Roger B. Chaffee

• 1. Introduction

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  Roger Bruce Chaffee was thirty-one years old when he climbed into the Apollo 1 command module on the afternoon of the 27th of January, 1967. He was the youngest American astronaut ever assigned to a spaceflight mission, and he had never been to space. He would never get there. At 23:31:04 GMT that evening, a voice came over the radio from inside the sealed capsule at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34: "We've got a fire in the cockpit." Most of those listening have come to believe that voice was Chaffee's.

  What the world lost that night was not only the youngest member of the Apollo 1 crew, but a man who had spent his entire life in deliberate preparation for exactly that moment. He had flown 82 classified reconnaissance missions over Cuba. He had survived jungle survival training in Panama on foraged food. He had passed his Navy pilot's eye exam only because a physician let him retake it the next morning. Every obstacle he encountered, he found a way through. Then, on a test that was supposed to be routine, the fire found him first.

  This is the story of how Roger Chaffee became an astronaut, what he contributed to the missions that came after him, and how the name of a boy from Grand Rapids, Michigan still appears on a plaque on the surface of the Moon.

• 2. Grand Rapids to the Sky

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  Donald Lynn Chaffee, Roger's father, had been a barnstormer pilot before settling into civilian life, and it was he who took his seven-year-old son on his first flight. Roger was immediately captivated, and the two of them started building model airplanes together. That early experience did not fade. It aimed his entire education toward a cockpit.

  Roger was born on the 15th of February, 1935, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the second child of Donald and Blanche Chaffee. The circumstances of his birth had a small drama of their own. His father had been diagnosed with scarlet fever just weeks before Roger arrived, so his mother moved in with her own parents in Grand Rapids. The family spent his earliest years in Greenville before relocating to Grand Rapids, where his father became the chief Army Ordnance inspector at the Doehler-Jarvis plant.

  At Central High School, Chaffee graduated in the top twenty percent of his class in 1953. He turned down a possible appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis in favor of an NROTC scholarship, enrolling at the Illinois Institute of Technology in September 1953. He made the Dean's List there and finished with a B+ average. But aeronautical engineering was his focus, and in the autumn of 1954 he transferred to Purdue University, home to one of the country's better-known programs in that field.

  His drive at Purdue was relentless. He worked as a server, then as a draftsman at a small local business, then as a mathematics teaching assistant instructing freshman students. He was elected to Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, as well as Sigma Gamma Tau, the engineering honor society specific to his field. He graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering, with distinction. His private pilot's license had come through on the 24th of May, 1957, just months before the degree was in hand.

• 3. The Scout Who Foraged in Panama

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  Chaffee earned his first merit badge at thirteen and then earned ten more that same year. Most of those awards were typically claimed by older scouts. The discipline and methodical accumulation that marked his Scouting years would reappear, in a different jungle, during NASA astronaut training.

  The second phase of training for NASA Astronaut Group 3 was survival training. The group was dropped into the jungle in Panama with only their parachutes and survival kits. Chaffee leaned on what he had learned in the Boy Scouts and managed to forage enough food to get through three days of jungle training. From there the group moved to the desert outside Reno, Nevada, where the astronauts fashioned clothing from their parachutes and subsisted for two days on lizards and snakes.

  Those experiences were sandwiched between the academic first phase, which included geological field trips to the Grand Canyon, Alaska, Iceland, and Hawaii, and an operational third phase that put the astronauts in simulators and aboard cargo planes that simulated weightlessness. Chaffee's assigned specialty within the program was communications. He concentrated on the Deep Space Instrumentation Facility, which the astronauts needed for navigation in space. It was a fitting specialty for the man who would later serve as the voice between the crew and mission control.

• 4. Cuba and the Reconnaissance Years

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  Between the 4th of April, 1960, and the 25th of October, 1962, Chaffee flew 82 missions over Cuba, sometimes as many as three in a single day. At his peak output, he logged over 100 flight hours per month. Some of those flights involved shuttling three men at a time to Guantanamo Bay, with the pilot, co-pilot, and a photographer aboard.

  Chaffee had arrived at the A3D twin-engine jet photo reconnaissance plane through an unexpected route. Assigned to repair one at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, he became so thoroughly familiar with the aircraft that he started flying it. The A3D was normally reserved for pilots at the rank of lieutenant commander or above. Chaffee was considerably junior to that. He became one of the youngest pilots ever to fly it.

  Those Cuba missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis earned him the Air Medal, his first decoration of several. He also wrote a quality control manual for Heavy Photographic Squadron 62, though some of his peers found it excessively demanding. By coincidence, one assignment had him flying over Cape Canaveral, where aerial photographs of future launch sites were taken. He did not know yet that he would one day be assigned to a spacecraft that would be assembled in the shadow of those same pads.

  By the time he applied to the astronaut program, Chaffee had logged more than 2,300 total hours of flying time, with more than 2,000 of those hours in jet aircraft. He was promoted to lieutenant commander on the 1st of February, 1966.

• 5. Apollo 1

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  On the 18th of October, 1963, it was officially announced that Chaffee was one of fourteen astronauts chosen for NASA's third group. He was on a hunting trip in Fairborn, Ohio, when a message from NASA in Houston arrived, and he called them back to learn he had been selected. He told them, "I've always wanted to fly and perform adventurous flying tasks all my life. Ever since the first seven Mercury astronauts were named, I've been keeping my studies up."

  His first spaceflight assignment came in January 1966 on AS-204, the first crewed Apollo-Saturn flight, alongside Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Senior Pilot Ed White. Chaffee had stepped into the third-ranked pilot seat after Donn F. Eisele was sidelined by a dislocated shoulder sustained aboard a weightlessness training aircraft. Three days after his selection for the crew, Chaffee flew to the North American Aviation Plant in Downey, California, to see the spacecraft being built.

  In the months before launch, the crew studied navigation stars in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; tested the spacecraft at sea level and at altitude; and conducted egress drills in the Gulf of Mexico. A failure in an oxygen regulator prevented the vacuum test from being completed, though the sea level test went through. Four Purdue astronauts attended the Rose Bowl as guests of honor on the 2nd of January, 1967: Grissom, Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong, and Chaffee. NASA announced on the 23rd of January that the target launch date was February 21.

  The fire on January 27 began with a momentary power surge detected at 23:30:55 GMT, believed to stem from an electrical short on the lower left side of the cabin. The pure oxygen atmosphere at pressures between 16.7 and 29 psi fed the fire with devastating speed. Chaffee's assigned role was to maintain communications with the blockhouse while Grissom opened a pressure vent valve and White opened the hatch. Grissom was prevented from reaching the valve by the fire's intensity. White tried and failed to open the hatch against the cabin pressure. Chaffee lost consciousness from lack of oxygen, which sent him into cardiac arrest. He died from asphyxia due to the toxic gases produced by the fire, with burns contributing to his death. Because he was seated farthest from the fire's origin, he suffered the least physical damage of the three.

• 6. What the Fire Changed

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  NASA Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight George Mueller announced shortly after the fire that the mission would be officially designated Apollo 1. The capsule underwent a sweeping redesign. The pure oxygen cabin atmosphere was replaced at launch with a sixty percent oxygen and forty percent nitrogen mixture. The astronauts' nylon spacesuits were replaced with beta cloth, a non-flammable material woven from fiberglass and coated with Teflon. Flammable cabin materials were swapped out for self-extinguishing ones, and the plumbing and wiring received protective insulation.

  Grissom and Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. White was buried at West Point Cemetery. Chaffee's widow received $100,000 from the life insurance portion of a contract the astronauts had signed with two publishing firms, along with $16,250 per year for the life of that contract.

  The Apollo 1 crew was posthumously awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1969, presented during the Apollo 11 crew's reception of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Chaffee and White received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1997 (Grissom had received the same medal in 1978). Chaffee was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983 and into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on the 4th of October, 1997. He received the NASA Ambassador of Exploration Award in 2007.

• 7. A Name on the Moon

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  Grissom was the one who started it. While planning star charts for the Apollo 1 mission, he wrote "Regor" as a navigational nickname for the star Gamma Velorum. Regor is Roger spelled backwards, a quiet joke at Chaffee's expense. He used similar invented names for White and himself. The astronauts who flew after them kept those names on the charts, a private memorial carried into space on each subsequent mission.

  Chaffee's name appears on the plaque left on the Moon with the Fallen Astronaut statue in 1971, placed there by the crew of Apollo 15. There is a Chaffee Crater on the far side of the Moon, and a Chaffee Hill on Mars, 14.3 km south-southwest of Columbia Memorial Station, part of the Apollo 1 Hills.

  Back in Grand Rapids, the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium bears his name, as does Roger B. Chaffee Boulevard, built along the main runway of the original Kent County International Airport after the airport relocated in 1963. A life-size bronze statue of Chaffee was unveiled outside the Grand Rapids Children's Museum in 2018, with his wife, family members, and astronaut Jack Lousma in attendance.

  The Roger B. Chaffee scholarship has been awarded every year since 1967 to high school seniors in the Kent Intermediate School District who are pursuing careers in math and science. Chaffee Hall, an engineering building at Purdue University, was dedicated to him in 1968. The scholarship and the building speak to something the Fallen Astronaut plaque and the reversed star-name also express: the people who knew Chaffee best remembered him not as a casualty, but as an engineer.