The Tragedy Of Apollo 1 And The Lessons That Brought Us To The Moon (forbes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/Service Module, an essential simulation of how the three-person capsule would perform under in-space conditions under its own power. At 6:30 PM, a voltage spike occurred, leading to a disaster. In 26 seconds, everything changed. The Apollo 1 fire and the tragic death of all three astronauts wasn't due to just a single point-of-failure, but rather due to five independent confounding factors that if any one of them had been different, the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee might have survived. As it stands, all the crewed Apollo missions were scrapped for 20 months while NASA changed how they did business. The changes worked remarkably well, and 2.5 years later, humans walked on the Moon.

Comments

Forbes Is In My Hosts File

[Irate Engineer]

Forbes' bullshit website went in my hosts file when Slashdot started steering posts there. It's basically killed half of the posted content on Slashdot.

Way to step on your own dick Slashdot! If you actually worried about your viewership you wouldn't steer us to that crap.

I remember that very well

[p51d007]

I was a 7 year old who was in love with the space program. Watched every launch from John Glenn through the shuttle. The weird thing about that whole mess, and the ironic nature was what happened to Grissom's Mercury flight. Up until the Apollo missions, the hatch opened OUTWARD. On Mercury, there was a button that the user would punch with his fist, that would activate explosive bolts to blow the hatch. Grissom's flight splashed down, and the hatch "just blew". Speculation was that Grissom wiggled around, got scared or something an hit the button, causing the capsule to take on water & sink. After that, they figured it would be better to have an INWARD opening hatch. Also, to simulate the take off, the "plugs out" test, the cabin pressure was tanked up to around 22psi of PURE O2. The used pure O2 back then, because they were worried about them getting the bends & they didn't want the added weight of a nitrogen tank. Also, since everything floats, they had YARDS of Velcro all over the place. I remember watching a test. Normal air, pressurized and igniting velcro. Nothing happened. Then the pure O2 pressurized, and the spark caused the whole thing to catch fire. Pure pressurized O2, LOVE flames along with the flammable Velcro. With the dual hatch design, the inner hatch pressurized outward, once the fire started, the hatch sealed tighter & tighter, making it impossible to open, until the safety valves popped open. By that time, they had been overcome by smoke, lack of breathable air, and had been asphyxiated. I remember the days after, and the funerals. Sad... A few years ago, they found the Mercury capsule of Grissom's, and took it to the Kansas Cosmodrome in Hutchison, Ks. After cleaning it up, they found out that the hatch "just blew" as Grissom had claimed all along. The switch was still in the off mode (it was a one way switch). Also, every Mercury astronaut had a distinctive red spot/bruise on their wrist, where they smacked that button (it required a LOT of force). Grissom had NONE. Had that hatch not "just blew", who knows...that fire might have allowed them to blow the hatch and escape. One positive outcome was it changed the mindset at NASA. They had "go fever" and finally put on the brakes, took a look at what they were doing and had a change of attitude. Gene Kranz, after the fire wrote two words on a blackboard, to NEVER be erased..."tough & competent". He & Kris Craft redid how mission control was run, and they never had an issue. Even when Apollo 12 was hit by lightning, or when the Apollo 13 explosion happened, they did what he always dictated, WORK THE PROBLEM. A lot of good came out of that tragedy

Heroes in more ways than one.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The Appollo I martyrs are heroes in more ways than one.

One of NASA's responses to the fire was to design a detector for miniscule amounts of smoke particles, to provide an early warning of electrical problems that might lead to a fire - in time to evacuate the capsule if on the ground or hunt down and fix the problem if in space.

The detector used a miniscule amount of radioactive material to ionize the smoke particles and then detected the current conducted by the ions. (Radioactive materials were for NASA, a government agency, to design with, difficult for random inventors or corporations to even consider.)

The first, space-rated, low-volume prototypes were pricey. But the circuitry and the detection chamber were dog-simple and could be dirt-cheap when manufactured in volume.

So this was plowshared, and became the ionization-type smoke detector, the first practical, affordable, smoke detector suitable for broad deployment in residences. Even when this was the only type in use, it was quickly saving, first hundreds, then thousands of lives per year.

Modern detectors, combining ionization and photoelectric mechanisms, are credited with cutting the death toll from fires by somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2. They detect different types of fires, and the one detected by ionization accounts for somewhat less than half of them - which is still an enormous number.

So the loss of those three lives has been repaid with enormous interest in the decades that followed. The benefits are still flowing.