Remembering Grissom, White, and Chaffee

This year will be the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, but there are other anniversaries that should be remembered. Today is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

At 6:31 p.m. EST on Friday, 27 January 1967—52 years ago, tonight—as darkness fell over Cape Kennedy in Florida, one of the worst disasters ever to befall America’s space program unfolded with horrifying suddenness. Out at the Cape’s Pad 34 sat a two-stage Saturn IB booster, capped with the Command and Service Module (CSM) for Apollo 1. In less than a month’s time, it was hoped, Apollo 1 Command Pilot Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White—who had already earned fame as the United States’ first spacewalker—and Pilot Roger Chaffee would fly the new spacecraft for the first time in a crewed capacity in low-Earth orbit. As outlined in a recent AmericaSpace history article, those plans turned figuratively and literally to ashes in a tragedy forever known as “The Fire.”

They weren't the first to die in the quest for space, and they wouldn't be the last. As with all of the tragedies that befell the Apollo program and later, the Shuttle, their deaths were preventable. Let's hope that some of the lessons learned are still being remembered.