NASA commemorates three space tragedies

By Tariq Malik

Staff writer

updated 7:08 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2007

Forty years ago Saturday, three NASA astronauts died while testing an experimental spacecraft that would one day ferry explorers to the surface of the Moon.

But on Jan. 27, 1967, Apollo 1 commander Gus Grissom and astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee were not in space. The three men were tucked inside their spacecraft atop a NASA launch pad in Florida, working through a training exercise, when an accidental fire swept through the vehicle.

“What we had were three good guys that paid the price with a spacecraft that was not so good,” former Apollo astronaut Walt Cunningham told Space.com, adding that the lessons learned from the Apollo 1 accident help safeguard future moon-bound crews.

NASA will hold a memorial service marking the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center Visitors Center on Saturday beginning at 10 a.m. ET. The service will be broadcast live on NASA TV.

The Apollo 1 service is the beginning of a somber trio of space tragedy anniversaries for NASA.

On Sunday, the space agency will mark the 21st anniversary of the 1986 loss of Challenger’s STS-51L crew, while Feb. 1 marks the fourth year since the 2003 loss of Columbia orbiter and seven STS-107 astronauts during landing. NASA’s annual Day of Remembrance to honor the three crews and all astronauts, cosmonauts and agency employees who have died, is set for Monday.

Cunningham, who served on the Apollo 1 investigation board and later flew as a lunar module pilot on NASA’s next manned mission — Apollo 7 in October 1968 — will speak during the ceremony, along with other NASA officials and Apollo 1 crew family members.

“He was the ideal big brother,” Lowell Grissom said of his astronaut brother, adding that remembering the human cost of space exploration is vital. “I think it’s important to everyone, not just people who are interested in space.”

Learning from Apollo 1
Cunningham and others have credited the fact that the Apollo 1 accident occurred on Earth — rather than in space — with salvaging NASA’s Moon program. 

“We had the evidence, we could look at it,” Cunningham said, adding that once changes were implemented his Apollo 7 mission with astronauts Walter Schirra and Donn Eisele went nearly flawless. “Consequently, the flight crews benefited. We had to fix anything that was even remotely connected with it.”

The Apollo 1 fire — which investigators later attributed to an electrical arc in an equipment bay after a momentary drop in power — did prompt a complete redesign of NASA’s Apollo crew capsules, space experts said. But the fact that the accident — and subsequent shuttle failures — occurred at all remains perplexing.

“Why didn’t they get that right the first time,” said Roger Launius, a former NASA historian who now chairs the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “Literally thousands of really smart people before that time never anticipated this, which just baffles me.”

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Cunningham, however, added that he and his fellow astronauts were fully prepared for some sort of accident, largely due to the inherent complexity of human spaceflight.

“We never expected to land a man on the moon without going through some kind of disaster,” Cunningham said. “It was asking too much to fly a perfect series of missions culminating with a landing on the moon. As I look back on it, we did a hell of a job.”

NASA is now preparing to one more return to the Moon with a capsule-based spacecraft that agency chief, Michael Griffin, has billed as “Apollo on steroids.”

“Let’s hope the lessons of Apollo will not be lost on them,” Launius said.

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