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The Apollo program began in the last years of its fifties, when the country was sheltered from the post-war industrial boom and free from major social unrest; but by the mid-sixties, the political landscape had changed considerably. These seemingly happy days had hidden the underlying tensions that had erupted in the 1960s and, in 1966, deadly racial riots, deeply rooted in poverty and inequality, were frequent and protests against America's involvement in the Vietnam War intensified.
Despite growing criticism and apathy, the Apollo program was maintained, even though NASA's inflation-adjusted budget was about to begin to contract. It was still massive – for 1966, it represented 4.4% of the federal budget – but the Congress message seemed mixed; they basically said, go ahead and land on the moon, but do not rely on another program of equal size after that. More than anything, what motivated NASA to maintain its commitment is its commitment to a beloved leader, cut off from his heyday less than three years after entering his government, a president who had been indifferent to the effort spatial at first, but who had come to kiss him. for political ends, then with real enthusiasm. JFK's death only reinforced this promise, and NASA members and other government officials would hold it, despite congressional critics and the scientific community who said the dangers of human space flight 39, outweighed its advantages and that machines and robots could do the same. things like their human counterparts and more – and for a lot less money.
By the end of 1966, Go Fever had moved to NASA and the factories of its thousands of subcontractors. The hurry was to do everything as quickly as possible, which meant neglecting any small issues, as processing could cause you to lose delivery dates. The end of the race was in sight. And although the Mercury project astronaut Gus Grissom is aware of the problems with the control module, he was also caught by Go Fever. Because if the Apollo 1 flight went well and the next flights too, he was convinced that he would be the first choice to land on the moon. After all, NASA's senior management, which included Slayton and Kraft, thought it was a Mercury astronaut if possible, and he was the only one left in who they trusted to do the job properly. After his successful flight with Gemini 3, he felt redeemed after the bad end of his Mercury mission and his relations with the press had improved a lot. from then on, said a journalist, he was "delighted with the journalist". If he and his crew could pass these tests and NASA could fix these problems on his spaceship, they would be fine.
Grissom's teammates for Apollo 1 were Ed White, the first American spacewalker and already a 36-year-old national hero, and Roger Chaffee, 31, a member of the 1963 astronaut group. his father, who had been a pilot in the thirties, that his goal was to make the first flight to the moon. Chaffee, although he did not fly in Gemini, was much appreciated; He was a former pilot of navy fighter and fighter jets – he had made reconnaissance missions over Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis – and was a perfectionist engineer. Chaffee and Grissom were both graduates of Purdue and they became close. Chaffee had even taken up some of Grissom's habits, as well as salting his speech with occasional profanation. Gus, who was soon to be forty-one, adored the young pilot and called him "a really great boy."
Grissom had not been able to climb the Apollo spacecraft fleet since its earliest stages of production as it had with Gemini. As both programs were developed simultaneously, other astronauts had participated in the assembly and preliminary testing of the North American Aviation Factory Order Service Module in Downey, California, and had not been authorized. to do the operation between Grissom and Gemini. To make matters worse, the contractor was not willing to share data and drawings with NASA's flight controllers and astronauts. But Grissom was doing his best to catch up and he was not happy with the development of things. None of the Apollo components had progressed smoothly or on schedule.
In fact, if the module had been a horse, "they would have shot in 1966, maybe as early as 1965," said Walt Williams, the former director of Mercury operations. What would be Grissom's trade, the AS-204 – labeled as such because it was Apollo-Saturn, launched into space by the fourth reminder produced in the second Saturn series, the Saturn IB – was plagued by many problems, from communications and propulsion to environmental systems and beyond. This resulted in an unruly accumulation of electric cables – there were about thirty kilometers in the spacecraft – that could hardly be inserted. Apollo was much more complex than Gemini, and all began to understand what it meant. schedules.
Slayton had given Grissom the first Apollo flight soon after Gus's Gemini 3 mission in March 1965. Gus and his teammates began spending weeks away from home, at the North American Aviation plant in California or at the local Grumman on Long Island, while Jim McDivitt, who was near Gemini 4 in early June, was assigned to the LM, and Grumman was in charge. They spent long days attending countless meetings, monitoring design and manufacturing reviews, performing inspections and testing the spacecraft, which meant sitting for hours while signaling defects. design and operation to one or more engineers or technicians. Some North American aviation engineers nicknamed Grissom "the Nitpicker" for its thoroughness. Grissom's home life and that of his teammates and replacements consisted mainly of spending a single weekend night with their families to remind their children that they had a father and their wife that they had a husband .
In Cape Town, the main mission simulator was so late in integrating the latest developments that Grissom suspended a large lemon a few days before the test. And at a press conference in December, Grissom had stated that a successful flight would be a flight in which he and his crew could come back alive. The journalists laughed, thinking that he was joking. This was not entirely clear, especially considering what he said privately to Al Shepard: "It's the worst spaceship I've ever seen." " He told his wife that his teammates were not spending enough time ordering module – "He thought that they should work instead of playing," she recalls. But he was careful not to touch too much. "They will fire me," he told his former Gemini 3 teammate, John Young.
The pressure for these components to be finished and shipped to Cape Kennedy was intense, and despite poor manufacturing and incomplete inspections, they did. The astronauts were just too involved to stay on top. Grissom gave Slayton and Shepard a long list of problems and assured him that they would be corrected before launch. But Go Fever took over and there was not enough time to do it right or repair what needed to be repaired now. NASA had three manned Apollo missions scheduled for 1967 and a total of fifteen Saturn V rockets on order, but it was hoped that a lunar landing would be completed before the ninth or tenth launch – and before the end of the decade. Keeping such a tight schedule depended on a good shakedown flight to find any problems in the command service module.
Although the actual mission was set for February 21, 1967, several important tests were scheduled before that date. One was a plug-out test: a simulated full countdown, at the end of which the spacecraft would be switched to an internal power supply, almost identical to the actual launch conditions, to test the compatibility of all systems and to ensure that the spacecraft could operate internal power alone. This would only involve the command and service modules, no reminder, so it would be prudent to carry out a routine repetition that would last about five hours. Inside the cabin, the environment would be composed of 100% oxygen, not an atmosphere of 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen at sea level, to avoid curvature that nitrogen in the blood could induce. A single-gas atmosphere also eliminated the need for complex plumbing, necessary to maintain the proper mix, and the added weight of this plumbing. Pure oxygen, although highly flammable, had been used in Mercury and Gemini without complications.
Wally Schirra and his rescue team were in the cone-shaped control module two days before performing a similar countdown test, which was plugged in, using an external power supply with the hatch left open. They had done it in an atmosphere at sea level, breathing in the ambient air and without any spacesuit. This test had become a twenty-three-hour marathon that had ended at three o'clock the night before. Subsequently, Schirra told Grissom that he had a bad feeling about the spacecraft. "You'll be there with plenty of oxygen tomorrow," he said. And if you have the same feeling as me, I suggest you go out.
At around noon on the cold Friday, January 27th, at the launch pad of Cape Kennedy 34, Grissom, White and Chaffee, dressed in their white flight suit, took the elevator to two meters out of twenty and crossed the podium. in the clean room, a protective enclosure surrounding the control module during installation and verification. Deke Slayton was with them – he had planned to lie at their feet in the cabin during the test to try to solve some communication problems with the control module, but Grissom vetoed the idea. At one o'clock they were tied up in their sofas, as they knew after hours spent testing vacuum chambers in Houston, and Slayton went to the blockhouse, where he would watch the test. The control service module was based on the unpowered Saturn IB booster.
The technicians have sealed the access hatch in three parts – first the inner hatch, then the outer hatch and finally the cap of the booster. The original design provided for a one-piece hatch that would be released by explosive locks, but when Grissom nearly drowned as a result of the Liberty Bell 7's splash, its design was changed to only more can be accidentally opened. None of the astronauts liked it because it eliminated the possibility of an EVA from the control module. A simpler hinged hatch was being prepared, but it would not be available on the Grissom Block I version. It needed a wrench to loosen the six bolts of the inner hatch (in the simulations, nobody could do it in less than ninety seconds) and the hatch could only open if the pressure at the inside and outside was equal. The cabin was pressurized to 16.7 pounds per square inch, slightly above sea level air pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch.
The crew was seated three meters in front, their shoulders almost touching each other: Grissom left in the commander's seat, the main pilot White in the center and the pilot Chaffee on the right. Above and in front of them were multiple gauges, switches, dials, lights, and switches.
The crew had spent the whole week in Cape Town, but they had spent the night from Sunday to Sunday with their families. Grissom and his wife had discussed the big party planned for all astronauts and their wives the day after the launch on Saturday in Houston. One of the last things he did was to pick a lemon from his garden tree for the simulator. The crew was hoping to complete this connection test – and an emergency training drive Grissom had insisted on – at a reasonable time to bring their T-38 back to Houston, have a good night's sleep at home and try to to let off steam at the party. But the control module did not cooperate. The astronauts slowly scanned the pre-flight checklist and waited for several holds as the ground crew tried to sort out a radio problem; Constant static static communication between the mission control and the spacecraft. After Grissom had to repeat himself several times to make himself understood, his frustration was exacerbated: "I said, Jesus Christ, if we can not communicate for three miles, how on earth are we going to communicate when we will we be on the moon? "
The day has passed. At 4 pm one group of technicians left and another arrived. At 5:40 pm, shortly before sunset, another wait was called at ten minutes to ten to deal with another communication problem before the simulated takeoff, when the traffic jams were removed. Everyone hoped it would be the last delay. After that, they could continue with the last ten minutes, complete, complete the emergency evacuation procedure – the three astronauts would take the elevator at high speed from the gantry to a truck at fire test waiting at the base of the platform – and would come out of there. . Someone suggested that the test be postponed, but this was rejected. Repeating the test would cost more time, and time was something they did not have.
A few seconds before 6:31 pm, as the crew members scoured their checklist again, there was a slight increase in tension.
Nine seconds later, one of the team members shouted, "Hey!
A moment passed then a voice – perhaps White's – sounded: "We have a fire in the cockpit!"
Seven seconds of silence followed. Then a distorted transmission, perhaps Chaffee: "We have a bad fire – let's go. . . we are burning. "
There was a last howl of pain and nothing more.
The twenty-seven men from the carpet rescue team crossed the podium. Fourteen seconds after the first alarm call, the shell of the control module broke, throwing flames and gas. The shockwave toppled them and some of them crossed the bridge to get to the elevator, thinking that the control module had exploded or was about to blast. be. Several fire extinguishers caught fire extinguishers, ran to the clean room and struggled to open the module hatch, but the heat and smoke drove many of them back. They came back a few moments later, some with gas masks. While the station manager called the fire department and the ambulances, five men took turns with a tool to remove the hatches. They worked to the touch in the dark, dense smoke and made several trips back and forth to breathe. About five minutes after the first fire report, the three hatches were finally opened, but it was already too late. The fire lasted only twenty-five seconds, but the three astronauts were gone, asphyxiated by the toxic gases in the cabin. There was no fire extinguisher inside.
A quarter of a mile further, in the concrete blockhouse, Deke Slayton, Grissom's best friend, was sitting next to rookie astronaut Stu Roosa, the Capcom, and was talking with Rocco Petrone, Director of Launch Operations at Cape Kennedy. Slayton rose from his seat when he heard the first cry. He and everyone else out there turned to the video monitors and stared helplessly at the flames of the spaceship turning into a black glow and then fading out. Slayton thought he saw a movement in the cabin. Seconds later, they heard someone on the launch pad scream for a doctor. Slayton and two doctors rushed to the notebook, took the elevator up to level eight and rushed into the clean room, where the hatch was already open. When Slayton looked inside, he saw a blanket of black ash covering everything. "It looks like inside a furnace," he says; The Washington Post used these words a few days later.
It would be determined later that a spark below and to the left of Grissom's couch – probably a short circuit in a bundle of wires somewhere in the many kilometers of control service module wiring – had reached some flammable and had lit a fire that had been unleashed. through the cabin, burning everything and anything in its path: belts and belts, nylon nets, space suits, helmet covers, oxygen hoses, aluminum cooling tubes, as well as many Velcro fasteners and patches scattered everywhere. Pure oxygen was replaced almost instantaneously by carbon monoxide and toxic black smoke that invaded the oxygen lines of the crew. The official cause of death was suffocation, although the men also sustained severe but life-threatening burns. It was then estimated that the indoor temperature reached at least 250,000 degrees Celsius – the melting point of stainless steel found to be melted inside.
In the last seconds before his death, Grissom was out of his seat, probably to help White open the trapdoor locks. The heat and the melted material had welded the astronauts to different parts of the cabin and, for Grissom and White, one to the other. When Slayton glanced inside the blackened shell, he could not tell which head belonged to which body. After the arrival of all the doctors, firefighters and other rescuers, the scene was photographed in detail, inside and out, to facilitate the investigation to come. Around 12:30, they started to remove the bodies; it would take ninety minutes to complete the job. Twenty-seven technicians were taken to the hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.
Some time later, once the escape rocket was disarmed, Slayton headed for his office. As tragedy spread through NASA's ranks, Deke and Chuck Friedlander, the chief groomer of the astronaut support office in Cape Kennedy, spent hours calling everyone who needed to know. Deke alerted astronauts in the Houston area and gave them a difficult task: they or their wives had to go to Grissom, White and Chaffee homes as quickly as possible to tell families what had happened. spent before hearing it on the news or received calls from curious reporters. Michael Collins was assigned to travel to Nassau Bay to inform Martha Chaffee. Some astronauts' wives had arrived earlier at her house but had not informed her; when she saw Collins arrive, she knew.
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