On the evening of July 20,
1969, I strained to stay awake in order to watch on television as Neil
Armstrong became the first person
to walk on the moon and to hear him utter the now famous words:
“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Space fever
still gripped me a few years later when my family took a vacation to SpringMill State Park, which is located near Mitchell, Indiana. What impressed me on
that trip was not the park’s Pioneer Village, with its restored log cabins and
working gristmill, or the blind fish swimming in Donaldson’s Cave, but rather a
simple, low-slung structure near the park’s entrance: the Virgil I. “Gus”Grissom Memorial.
Formally
dedicated by Indiana governor Edgar D.
Whitcomb in 1971, the memorial pays tribute to the Mitchell-born
Grissom, one of the nation’s seven original astronauts, the second American to
go into space, the first person to travel into space twice, and one of the
first in NASA’s space effort—along with Apollo 1
crewmates Ed White and Roger Chaffee—to die, when a fire swept through the
spacecraft during a test at Cape Kennedy
early on the evening of January 27, 1967.
To
a space nut like me, the Grissom memorial was heaven. My two brothers and I
eagerly explored the interior of Grissom’s Gemini 3 two-man capsule, which the astronaut had named after the title character
in the Broadway musical The Unsinkable
Molly Brown, about a woman who helped save a number of her shipmates on the
ill-fated RMS Titanic. Naming the
capsule after that character, Grissom reasoned, might help avert a calamity such
as the one that befell him when his Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule sank at the conclusion of his 1961 spaceflight. Also
impressive to my young eyes was the memorial’s Universe Room, which included a
six-foot-in-diameter illuminated globe that rotated as a tape of Grissom and
his ground-control cohorts during his Gemini flight played in the background.
To this Hoosier, Gus Grissom has always been a full-blooded American hero.
To
some, however, Grissom is not now remembered as such. Both Tom Wolfe’s
best-selling The Right Stuff,
published in 1979, and the movie of the same name based on that book have
implied that Grissom panicked—had, in test-pilot parlance, “screwed the
pooch”—at the end of his approximately fifteen-minute Mercury spaceflight.
Whether Grissom accidentally brushed against the plunger that triggered the
hatch’s firing or purposefully pushed it, the book and movie blamed him for
causing the hatch to blow off the capsule, which allowed the craft to take on
water and sink like a stone to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Grissom’s
explanation of “I was lying there, flat on my back—and it just blew,” was met,
according to Wolfe, by a healthy amount of skepticism from space-agency
officials and Grissom’s test-pilot brethren. “The damned things had been wrung
inside out, but never, so far as anyone could recall, had a single hatch ever
‘just blown,’” Wolfe noted. Both author Wolfe and film director Philip Kaufman found their hero in Chuck Yeager,
World War II fighter ace and the first man to break the sound barrier; Grissom
became the goat.
Wolfe’s
assertions about Grissom’s panicky behavior after the Mercury flight and the
depiction of Grissom in the movie as a bit of an oaf were met with anger and
dismay by Mitchell residents, who had turned out by the thousands to cheer
their local hero at a special Memorial Day parade following his Gemini flight
in 1965. Don Caudell, who worked for years to build the rocket-shaped memorial
honoring Grissom that now stands on the site of the astronaut’s former
elementary school, spoke for many residents of the town when he said he worked
so hard on behalf of the project not because of Grissom’s tragic death, but
rather because of his achievements. “He came from the ground up and, by his own
efforts, he got to a place where people hadn’t been before,” Caudell said of the
astronaut. “That’s what made him special.”
Bill
Head, another Mitchell resident, sees the rise of his childhood friend to
worldwide renown as a success story comparable to that of another notable southern
Indiana native son: Abraham Lincoln. Living in Mitchell during the height of
the Great Depression, Head noted that he and Grissom’s future seemed “damned
dim. What did we have to look forward to?” The shocking thing to Head is not
that both Grissom and Lincoln were raised in small-town Indiana, but that they
“got out” and made something of themselves in the larger world outside of the
Hoosier State. “He was in the right place at the right time with the right
background,” Head said of his friend.
What’s more, once Grissom became famous,
said Head, he never forgot where he had come from. When early press accounts
about the reaction to Grissom being named an astronaut were datelined Bedford,
Grissom, Head pointed out, made sure that subsequent reports used Mitchell
instead. “He put Mitchell on the map,” he said. Head’s description of his
friend is in stark contrast to the portrayal in Wolfe’s book of Grissom as one
in a long line from the Midwest and elsewhere who “prostrated themselves daily
in thanksgiving” at having escaped “the gray little town they came from.”
Others
in the southern Indiana area were so inspired by Grissom’s example that they
too went on to careers in the American space program. Bedford, Indiana, native
Charles D. Walker, a Purdue University graduate, NASA’s first industrial
payload specialist, and a veteran of three Space Shuttle missions, noted that
he did not believe he could have accomplished what he has done in his life if
it were not for Grissom. “He was my hero,” said Walker. “He was somebody from
home.” Although born in Portsmouth, Virginia, Kenneth D. Bowersox graduated
from Bedford High School in 1974 and considers the Lawrence County community to
be his hometown. Growing up in the area with the memory of Grissom still fresh
in the mind of many helped reinforce the veteran of four Space Shuttle flights
belief that he could accomplish whatever he wanted to do in his life.
Grissom
also had his defenders among his fellow astronauts and NASA engineers, who
claimed that the Korean War pilot, veteran of one hundred combat missions, had
nothing to do with the hatch mishap. Wolfe’s insinuations of panic on Grissom’s
part were way off base according to Gordon Cooper, one of the country’s
original seven astronauts, who died recently. “He [Grissom] did not screw up
and lose his spacecraft,” Cooper said. “Later tests showed the hatch could
malfunction, just as Gus said it did.” Sam Beddingfield, a NASA engineer
responsible for the pyrotechnics and recovery system on the Mercury capsule and
a friend of Grissom’s who believed in the astronaut’s courage and poise,
thoroughly investigated the incident and discovered ways in which the hatch could
have blown in the manner described by Grissom.
The lead recovery helicopter pilot for
the Liberty Bell 7 flight, Jim Lewis,
said years after the capsule’s sinking that in his mind Grissom remained a
great pilot. “When people say that Grissom panicked and blew the hatch,” said
Lewis, “I say he was a smart man. He was a test pilot. Nobody is going to look
outside and see water at their eyeballs and open the door.” Even the actor who
played the unlucky astronaut in the movie The
Right Stuff, Fred Ward, expressed doubt about Grissom blowing the hatch on
purpose. Ward learned that all the astronauts who did blow their hatches
suffered a bruised hand, and Grissom’s hand remained unmarked after his flight.
“I think NASA sort of pointed the finger at him to take the blame off
themselves for losing the capsule,” the actor said. “I don’t think he was
responsible at all.”
Although
the hatch incident still haunts Grissom’s reputation today, it failed to harm
his career with NASA. While the Mercury program continued to send men into
space, Grissom moved on to work on the space agency’s next project: Gemini. His
influence on the design of the two-man spacecraft was so strong that his fellow
astronauts dubbed it the Gusmobile. Fellow astronauts might have complained
about the cramped crew compartment (modeled after Grissom’s short height), but
many shared Pete Conrad’s sentiment when he compared Gemini’s flight
characteristics to that of “a high-performance fighter.”
NASA
officials must have been pleased with Grissom’s work on Gemini as he was
selected as commander of the first Apollo flight, which became the ill-fated Apollo 1. If all had gone well with that
assignment, the Mitchell-born flier was in line for another milestone—becoming
the first man to walk on the moon. Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, one of the
original seven astronauts who later picked crews as head of the astronaut
office, said he and Robert Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in
Houston, had agreed before the Apollo 1
tragedy that if possible a Mercury astronaut would have first crack at walking
on the moon. “And at that time Gus was the one guy from the original seven who
had the experience to press on through to the [moon] landing,” said Slayton. If
Grissom had lived he, and not Armstrong, might have been the one remembered in history books for being the first human to stand on
another world.
Even
without the historic distinction that would have come with being the first to
plant a footprint on the moon’s surface, Grissom and his life (particularly the
continuing mystery of Liberty Bell 7’s hatch) have inspired the imagination of dreamers,
deep-sea explorers, actor-scientists, and others. The film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, released in 1984, featured an
Oberth class Starfleet science vessel named in honor of the lost astronaut, the
USS Grissom.
In May 1999, Curt Newport, a veteran deep-sea explorer, found Grissom’s spacecraft lying three
miles down on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean about three hundred miles
southeast from where it was launched. Unable to raise the capsule due to the
loss of the submersible craft Magellan,
Newport returned to the site in July and successfully hoisted the Liberty Bell 7 (minus its hatch) off the
ocean floor, thirty-eight years after it became the only American manned
spacecraft to be lost following a successful mission. The operation ended
nearly fifteen years of research and planning by Newport, whose expedition was
financed and filmed by the Discovery Channel. Although the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center restored the capsule and sent it on a nationwide tour, it
failed to find a definitive answer to the blown-hatch mystery.
The astronaut is also still revered
in the Hoosier State. To commemorate the end of the twentieth century, the Indianapolis Star in December 1999
announced an effort to name the ten greatest Hoosiers of the past century.
Approximately 6,000 readers cast their opinion in what the Star called “one of the largest reader participation projects in
the newspaper’s history .” When all
the ballots were counted, Grissom, the son of a railroad worker, ranked fifth
in the voting, placing behind such legendary figures as businessman Eli Lilly,
poet James Whitcomb Riley, war correspondent Ernie Pyle, and composer Cole
Porter, and ahead of such great names as songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, comedian
Red Skelton, businesswoman Madam C. J. Walker, basketball star Larry Bird, and
former Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony Hulman.
The wildly differing viewpoints of
Grissom as a man and as a pilot over the years can be seen in part as a
reflection of the times. Upon his selection as an astronaut in 1959, the United
States was engaged in a seemingly desperate struggle for survival with the
Soviet Union—a country that had beaten America into space two years before with
its Sputnik (a “traveling companion”
or “fellow traveler”) satellite. The Russian success, followed shortly by launching
a dog into orbit, shocked the American public, which, as historian William
Manchester noted, seemed to believe that this country held a monopoly on
technological advances. But the launch of Sputnik meant that the Soviet Union had developed an intercontinental ballistic
missile that could threaten American cities with nuclear annihilation.
President Dwight Eisenhower's administration
attempted to downplay the Russian achievement, but both the public—and the
Democratic opposition in Congress—clamored for action. “Control of space means control of the world,
far more totally than any control that has ever or could ever be achieved by
weapons, or troops of occupation,” warned then–U.S. Senate majority leader Lyndon
B. Johnson. “Whoever gains that ultimate position gains control, total control,
over the earth, for the purposes of tyranny or for the service of freedom.”
When the United States attempted to
match the Communists’ achievements, it floundered badly. In July 1955 the White
House had announced plans to launch a small Earth-orbiting satellite in
observation of the International Geophysical Year (established by the
International Council of Scientific Unions as July 1, 1957, to December 31,
1958, a time of high solar activity).
For the mission, the Defense Department
selected the Naval Research Laboratory’s as yet undeveloped Project Vanguard,
which won out over Wernher von Braun’s team of German engineers at the Army
Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal. On December 6, 1957, before a
host of reporters and a live television audience, an American Viking rocket
rose only a few feet off its launching pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, before
disaster struck. The rocket never got off the ground, breaking apart and striking
the ground with a roar that could be felt by scientists safe behind a
blockhouse’s two-foot-thick concrete wall and six inches of bulletproof glass.
Not everything went wrong with
Project Vanguard. The grapefruit-size satellite survived the explosion, landed
in some nearby scrub grass, and its transmitters began to faithfully broadcast
its radio signals. The sight and sound of the forlorn American scientific
apparatus prompted columnist Dorothy Kilgallen to ask, “Why doesn’t someone go
out there, find it, and kill it?” Newspaper headlines across the country heaped
scorn upon the effort, with the Chicago
Sun-Times’s cleverly reading, “Oh, What a Flopnik,” and the San Francisco News calling the fiasco a
“Cold War Pearl Harbor.” Time magazine
suggested that the satellite program be renamed “Project Rearguard.” America’s
humiliation became complete at the United Nations when the Soviet delegation
offered the United States financial aid as part of a Russian program to aid
less-developed nations.
Although the United States finally
managed to place an object in space with Explorer
1 onboard a Juno rocket on January 31, 1958, the American public still
itched to overtake its Soviet foes in the space race. When the newly created
National Aeronautics and Space Administration presented the country’s original
astronauts—Grissom, Slayton, and Cooper from the U.S. Air Force; Malcom Scott Carpenter, Walter M. Schirra Jr., and Alan B.
Shepard from the U.S. Navy; and John H. Glenn Jr. from the U.S. Marines—at a 2:00
p.m. press conference on April 9,
1959, in Washington, D.C., the assembled members of the media actually
applauded and cheered—an ovation that stunned the astronauts.
“I’ve never seen
anything like it, before or since,” said Slayton, a veteran flyer from World
War II. Loudon Wainwright, a reporter for Life
magazine, which had signed the astronauts and their wives to an exclusive
contract for their personal stories, described the seven men in a 1961 book as
“perhaps the most adventurous, the most thoroughly courageous, the best-rounded
group of explorers ever assembled anywhere at any time.”
The press’s enthusiasm merely
reflected the public’s high regard for the brave pilots ready to risk their
lives aboard America’s finicky rockets, which showed an alarming tendency to blow
up on the launching pad. Becoming the country’s newest heroes, noted Slayton,
happened “without us doing a damned thing” except appear at a news conference,
a situation the air force veteran termed as “crazy.” The esteem in which the
astronauts were held was highlighted by the reaction of one audience to a
speech given by Grissom, not known among the astronaut corps for his
loquaciousness. Speaking before approximately eighteen thousand workers at
General Dynamics in San Diego, where the Convair Division was building the
Atlas rocket, Grissom uttered just three words: “Do good work.” The Hoosier’s
remarks, perhaps the shortest pep talk in history ,
prompted the crowd to scream its approval so loudly that Grissom and other
dignitaries were almost knocked off the stage.
Grissom’s taciturn nature was no
secret to the other members of the astronaut corps. On weekends he and Slayton
would often climb aboard a jet and fly around the country. John Glenn noted
that when the two men flew on these coast-to-coast excursions they probably
“made the least talkative flights ever made by two people anywhere.” Even
Grissom and Slayton joked about the silence, dubbing their flights as being
“East Coast to West Coast in ten words or less.” Grissom always seemed
uncomfortable with the public attention, particularly from the press, that came
from being an astronaut.
The negative publicity following his Liberty Bell 7 flight only hardened his
media shyness and led him to do whatever he could to blend into the woodwork.
“As far as I know,” said CBS television anchorman Walter Cronkite, “he was the
only astronaut ever to don [a] disguise to duck the waiting press.” Cronkite
also remembered that Grissom faced the media responsibilities associated with a
spaceflight with much more apprehension than the flight itself, and his answers
to the press’s questions were “cryptic and laconic.”
On one occasion when
Grissom was set to board a commercial flight in Orlando, Florida, to visit an air
force installation in Texas, he donned a disguise that included a floppy straw
hat and sunglasses. When Grissom asked Slayton for his opinion about his
outfit, the astronaut deadpanned: “You look just like Gus Grissom in dark
glasses and a hat.” In spite of his friend’s skeptical assessment, Grissom
managed to slip by the reporters and photographers who were lying in wait for
him at the Orlando airport, a small victory that pleased the astronaut no end.
For the most part, however, the
astronauts faced a friendly response from the press. With the benefit of
hindsight, Wainwright later reflected that he and the other staff members from Life came to their assignment with a
different mindset than usual when reporting a story. “We had virtually
abdicated skepticism,” he said. “Possibly our attitudes had to do with the
general innocence of the period or with a more ordinary need for heroes.
Yet,
from top to bottom, the Life group
stood in some real awe of the Mercury pilots and were pretty wide-eyed about
their mission.” Also, because the magazine had bought the astronaut’s stories,
it and its staff were not looking to cause any problems with the space program.
The Life team of reporters, editors,
and photographers took upon themselves “the responsibility of telling the story
in a positive way, one that would reflect credit on the men and the space
program,” said Wainwright. They believed it was their duty to protect what had
become an extremely valuable national asset. He added that NASA was all too
willing to aid in that effort as a way to win public acceptance, and increased
government funding, for its program. All of these factors helped turn the
reporters from observers to cheerleaders, Wainwright noted, and the interests
of “patriotism and successful publishing seemed somehow to meld together . . .
in a warm, red-white-and-blue glow.”
The public, too, was more than ready
to embrace the astronauts, perhaps to counteract the swelling panic that
gripped the nation following the Soviet Union’s space triumphs. Faced with a
public looking for heroes and a media unwilling to report on any negative
personal qualities, there soon developed the “myth of the super-hero
astronaut,” noted Apollo 7 veteran
Walter Cunningham, who along with Donn Eisele and Schirra served as the backup
crew to Grissom’s Apollo 1 flight.
Most of the astronauts found the attention both flattering and easy to get
along with, said Cunningham, but few could actually live up to the image
projected by the media and NASA. “We weren’t all simon-pure nor all
hell-raisers,” Cunningham noted in his book about the astronauts, aptly titled The All-American Boys. The great deeds
accomplished by the American space program were “fulfilled by men who were all
too human in their weaknesses as well as their strengths,” he wrote.
The myth of the super-hero astronaut
endured for many years, egged on by continuing progress with the Mercury and
Gemini programs and the promise of fulfilling President John F. Kennedy’s goal
of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end
of the decade with the mighty Apollo project. The deaths of Grissom, Chaffee,
and White, however, came just before one of the most tumultuous times in the
country’s history . The year 1968 saw
the North Vietnamese launch their Tet Offensive against South Vietnam and its
American allies, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and RobertKennedy, large-scale riots by African Americans in a number of large cities,
and police and protesters clashing at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago. With the escalating involvement of American troops in Vietnam, NASA
had to endure severe cuts in its budget. Following Apollo 11’s achievement of a moon landing in 1969, the space agency
found it harder and harder to find support in Congress for its programs, with
the planned missions of Apollo 18, Apollo 19, and Apollo 20 eliminated.
As NASA suffered budget
limitations—why spend more money on space when the United States had already
beaten the Russians to the moon?—America’s space heroes had their own problems.
Fueled by the legacy of Vietnam and Watergate, the American media refused as it
once did to turn a blind eye to the peccadilloes of those in the public eye,
politicians and astronauts alike. Wolfe’s critically acclaimed The Right Stuff not only penetrated the
closed world of the test-pilot, fighter-jock fraternity, but it also laid bare
the astronaut’s extracurricular activities of “Drinking & Driving & the
rest,” complete with “juicy little girls” bragging about their sexual liaisons
with the original seven astronauts by “going around saying, ‘Well, four down,
three to go!’”
But even before Wolfe’s book, some astronauts had admitted their
failings to the public. In his book Cunningham told about the “astronaut
groupies” who worked hard to add as many space travelers to their scorecard as
possible. Still, as a group the astronauts, Cunningham estimated, were no
better or worse than the national average when it came to infidelity. “It is
even possible, under the circumstances,” he noted, “that our behavior was
better than the gossip and suspicion implied.” After all, astronauts had far
more temptations facing them than the average businessman did.
The deconstruction of the astronaut
hero continued when Wolfe’s book was made into a 1983 movie, which was written
and directed by Kaufman. Originally, veteran Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote screenplays for such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, had been selected by United Artists
producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler to pen the film’s script.
At the
time Goldman became involved with the project (November 1979), radical Iranian
students had seized as hostages diplomats and other employees of the American
embassy in Iran. For the first time in his career, Goldman wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, he
wanted to write a film that had a message. “I wanted to ‘say’ something
positive about America,” said Goldman. “Not patriotic in the John Wayne sense,
but patriotic none the less.” By telling the story of the astronauts, the
screenwriter hoped to impart to viewers that “America was still a great place,
and not just to visit.”
That effort came to naught when
Kaufman, who had directed the critically acclaimed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), was brought on board as
director. The two men’s ideas about the film clashed at once. When Goldman told
Kaufman about his plans for producing a patriotic movie, the director blanched.
Kaufman, according to Goldman, had been won over by Wolfe’s depiction of Yeager
as the country’s greatest pilot, an iconic figure head and shoulders above all other
flyers. “Phil’s heart was with Yeager. And not only that,” said Goldman, “he
[Kaufman] felt the astronauts, rather than being heroic, were really minor
leaguers, mechanical men of no particular quality, not great pilots at all,
simply the product of hype.”
What Kaufman wanted to say, Goldman noted, was
that America might have been a great country at one time, but those days were
long gone. According to Kaufman, the story of Yeager was “the essence of what
Tom Wolfe’s book was about. It’s about searching for the origin of that special
quality. Whatever you may want to call it—grace under pressure—a kind of secret
quality that was passed on from one generation of test pilots to the next.” Goldman
did not share the director’s vision for the film and left the project.
Kaufman’s view of Yeager as being superior
in ability to the men who eventually became astronauts permeates the film. One
scene that typifies Kaufman’s viewpoint comes when two hapless governmental
representatives, played with comic aplomb by Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer,
arrive at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert to recruit test
pilots for the new American space program. Walking into a local bar where the
pilots congregate—Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club—the men and the program
they represent are greeted with disdain by such top test pilots as Yeager and Scott Crossfield. “What you need,” says Yeager,
played by Sam Shepard, “is a little lab rabbit to curl up inside your damn
capsule with his heart going pitter-patter and a wire up the kazoo. I don’t
hold with it.”
Of course, the government does not want the “best” test pilots;
Yeager is ineligible for the astronaut program because he did not attend
college and Crossfield, as a civilian, failed to have the proper security
clearance. Instead of the top pilots, the government had to, according to
Kaufman, take such second-rate flyers as Grissom and Cooper. Cooper, played by
Dennis Quaid, even acknowledges the disparity of talent between the two groups,
noting to his friend Grissom, “Well, there sure is a long line of shit-hot
rocket aces around here. A long line.” Why not attempt to jump ahead in line by
volunteering for a project that had the potential for becoming a high priority
with the nation’s leaders?
Neglected in Kaufman’s version of
events are the many accomplishments of the pilots selected as astronauts, and
the fact that while they were at Edwards both Grissom and Cooper were not in
direct competition with Yeager, but students
at the air force’s test-pilot school there. After graduation, Grissom left
Edwards for an assignment at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
He was flying jets there when President Eisenhower decided in 1958 to draw upon
the ranks of approximately five hundred military test pilots for the new
astronaut corps. NASA’s Space Task Group was pleased to have such qualified men
to pick from, believing as it did that the eventual success of a mission could
well depend on a pilot’s actions in space.
As Slayton noted in his
autobiography, some of the astronauts certainly did not have the same
professional achievements to compare with test pilots such as Yeager and
Crossfield. Others in the program, however, had solid test-flight credentials:
both Schirra and himself had done frontline test flying, Shepard had been one
of the first navy flyers to land on an angled-deck carrier, and Grissom had
been involved with all-weather testing at the Wright Air Development Center at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Whatever the opinion on the piloting
skills of the original astronauts, they achieved their mission in spite of a
run of bad luck that would have daunted lesser men. Grounded during the Mercury
program due to an irregular heartbeat, Slayton stayed the course, eventually becoming
chief of flight-crew operations for NASA and finally making it into space as
part of the crew for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission in 1975. Shepard,
the first American in space aboard Freedom
7, earned his nickname as the “Icy Commander” several times over after Ménière’s
syndrome, an inner-ear disorder, kept him from flying more missions and he took
over for Slayton as head of the astronaut office. Given new life by a radical
medical procedure that cured his inner-ear imbalance, Shepard, too, made it
back into space, walking on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission.
None of the original
astronauts, however, endured Grissom’s string of calamities and bad luck. In
addition to the brouhaha and finger pointing over Liberty Bell 7’s blown hatch, he also suffered the embarrassment of
being reprimanded by NASA officials and Congress for accepting and taking a few
bites from a corned-beef sandwich smuggled aboard Gemini 3 by crewmate John Young (thoughtfully provided by prankster
Schirra from a Cocoa Beach delicatessen).
Years later, with the hatch
controversy still dogging his career, Grissom became a forceful voice against
using an explosive hatch on Apollo 1—a
device that might have saved the crew from the toxic gases that killed them. Given
Grissom’s rotten luck as an astronaut, it seemed almost inevitable that someone
would try to blame him for causing, at that time, NASA’s worst disaster. One
North American Aviation engineer hypothesized that Grissom had accidentally
scuffed the insulation of a wire while moving about the spacecraft, which lead
to a spark and the subsequent fire. This hypothesis was immediately rejected by
the NASA review board and a congressional committee investigating the Apollo tragedy.
Throughout his career, however, Grissom
never let his misfortunes stand in the way of his stated purpose for accepting
such dangerous assignments—patriotism. “If my country has decided that I’m one
of the better qualified people for the mission, then I’m glad I can
participate,” he told a reporter from Life
magazine.
For a short time, Grissom even considered leaving NASA to join
other air force pilots in flying missions in the Vietnam War (a pilot friend
warned him that Vietnam was nothing like Korea). Instead of returning to air
combat, Grissom continued to strive to put America on the moon, giving his life
in the process and earning a hero’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery in
Virginia, with the service broadcast nationwide on television. Neighbors from
Mitchell joined President Lyndon B. Johnson, members of Congress, and fellow
astronauts at the funeral.
It took NASA more than a year after the Apollo 1 accident, during which time the
spacecraft was extensively reworked, to launch another manned mission. Apollo 7, commanded by Grissom’s friend
Schirra, made 163 orbits during its eleven-day mission in the redesigned
command module; America was back on its way to the moon. Years later, after six
successful landings on the moon, Betty Grissom, reflecting on her husband,
said: “I hate it that Gus is gone, but I guess the program was worth it. He
wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
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