Tragedy on Pad 34: Gus Grissom and the Apollo 1 Fire

On Friday, January 27, 1967, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration engaged in yet another step on the long journey to meet President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth by attempting a simulated countdown of the three-man Apollo spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center's Pad 34 in Florida.

At one o'clock in the afternoon astronauts Roger Chaffee, a rookie and the youngest person ever selected to join the astronaut corps; Ed White, the first American to walk in space; and Hoosier native Gus Grissom, the first American to fly in space twice; entered the Apollo command module, built by North American Aviation. They never made it out alive. At 6:31 p.m., flight controllers on the ground heard an astronaut, probably Chaffee, calmly announce: "Fire. I smell fire." Seconds later, White more urgently stated: "Fire in the cockpit."

According to NASA procedures, an emergency escape from the Apollo spacecraft took at least 90 seconds. The crew, however, had never accomplished such a difficult feat in that time. To escape the troubled capsule, Grissom had to lower White's headrest so White could reach above and behind his left shoulder to use a ratchet-type device to release the first in a series of latches to open the hatch.
The astronauts performed their tasks bravely in spite of the inferno raging around them. White, with Grissom struggling to help him, made part of a full turn with the ratchet before being overcome by smoke. Chaffee, the rookie, had carried out his duties by turning up the cabin lights as an aid to vision and turning on the cabin's internal batteries for power.

The intense heat and smoke hampered rescue efforts, but pad workers finally were able to open the hatch. They were too late; the three astronauts were dead, killed not by the fire, but the carbon monoxide that filled the cabin and entered their spacesuits after flames had burned through their air hoses. Doctors treated 27 men involved in the rescue attempt for smoke inhalation. Two were hospitalized.

It took NASA more than a year after the accident, during which time the spacecraft underwent extensive modification, to launch another manned mission. Apollo 7, commanded by Grissom’s friend Wally Schirra, an original Mercury astronaut, made 163 orbits during its eleven-day mission in the redesigned command module; America was back on its way to the moon.

There were several ironies associated with the Apollo 1 disaster, the most obvious being that three astronauts had been killed not on a hazardous trip into space, but on the ground during what was believed to be a relatively safe test involving an unfueled rocket. Also, there were many in NASA who believed that the fire, great a tragedy as it was, might have been one of the best things that could have happened for the American space program. "I think we got too complacent in the manned program," one Apollo engineer said. "The fire really woke people up." And if there had not been a fire on the ground, there may have well been one in space. If that had happened, if a fire had occurred while Apollo was in orbit or on its way to the moon, the American space effort might have been set back for a decade.

To understand the other ironies associated with the Pad 34 catastrophe, it is necessary to examine the often-unlucky astronaut career of the commander of the Apollo 1 mission -- Gus Grissom. It is a career with much to be proud of. Grissom may have been a goat and screwup to The Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe, but to fellow Hoosiers, Grissom had always been a full-blooded American hero.   

Virgil Ivan Grissom, was born on April 3, 1926, the oldest of four children. He was brought up in this Hoosier town in a white frame house at 715 Baker Street (a road later renamed in his honor). Grissom’s father was a signalman for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, where he worked six days a week at fifty cents an hour. The young Grissom was no stranger to work himself, rising early in the morning to pick up copies of the Indianapolis Star at the downtown bus station for delivery to local residents. "He never did a mean thing in his life," Grissom's mother said of her son. "He never had any trouble."

Reportedly equipped with an IQ of 145, Grissom was nevertheless, he later admitted, not much of a “whiz” in school. “I guess it was a case of drifting and not knowing what I wanted to make of myself,” he said. “I suppose I built my share of model airplanes, but I can’t remember that I was a flying fanatic.” Although sons in railroading families often followed in their father’s footsteps, Grissom recalled that his father encouraged him instead to explore other career possibilities “in which he felt there were better chances for getting ahead.”

Standing only five feet, four inches tall when he entered high school, Grissom was too short to make the school’s basketball team, the dream of many a Hoosier youth. Instead of taking the court as a member of the basketball team, he led his Boy Scout honor guard in carrying the American flag at the opening of games, impressing fellow student and future wife Betty Moore, who played the drum in the school band.

During his high school years, Grissom completed one year of precadet training in the United States Army Air Corps. Following his graduation from high school, he was inducted into the Army Air Corps and sent to Wichita Falls, Texas, for five weeks of basic training. Stationed eventually at Brooks Field in San Antonio, Grissom spent much of his time before his discharge in November 1945 serving as a deskbound clerk. 

Grissom returned to Mitchell for his marriage on July 6, 1945, to Betty Moore. After his discharge from the armed forces, Grissom found a job installing doors on school buses at Carpenter Body Works. With the help of the GI Bill, Grissom left Mitchell to enroll at Purdue University as a mechanical-engineering student. Life for the young couple was rough; during his first semester Grissom shared a basement apartment with another male student while his wife remained behind in Mitchell with her parents.

Joining her husband during the second semester of his studies at the West Lafayette campus, Betty Grissom helped pay for the future astronaut’s education by working as a long-distance operator for the Indiana Bell Telephone Company. Grissom, who worked after class as a short-order cook, finished his degree early by skipping summer vacations and graduated in 1950. Donald S. Clark, one of Grissom’s professors in mechanical engineering, recalled that the future astronaut was a “better than average student and was a very determined young man who wanted more than anything else in the world to become a test pilot.”

After graduating from Purdue, Grissom needed a job, and fast, he said, “because I didn’t want Betty spending any more of her life at a switchboard. She had made my degree possible.” He decided to rejoin the armed services and became an air cadet at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas.

After completing his basic training, he moved on to Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, where his wife and six-month-old son, Scott, joined Grissom and his $105 monthly salary. In March 1951 Grissom received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Force and saw his pay skyrocket to $400 a month. Just nine months later Grissom received orders for Korea where he joined the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Kimpo Air Force Base, just twelve miles from the front lines.

In the approximately six months that he was in Korea, Grissom flew more than one hundred combat missions and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions on March 23, 1952 as he flew cover in his F-86 for a photoreconnaissance mission. Even after flying his one hundredth mission, which meant a return home, Grissom wanted more, requesting to fly twenty-five more missions. “If you were a shoe salesman,” he explained, “you’d want to be where you could sell shoes.”

With his request denied by the Air Force, he returned home as an instructor, an assignment that Grissom considered the most dangerous in his career. “I know what I’m going to do when I’m up there, all the time,” he noted, “but I don’t know what that student is going to do.”

In August 1955 Grissom took a vital step toward becoming a test pilot, and consequently an astronaut, when he enrolled at the Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where he met and became friends with Gordon Cooper, another future space explorer. Both also attended test-pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Completing his test-pilot training, Grissom was assigned by the Air Force to return to Wright-Patterson.

Grissom was still at the Dayton facility testing aircraft like the F-104 Starfighter on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union shocked the world by announcing it had successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space. The 184-pound satellite, the size of a basketball, could be heard by American tracking stations as it circled the globe making its “beep-beep” sound. The space race had begun.

After a few false starts (early rockets had the disconcerting habit of blowing up), scientists managed to put the first American satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit nearly four months after the Russians’ space success. As the public and politicians clamored for action, the government initiated in 1958 the United States’ first man-in-space program, Project Mercury.

President Dwight Eisenhower decided that the astronauts for the space program should come from the ranks of military-service test pilots, and NASA asked the services to list their members who met specific qualifications. A candidate for the space program had to be under forty years old, be less than five feet, eleven inches tall; have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in engineering; be a qualified jet pilot; be a graduate of test-pilot school; and have at least fifteen hundred hours of flying time. Approximately five hundred candidates qualified; one hundred and ten survived the initial screening process.

One of the pilots called to Washington, D.C., at the beginning of February 1959 to be evaluated as a possible astronaut was Grissom, who received the top secret news from the adjutant at Wright-Patterson, who asked him, “Gus, what kind of hell have you been raising lately?” A confused Grissom expressed puzzlement over the question and learned that he had received orders to report to Washington wearing civilian, not military, attire. Before he left home, Grissom’s wife, thinking of the wildest possibility, prophetically asked him: “What are they going to do? Shoot you up in the nose cone of an Atlas [rocket]?”

Reporting to the nation’s capital—he felt like he had “wandered right into the middle of a James Bond novel”—Grissom was ushered into a large reception room filled with men who were, he discovered after a brief time talking with them, fellow test pilots. From this group, a total of thirty-nine men, Grissom included, were sent to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be probed and prodded by scientists. They later underwent pressure-suit tests, heat tests, acceleration tests, and vibration tests at the Aeromedical Laboratory of the Wright Air Development Center in Ohio.

From this torturous process NASA picked seven men to serve as Project Mercury astronauts and presented them to the public in April 1959. The American astronauts were, from the Marines, John Glenn; from the Navy, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Malcolm Scott Carpenter; and from the Air Force, Donald “Deke” Slayton, Gordon Cooper, and Grissom.

The Hoosier pilot had almost missed out on the historic designation when doctors during their wide-ranging tests discovered that Grissom suffered from hay fever. His pointed reply—“there won’t be any ragweed pollen in space”—saved him from being dropped from consideration.

With his allergy problem out of the way, Grissom and his fellow astronauts underwent training to see which one, NASA confidently predicted, would be the first man in space. The astronauts, except for Glenn, seemed more at ease with training for going into space than they did with dealing with the crush of media attention on them and their families.

The press coverage grew so great that Grissom, never comfortable in the spotlight, went as far as to disguise himself in a floppy hat and dark glasses in order to slip by newsmen without being recognized. The media scrutiny grew even more intense as time went by. On January 19, 1961, Robert Gilruth, head of Project Mercury, confidentially informed the astronauts of the flight order: Shepard would be the first man to ride the Redstone rocket; Grissom had the second flight; and Glenn would be the backup for both missions.

It did not work out as the American space agency had planned; on April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin made a one-orbit flight around the Earth that lasted one hundred and eight minutes in his Vostok spacecraft Swallow, winning for the Soviet Union the honor of being the first nation to put a human being into the inky void of space.

Glenn, the most comfortable with the press, spoke for the rest of the astronauts when he noted: “They [the Russians] just beat the pants off us, that’s all. There’s no use kidding ourselves about that. But now that the space age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.” That hard work resulted in Shepard finally becoming the first American into space with his suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961.

Except for a problem with a full bladder, which Shepard solved by relieving himself in his spacesuit, the United States’ initial manned mission into space went well. The same could not be said of Grissom’s flight, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral on July 21, 1961. The Hoosier native had “maintained an even strain,” as fellow astronaut Schirra liked to say, the morning of his mission. During a last-minute physical, the doctor examining Grissom had been surprised at his subject’s low blood pressure. His fifteen-minute, thirty-seven-second flight went off without a hitch, as his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft made a successful splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. From that point on, however, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

According to the recovery plan, a helicopter pilot from the aircraft carrier Randolph was supposed to radio to Grissom as soon as he had successfully hooked on to the capsule and lifted it from the water. At that point, Grissom would remove his helmet, hit the switch to blow off the hatch, and exit the spacecraft. “I had unhooked the oxygen inlet hose by now and was lying flat on my back and minding my own business,” Grissom recalled, “when suddenly the hatch blew off with a dull thud. All I could see was blue sky and sea water rushing in over the sill.”

Tossing off his helmet, the astronaut hoisted himself through the hatch. “I have never moved as fast in my life,” said Grissom. “The next thing I knew I was floating high in my suit with the water up to my armpits.”

Although a recovery helicopter managed to snag the capsule, it could not handle the weight of the waterlogged spacecraft and had to cut it loose; it was the first time in his long flying career that Grissom had ever lost an aircraft. Meanwhile, the astronaut was struggling to keep from drowning. Although his space suit kept out the water, he was losing buoyancy because of an open air-inlet port in the belly of his suit. 

As he fought to stay afloat, Grissom regretted the two rolls of dimes, three one-dollar bills, two sets of pilot’s wings, and some miniature models of the Liberty Bell spacecraft he had stowed in the leg pocket of his space suit as souvenirs of his flight. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, you’ve gone through the whole flight, and now you’re going to sink right here in front of all these people,’” Grissom said.

Rescued by another chopper, the now exhausted astronaut had strength enough to grab a Mae West life jacket and put it on for the flight back to the aircraft carrier. “I wanted to make certain that if anything happened to this helicopter I would not have to go through another dunking,” he said.

Once Grissom was safely onboard the Navy carrier, an officer came up to him and handed him his space helmet, which had been plucked from the water by the crew of an escort destroyer, and told him that it had been found floating right next to a ten-foot-long shark.

Although an accident review panel cleared Grissom, and the other astronauts supported him, unanswered questions about the hatch dogged the Hoosier native for the rest of his career. NASA, however, backed Grissom, and his career as an astronaut was saved. The Purdue graduate became so involved in the design of the two-man Gemini spacecraft that fellow astronauts dubbed it “the Gusmobile.” He and John W. Young were selected to make the first manned flight in the Gemini program. In naming the Gemini 3 spaceship, Grissom found a way to exorcise the demons from his Mercury mishap.

At first, Grissom wanted to use Wapasha, after a Native American tribe that had lived along the Wabash River. Then someone pointed out to Grissom that people might start calling the spacecraft The Wabash Cannon Ball. “Well, my Dad was working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and I wasn’t too sure just how he’d take to The Wabash Cannon Ball,” said Grissom. “How would he explain that one to his pals on the B&O?”

Instead, Grissom, attempting to squelch ideas that he was still sensitive about losing the Liberty Bell 7, christened his Gemini craft Molly Brown after the character from the Broadway musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Some officials at NASA were not amused at the choice of names and asked him to pick another. “Well,” Grissom told one, “what about the Titanic?” NASA decided that the name Molly Brown was fine after all.

Grissom and Young’s three-orbit Gemini flight on March 23, 1965, went off without a hitch, except for some consternation on behalf of space-agency scientists who fretted over an unauthorized meal sneaked aboard by Young, in cahoots with Schirra: a corned-beef sandwich. The astronauts ate a few bites before concern about the possibility of crumbs damaging sensitive electronic equipment caused the duo to stow it away for safekeeping. 

In spite of the media latching onto the so-called “sandwich affair” after the flight, and some members of Congress wailing that the space agency had lost control of its astronauts, Grissom remained one of NASA’s top men and was picked to command the first manned Apollo mission, one of the initial steps on the way to meeting President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

Deke Slayton, responsible for selecting flight crews, privately told his friend Grissom that if all went well, the Hoosier native would be first in line to command a lunar mission. "One thing that would probably have been different if Gus had lived," Slayton said in his autobiography, "the first guy to walk on the moon would have been Gus Grissom, not Neil Armstrong."

Slayton and other NASA officials had agreed prior to the Apollo 1 fire that, if possible, one of the Mercury astronauts would have the opportunity to be the first person on the moon. At that time Grissom was the one astronaut from the original seven who had the experience to press on through to the moon landing, according to Slayton.

Troubles plagued the Apollo program from the start, especially with the scheduled first manned vehicle, numbered as Spacecraft 012. Betty Grissom remembered her husband receiving a number of phone calls at home concerning difficulties with the Apollo craft. “That was not like Gus,” she said. “He never brought work problems home with him. . . . But now he was uptight about it.”

Questioned by a reporter about rumors swirling around that the program had experienced problems, Grissom did express some misgivings. “We’ve had problems before,” he said, “but these have been coming in bushelfuls. Frankly, I think this mission has a pretty damn slim chance of flying its full fourteen days.” On what was the final time he was ever home, Grissom, according to his wife, went out to their yard and cut down a lemon to take with him to hang on a full-scale duplicate of the troubled Apollo spacecraft.

Grissom’s premonition of trouble came tragically true during the January 27, 1967, test of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn 1B rocket. For the test, Grissom, as commander, was in the left couch under the flight control panel; White, navigator for the mission, occupied the middle couch; and Chaffee sat on the right where the communications equipment was located. Once again, glitches popped up to frustrate the astronauts. A sour odor, described as somewhat like buttermilk, fouled the capsule’s pure-oxygen interior for a time. The next problem was a high oxygen flow indication that periodically triggered the capsule's master alarm.

Grissom, upset over a communication problem with the test-control sites, angrily told mission control: “If I can’t talk with you only five miles away, how can we talk to you from the moon?” Shortly after 6:30 in the evening, under Grissom’s commander seat, a frayed wire sparked, causing a fire. 

Fueled by the pure-oxygen atmosphere that permeated the Apollo spacecraft’s pressurized crew cabin, which caused even fire-resistant material to burn at a furious rate, the fire also fed itself on a host of combustible materials in the command module, especially the Velcro and nylon netting used by the crew as a means of holding items that would float around the capsule if not secured while in space. As the material burned, it released poisonous gases that eventually suffocated the three astronauts.

Spacecraft technicians attempted to free the trapped crewmen, but before they could reach the sealed Apollo the command module ruptured, belching flame and smoke into the room and hampering rescue operations. There was also the fear that the fire might set off the launch escape system sitting on top of the spacecraft. In spite of these dangers, many technicians stayed in the area and worked to open the hatch. They were too late; the astronauts were dead, killed by the carbon monoxide, with thermal burns as contributing causes. The fire had destroyed 70 percent of Grissom's spacesuit, 25 percent of White's, and 15 percent of Chaffe's.

Grissom was given a hero’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, with the service broadcast nationwide on television. Neighbors from Mitchell joined President Lyndon Johnson, members of Congress, and fellow astronauts at the funeral. Meanwhile, an investigative review board set up by NASA went through the charred spacecraft looking for answers. Engineers at the Manned Spacecraft Center duplicated conditions of the Apollo spacecraft without the crewmen in the capsule. They reconstructed events and the investigation on pad 34 showed that the fire started in or near one of the wire bundles to the left and just in front of Grissom's seat on the left side of the cabin -- a spot visible to Chaffee. The fire was probably invisible for about five or six seconds until Chaffee sounded the alarm.

Of course, given Grissom's bad 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 engineer hypothesized that Grissom had accidentally scuffed the insulation of a wire while moving about the spacecraft. This hypothesis was immediately rejected by the NASA review board and a congressional committee investigating the Apollo fire. Astronaut Frank Borman, a member of the review board, testified to Congress that the board "found no evidence to support the thesis that Gus, or any of the crew members, kicked the wire that ignited the flammables."

The review board's final report was 3,300 pages long and weighed nineteen pounds. The report blasted both NASA and North American Aviation, contractor for the command module, for poor management, carelessness, and failure to consider the safety of the astronauts. Among the review board's criticisms were these:

• The Command Module contained many types and classes of combustible material in areas contiguous to possible ignition sources

• Due to internal pressure, the Command Module inner hatch could not be opened prior to rupture of the Command Module

• The overall communications system was unsatisfactory

• Emergency fire, rescue and medical teams were not in attendance

• The Command Module Environmental Control System design provides a pure oxygen atmosphere. This atmosphere presents severe fire hazards

To respond to these criticisms, NASA spent nearly a half billion dollars on a revamped Apollo spacecraft, which included extensive use of fire resistant materials, a single-hinge hatch that could be swung outward with only one-half pound of force, a redesign of the electrical system, use of a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere when the spaceship was on the ground, and use of a new flame-proof material called "Beta Cloth" instead of nylon for the astronaut's spacesuits.

Although the review board recommended that NASA continue to try and meet Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of 1969, it stressed that safety must be the prime consideration for America's space program, outranking even the target date. 

Reflecting on the tragedy from a perspective of many years, NASA flight director Chris Kraft noted that while it was "unforgivable that we allowed that accident to happen," if it had never occurred American would not have gone to the moon when it did. "We made a lot of changes to the command and lunar modules as a result of that experience," Kraft said. "I think we would have had all kinds of trouble getting to the moon with all the systems problems we had. That terrible experience also brought a new resolve and a renewed commitment to get the job done."

It was Grissom himself, however, who perhaps best summed up the feelings of the astronauts, many of them test pilots used to losing friends in the line of duty: "If we die, we want people to accept it, and hope it will not delay the space program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of human life."