Apollo 1

Last year we looked at the Challenger. This year: Apollo 1. On January 27, 1967, the three-man crew of Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White who were in training for the first Apollo flight were asphixiated in their capsule during a training exercise. The men reported communications glitches prior to the disaster, and it is believed that a spark in their pure-oxygen atmosphere quickly started an unstoppable blaze, consuming the many flammable components in the capsule. There were three hatches between the men and the outside of the capsule, which were not designed to be opened in less than 90 seconds. In addition, it is doubtful that the astronauts could have opened the internal hatch at all since pressure inside the spacecraft rose rapidly after the fire, exceeding the capacity of the pressure-equalization valves. Future designs were modified to remove most of the flammable components from the crew area and include a new quick-opening hatch. NASA has a retrospective.

Comments

Re:Incompetence

[s20451]

In the case of Apollo 1, NASA was too lazy to use a proper atmosphere

In addition to being more complex, a two-gas system was shown to be dangerous in itself. In Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Murray and Cox, there is a reference to a case where a test pilot nearly died precisely due to errors made in implementing a two-gas atmosphere. It's easy to sit back and blame incompetent bureaucrats, but more often than not the engineers make design tradeoffs with no completely safe alternatives.

Their deaths saved thousands more - and still do

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Nasa engineers believed that before the fire actually flashed (almost like a flashbulb, with all that exotic metal in a pure O2 atmosphere), the insulation smouldered for a bit. They decided that one way to prevent future accidents of that sort was to detect the smoke the preceededs the fire.

So they commissioned research to do so. And the result was the ionization-type smoke detector. Which you can now buy at any hardware store for as low as ten dollars, and which is required by zoning for virtually all human-habitable houses in the US and many other countries.

These devices have saved many thousands of lives so far, and will continue to do so.

These devices use a small radioactive source to ionize smoke particles, so they don't need to depend on natural ionization and can thus detect extremely miniscule amounts of smoke. This greatly increases their sensitivity, giving much earlier warning. The anti-nuclear hysteria was in full cry at the time. So it's unlikely a private company would have tried to design and market such a device for consumers. But for a NASA project, for short-term use above the atmosphere, it made sense. Once the device was done and its characteristics known, it was easy to show that a tiny amount of short-lived isotope, whose radiation doesn't leak beyond the container during the device's service life, was a miniscule risk compared to the number of lives saved. And a classic NASA spinout occurred.

So the fire and the deaths of the three astronauts was the direct cause of the invention and introduction of practical domestic smoke detectors, which otherwise certainly would not have been introduced for decades, if ever.