|
Reader's Favorites
Media Casualties Mount Administration Split On Europe Invasion Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire Congress Concerned About Diversion From War On Japan Pot, Kettle On Line Two... Allies Seize Paris The Natural Gore Book Sales Tank, Supporters Claim Unfair Tactics Satan Files Lack Of Defamation Suit Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff A New Beginning My Hit Parade
Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) Tim Blair James Lileks Bleats Virginia Postrel Kausfiles Winds Of Change (Joe Katzman) Little Green Footballs (Charles Johnson) Samizdata Eject Eject Eject (Bill Whittle) Space Alan Boyle (MSNBC) Space Politics (Jeff Foust) Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey) NASA Watch NASA Space Flight Hobby Space A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold) Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore) Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust) Mars Blog The Flame Trench (Florida Today) Space Cynic Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing) COTS Watch (Michael Mealing) Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington) Selenian Boondocks Tales of the Heliosphere Out Of The Cradle Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar) True Anomaly Kevin Parkin The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster) Spacecraft (Chris Hall) Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher) Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche) Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer) Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers) Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement) Spacearium Saturn Follies JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell) Science
Nanobot (Howard Lovy) Lagniappe (Derek Lowe) Geek Press (Paul Hsieh) Gene Expression Carl Zimmer Redwood Dragon (Dave Trowbridge) Charles Murtaugh Turned Up To Eleven (Paul Orwin) Cowlix (Wes Cowley) Quark Soup (Dave Appell) Economics/Finance
Assymetrical Information (Jane Galt and Mindles H. Dreck) Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen et al) Man Without Qualities (Robert Musil) Knowledge Problem (Lynne Kiesling) Journoblogs The Ombudsgod Cut On The Bias (Susanna Cornett) Joanne Jacobs The Funny Pages
Cox & Forkum Day By Day Iowahawk Happy Fun Pundit Jim Treacher IMAO The Onion Amish Tech Support (Lawrence Simon) Scrapple Face (Scott Ott) Regular Reading
Quasipundit (Adragna & Vehrs) England's Sword (Iain Murray) Daily Pundit (Bill Quick) Pejman Pundit Daimnation! (Damian Penny) Aspara Girl Flit Z+ Blog (Andrew Zolli) Matt Welch Ken Layne The Kolkata Libertarian Midwest Conservative Journal Protein Wisdom (Jeff Goldstein et al) Dean's World (Dean Esmay) Yippee-Ki-Yay (Kevin McGehee) Vodka Pundit Richard Bennett Spleenville (Andrea Harris) Random Jottings (John Weidner) Natalie Solent On the Third Hand (Kathy Kinsley, Bellicose Woman) Patrick Ruffini Inappropriate Response (Moira Breen) Jerry Pournelle Other Worthy Weblogs
Ain't No Bad Dude (Brian Linse) Airstrip One A libertarian reads the papers Andrew Olmsted Anna Franco Review Ben Kepple's Daily Rant Bjorn Staerk Bitter Girl Catallaxy Files Dawson.com Dodgeblog Dropscan (Shiloh Bucher) End the War on Freedom Fevered Rants Fredrik Norman Heretical Ideas Ideas etc Insolvent Republic of Blogistan James Reuben Haney Libertarian Rant Matthew Edgar Mind over what matters Muslimpundit Page Fault Interrupt Photodude Privacy Digest Quare Rantburg Recovering Liberal Sand In The Gears(Anthony Woodlief) Sgt. Stryker The Blogs of War The Fly Bottle The Illuminated Donkey Unqualified Offerings What she really thinks Where HipHop & Libertarianism Meet Zem : blog Space Policy Links
Space Future The Space Review The Space Show Space Frontier Foundation Space Policy Digest BBS AWOL
USS Clueless (Steven Den Beste) Media Minder Unremitting Verse (Will Warren) World View (Brink Lindsay) The Last Page More Than Zero (Andrew Hofer) Pathetic Earthlings (Andrew Lloyd) Spaceship Summer (Derek Lyons) The New Space Age (Rob Wilson) Rocketman (Mark Oakley) Mazoo Site designed by Powered by Movable Type |
In Memoriam 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. Posted by Rand Simberg at January 27, 2003 12:24 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/mt-diagnostics.cgi/712 Listed below are links to weblogs that reference this post from Transterrestrial Musings.
Go Fever
Excerpt: Today marks the 36th anniversary of the fire on the launchpad that killed Apollo astronauts Gus Grissom (the second American Weblog: Andrew Olmsted Tracked: January 27, 2003 03:49 PM
Apollo 1 Remembered
Excerpt: Rand Sandberg looks back at the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster, which claimed the lives of astronauts Gus... Weblog: Chris Lawrence's weblog Tracked: January 27, 2003 08:14 PM
Comments
You are right about needing to remember this day, many of us were alive but don't remember this date for what it is. Here is my rememberance. I was on my first Boy Scout camping trip, trying to get my "Toten' Chip" so I could carry a knife and hatchet I'd gotten for Christmas. It was bitterly cold in the Knobs of Indiana. We carped and complained all day about the cold and lack of "fun" we were having. We kept complaining until the Scout Master told us about the crew of Apollo 1. He'd gotten a newspaper somewhere and read us the story. We said some prayers for the families and for the Astronauts themselves and went to back work on our camp site chores, working much harder than before we'd heard the news. We were quieter too, I do remember that. It's days like that one that make us grow up faster, we began to realize that life was not forever. Some of us, maybe all, dreamed of being Astronuats, it was what you dreamed of as a boy in 1967. That day made all of us think about our own mortality, something not many of us had ever done I expect. I will mark this day on my calendar so it doesn't slide by again, thanks for the reminder. Posted by Steve at January 27, 2003 01:50 PMEvery one should check out this site and thank God we have men like this in our country!! www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204 Posted by Steve at January 27, 2003 03:03 PMFor a feeling of the true horror of the event see these pictures of Roger Chaffee's flight Suit: http://www.geocities.com/lvhorseplayer/chaffee.html
http://www.geocities.com/lvhorseplayer/white.html
http://www.geocities.com/lvhorseplayer/grissom.html There was a very nice restaurant across the street from North American's Downey CA plant that did the building of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo capsules. After the fire, the NASA bean-counters came in and cracked down on the extensive overtime and the expense-account lunches. Within a year, that restaurant fell to a very suspicious, but unproven arson. By the time Rockwell took over, a lot of the fat in the program had been sweated-out, and a lot of the local hospitality industry had to tighten their belts a lot. Posted by Drew at January 27, 2003 10:35 PMNot to mention the hookers in the motels down on Lakewood Boulevard... Posted by Rand Simberg at January 27, 2003 10:53 PMEveryone here seems to be pointing the finger at North American. However, I believe North American fought bitterly with NASA over the use of pure oxygen in the capsule, which was a prime ingredient in the speed and severity of the fire. Which reminds me of Martin-Marietta engineers begging NASA not to launch the Challenger because of the cold. In both cases, the engineers were overruled by NASA management who "knew" better. I was too young to be very effected by the Apollo I disaster, but after Challenger I realized that NASA had lost its way. Posted by Larry Brown at January 28, 2003 07:24 AMI didn't mean to imply that the fault lay solely with North American--certainly NASA bore responsibility as well. I was just making the point that they took the blame for it (which many believe helped them win the Shuttle contract five years later). Posted by Rand Simberg at January 28, 2003 08:44 AMWell they had performed experiments in zero G and found that even in a pure oxygen environment that a fire that is started will extinguish on its own. Its the effects that gravity has on a convective action of fire that keeps it burning. In zero G oxygen is fine, it was just a bad idea to use pure Oxygen for a static test on the ground in the presence of 1 G Posted by Hefty at January 28, 2003 06:10 PMI hate to disagree with you, Hefty, but there's an oxygen-saturation effect regardless of the gravity, and microgravity combustion experiments have shown that flame can still propagate in microgravity, even if it's slowed. Add to this the increasing pressure, which would by itself cause quite a bit of circulation; so would crew movements. I think a fairer assessment of the Apollo 1 fire is this: until that fire, the pure-oxygen-atmosphere fire hazards hadn't been closely examined, and weren't appreciated. Posted by Troy at January 29, 2003 09:39 PMPost a comment |