NASA has to fight the forgetting

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - Astronauts had died before, in aircraft accidents associated with their training, but the Apollo fire on Jan. 27, 1967, was different. They were in spacesuits, in their spacecraft, on the pad, and in radio contact with Mission Control in Houston — about as close to a real mission as they could get.

Enough rockets had blown up over the years that the idea of it happening with men on board was never far from people’s minds. The idea of people getting killed while doing a space mission was accepted in light of how hard and risky spaceflight clearly was.

But when it actually happened, all the anticipation and speculation was forgotten in the shock of the moment. The crew was already well known to the public, especially Gus Grissom and his Mercury and Gemini flights, and Ed White and his stirring spacewalk, and even rookie Roger Chaffee and his bantam-rooster air of confident competence. It hurt then, and it still hurts now.

In post-disaster attempts to make sense, and impart meaning, to the fire, many said that it “taught lessons” and inspired the space team to better workmanship. The sacrifice, so they said, made Apollo safer, and probably prevented an even greater catastrophe later during actual moon missions. Historians agree that this was, in fact, a consequence of the disaster — but there are still differences of opinion as to whether such a disaster was the only way to achieve such ends.

Now as America’s return to the moon gathers strength, NASA is gathering anew the wisdom and insights of the Apollo experience. Documents, memoirs and even interviews with veterans are providing clues to the methodologies and mental attitudes that created an Earth-moon transportation system with high reliability and adequate robustness, even in the face of breakdowns such as Apollo 13.

But perhaps the mythologization of the Apollo-204 fire (the more formal mission designation that gave way to “Apollo 1”) — the comforting urge to wrap a disaster in meaningful significance — is itself a cultural failing. It could be a distraction from what a more cold-blooded calculus should be telling us, and what we really should know — and believe — as we embark again for the moon.

If we accept the “inevitability” of the disaster, and of the Challenger and Columbia tragedies that followed (and are also memorialized now in a three-for-one NASA observance), and if we congratulate ourselves for “how much the sacrifices taught us,” we are ducking a fearsome responsibility. It is this: We should have known already, and people should not have had to die to remind us. The later disasters were not “accidents,” random and unavoidable — they were consequences of complacency and carelessness.

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In hindsight, they were predictable. What’s even more horrifying is that they had been predictable in foresight as well — and that some engineers, true to NASA’s traditional safety culture, had tried to warn their teammates and managers. Why they failed is a lesson that the future space program must never be allowed to forget.

The Apollo fire occurred amid the passions of the early space race, and some relevant engineering data were unavailable because of Cold War secrecy. The Soviets had killed a cosmonaut-trainee in an oxygen chamber fire a few years before, but had kept it secret to protect their propaganda programs (Nikita Khrushchev, in charge at the time, later regretted not sharing the incident privately with NASA). NASA engineers had some experience with oxygen and thought they could keep it safe. So maybe there were marginally mitigating circumstances in 1967.

Not so in 1986 and 2003, and not so today or tomorrow or in the next decade. Two space shuttles, and seven astronauts each time, were wiped out not by surprising hazards or unknown circumstances, but because space workers forgot what they once knew, and still should have known, about minimizing the dangers as much as possible in space. They forgot the lessons paid for in time, treasure and blood on Jan. 27, 1967.

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