Gus Grissom

• 1. Introduction

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  Gus Grissom was born in Mitchell, Indiana, on the 3rd of April 1926, the son of a railroad signalman and a homemaker. His nickname came from a friend who misread "Griss" upside down on a scorecard. That accidental name would one day be attached to craters on the Moon, an asteroid, an air force base, a horse race, and a starship in a science fiction franchise.

  By January 1967, Grissom had flown two space missions, helped design the capsule that bore his imprint so clearly his colleagues called it "the Gusmobile", and taken on command of the first crewed Apollo flight. What happened next did not merely end his life. It reshaped the entire American space program, delayed the Moon landing by more than a year, and made his name a permanent fixture of the national memory.

  How did a boy from a small Indiana town who once picked fruit in summer orchards become the second American in space? Why did the hatch of Liberty Bell 7 blow open in the Atlantic, nearly drowning him and sparking a controversy that persisted for decades? And what did the fire on Launch Pad 34 reveal about the risks NASA had been willing to accept in the race to reach the Moon?

• 2. Mitchell, Indiana

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  Dennis David Grissom worked as a signalman for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the family lived in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana. Gus was the second child; an older sister named Lena died a year before his birth. He delivered newspapers in the mornings for The Indianapolis Star and in the evenings for the Bedford Times, and in summer he picked fruit in area orchards.

  Flying entered the picture through a local attorney in Bedford, Indiana, who owned a small plane and took the young Grissom up, teaching him the rudiments in the air. Grissom also built model airplanes and earned the rank of Star Scout in his local troop, crediting the Scouts with his love of hunting and fishing.

  At Mitchell High School, starting in 1940, Grissom wanted to play varsity basketball but was too short, so his father steered him toward the swimming team. He excelled at mathematics while remaining an average student in other subjects, and graduated in 1944. By November 1943, still in his senior year, he had already completed the entrance exam for the U.S. Army Air Forces aviation cadet program.

• 3. War and Wings

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  Grissom was inducted into the U.S. Army Air Forces on the 8th of August 1944 at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. He passed through Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, then moved to Brooks Field in San Antonio, and then to Boca Raton Army Airfield in Florida, spending most of his time before his 1945 discharge working as a clerk rather than flying.

  After the war he enrolled at Purdue University in September 1946 on the G.I. Bill, working part-time as a cook to help cover expenses while his wife Betty worked the night shift as a long-distance operator for Indiana Bell. He graduated in February 1950 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering.

  Re-enlisting in the newly formed U.S. Air Force, Grissom received his pilot wings in March 1951 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. When his squadron was dispatched to the Korean War zone in February 1952, he flew as an F-86 Sabre replacement pilot with the 334th Fighter Squadron at Kimpo Air Base. He flew one hundred combat missions over approximately six months, breaking up North Korean MiG raids on multiple occasions. On the 23rd of March 1952, he flew cover for a photo reconnaissance mission and was later cited for "superlative airmanship." After completing his quota, he asked to stay for another twenty-five flights; the request was denied.

  Back in the United States, he instructed trainee pilots at Bryan AFB in Texas, surviving a close call when a cadet's error snapped a flap off their two-seat trainer and sent it into a roll. Grissom climbed from the rear seat and took over the controls, landing safely. He later completed a year-long course at the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology, earning a degree in aeromechanics in 1956, and then attended the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

• 4. Seven Men, One Program

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  In 1959, a classified teletype message reached Grissom ordering him to report to a Washington, D.C. address in civilian clothes. Of 508 military candidates considered, he was one of 110 test pilots invited to learn more about Project Mercury. After passing an initial screening, he was sent to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and to the Aeromedical Laboratory of the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, for extensive physical and psychological testing.

  Doctors nearly cut him from the program when they discovered he had hay fever. Grissom argued that ragweed pollen would not be a problem in space. The examiners accepted the point.

  On the 13th of April 1959, Grissom received official notification of his selection as one of the seven Project Mercury astronauts. He and the six others reported to the Space Task Group at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on the 27th of April 1959 to begin training. The men had taken leaves of absence from their respective military branches. From that moment, Grissom's career belonged to the space program.

• 5. Liberty Bell 7 and the Open Hatch

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  On the 21st of July 1961, Grissom piloted Mercury-Redstone 4, the second Project Mercury flight. He named the spacecraft Liberty Bell 7 after the famous bell, and drew a crack on its hull as a deliberate visual reference. The sub-orbital flight lasted 15 minutes and 37 seconds before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.

  Then the explosive bolts on the hatch fired without warning. Water flooded into the capsule. Grissom exited through the open hatch into the ocean and waited for recovery helicopters, but his spacesuit began losing buoyancy through an open air inlet. He fought to stay afloat until a helicopter pulled him out. A second helicopter tried to retrieve Liberty Bell 7, but the flooding spacecraft grew too heavy and the recovery crew was forced to cut it loose. The capsule sank.

  Asked by reporters how he had felt, Grissom said, "Well, I was scared a good portion of the time; I guess that's a pretty good indication." He maintained he had not triggered the hatch. NASA found no definitive evidence to contradict him: the triggering plunger required five pounds of force and typically left a bruise on the hand, and Grissom's hand showed none. Mission director Robert F. Thompson noted that Grissom had gotten ahead in the mission timeline and had removed the detonator cap and the safety pin, meaning a chance contact from wave action or helicopter rotor wash could have fired the bolts.

  The debate did not close for decades. Pad leader Guenter Wendt later wrote that a small protective cover over the external release actuator may have been accidentally lost. Lieutenant John Reinhard, the helicopter co-pilot whose job was cutting a capsule antenna with a pole, told a researcher in the 1990s that he remembered seeing an electric arc jump between the capsule and the pole just before the hatch blew. The pilot of Grissom's rescue helicopter said closer inspection of film footage supported the static discharge theory. When Liberty Bell 7 was recovered in 1999, no conclusive explanation had emerged. Fellow astronaut Wally Schirra, after his own flight on the 3rd of October 1962, deliberately blew his hatch while still aboard the recovery ship and bruised his hand to demonstrate the force required.

• 6. The Gusmobile

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  In early 1964, Alan Shepard was grounded after being diagnosed with Meniere's disease, and Grissom was assigned as command pilot for Gemini 3, the first crewed Project Gemini flight. It launched on the 23rd of March 1965. The two-man flight with pilot John W. Young made three revolutions of the Earth and lasted 4 hours, 52 minutes and 31 seconds. Grissom became the first person to fly in space twice.

  Grissom was the shortest of the original seven astronauts, standing five feet seven inches tall. He worked closely with the engineers at McDonnell Aircraft on the Gemini spacecraft's design, so deeply involved that his fellow astronauts took to calling the capsule "the Gusmobile." By July 1963, NASA had discovered that 14 of its 16 astronauts could not fit into the original cockpit; the cabin was modified as a result. Grissom also invented the multi-axis translation thruster controller used to push the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft in linear directions for rendezvous and docking.

  Naming the Gemini spacecraft was its own comedy. In a deliberate joke about the sinking of Liberty Bell 7, Grissom called it Molly Brown, after the Broadway show The Unsinkable Molly Brown. NASA publicity officials disliked the name and asked for a different one. When Grissom and Young offered Titanic as an alternative, NASA officials decided to allow Molly Brown but declined to use it in official references. On launch day, CAPCOM Gordon Cooper sent them off with "You're on your way, Molly Brown!"

  After Gemini 3's safe return, NASA announced that future spacecraft would not be nicknamed. Gemini 4 was not called American Eagle, as its crew had planned. The ban on nicknames was lifted before Apollo, when managers realized that each mission's two flight elements, the Command Module and the Lunar Module, needed distinct names. By then Grissom was gone.

• 7. Apollo 1 and the Fire

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  Grissom was assigned commander of AS-204, the first crewed Apollo mission, alongside Senior Pilot Ed White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. The crew was given permission to call their flight Apollo 1 on their mission patch.

  Problems with the Apollo program's training simulator were relentless. Grissom told a reporter that the issues with Apollo 1 came "in bushelfuls" and expressed doubt it could complete its planned fourteen-day mission. His directness about the spacecraft's faults earned him the nickname "Gruff Gus." Backup astronaut Walter Cunningham later recalled: "We knew that the spacecraft was, you know, in poor shape relative to what it ought to be."

  On the 22nd of January 1967, before returning to Cape Kennedy, Grissom picked a lemon from the tree in his back yard. He explained to his wife Betty that he intended to hang it on the spacecraft. He actually hung it on the simulator, a duplicate of the craft he would be flying.

  On the 27th of January 1967, during a plugs-out test on Launch Pad 34, the Command Module interior caught fire. Grissom, White, and Chaffee were working inside the closed capsule with a pressurized 100 percent oxygen atmosphere. Grissom said, "How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" and then shouted "fire!" All three men were asphyxiated. The fire's ignition source was damaged wiring. Contributing factors included wiring and plumbing flaws, flammable materials in the cockpit and flight suits, and an inward-opening hatch that could not be opened quickly and could not be opened at all under full internal pressure.

  Grissom's funeral and burial at Arlington National Cemetery took place on the 31st of January 1967. President Lyndon B. Johnson attended, along with members of Congress and fellow NASA astronauts. Grissom was interred beside Roger Chaffee. Ed White's remains were interred at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

• 8. What He Left Behind

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  At the time of his death, Grissom held the rank of lieutenant colonel and had logged 4,600 hours of flying time, including 3,500 hours in jet aircraft. Deke Slayton, who managed astronaut assignments, wrote that his first choice to take the first steps on the Moon would have been Gus Grissom, a view seconded by Chris Kraft and Bob Gilruth. That honor ultimately went to Neil Armstrong on the 20th of July 1969, when Apollo 11 completed what Apollo 1's crew had set out to make possible.

  The Apollo program did not designate Grissom's mission as Apollo 1 until after the accident, and then skipped to Apollo 4 for the first uncrewed Saturn V flight. The redesigned Apollo 7, commanded by Wally Schirra, launched on the 11th of October 1968, more than eighteen months after the fire.

  Memorials spread across the country and beyond. Grissom's name appeared on the plaque left on the Moon with the Fallen Astronaut statue in 1971 by the crew of Apollo 15. A crater on the far side of the Moon was named for him, first informally by the Apollo 8 crew and then officially by the International Astronomical Union in 1970. An asteroid discovered in 1963 and officially designated in 1981 as 2161 Grissom carries a name referencing his launch date of the 21st of July 1961. Grissom Hill on Mars was named by NASA on the 27th of January 2004, the 37th anniversary of the fire on Launch Pad 34.

  The star Gamma Cassiopeiae carries the seldom-used nickname Navi, Ivan spelled backwards, which Grissom placed on his Apollo 1 star charts as a private joke. The astronauts who came after him kept using it.