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Apollo 1 Remembered at 50
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Apollo 1 Remembered at 50 Last month, the world remembered the first American to orbit Earth, John H. Glenn Jr., Col (Ret), USMC. Earlier this month, the world remembered the last man to walk on the Moon, Eugene A. "Gene" Cernan, Capt (Ret), USN. Today, January 27, 2017, marks a tragic remembrance: the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 accident that claimed Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Lt Col, USAF; Edward H. "Ed" White II, Lt Col, USAF; and Roger B. Chaffee, Lt Cdr, USN. The Crew Gus Grissom was an Air Force test pilot and veteran of Mercury-Redstone 4 (Liberty Bell 7), the second manned sub-orbital flight of the Mercury capsule. He was NASA's chief liaison between the astronauts and McDonnell Aircraft, prime contractor for the Gemini capsule. He helped design the cockpit of the capsule, and later flew Gemini 3, the first manned Gemini flight and first American multi-person space flight with future Apollo and Space Shuttle astronaut John Young, Capt (Ret), USN. Apollo 1 was to be Grissom's third space flight. Ed White, and namesake of a famous Army and Air Force Major General, followed in his father's footsteps with a degree from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1952 (seven years before the USAF Academy opened), was commissioned in the USAF and flew a variety of Air Force jets before becoming a test pilot. White was one of West Point's best athletes, missing an Olympic berth in the 400m hurdles by 0.4 sec. He earned his major claim to fame as America's first space walker on the Gemini 4 flight with James McDivitt, Brig Gen (Ret), USAF. Apollo 1 was to be White's second space flight. Roger Chaffee was the rookie assigned to the Apollo 1 mission, replacing Donn Eisele, Col (Ret, Dec), USAF who injured his shoulder in a KC-135 zero-gravity training flight. Chaffee was one of only three members of the first three groups of NASA astronauts who was not a test pilot in military service: he was a reconnaissance pilot. (One of the two civilian test pilots was Neil Armstrong, who at the time of his selection in the second group of astronauts worked mainly for NASA on the X-15, and who went on to command Gemini 8 and the first human moon walk on Apollo 11.) Chaffee was one of the youngest pilots ever to fly the A3D-2P jet reconnaissance plane (which he first maintained, very unusual for commissioned officers to do) and the U-2 Dragonlady in the early 1960s. He photographed future launch sites at Cape Canaveral, as well as the Soviet missile sites in Cuba that sparked that infamous missile crisis in October 1962. In a pre-accident interview with CBS News reporter Nelson Benton, aired as part of a CBS News Special Report the night of the accident (and re-aired by CBSN on the 50th anniversary), Chaffee candidly mentions the stories his test pilot fellow astronauts told about taking maiden flights of new aircraft and the fact he had never done so. The spacecraft and the accident The crew was conducting a systems test on launch pad 34, in anticipation of a planned February 21 launch for low Earth orbital testing of the "Block I" Apollo Command Module (CM) and Service Module (SM). (Block I CMs, developed before the lunar orbit rendezvous configuration was chosen for lunar landings, did not have the lunar module (LM) modifications such as the docking mechanism and top hatch that the Block II CMs used for Apollo 8-17, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) would have.) The systems test was referred to as "plugs out", meaning the spacecraft would run on its own power rather than ground power. During construction of the first CM, the crew raised many issues with management and the contractor that were not adequately addressed. Grissom placed a lemon on the CM simulator to express the crew's lack of faith in the manufacturing, and the crew was photographed praying with a model of the CM, as if they knew something dreadful was due to happen. During the pad test, there were problems with electrical systems and the ECS, the environmental control system controlling the CM's interior climate. Communications between the spacecraft, the block house (the launch control center) and another building with technicians were spotty, often receiving stray air traffic control transmissions. Grissom remarks how can they get to the Moon if they can't communicate between two or three buildings... Then, all of a sudden, came word of a fire in the spacecraft. In less than 30 seconds, the crew was dead of asphyxiation. Why did the accident happen? In the rush to meet JFK's deadline of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade, many things were overlooked: - NASA failed to listen to the concerns of the astronauts who would be operating the spacecraft. Tom Stafford, Lt Gen (Ret), USAF, veteran of Gemini 6A, Gemini 9A, Apollo 10 and ASTP, added insight during remarks opening the new Apollo 1 exhibit described in the last section of this post. He reminded the audience that Gus Grissom spent two years living and working out at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis to ensure the Gemini capsules were flight ready when they left the production line. This attention to detail was overlooked by NASA when they selected North American Aviation of Downey, California (best known for building aircraft like the P-51 Mustang and X-15) to build the Apollo CM and SM. Most of NASA's liaisons were test pilots from the second and third groups of astronauts with no space flight experience. They did not yet have the skills to communicate to NAA's designers and builders what Grissom relayed from Florida, and when Grissom did visit Downey, the NAA engineers still didn't get it. Had an experienced astronaut been living and working at the NAA plant, the problems with the Apollo CM would have been noticed and corrected long before a faulty product put astronauts in peril. - Many flammable materials had escaped quality control checks, not to mention moving parts such as the flap in the ECS air duct which had an edge sharp enough to breach wiring insulation and spark a fire (the believed source of the spark by those who knew the CM). Such was the rush to get the capsule done that many parts included in the CM did not have complete tracking, as McDonnell's Mercury/Gemini capsules before had (and every CM built by NAA/Rockwell after would). - The 16 psi (higher than normal atmospheric 14.5 psi) pressure pure oxygen atmosphere, taken for granted during Mercury and Gemini, fueled the fire and left no oxygen for the crew to breathe. The pressurized capsule was designed to exert pressure to help seal the inward opening internal hatch, and made it impossible to open the hatch quickly until the vent was fully open to equalize capsule and outside air pressure. The vent control was on Grissom's side of the capsule, where the fire is believed to have started. (The heat of the fire caused the capsule to crack open, which finally allowed the hatch to be opened to extract the bodies.) - And last but not least, the accidental opening of Liberty Bell 7's hatch at the end of Grissom's first flight would ultimately kill him. NASA had NAA design a much more complex three-layer hatch for Apollo that could not be easily or accidentally opened, and this prevented pad technicians from rescuing the crew; many had burns and inhaled thick smoke through faulty gas masks in the five minutes it took to open the hatch. As flight director Gene Kranz would say, nobody had the courage to say "STOP!" when these problems arose, because everyone in the Apollo program had "go fever". It would be nearly 21 months before a thoroughly redesigned and tested manned CM launched from pad 34 on Apollo 7, with Eisele as part of the crew in October 1968, the only flight launched from that pad. The Saturn I-B rocket intended to launch Apollo 1 was used on Apollo 5, the first unmanned flight of the LM in January 1968. Grissom, White and Chaffee were the first (and only) American astronauts to die in a ground spacecraft accident. What can/did we learn from this? The Apollo 1 accident reminded us that every worthwhile endeavor in life comes with risks, and that not properly accounting for and managing those risks is a recipe for disaster. The redesign of the CM ensured that not even days of condensation in deep space would cause short circuits if a CM was shut down and then restarted in flight, as happened on Apollo 13 in April 1970. The atmosphere would be a normal pressure 40% oxygen/60% nitrogen mix until the spacecraft was in space, where a much lower pressure pure oxygen one took over. The three-layer hatch was replaced with a robust outward-opening one that could be opened in five seconds in an emergency. The fact that the CM's flaws were found on the ground was also a huge blessing in disguise, as Stafford pointed out. If the accident had happened in flight, there would be no way to fully know what went wrong. What do we still have to learn? Apollo 13 was categorized as NASA's most successful failure, but it could have been avoided. Even with NASA's attention to detail in the wake of Apollo 1, three things were overlooked in the SM to be used on that flight. First was the liquid oxygen tank #2, which still had its original 28 volt thermostat long after NASA and NAA had updated ground power to 65 volts. Second was damage to the tank shelf assembly when it was dropped while loading it into the SM, which damaged internal piping crucial to proper operation of the system. Third was ground technicians using an unapproved shortcut to boil off excess pressure by turning on the tank heaters. The damaged piping prompted the boil off, and when tank #2's heaters were turned on, 65 volts fused the 28 volt thermostat, causing longer than normal to get the tank pressure down, and heating the tank to many hundreds of degrees. This burned insulation of the wiring to that tank's cryogenic stir fans. As the first 55 hours 54 minutes (approx.) of the mission went by, two cryo stirs did not explode since there was not yet enough gaseous oxygen in the tank. The third cryo stir did the trick, exploding the top of LOX tank #2 which expanded and took out its fuel cell and the quarter panel on its way out into space. The damaged piping also prevented the crew from isolating LOX tank #1 and its fuel cell, a problem fixed on future Apollo SMs. And before I leave the Apollo program behind, what kind of bureaucracy specifies different types of Lithium Hydroxide filters (the CO2 air scrubbers) for the CM (square cube) and the LM (round cylinder)? We were extremely lucky to get the crew home safe. Unfortunately, "go fever" afflicted NASA management again in January 1986, trying to keep space shuttles launching on a routine schedule, and ignoring Morton Thiokol's SRB experts' recommendation not to launch shuttle Challenger on January 28, when launch temperatures were expected to be at or slightly below freezing (32F/0C), and their own normal redline was 39F. They ignored the fact that rubber o-rings in the solid rocket booster's field expansion joints shrink when exposed to temperatures below 53F, allowing hot exhaust to erode past the seal as the joints flex or rotate in flight, and could not properly expand to fill them at 30F, a fact demonstrated during the accident review board by physicist Richard Feynman soaking a piece of the o-ring in a glass of ice water to show how rigid the cold made it. Several times before, the o-rings had come close to the same erosion failure that claimed Challenger. A system with a projected 1-in-30 failure rate failed on flight 25. The joints were redesigned to contain three o-rings instead of two, and the NASA and Thiokol administrators who green-lighted the launch lost their jobs. Once again, a case of not properly managing risks. And who knew styrofoam could puncture a shuttle wing? That's what doomed Columbia on January 16, 2003, as a 2 pound piece of foam from the shuttle's huge external tank (covering the front support where the shuttle attached to the ET) broke loose and struck reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) panel 8 on the left wing. This 25 cm hole in the RCC panel, which provided only heat protection on reentry and no structural integrity to the craft, would be fatal to Columbia and her crew. As with Challenger's o-ring problems, there had been previous foam hits from the ET to the other shuttles in the fleet. The video of launch was reviewed the day after, and NASA overlooked it. They communicated the launch review to the mission commander and their lack of concern. NASA was also under pressure to keep its schedule of ISS building flights on track before a penny-pinching Congress cut the purse strings. Without adequate repair options, the shuttle disintegrated on reentry February 1 as the hole in the wing allowed the extra-hot gases of reentry to cause sensors to fail before heating and causing the internal left wing structure to fail, and the shuttle broke apart as the thrusters automatically tried to compensate for the imbalance. Another case of not properly accounting for and managing that risk. Legacy Because of poor risk management, NASA has lost 14 astronauts and two spacecraft in flight, plus the three astronauts and the CM from Apollo 1. (And came very close to losing Apollo 13.) When it comes to crew safety, failure is NOT an option with a tough and competent staff, the two words Kranz demanded all his flight controllers write on their blackboards and principles they would live by until JFK's goal was accomplished. And we still need to learn/remember that flying into space will always be risky. Always. SpaceX and Boeing (who bought NAA/Rockwell) need to keep that in mind as they bring the first private American crew capsules online, and NASA must keep that in mind for the Orion MPCV and Constellation program, assuming President Trump revives it as a first step towards longer range exploration of space. The KSC Tribute Exhibit As part of the commemoration, NASA's Kennedy Space Center has added a new exhibit about Apollo 1 and its crew. It is called "Ad Astra Per Aspera -- A Rough Road Leads to the Stars", a phrase from one of the commerative plaques attached to pad 34. In addition to personal momentos of the crew, NASA has finally allowed one part of the Apollo 1 spacecraft to be publicly displayed: the charred CM hatch. Alongside the three layers of the hatch is also displayed the easy-open hatch NAA/Rockwell designed to replace it, a design that flew on every CM built over the next eight years. |
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Remembering Apollo 1's brave crew.
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You are welcome, Annette! Thanks for your comment.
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Thank you for this enlightening and very interesting post!!! (Virtual Symposium Group) use Virtual Symposium Group
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Thank you for this enlightening and very interesting post!!! 
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Remembering the Columbia crew today on the 14th anniversary of its accident.
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Indeed.  Gus Grissom himself said it best: "If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
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