Orrin Judd points to an anniversary that I would have posted about a little later today, regardless, but he provides a link to the original NYT story, back when it was the Paper of Record.

Many of the younger set aren’t aware, and many of my cohorts have forgotten, that we lost astronauts in the Apollo program, and not just in training accidents in aircraft. I recall it myself somewhat vividly, because it was the day before my birthday. Thirty six years ago today, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee burned to death in a fire on a launch pad during an Apollo flight simulation.

This occurred less than two years before our first Apollo flights to the Moon (though the first actual landing was about two and a half years off, in July of 1969). One can’t tell from this article the impact that it would have on the program, of course, but it was immense. There was a great deal of concern that it could be enough of a setback that we wouldn’t achieve Kennedy’s goal of “within the decade,” and like the Challenger disaster, it pointed up many deficiencies in the program management, not just in the dangerous practice of using pure oxygen as a spacecraft environment, but also sloppy attention to detail overall.

In addition to the use of the pure oxygen, the hatch to allow the astronauts to get out had to be unbolted, rather than having a quick release (as for example, airline emergency hatches have). They died before they could even start to undo all the fasteners. There’s a dry, and simultaneously chilling, if you have the vaguest understanding of what the crew was going through during the events, timeline available from NASA.

Management was thoroughly overhauled at North American, the lead contractor for the capsule (it was purchased by Rockwell later that year) and, as a result, the program was improved considerably.

A key difference between this accident and the Challenger catastrophe was that in Apollo, we had a goal and a schedule. Accordingly, we dusted ourselves off, analyzed the problem, addressed it, and kept to the schedule.

With the Shuttle, the political reality was that there was no particular reason to fly Shuttles–no national commitment would be violated, no vital experiments wouldn’t be performed, no objects would fall from the sky on our heads, and no elections would be lost, if the Shuttle didn’t fly.

So, two and a half years after the Apollo I fire, we landed men on the Moon. Two and a half years after STS 51-L, the fleet was still grounded. It didn’t fly again until two years, nine months later.

What a difference a couple decades make.