The Tragedy Of Apollo 1 And The Lessons That Brought Us To The Moon
The first of the three great NASA disasters — Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia — happened 49 years ago. Look back.
“If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re 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.” -Gus Grissom
At the dawn of the space race, Project Mercury was all the rage. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the USA’s response was to put a human into Earth orbit and return them safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Alan Shepard became the first American in space in 1961 and John Glenn became the first to orbit Earth, but both were beaten by the Soviets Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, respectively. Project Gemini succeeded Mercury: a series of two-person flights, where the first American spacewalk was performed by Ed White (again, behind a Soviet: Alexey Leonov), and where the United States took the lead in the space race over the USSR by performing:
- the first week-long flight,
- the first two-week-long flight,
- the first use of fuel cells for power,
- the first space rendezvous with another vehicle,
