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Today Marks 50th Anniversary of Fatal Apollo 1 Disaster (nasaspaceflight.com)
schwit1 writes: NASASpaceFlight.com reports: "Fifty years ago Friday, the first -- but sadly not the last -- fatal spaceflight accident struck NASA when a fire claimed the lives of Virgil 'Gus' Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White during a training exercise at Launch Complex 34. The accident, a major setback for the struggling Apollo program, ushered in the first understanding of the 'bad day' effects of schedule pressure for spaceflight and brought with it words and reminders that still echo today." The article provides a very detailed and accurate look at the history and causes of the accident, as well as its consequences, which even today influence American space engineering. Are there any Slashdotters who were old enough to remember the incident? If so, we'd love to hear your take on the disaster. Where were you when the news broke and how did it affect you and the country at that time...?
I remember bits of it. I was in 3rd grade at the time. We had been talking about it at school in science class all week. It was late in the week, Thursday or Friday. We had no tv in the school, but we had radio. I don't recall which class I was in at the time, but I remember listening to early parts of the countdown on a radio the teacher brought to the classroom. After school, I had finished my homework and was watching something on tv before supper. A reporter broke in with a special announcement that the astronauts had burned to death. (They didn't really, they were asphyxiated inside their suits.) Mom heard that from the kitchen and came in and listened and then shut the tv off. The next day at school the morning prayer (Catholic school) was announced for the three astronauts' souls and their families left behind. That Sunday's mass was also dedicated to the tragedy. Up to that point, my friends and I used to talk about being astronauts, and who would get to go first. Several of them were no longer so excited about it within a few days. A few years later I was glued to the tv watching Apollo 11. Of that group of friends, I'm the only one that actually went into an aerospace field.
I first became aware of humans in space when I saw a Time magazine with a picture of John Glenn in Time magazine cover in hour house. While I was too young to appreciate the functional evolution of the US space program (suborbital to orbital flight, single-seat to multi-seat capsules, increasing task complexity --including EVAs--, docking with other craft), I did realize the goal of the Apollo program was to carry astronauts to the moon.
I didn't understand the baby steps needed to get there. As a kid, I'd imagine mission control with a surprise announcement to the crew: "Good news; we're moving up the schedule and sending you guys TODAY instead of evolving and learning for two more years".
The coverage of the Apollo 1 disaster that I remember focused on the explosion resulting from the choice of 100% oxygen for the capsule environment.
Sometime during the frenzy of the Gemini/Apollo era, some the elementary schools where we lived then were named after astronauts. To my surprise, these schools (in Old Bridge, NJ) still carry these names 50 years later: Carpenter, Copper, Grissom, McDivitt. Schirra, Shephard.
A few years ago, I took one of the tours of Kennedy that includes access to the historic Mercury and Apollo launch sites, including the pad where the Apollo 1 crew had died. Very sobering.
I've meet many people involved in getting men to the moon.
One was in charge of life support for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Shortly before he died we had a long talk about Apollo 1. He was convinced that it was his fault that he didn't know that high O2 environment would have been highly flammable. There are likely a thousand guys who thought the same thing.
He also pointed out that USAF has a museum inside the Cape grounds and I should go see it.
Yes, I remember. I was working for RCA downrange on a missile tracking ship. We were in Dakar, Senegal. Although I don't remember how I found out (since it was difficult to get news back in those days), I recall reading a book about the entire Apollo program (from and engineer's point of view) many years later and when I came to that part of the book - it brought tears to my eyes. The ship I was on spent a lot of time in port at Cape Canaveral and although I never actually saw any of the astronauts I heard about their exploits by locals. I hung out in a bar where Gus Grissom was reported to have hung out although I never saw him there. It was just off A1A on the turnoff that took one to Cape Canaveral.
The "more" aspect of this story is that the pure oxygen atmosphere was deemed "a solved problem" as it had been used during the Mercury and Gemini missions and had never posed a problem before. Note also that the astronauts were wearing pressure suits, and those were pressurized to 17psi pure oxygen - this remained the case even after the changes were made post-Apollo-1 to bring in a nitrogen-oxygen mix during ascent (the cabin atmosphere was dumped when in orbit, and repressurised with 5psi oxygen - this was always the plan, so you are correct in that it needed to be pressurised at launch).
So the pure oxygen atmosphere never posed an issue before, mainly because the capsules were of higher quality than Apollo 1 turned out to be.