Apollo 1

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollo 1 never left the ground. On the 27th of January, 1967, three astronauts -- Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee -- strapped into their capsule at Launch Complex 34 on Cape Kennedy Air Force Station for what planners had classified as a routine, non-hazardous test. The rocket beneath them held no fuel. The explosive bolts were disabled. Nobody expected anything to go wrong. Sixteen seconds after fire broke out in the cockpit, all three men were dead.

  The mission had been designated AS-204, the first crewed test of the Apollo command and service module, scheduled to lift off on February 21. Instead, it became the site of NASA's first in-program fatality -- and the name Apollo 1, chosen by the crew themselves, was made official only after the fire, at the request of their widows. What caused the fire? What did NASA know, and when? And what had to change before a crewed Apollo mission could ever fly again? Those are the questions this story answers.

• 2. The Crew and the Craft

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  Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, assembled the first Apollo crew in January 1966. Grissom, a veteran of Mercury and Gemini, was chosen as Command Pilot. Ed White, the first American to walk in space, was named Senior Pilot. The original Pilot slot went to Donn F. Eisele, but Eisele dislocated his shoulder twice aboard the KC-135 weightlessness training aircraft and required surgery on the 27th of January -- exactly one year before the fire. Slayton replaced him with rookie Roger Chaffee, and NASA announced the final crew lineup on the 21st of March 1966.

  The spacecraft they were assigned, command module CM-012, was built by North American Aviation. It was a Block I design, conceived before the lunar orbit rendezvous landing strategy was adopted; it lacked the ability to dock with the lunar module. CM-012 arrived at Kennedy Space Center on the 26th of August 1966, under a conditional Certificate of Flight Worthiness -- 113 significant engineering changes still had to be completed on-site. After delivery, an additional 623 engineering change orders were made and completed.

  Grissom grew so frustrated with the pace of changes that he pulled a lemon from a tree by his house and hung it on the training simulator. At a review meeting with Apollo Spacecraft Program Office manager Joseph F. Shea on the 19th of August 1966 -- a week before the spacecraft's delivery -- the crew raised concerns about the volume of flammable nylon netting and Velcro lining the cabin interior. Shea approved the spacecraft anyway. As they left, the crew gave him a portrait of themselves posed with heads bowed and hands clasped in prayer, inscribed: "It isn't that we don't trust you, Joe, but this time we've decided to go over your head."

• 3. Eighteen Minutes of Fire

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  The plugs-out test on January 27 was designed to confirm that the spacecraft could operate on simulated internal power while completely disconnected from external cables and umbilicals. At 1:00 pm EST, Grissom, then Chaffee, then White entered the capsule fully pressure-suited and strapped in. Almost immediately Grissom noticed a strange odor in his suit air supply -- he compared it to "sour buttermilk" -- and the simulated countdown was put on hold at 1:20 pm while air samples were taken. No cause was found. The count resumed at 2:42 pm.

  Communications between the crew, the Operations and Checkout Building, and the Complex 34 blockhouse were plagued by problems throughout the afternoon. Grissom's frustration boiled over: "How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" The count was again put on hold at 5:40 pm to troubleshoot the communications loop. By 6:30 the countdown sat at T minus 10 minutes.

  At 6:31:04.7 pm, a momentary voltage spike on AC Bus 2 preceded one of the astronauts -- most likely Grissom, by acoustic analysis -- shouting "Hey!", "Fire!", or "Flame!" Two seconds of scuffling followed. At 6:31:06.2 pm, a voice believed to be Chaffee's reported "I've / We've got a fire in the cockpit." A second, badly garbled transmission ended with a cry of pain. The entire sequence from first alarm to cabin rupture lasted roughly 15 seconds.

  The pure oxygen atmosphere at 16.7 psi -- more than five times the partial pressure of oxygen in normal air -- caused the fire to spread with extreme speed. Cabin pressure surged to 29 psi, rupturing the inner wall at 6:31:19. Flames and hot gases shot through open access panels to two levels of the pad service structure. Gas masks worn by pad workers were designed for toxic fumes, not smoke, and the dense black smoke made visibility impossible. It took five minutes to open all three hatch layers. The bodies of Grissom and White were found at the lower edge of the hatch; Chaffee was still strapped into his right-hand seat, holding the communications channel open as procedure required. The bodies could not be removed for 7.5 hours due to toxic gases and the melted nylon that fused the suits to the cabin interior.

• 4. What the Investigation Found

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  The Apollo 204 Review Board was chaired by Langley Research Center director Floyd L. Thompson and included astronaut Frank Borman, spacecraft designer Maxime Faget, and six others. The board issued its final report on the 5th of April 1967. Autopsies determined the primary cause of death for all three astronauts was cardiac arrest caused by high concentrations of carbon monoxide.

  The electrical power had momentarily failed at 23:30:55 GMT, and investigators found evidence of multiple electric arcs inside the spacecraft. No single ignition source could be conclusively identified, but the board determined the fire most likely began near the floor in the lower left section of the cabin, close to the Environmental Control Unit. A silver-plated copper wire running through that unit had been stripped of its Teflon insulation by repeated opening and closing of a small access door. That wire ran near a junction in an ethylene glycol-water cooling line known to be prone to leaks. Experiments confirmed on the 29th of May 1967, at the Manned Spacecraft Center that electrolysis of ethylene glycol solution with a silver wire anode could produce a violent exothermic reaction in a pure oxygen atmosphere.

  The 34 square feet of Velcro the NASA crew systems department had installed in the cabin -- nearly carpeting the interior -- burned readily in high-pressure oxygen. According to astronaut Buzz Aldrin's 1989 book Men From Earth, the flammable materials had in fact been removed following the crew's August 19 complaints and Shea's order, but were replaced before the August 26 delivery to Cape Kennedy.

  The inward-opening plug door hatch sealed more tightly the higher the internal pressure rose. Emergency procedure required Grissom to open a vent valve to equalize pressure before White could remove the hatch. The valve was located to Grissom's left -- behind the initial wall of flames. Even without the fire, the system's flow capacity was utterly incapable of handling the rapid pressure rise to 29 psi. North American had originally proposed an outward-opening hatch with explosive bolts, as Mercury used. NASA had rejected it, pointing to an accidental opening on Grissom's own Liberty Bell 7 flight. Before the accident, Apollo astronauts had already recommended reverting to an outward-opening design; it was slated for inclusion in the Block II module.

• 5. The Phillips Report and Congress

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  Three weeks after the fire, in the February 27 hearing before the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Senator Walter F. Mondale asked NASA administrator James E. Webb whether he knew of a report documenting serious problems with North American Aviation's performance on the Apollo contract. Webb said he did not. Manned Space Flight Administrator Dr. George E. Mueller and Apollo Program Director Maj Gen Samuel C. Phillips also denied knowledge. The problem was that the report existed.

  In late 1965, Phillips had led a "tiger team" examining cost overruns, schedule delays, and quality failures in both the Apollo command and service module and the Saturn V second stage -- both of which North American was building. He presented his findings to Mueller and Seamans in a memo and oral briefing, and also sent a strongly worded memo to North American president John L. Atwood. Webb had never been told. When Mondale pressed the issue, Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans -- worried Mondale might have an actual copy -- carefully acknowledged that contractors were sometimes subject to progress reviews, without confirming the document's existence.

  The disclosure enraged Mondale. In his own Additional Views appended to the Senate committee's final report, he accused NASA of "evasiveness,... lack of candor,... patronizing attitude toward Congress... refusal to respond fully and forthrightly to legitimate Congressional inquiries, and... solicitous concern for corporate sensitivities at a time of national tragedy." Despite the political storm, both the Senate and House committees ultimately concluded that the problems documented in the Phillips report had no bearing on the accident itself.

  Relations between NASA and North American deteriorated badly. North American argued it was not responsible for the fatal atmosphere design decision. Webb eventually demanded that either North American president John L. Atwood or chief engineer Harrison Storms resign. Atwood fired Storms. On the NASA side, Joseph Shea -- who bore direct responsibility for the spacecraft -- began relying on barbiturates and alcohol. He was eventually reassigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., six months after the fire, which he described as a "non-job." He left two months later.

• 6. Redesign and Recovery

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  Gene Kranz called his Mission Control staff together three days after the accident and delivered a speech that became foundational to NASA culture. "We were too 'gung-ho' about the schedule and we blocked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work," he told the room. "Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we." He set a new standard: every member of every team in Mission Control must be "tough and competent," with nothing less than perfection required. In 2003, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe cited Kranz's speech in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

  Crewed Apollo flights were suspended for twenty months. The Block II command module that emerged from the redesign incorporated sweeping changes. The cabin atmosphere at launch was adjusted to 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen at 14.7 psi; during ascent it vented rapidly down to 5 psi, and pure oxygen was then slowly reintroduced over the following day. The nylon used in the Block I suits was replaced with Beta cloth -- fiberglass woven and coated with Teflon, highly resistant to flame and melting. A completely redesigned hatch opened outward and could be cleared in less than five seconds; a cartridge of pressurized nitrogen drove the release in emergencies, replacing explosive bolts. Flammable cabin materials were swapped for self-extinguishing versions, and plumbing was rerouted using stainless steel brazed joints where possible.

  The AS-204 Saturn IB launch vehicle -- the rocket that would have carried Apollo 1 -- was eventually used to launch Apollo 5, the first uncrewed test flight of the lunar module LM-1, in January 1968. The backup crew for Apollo 1 -- Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham -- flew the first successful crewed Apollo mission, Apollo 7, in October 1968. On the 24th of April 1967, Mueller officially designated AS-204 as Apollo 1, recorded as "first manned Apollo Saturn flight -- failed on ground test," with the names Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 going officially unused.

• 7. Memory and Legacy

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  Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Ed White was buried at West Point Cemetery on the grounds of the United States Military Academy, in accordance with his own wishes -- wishes NASA officials tried to override. Astronaut Frank Borman intervened to ensure White's burial took place where his widow Pat knew he wanted to be.

  President Jimmy Carter awarded Grissom the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously on the 1st of October 1978. President Bill Clinton awarded the same honor to White and Chaffee on the 17th of December 1997. An Apollo 1 mission patch was left on the lunar surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin after the first crewed Moon landing. The Apollo 15 mission placed on the Moon's surface a small memorial statue called Fallen Astronaut, along with a plaque listing the Apollo 1 crew alongside other astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the pursuit of spaceflight.

  The crew had left behind one distinctly human mark on the space program. As a practical joke during their training, Grissom, White, and Chaffee renamed three navigational stars in the Apollo catalog after themselves, in reverse. Gamma Cassiopeiae became Navi -- Ivan, Grissom's middle name, spelled backwards. Iota Ursae Majoris became Dnoces -- "Second" reversed, for Edward H. White II. Gamma Velorum became Regor -- Roger spelled backwards. Later Apollo crews used these names in routine navigation, and the names stuck. On the 27th of January each year, families of the Apollo 1 crew return to the concrete launch pedestal that remains at Cape Canaveral -- all that is left of Launch Complex 34 -- where two plaques remember the mission that never flew.