Apollo 1 Anniversary

Forty-two years ago yesterday, at the end of a long, frustrating day of training in the new Apollo command module, a fire broke out in the capsule and roared through the pure oxygen atmosphere within, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee. The accident stunned NASA and the nation. Grissom had been one of the Original Seven Mercury astronauts, and White was the first American to walk in space. Chafee was training for his first mission.

The three, however, did not die in vain. They had committed their lives to helping put Americans on the Moon, and after the fire, the command module was extensively redesigned, becoming a much more capable spacecraft. So capable, in fact, that it not only took nine crews to the Moon and brought them all home safely, but did so after shrugging off a lightning strike just after the launch of Apollo 12 and surviving the famous explosion in the service module during Apollo 13.