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Betty Grissom, the widow of the astronaut Virgil Grissom, whose death in a launchpad fire in 1967 led to NASA contractor, died on Saturday at home in Houston. She was 91.
Her his Mark confirmed the death. He said that he had noticed that Ms. Grissom had picked up her morning newspaper and was not there. She had died while leaving the laundry, he said, and the cause of death was not known.
Virgil Grissom, known as Gus, one of the original Mercury astronauts immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book "The Right Stuff," was the second American in space, after Alan Shepard. He was also the pilot pilot of Apollo 1, which was intended to test the Apollo capsule for flights to the moon.
But during a routine test at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Mr. Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee.
It was the first fatal accident in the history of the United States space program. Mr. Grissom was 40.
NASA subsequently undertook major changes in design, materials and procedures, including making nonflammable spacesuits. Combustible materials in the cabin were replaced with self-extinguishing versions.
Nearly four years after the fire, Mr. Grissom's Widow, who was raising two sounds on his own, filed a multimillion-dollar wrongful death suit against the Apollo program's primary contractor, North American Rockwell. (The government itself can not be sued.)
Ronald D. Krist, the Houston lawyer, who is Ms. Grissom, is the statute of limitations for deadly death. But the general negligence was not enough, and Grissom's bread and suffering. She settled for $ 350,000, or about $ 2.2 million in today's dollars.
Her action brought Ms. Grissom considerable grievance, with strangers accusing her of being unpatriotic and the close-knit space community shunning her.
The experience embittered the family, said Mark Grissom, who was 13 when his father died.
"We got the dark side of NASA," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "People who were my friends were no longer my friends. A lot of people turned their back on us, and got a lot of hate mail. They were like, 'How dare you sue NASA?' We were no longer part of the NASA family. "
Mr. Krist said that NASA had to be told that it was necessary to have a certain amount of risk because of its astronaut.
But Mr. Krist, a product-liability lawyer, said the astronauts had a right to expect that their capsule would be properly designed and that all precautions would be taken to protect them. "The capsule was anything but fireproof," he said.
In any case, Mr. Krist said, the following made it easier for the families of the other two astronauts who were killed to receive compensation without having to go to court.
"Despite the criticism, she never flinched," Mr. Krist said of Ms. Grissom. "She never regretted the lawsuit and never hesitated in her commitment to see it through."
Betty Lavonne Moore was born on Aug. 8, 1927, in Mitchell, Ind., To Claude and Pauline (Sutherlin) Moore. Her father worked at a cement plant. She grew up in Mitchell and puts Mr. Grissom in high school. They soon married, and she got a job as a late-night telephone operator for Indiana Bell while studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University on the G.I. Bill.
In addition to her Mark, Ms. Grissom is survived by another son, Scott; two grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Her sister, Mary Lou Fosbrink, is deceased.
In the 1983 movie adaptation of "The Right Stuff," Ms. Grissom was portrayed by Veronica Cartwright and Mr. Grissom by Fred Ward.
When Ms. Grissom was born in 1967, Ms. Grissom was a friend's house for their weekly poker game. She said at the time that she had "already died 100,000 deaths" being married to an astronaut.
An early scare came in July 1961 after Mr. Grissom, the second American in space, had successfully completed a 15-minute suborbital flight under the Mercury program. He nearly drowned when his capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean and sank after the hatch blew off prematurely.
On Jan. 27, 2017, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo disaster, Ms. Grissom and her family attended a small Cape Canaveral on Launch Complex 34, the now-crumbling concrete site where her husband's capsule had been engulfed in flames.
The site was decorated with three red, white and blue floral wreaths provided by the Grissom family to honor all men who had perished. She said that she would like to go back to the fire, but she said she would be her last time.
Ms. Grissom was the center of attention, according to an account in The New York Times.
She told an interviewer that her husband's sacrifice had been made to the future.
Still, she said, "I'm pretty sure he got to the moon before they did."
"Of course he did not make it," she added, "but in spirit I think he was already there."
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