“…then there was silence from the pad.”
Eric Berger writes about Apollo 1, on the fiftieth anniversary. I remember it, the day before my birthday. It was a huge wake-up call for the Apollo program, which ultimately resulted in beating the Soviets in the space race less than two years later, with Apollo 8.
Pushing too fast.
Weather was terrible in my hometown that week. We were in the midst of the after effects of a major ice storm followed by a round of sub-freezing temperatures that had knocked down so many power lines that we were without electricity for 14 days. I remember hearing about the Apollo 1 fire from a newscast on a battery powered transistor radio under the light of a kerosene lamp in the kitchen where we had all moved to stay warm from the heat given off by our gas oven which could only be safely operated in shifts. The house had no fireplace and the gas forced hot air furnace required electricity to operate.
This Friday I’ll be reaffirming yet again my pledge to Roger Chaffee, that I’ve been renewing each year, and each time I’m up in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Toni DeVilbiss I’m not, so I can’t do the coding to piece him back together and get him his spaceflight myself, but I’m hoping to move the Overton Window enough that, when the processors and chipsets are developed to run human consciousness on a machine substrate, it won’t have to be done in secret, or the programmer have to face a show trial with a predetermined verdict.
Good article.
The Russians also had “go fever” at the time. After a couple of unmanned test flights that can only be described as “disastrous”, they went ahead and launched Soyuz 1 in April, with an equally disastrous result. I guess they thought that the test flights failed because of faults in the automated systems, and a cosmonaut on board could have gotten them under control.
Kosmos 133
Kosmos 140
I was 9 years old at the time of Apollo 1, and the main thing I remember that evening was my father sending a condolence telegram to Gus Grissom’s father. They were both railroad workers. We lived in Cincinnati, OH at the time, and the Grissoms were in neighboring Indiana. I don’t know how well they knew each other, and I don’t believe my father ever met Gus.
I was almost 9 years old, and was watching tv when successive interruptions were made to announce the accident and deaths. Many years later I heard a part of the tape of the guys screaming in agony.
Horrible.