Fifty years ago today, three American astronauts died in a sudden, uncontrollable cabin fire aboard the Apollo I space capsule. The deaths of Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee could have spelled doom for the entire Apollo space program, particularly after a report surfaced showing NASA had been aware of problems and deficiencies in the work performed by North American Aviation, the contractor in-charge of building the Apollo 1 capsule. The loss of Apollo I’s crew ultimately didn’t lead to the cancellation of the space program, but it did drive significant changes to NASA’s testing methodologies and best practices, some of which endure to this day.
AS-204 was supposed to be the first manned flight test of the Apollo Command/Service Module (CSM). The goal was to keep the module in-orbit for as long as 14 days for a full evaluation of the spacecraft’s various capabilities. The Apollo I CSM was vastly more complex than any other spacecraft the US had previously built, and NASA’s chosen contractor made several decisions that directly led to the fire and loss of Apollo I’s crew. As Ars Technica notes, North American had used machines to bundle wires into the spacecraft, with a number of frayed wires and potential short-circuits. Spacecraft 012 (as it was then known) had shipped to Florida with more than 100 “significant” engineering issues. The astronauts themselves may have been wary of complaining too loudly about problems with the capsule, lest they be pulled off the flight. NASA has been described as being gripped with “Go Fever,” during this time — think “launch, baby, launch as opposed to “drill, baby, drill.”
NASA had been moving at a rapid clip. The first manned Mercury flight was in 1961, and while President Kennedy commissioned Apollo as a follow-up to Mercury, a new intermediate program was needed (Gemini). By 1967, NASA had built three distinct new spacecraft — Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, with the Apollo I capsule under construction before the first manned Gemini flight.
As Ars notes, in the fifty years since Apollo I, NASA has fielded just one new crewed spacecraft — the Space Shuttle. (To be fair, this says more about shifting Presidential priorities and a general lack of emphasis on the space program, post-Apollo, than it does about NASA.)
The launch simulation on January 27, 1967, was a “plugs-out” test designed to measure how the spacecraft would operate on simulated internal power, with no support from cables or umbilicals. Neither the spacecraft nor the rocket was fueled and all pyrotechnic systems were disabled.
In order to cut costs and trim mission weight, NASA had decided to utilize a pure-oxygen environment inside the Apollo I capsule. This wasn’t seen as a problem, since Gemini and Mercury had both used a similar system, and it saved weight compared with a more complex nitrogen-oxygen system.
