Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire

Deke Slayton on Gus Grissom and the moon landings:

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"Had Gus been alive, as a Mercury astronaut he would have taken the [first] step ... My first choice would have been Gus, which both Chris Kraft and Bob Gilruth seconded."

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I've always been fascinated by the early space flight astronauts since seeing The Right Stuff as a kid.

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The Right Stuff

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I dusted off my old DVD copy of this and watched it a few weekends ago.

Regarding the Apollo 1 fire, I made the mistake of listening to a recording of the raw cockpit audio from that day. Very haunting, to say the least.

I was reading a piece yesterday or the day before about NASA finally deciding to bring the hatch out of storage and showing it in a memorial display at KSC. I did not realize that they had put remnants of Challenger and Columbia on display a few years ago as well.

Glad to see the Apollo 1 crew getting the full recognition they deserve. It is sad to think that there was a time the families had to pay for and place the memorial wreath each year themselves.

I've been trying to figure out why 1/27 was significant all morning.

Thanks guy.

RIP to three American heroes. Gus was America's second man in space. Ed was the first American to perform a space walk. We take those actions relatively for granted, but back then it was literally strapping yourself to a weapon of war and praying that any one of a million moving parts wouldn't fail and kill you. Or if it did, it would do so quickly.

Even though suffocation through fire sounds like a relatively agonizing death - because of the unique nature of the pressurized environment and the overall violence of the event, they were likely unconscious after just a few seconds and expired a few seconds after that. At least I pray that's how it went. However small a comfort that is - I'll take it.

must have been a horrific way to go! It still amazes me that we sent people to the moon with the technology that was available at the time.

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Supposedly there is an audio recording of a Russian cosmonaught as he was falling back down to earth and he was cussing everyone out.

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Fascinating read. The person he was speaking to was Yuri Gagarin. The cosmonaut took Gagarin's spot because he knew Gagarin would die if he went up.

NPR

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Last month, I read a book that recounted the horrendous death in 1967 of Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. The story amazed me. I described it this way:

"So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die. The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, 'cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.'"

That's roughly the story I read in Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, a new edition of which was released last month in the United States. In my post, I said, "This version (of Komarov's death) — if it's true — is beyond shocking."

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I understand but you are going to confuse the shite out of some of the less intelligent.

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Why they insisted on pure oxygen I will never figure out.

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It wasn't the pure oxygen alone that was the problem.

1. Pure oxygen

2. Almost 17 PSI

3. Velcro in the cabin

4. Test not classified as hazardous, so routine (and only routine) safety protocols were in place


Any 1 of those factors removed and the incident either doesn't happen or isn't fatal.

How did velcro contribute to the fire?