Apollo 1

The Tragedy That Put Us on the Moon

Ryan S. Walters

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684511471
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into a new spacecraft perched atop a large Saturn rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a routine dress rehearsal of their upcoming launch into orbit, then less than a month away. All three astronauts were experienced pilots and had dreams of one day walking on the moon. But little did they know, nor did anyone else, that once they entered the spacecraft that cold winter day they would never leave it alive. The Apollo program would be perilously close to failure before it ever got off the ground.But rather than dooming the space program, this tragedy caused the spacecraft to be completely overhauled, creating a stellar flying machine to achieve the program's primary goal: putting man on the moon. Apollo 1 is a candid portrayal of the astronauts, the disaster that killed them, and its aftermath. In it, readers will learn:

• How the Apollo 1 spacecraft was doomed from the start, with miles of uninsulated wiring and tons of flammable materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere, along with a hatch that wouldn't open
• How, due to political pressure, the government contract to build the Apollo 1 craft went to a bidder with an inferior plan
• How public opinion polls were beginning to turn against the space program before the tragedy and got much worse after

Apollo 1 is about America fulfilling its destiny of man setting foot on the moon. It's also about the three American heroes who lost their lives in the tragedy, but whose lives were not lost in vain.

I THE BEGINNING: MERCURY

Captain Gus Grissom of the United States Air Force sat uncomfortably as he faced a swarm of reporters and photographers packed into NASA’s temporary headquarters in Washington, D.C. The date was April 9, 1959. As a career military man, Grissom was unaccustomed to the public eye. In fact, it was far from a welcome sight, even for a skilled pilot and engineer who had flown one hundred combat missions during the Korean War. Facing enemy MIGs was one thing; facing more than two hundred members of the media snapping endless pictures and seeking to probe your innermost thoughts was quite another. But as nerve-racking as the experience might have been, Gus wouldn’t have traded it for any other assignment; it was where he wanted to be—at the top, sitting among the final seven of an elite group, America’s first astronauts. And they were in the nation’s capital to be introduced to the American people and the world.

The public was eager to learn more about the first men whom the space agency had chosen to ride a rocket into the void. Space fever had begun to take hold across the United States, and the seven astronauts would quickly become national heroes. Seated alongside Gus were Navy Lieutenant Malcolm Scott Carpenter, Air Force Captain L. Gordon Cooper, Marine Major John H. Glenn, Navy Lieutenant Commander Walter M. Schirra, Navy Lieutenant Commander Alan B. Shepard, and Air Force Major Donald K. Slayton. Several of the newly minted astronauts would later admit that their newfound celebrity terrified them. But public exposure was a price they were willing to pay to fly in space, an endeavor for which they showed no fear whatsoever.

As flashbulbs popped and correspondents jockeyed for position, Gus and his six colleagues, all distinguished military test pilots, sat behind a long table covered with a felt cloth and lined with microphones. Steely-eyed and serious, the Mercury Seven, now seen as national heroes, would take on the enormous and very dangerous task of countering the Soviets in what seemed even at this early stage like their almost insurmountable lead in the space race. But that didn’t matter to the media, who stood in awe of these seven brave souls. The Mercury Seven, wrote journalist James Reston, “talked of the heavens the way old explorers talked of the unknown sea.” And they shared the same sense of adventure to explore that unknown. Their objective was to win the race for space and possibly the moon, and the soft-spoken man known as Gus would prove to be an integral part of the equation.¹

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Gus was born Virgil Ivan Grissom on April 3, 1926, in Mitchell, Indiana, the oldest of Dennis and Cecile King Grissom’s four children. He had two brothers, Norman and Lowell, and one sister, Wilma. Years later a colleague misread Gris as “Gus,” and the nickname stuck. In his adolescent years, Gus’s father, Dennis Grissom, held a job with the Baltimore and Central Railroad, which afforded the Grissom household some comfort in the midst of the Great Depression. “I worked six days a week at 50 cents an hour,” Dennis Grissom remembered. “Men got laid off all around me. I worried I’d be next, but at $24 a week, my family was well off.” At least comparatively speaking. “We were far from rich,” Gus remembered, but “we had a warm, comfortable family life, strongly reinforced by our parents’ deep religious convictions.”²

Gus’s father never pushed his sons to follow him in the railroad business and encouraged them to follow their own dreams. “I suppose I built my share of model airplanes,” Gus recalled about his childhood, “but I can’t remember that I was a flying fanatic.” He also readily admitted that he was not “much of a whiz in school,” a “case of drifting and not knowing what I wanted to make of myself. I’m reasonably certain that most of my teachers in high school didn’t think I’d make it to college, or if I did, be able to keep up with the grades.” But he was active in his teenage years, played high school baseball, was in the Boy Scouts, and ran a morning and evening paper route. In the summertime, he picked fruit in the many orchards around town to put a few extra bucks in his pocket.³

While a sophomore in high school he met an incoming freshman named Betty Moore, whom he would later marry. Gus grew up in town, a “city boy,” as Betty described him, with a comfortable enough lifestyle to have indoor plumbing, a rare commodity at the time, especially for those who lived in the country, where Betty grew up. But those differences mattered not to Gus. “The first time I saw you I decided you were the girl I was going to marry,” he would later tell her.⁴

As sparks started to fly between Gus and Betty, World War II came to America with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Gus was 15, the age when war and the daring feats of soldiers, sailors, and aviators most strongly pique the curiosity of young men. He had already been reading about the great air duels in Europe between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force Fighter Command over the past year and made up his mind to join the war effort once he graduated from high school in 1944. He decided on the Air Force, then a part of the Army, for a simple reason: “flying sounded a lot more exciting than walking,” he would later write. Gus’s orders came in August 1944, and he was soon off to Texas for training, hoping he could qualify for aviation. But the war began to wind down before Corporal Gus Grissom could receive any flight training.⁵

Mustered out of the service after the war ended, Gus married Betty back in Mitchell on July 6, 1945, and the new couple began their life together. The early going was tough. With millions of young men returning home from the front, jobs were hard to find and good jobs rarer still. Living in a small apartment on Main Street in Mitchell, Gus worked for Carpenter’s Bus Body Works putting doors on school buses, while Betty took a job at Reliance Manufacturing, a factory that made shirts for the Navy, a position she had held the previous summer. Gus took numerous days off from work and drove around the area looking for a better job but had no luck. He was edgy and impatient, wanting more out of life than what he had in Mitchell. “He got on my nerves a little bit in those days,” remembered Betty. “I really didn’t mind working. In fact, I enjoyed it. It gave me something to do while he was running around looking for something else. We weren’t making much money, but we had grown up that way, and when you’re young, you can adapt to a lot of things. Whenever he was grumpy, I tried to laugh it off. I said: ‘I can’t get upset with you because my mother said if we had a fight I couldn’t come home.’ ”⁶

But Gus knew what he wanted out of life—flying jets—and he also understood what he had to do if he wanted to fly for the U.S. military. “I realized soon after I got into the Air Force… that I needed more technical training if I was going to get ahead,” he wrote in We Seven. He needed a college education so he could return to the service as an officer and begin training as a pilot. So, he began looking through engineering course books from Purdue University, which gave Betty “a distinct sense of relief,” although she didn’t say anything to him about it. Then one morning over breakfast he asked her, “What would you say if I decided to go back to school?” Being the supportive wife that she was, Betty would stick with him. “If that’s what you want, it’s fine with me,” she said.⁷

It wouldn’t be quite so simple and easy. Deciding to go was one thing; getting accepted and enrolled was something else altogether. He would only qualify for $105 a month from the GI Bill and, with so many vets returning from the war, open spaces in college and universities were minimal. To get the ball rolling he needed a letter of recommendation from his high school, but his “average high school record caught up with him.” After a sit-down with the principal, George Bishop, who remembered Gus “as an average solid citizen who studied just about enough to get a diploma,” he was able to get a good letter to send to Purdue. He was eventually accepted.⁸

So, in the fall of 1946, Gus moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, to begin a study of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. With hard work and dedication, Gus and Betty forged ahead as a team, doing whatever was necessary. To make it work, they sold their car, and Betty moved back in with her parents when Gus left for school because he had to board in a small, basement room with another male student, not exactly the appropriate atmosphere for a young wife.⁹

But during his second semester, he found a place for the both of them, a simple room in a boarding house where they lived for a year, before finding a “pint-sized apartment near campus.” Gus studied and, to make ends meet, worked as a short-order cook flipping burgers thirty hours a week after classes, and Betty got a job as a long-distance telephone operator, working the 5:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. shift, which boosted their monthly income to $350. Gus worked through the summers, skipping holiday time, and finished his degree in three and a half years, graduating in 1950, an achievement he readily admitted was made possible by Betty’s love, hard work, and never-ending support.¹⁰

He always knew that his career would not have been possible without a supportive wife at home. Betty was as much a part of his success as he was. She liked to joke that she had earned a P.H.T.—“Putting Hubby Through.” Gus was quick to give her credit, even when he reached the top of his profession. At the Mercury introductory press conference in 1959, the new astronauts were asked about the support they had from their family at home. Gus answered that Betty was very supportive “or, of course, I couldn’t be here,” which drew a chuckle from his fellow fliers and the assembled press. “She’s with me all the way.”¹¹

After finishing at Purdue, and with the “Air Force bee in my bonnet,” Gus returned to military service, training first at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, then Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, while Betty stayed in Indiana. She was later able to join him in Arizona with the couple’s first child, six-month-old Scott, in tow. In March 1951, Gus received both his flying wings and his bars as a newly commissioned second lieutenant.¹²

Not long after Gus received his wings, a new conflict would mobilize American forces. War had broken out the previous year in Korea. The Air Force shipped Gus out in December 1951. He flew an F-86 Sabre with the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. He had orders to remain in Korea “until I had completed one hundred missions—or got knocked out—whichever came first.” During the war, Air Force pilots were transported from their barracks to the flight line by buses, and the rule was that no pilot could take a seat on the bus, but had to remain standing during the ride to and from the flight line until he had been shot at by an enemy MIG. Gus took a seat after just two missions. Flying the wing position, Gus’s job was to protect the flanks of the other flyers during combat missions and keep a sharp eye out for MIG fighters. After his 100th mission, he had been shot at plenty of times but still had not lost a single plane that he had been tasked with protecting. And more importantly, he hadn’t lost his own plane. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and volunteered to fly twenty-five additional missions but was sent home instead, his assignment completed.¹³

Returning home alive and well, he “served a hitch teaching some younger pilots how to fly,” studied aeronautical engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and completed the Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He then ended up back in Dayton test-flying the newest fighter planes. “This was what I wanted all along,” he wrote, “and when I finished my studies and began the job of testing jet aircraft, well, there wasn’t a happier pilot in the Air Force.”¹⁴

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By the late 1950s, there was a new game in town for pilots: spaceflight. While Gus was busy test-flying jets, America was at war with the Soviet Union for the high ground of space. The initial battle over satellites was winding down; now the goal was manned spaceflight under the federal government’s new agency, NASA. With the creation of NASA in 1958 came Project Mercury, the fledgling agency’s first manned flight program. The goal was simple: put a man in space, orbit the earth, come home safely. Nothing more. But since such feats had never been done, or even attempted, nobody thought it was going to be easy. First, though, NASA had to find people brave enough—or dumb enough, depending on one’s perspective—to climb on top of a rocket filled with explosive fuel, ride the missile into space, orbit the earth at over 17,000 miles per hour, then plunge back into earth’s atmosphere where friction from the increasingly thickening air on the spacecraft would send temperatures into the thousands of degrees, before splashing down in the ocean to be rescued by the U.S. Navy. Not exactly a job that would suit most people.

NASA decided early on that it wanted military test pilots to serve as America’s original astronauts, even though quite a colorful list of alternatives was put forth in early meetings, including surfers, acrobats, mountain climbers, race car drivers, and daredevils. But this was a serious operation, relying on unproven mathematical trajectories and re-entry theories, where men would be flying a number of untested vehicles that sat atop millions of pounds of highly combustible fuel that could explode at any second, as the Cape Canaveral fireworks shows had demonstrated to everyone who cared to watch. America needed the best, and the best could be found in the U.S. military.

To recruit prospective candidates, NASA went to the Pentagon and met with commanders from the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps, each of whom agreed to participate in the new program even though they might lose at least a few of their very best pilots. This was the Cold War, an all-out battle with the Soviet Union, one of those rare times when the leadership of individual branches of the military were willing to put aside their mutual rivalries in the pursuit of common goals. If the best military pilots were needed to beat the Russians in space, then so be it.

A few career aviators were unsure about leaving the military to join a civilian agency, wondering if they would be seen as deserters, or if they could return to the ranks if things did not work out as astronauts. Many chiefs assured them that they had the full backing of their respective branches. The tough, no-nonsense Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis Lemay, the architect of the firebombing campaign over Japan during World War II, assured his pilots that he supported them 100 percent if they were chosen for astronaut duty. “There are a lot of people who’ll say you’re deserting the Air Force if you’re accepted into NASA. Well, gentlemen, I’m Chief of the Air Force and I want you to know I want you in this program,” he told a group of prospective astronauts in 1962. “I want you to succeed in it, and that’s your Air Force mission. I can’t think of anything more important, so don’t any of you feel like a deserter.” Lemay’s attitude was typical of each military branch.¹⁵

Of all the pilots in the U.S. military, just 110 fit NASA’s bill—58 air force pilots, 47 naval aviators, and 5 marines. Potential astronauts had to meet several basic qualifications: they had to be younger than 40, in good physical condition, under 5'11" tall and not over 180 pounds, possess a bachelor’s degree, preferably in engineering, be a graduate of test pilot school, have at least 1,500 hours flying time, and be qualified in jet aircraft. Gus met the qualifications, even though he didn’t know it yet.¹⁶

One day in January 1959, Gus received what could only be described as a strange order. He was directed by the Pentagon to report to Washington. The teletype message was marked “Top Secret.” It gave no specifics, just that he had to wear civilian clothes and report to a specific address in the capital. When he came home and told Betty, she made light of the situation. “What are they going to do? Shoot you up in the nose cone of an Atlas?” she asked. Gus had no clue but he would find out soon enough. First in a room with other military test pilots, each was interviewed separately, then given a classified briefing about Project Mercury, the effort to put a man in space. Because he “somehow met their requirements,” Gus was “invited” to try out for the new program. Anyone who did...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Major Players
• Introduction
• Prologue: The Foundation: Early Race for Space
• Chapter I: The Beginning: Mercury
• Chapter II: The Bridge: Gemini
• Chapter III: The Goal: Apollo
• Chapter IV: The Fire: “We’re Burning Up!”
• Chapter V: The Investigations: “Stop the Witch Hunt”
• Chapter VI: The Politics: A Webb of Intrigue
• Afterword: The Moon: “The ‘Eagle’ Has Landed”
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright