Rating: Not rated
Tags: History, Lang:en
Summary
Includes pictures Explains the design of the Apollo
program and investigations into what went wrong
Includes online resources and a bibliography for further
reading Includes a table of contents “There's always
a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of
course; this can happen on any flight; it can happen on the
last one as well as the first one. So, you just plan as best
you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get a
well-trained crew and you go fly.” - Gus Grissom,
December 1966 The Apollo space program is the most famous and
celebrated in American history, but the first successful
landing of men on the Moon during Apollo 11 had complicated
roots dating back over a decade, and it also involved one of
NASA’s most infamous tragedies. Landing on the Moon
presented an ideal goal all on its own, but the
government’s urgency in designing the Apollo program was
actually brought about by the Soviet Union, which spent much of
the 1950s leaving the United States in its dust (and rocket
fuel). In 1957, at a time when people were concerned about
communism and nuclear war, many Americans were dismayed by news
that the Soviet Union was successfully launching satellites
into orbit. Among those concerned was President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, whose space program was clearly lagging a few years
behind the Soviets’ space program. From 1959-1963, the
United States worked toward putting satellites and humans into
orbit via the Mercury program, but Eisenhower’s
administration was already designing plans for the Apollo
program by 1960, a year before the first Russian orbited the
Earth and two years before John Glenn became the first American
to orbit the Earth. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy
addressed Congress and asked the nation to “commit itself
to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a
man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Given America’s inability to even put a man in orbit yet,
this seemed like an overly ambitious goal, and it isn’t
even clear that Kennedy himself believed it possible; after
all, he was reluctant to meet NASA Administrator James E.
Webb’s initial funding requests. As Apollo 11’s
name suggests, there were actually a number of Apollo missions
that came before, many of which included testing the rockets
and different orbital and lunar modules in orbit. In fact, it
wasn’t until Apollo 8 that a manned vehicle was sent
towards the Moon and back, and before that mission, the most
famous Apollo mission was Apollo 1, albeit for all the wrong
reasons. There were no delusions regarding the dangers of
manned space travel, but they were brought home on January 27,
1967, when all three astronauts were killed by a fire that
ignited in the cabin during a launch rehearsal. To this day,
there is still debate over what ignited the fire, but the
disaster made clear that the modules being used by NASA had a
series of fatal flaws. After the Apollo 1 tragedy, NASA changed
its plans by first running a series of unmanned missions to
test the Saturn rockets and the different modules throughout
1967 and early 1968. and it would not be until Apollo 7
launched about 20 months after the disaster that NASA dared to
conduct another manned mission. The Apollo 1 Disaster: The
History and Legacy of the Controversial Fire analyzes the
conception of the Apollo program and the events that brought
about the fateful disaster. Along with pictures of important
people, places, and events, you will learn about Apollo 1 like
never before, in no time at all. **