Looking Back

Today is the 41st anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed astronauts Roger Chafee, original Mercury astronaut Virgil (Gus) Grissom, and Ed White, the first American to walk in space.

The training accident stunned the nation and NASA. The space agency, charged with meeting President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the Moon before the decade was out, and returning him safely to the Earth, was driving towards that goal when the fire devastated the new Apollo command module. Implicit in Kennedy's challenge was that the United States should beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. In early 1967, from NASA's viewpoint, the outcome of that race was still unclear.

Still, with so much on the line, NASA decided it had to undertake a massive redesign of the Apollo spacecraft. That redesign resulted in an extremely capable vehicle. No one was ever lost on an Apollo mission. The Apollo 12 command module was struck by lightning seconds after launch, but the flight continued to accomplish the second manned lunar landing. The remarkable story of Apollo 13 is well known.

By the end of Kennedy's decade, NASA had put not one man on the Moon, but four men, on two separate missions. Chafee, Grissom, and White did not die in vain.