It Was Not the First Time

By Jamie Murphy

The explosion that destroyed Challenger inevitably evoked memories of an earlier tragedy in America's space program. On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire erupted in the first manned Apollo spacecraft as it sat atop its Saturn 1-B rocket during a test at Cape Kennedy. The blaze killed Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, 40, Edward White, 36, and Roger Chaffee, 31, who until last week were the only astronauts to perish aboard a U.S. spacecraft.

Grissom, the second American in space, White, who made the first U.S. space walk, and Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, had been scheduled to run through a simulated Apollo launch. Suited up, they clambered into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream of pain. "It was horrible," recalled a former NASA official. "We could hear it happening and we were powerless to do anything."

The astronauts died of asphyxiation in the raging inferno, which began, NASA eventually concluded, with a short circuit in the Apollo's 20 miles of wiring. Flames spread along a nylon net under the astronauts' couches. Had the fire occurred in a natural atmosphere, the three might have had time to escape. But the blaze flashed through the pure oxygen in seconds. Even then the astronauts might have had a chance if they could have blown out Apollo's hatch by touching off explosive bolts. But Grissom was firmly opposed to the use of such bolts. Splashing down in the Atlantic in his Mercury capsule 5 1/ 2 years earlier, he had nearly drowned after its hatch bolts somehow blew prematurely, filling the craft with water.

The Soviet space program has also had its tragedies. Just three months after the Apollo fire, Colonel Vladimir Komarov plunged more than four miles to earth in Soyuz 1 after its parachute snarled. In June 1971, Cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev suffocated during re-entry. Soviet officials later revealed that a valve had opened when the capsule separated from the Salyut 1 space station, allowing the cabin to depressurize.

After Komarov's death, the Soviets halted manned space flights for 18 months and extensively redesigned the Soyuz capsule. NASA was also cautious. It suspended manned flights for 21 months after the Apollo fire, a period of agonizing self-appraisal. Admitting that no one had realized the extent of the fire hazard in a capsule full of pure oxygen, NASA switched to cabin atmospheres that consisted of 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen while the spacecraft was on the pad. The agency also developed a new type of hatch that could be opened in five seconds. As NASA workers last week searched for answers to the Challenger tragedy and pondered the future of manned space flight, they could find some solace in the fact that 2 1/2 years after Apollo 1 burned, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

With reporting by Benjamin W. Cate/Los Angeles and James O. Jackson/Moscow