The Apollo One Tragedy and Investigation
On January 27, 1967, astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee continued their training for the first manned Apollo flight. Designated as Apollo/Saturn 204, the mission involved a 14-day spaceflight and a check-out of primary systems designed for a future flight to the moon.
At 1:00pm, the crew entered the Command Module to begin a “plugs-out” test that disconnected the spacecraft from all external power systems and tested the internal electrical power system. The test occurred with the Command and Service Modules mounted on the Saturn IB booster at Pad 34. Several minor problems delayed the tests. A larger communications failure caused Mission Control to place a hold on the count until 5:40pm.
At 6:31pm, Roger Chaffee reported “Fire, I smell fire.” Seconds later, Ed White exclaimed, “Fire in the Cockpit.” Several other voice transmissions included “They’re fighting a bad fire—let’s get out.” “Open’er up.” “We’re burning up….” The last transmission ended within 17 seconds after the first report of the fire. Grissom, White, and Chaffee perished within 30 seconds due to smoke inhalation and burns.
The aftermath of the tragedy included an investigation that included teams of engineers, astronauts, and contractors who disassembled and studied the command module. The following quotation from Colonel Al Worden’s NASA Oral History provides a personal overview of the investigation:
WORDEN: “Well…they assigned, after the fire…a team to basically reinvent the command module. …The fire was not caused by the hatch, but the hatch is what cost the three lives, because they couldn’t get [it] open. The fire was caused by an electric spark inside that touched off all the foam rubber they had inside in a pure oxygen environment. It’s like an explosive, and the guys didn’t have a chance.
So they put together a team headed by Frank Borman to reinvent, if you will, the spacecraft. We came up with the hatch that’s on it today, or that was it till they quit using it, that opened only outward. The original hatch, you had to pull the hatch inside, put it against the frame from the inside, and bolt it down. That provided the pressure seals. If you get in space, you [have] pressure inside the spacecraft, you [have] zero pressure on the outside, and that pressure inside is helping to maintain that seal.
The problem is if the pressure goes way out of sight inside, you can’t get that hatch open. …The pressure vessel on the spacecraft burst at about 32 psi, something like that. I mean, it was astronomical in terms of what it should have been. That had to be redesigned.
We looked at all the flammability, all the things inside that could be flammable. That’s when we switched to covering everything with beta cloth. We had to look at all that. We had to look at all the wiring. We had to look at all the malfunction procedures. I mean, it was a complete sweep of the whole thing. It was a monumental task, and Jack Swigert and I were out there every week for over a year, five days a week, working that problem. It took that much. “
NASA Oral History Project – Al Worden
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