Ryan S. Walters - Apollo I: The Tragedy That Put Us on the Moon

Apollo 1

The Tragedy That Put Us on the Moon

Ryan S. Walters

Copyright 2021 by Ryan S. Walters

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ISBN: 978-1-68451-094-8

eISBN: 978-1-68451-147-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953048

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Cover design by John Caruso

Astronauts photo courtesy of NASA

To the families of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee: You made the ultimate sacrifice to put America on the moon. A grateful nation will forever be in your debt.

Ad astra per aspera.

A rough road leads to the stars.

Theres always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course; this can happen on any flight; it can happen on the last one as well as the first one. So, you just plan as best you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get a well-trained crew, and you go fly.

Gus Grissom

People might look at our work as being perhaps dangerous, or risky of sorts, but I think we train in it and work in it so much and understand it well enough that we dont look at it from this viewpoint. We accept the risks.

Ed White

Theres a lot of unknowns and a lot of problems that could develop or might develop and theyll have to be solved. And thats what were there for. This is our business to find out if this thing will work for us.

Roger Chaffee

Clinton Anderson U.S. senator from New Mexico; chaired Senate Space Committee hearings

Bobby Baker Powerful protg of Lyndon Johnson and secretary for the Senate majority; known as the 101st Senator

Fred Black Washington lobbyist for North American Aviation

Frank Borman Astronaut, Gemini 7; member of Apollo 204 Review Board; commanded Apollo 8, the first flight to the moon

Martha Chaffee Wife of Roger Chaffee

Roger Chaffee Astronaut, Apollo 1 pilot

Walter Cunningham Astronaut, Apollo 1 backup crew, Apollo 7 pilot

Kurt Debus Head of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral

Donn Eisele Astronaut, Apollo 1 backup crew; originally on the Apollo 1 prime crew; senior pilot on Apollo 7

Robert Gilruth Head of the Space Task Group; director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston

Betty Grissom Wife of Gus Grissom

Gus Grissom Astronaut, Apollo 1 commander; Mercury 4 and Gemini 3

Lyndon B. Johnson 36th president of the United States; in office at the time of the fire

John F. Kennedy 35th president of the United States; assassinated on November 22, 1963

Robert Kerr U.S. senator from Oklahoma and millionaire oil man; helped North American Aviation receive the contract to build the Apollo spacecraft

Chris Kraft NASA flight director; director of flight operations in Houston

Walter Mondale U.S. senator from Minnesota; criticized NASA during the Senate hearings in 1967

Lola Morrow Secretary to the astronauts

George Mueller Associate administrator for Manned Space Flight

Rocco Petrone Director of Launch Operations at the Kennedy Space Center

Sam Phillips Air Force general; head of the Apollo Program in Washington, D.C.

Wally Schirra Astronaut, Apollo 1 backup crew; Mercury 8, Gemini 6, Apollo 7

Robert Seamans Deputy administrator of NASA

Joe Shea Head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program in Houston

Deke Slayton Original Mercury astronaut; director of Flight Crew Operations in Houston

Tom Stafford Astronaut, Apollo 1 support crew; Gemini 6, Gemini 9A, Apollo 10, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

Harrison Stormy Storms Headed the Space Division at North American Aviation

Olin Teague Texas congressman; chaired House Space Committee hearings

James Webb Administrator of NASA; appointed by Kennedy, served under Johnson until 1968

Ed White Astronaut, Apollo 1 senior pilot; Gemini 4 pilot, the first American to walk in space

Pat White Wife of Ed White

John Young Astronaut, Apollo 1 support crew; pilot on Gemini 3 with Gus Grissom; command module pilot on Apollo 10 and commander of Apollo 16, the ninth person to walk on the moon

O n January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into a new spacecraft perched atop a large Saturn rocket at the Kennedy Space Center. They were in Florida for a routine dress rehearsal of their upcoming launch into orbit, then less than a month away. Their mission, set for February, would inaugurate the new Apollo program.

All three astronauts were experienced pilots with dreams of one day walking on the moon. Little did they know that once they entered the spacecraft that cold winter day, they would never leave it alive. The mission meant to herald the dawn of the Apollo program would lead it to near failure before it ever got off the ground.

Project Apollo had one goal: land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earthsomething mankind had often dreamed of but had never achieved. The moon has captured mans imagination for millennia as an object of fascination, wonder, and scientific study. To some it is a deity to be worshipped; to others, the inspiration for a lovers serenade; and for a chosen few in the 1960s, it was a military objective in a worldwide battle for global supremacy.

A century before the great moon race, the moon captured the full attention of French novelist Jules Verne, a man with a vision that was truly ahead of his time. The moon, by her comparative proximity, and the constantly varying appearances produced by her several phases, has always occupied a considerable share of the attention of the inhabitants of the earth, he wrote in his epic novel From the Earth to the Moon.

The year was 1865. While America was ending four years of bloody conflict, Verne was dreaming of men from earth peacefully traveling to the moon, nearly a century before such a journey became the center of the Cold War world. Verne prophetically envisioned that Americans, not Europeans, would achieve such an astonishing feat. As for the Yankees, they had no other ambition than to take possession of this new continent of the sky, and plant upon the summit of its highest elevation the star-spangled banner of the United States of America, he wrote. They would do so, he imagined, using a cannonball-type of spacecraft, fired from an enormous space gun named