom especially, had real reservations about the quality of the spacecraft and its simulator. One much-repeated story says Grissom hung a lemon on the simulator in protest; the details vary between tellings, so it is best treated as a reported anecdote rather than a documented event. What is well established is that the command module delivered to the Cape still had many open problems.
The plugs-out test
The test on 27 January was called a “plugs-out” test. The spacecraft, sitting on top of its Saturn IB rocket, was to run on its own internal power with the umbilical connections removed, simulating a countdown. The rocket was not fuelled, and the test was not classed as hazardous.
The three men entered the module in the early afternoon, in their pressure suits, and the hatch was closed. The cabin was filled with pure oxygen. The test was held up repeatedly by a sour smell in the suit oxygen loop and by communication problems between the crew and the control rooms. Late in the afternoon, at around 6:30 pm Eastern time, a fire started in the cabin. It spread within seconds, and the pressure inside rose until the cabin wall ruptured. The men could not open the hatch in time. The investigators later concluded that the crew lost consciousness very quickly and died from the effects of the fire, mainly smoke and carbon monoxide, rather than from burns alone.
A day of other news
The same day, in Washington, London and Moscow, representatives were signing the Outer Space Treaty, a diplomatic milestone for the peaceful use of space. The news from Florida overshadowed it. Within months the loss would be followed by the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1, which made 1967 one of the grimmest years of the early space age.
Remembering the crew
Grissom and Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and White at the cemetery of the US Military Academy at West Point. Launch Complex 34 was later dismantled, and a memorial plaque remains at the site. NASA marks 27 January each year as part of its remembrance of those lost in spaceflight.
The reputation of the three men rests on more than the manner of their deaths. Grissom and White were accomplished pioneers, and Chaffee was a capable newcomer on the verge of his first mission. The Apollo 1 fire changed how NASA designed and tested spacecraft, and later crews who reached the Moon often acknowledged that debt.