On the evening of that day in 1967 I was a nine year old space junkie watching Batman -- a phenomenally popular TV show in my demographic -- when ABC interrupted the show with a bulletin that "one astronaut had died on the pad" at Cape Kennedy. No other explanation was provided. I was mystified. I knew there was no launch that day. Our astronauts just didn't die on the pad, and why only one? Before I could figure it out ABC interrupted again and said three astronauts had died.

It's flashbulb memory... I can remember where in the house I was sitting, I can remember the rabbit-ears black-and-white TV, and I can remember the black-circle dominated graphic that ABC put on the screen. And I remember the horrible picture of the burned spacecraft on the front page of the Washington Post two days later as my father held the paper up to read an inside page.

Apparently ABC got a lot of angry calls for interrupting Batman.

Weirdly, years later I was working at a very high profile Silicon Valley start-up, when our cock-sure management dramatically announced a huge new project that they had named "Apollo." I realized immediately that it was, to the day, the 30th anniversary of the fire. I confess that I am a small man, and did enjoy pointing out the anniversary to others. At least no one died when our Apollo failed. RIP Roger, Ed, and Gus.

Hmm, Wikipedia says there was no Batman episode broadcast that night [0]. I don't believe it! [edit:] Well, maybe it was "Time Tunnel" -- my other favorite show of that era. It was on that night [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman_(TV_series)_epi...

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723777/

It's fascinating that you can just look up what was on TV 50 years ago, without having to go into ancient archives of a TV station somewhere.

It's something I envy the US a lot for. I'm assuming it has to do with the population of the state I live in being only 6 million, but there is so comparatively little archived about things like TV shows, and other kinds of trivial (yet important in its own way) history. You can look up what was on TV 50 years ago, and I couldn't even figure out if "Hey Arnold!" was dubbed or subtitled.

Unless I'm missing something... it says "Penguin Is a Girl's Best Friend" aired on January 26th, 1967, which is the date of the accident according to the article.

The article is unclear. Walt Cunningham's test was on the 26th, but the fire was the next day: the 27th.

The event happened 23:31:19 UTC, Jan 27 1967. Please calculate when it was for the place you lived, then compare, maybe the interruption you remember happened before prime-time, that is, before 7:30?

Eastern time zone -- same as the Cape. Of course, an indeterminate positive amount of time would have elapsed after the event until the time ABC interrupted.

  But in less than 30 months following the Apollo 1 accident, 
  NASA flew five Apollo missions. During the final one of
  those five, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the
  Moon. Much later, in the last decade of his life, Armstrong
  would reflect on what it took to reach the Moon. “The rate
  of progress is proportional to the risk encountered,” he
  said. “The public at large may well be more risk averse 
  than the individuals in our business, but to limit the
  progress in the name of eliminating risk is no virtue.”

Sadly, Armstrong and his ilk no longer makes the calls at NASA (and haven't for quite some time.) And so we see no progress.

Or is the problem that each incoming administration wants to rejigger the programs? If each president (thinking about Bush and Obama) would just hand the scientists and engineers a few billion dollars and tell them "go do something that'll make America proud," we'd have something to be proud of by now.

The Presidents don't have the final say in how much money each agency gets and how many Congressmen get a shiny new NASA facility or contract in their district. The slice of the budget that the executive branch has the authority to allocate is miniscule compared to debt payments, entitlements, and military spending.

NASA's problem isn't really the money, it's the ridiculous bureaucracy and systemic inneficies that inevitably occur when you are forced by opportunists to fragment your supply chain and distribute your engineering infrastructure across the entire country. The constant change in executive policy is a consequence of NASA's inability to achieve its potential in the face of a functionaly hostile legislature.

The same systemic problems caused the loss of Challenger: the reason why SRBs were segmented was that they had to be transported over rail from another state, instead of over barge from a nearby factory.

Arguably the loss of Columbia was also partially caused by the same systemic problems: shuttle had wings (instead of a lifting body shape) due to Air Force's wishes. IIRC this necessitated the existence of the ET.

We'd still need someone to provide a singular vision and focus. Human nature says you can't just throw money at a group of people and expect that to happen on its own.

100 times this. Providing "stupid money" but no vision and no accountability leads to the "but 4 billion of the budget needs to be spent in MY state - but then we'll have to transport the boosters by train - but then we'll have to cut them apart - but then we have to use complex o-ring seals instead of simply welding them together -> Challenger blows up" bikeshedding of the shuttle era.

I wonder if you think the vision needed to advance science is stronger among NASA scientists or US politicians.

Yeah, Bell Labs never did anything really important.

Actually it's scientifically been shown that you can just throw money at people. However, that study was not conducted on scientists, whom I am certain will squander it as they do now.

Without commenting on the relative merits of Apollo vs the Space Shuttle programs, it bears remembering that there were 11 Apollo flights and 135 Space Shuttle flights. There simply aren't enough statistics to know whether the Apollo flights were more risky than the Shuttle flights or not, and hence which program did the most to "limit progress in the name of eliminating risk".

One may criticize its progress for being slow, but what is beyond debate is that the Shuttle program did not anywhere near eliminate risk.

NASA doesn't have a champion, if they do this person is not enough to spark the public interest. That takes it off the minds of the majority of Americans. Worse with regards to politicians supporting NASA doesn't really garner them many votes so they allocate money into areas that will.

We need a dreamer who can connect to the public in such a way that politicians support NASA. The issue is, what is good enough and reasonable enough of a dream to accomplish? I think a permanent base on the moon that suggests one day civilians will be able to go might work but it will be a hard sale

The sheer bravery of the first men to sign up to go to the moon is outstanding. I remember listening to an interview where Buzz Aldrin said he estimated that there was a 60% chance of going to the moon and coming back home alive. He still decided to do it.

They even wrote a speech for Nixon in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got stranded on the moon:

  Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to 
  explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

  These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that 
  there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that 
  there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
  
  These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most 
  noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

True, but not less brave than those that ventured into the endless oceans, when everything everyone knew was only Europe.

Or the 8 men on the K-19 Widowmaker submarine who had to repair their reactor knowing it meant certain death.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3136111.stm

Man, the Hawaiians got that beat for courage. They had smaller boats, no magnetic compasses, and they still managed to find some tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific by ~900CE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History_of_the_Polyn...

Totally agree. Many of the first Portuguese and Spanish explorers didn't even know if they would ever come back. They were leaving home to go to distant lands at a time where people still believed in monsters, witches and mermaids.

Good information on the chain of decisions that set up Apollo 1 for the disaster:

"Why Did NASA Still Use Pure Oxygen After the Apollo 1 Fire?" http://www.popsci.com/why-did-nasa-still-use-pure-oxygen-aft...

(Warning: Horrible crap foisted on you via Javascript if you have that enabled.)

tl;dr:

1. Designed Apollo to used a mixed gas (nitrogen/oxygen) atmosphere.

2. Needed weight savings. Mixed gas requires complicated, heavier, support.

3. NASA changed to pure oxygen over the objection of the North American Aviation engineers.

Justification:

a. Pure oxygen was used in the past with no disasters.

b. The pressure in orbit was 5psi. At 5psi, fires are controllable.

4. Launch pad test with a closed hatch required atmospheric pressure + 5psi to get the differential pressure of space.

5. Spark + high pressure oxygen + fuel = disaster.

Added: There were a lot more contributing factors such as the schedule pressure (wiring issues probably caused the spark) and the lack of explosive bolts on the hatch which prevented the astronauts from escaping quickly.

Bonus tl;dr on the resolution:

They pressurized the capsule with nitrogen/oxygen on the pad, so it was safe (other than being on top of a massive bomb). As the capsule ascended, they bled off the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere to maintain the 5psi differential pressure (the astronauts were breathing oxygen via their space suits so it did not matter to them). Once they were in space, the atmosphere was maintained with pure oxygen at +5psi.

Also, on the way down during landing, the capsule let in external air once external air pressure was larger than internal. This way they avoided having oxygen at atmospheric pressure inside at that time.

Frank Borman, in his testimony before congress, referred to the accident being due to a failure of imagination. In searching for his full testimony, I found this:

"Apollo 1-Challenger-Columbia Lessons Learned" - https://nsc.nasa.gov/sfcs/systemfailurecasestudyfile/downloa...

I also found transcripts of his testimony, but they aren't searchable - http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/inv.html

(I'll have to OCR the pdfs. I started to read the first one and it's fairly interesting.)

There's two books I always recommend re: Apollo:

1) A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin.

2) Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond, by Gene Kranz.

Chaikin is terrific on the astronauts. Kranz is staring at me from my bookshelf, but I've not yet opted to read him. Let me add 'Apollo' by Murray and Cox to your list. It's focused on the Apollo engineers and managers, including great discussions of how they re-engineered things after Apollo 1, and of the behind-the-scenes work on Apollo 13, as well as many other elements.

The Kranz book is really great. The LEM had its problems, too :)

Even though it had problems, the engine design was incorporated into Merlin engines under SpaceX later on.

Apollo technology - the gift that keeps on giving.

The testimony is "barely searchable", the text seems to have been already OCRed in someway, but it's disconnected at parts (so a full search may fail, whereas a partial might succeed). It'd then be a problem of parsing and joining the parts in a coherent way... which may not be an easier problem than just re-OCRing everything.

Thanks. I can't find his "failure of imagination" response (I searched for "imag"). I think these transcripts may not be complete.

Mmmm... I remember the scene in From The Earth to The Moon, if it was scripted "historically" then that might give a bit of context as to the previous parts of the testimony, right before the quote?

Edit: I did some more searching, and the best I've found is something that confirms your suspicions[0]: that the records are more extensive, and the PDFs available don't cover all of his testimony.

[0] http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000779.html

Watch the documentary "The Last Man on the Moon" about Gene Cernan. It spends some time on the human impact of the Apollo 1 disaster. Imagine having to tell your next door neighbor that her husband had just burned to death.

http://thelastmanonthemoon.com/

> The risk, of course, is that pure oxygen under high pressure requires but a spark to ignite and rapidly burn.

Frustrating to see even a technically-oriented publication report that oxygen burns.

I don't know, I think it kinda depends on how you look at it. Sure oxygen doesn't burn without a fuel source, but a fuel source won't burn without oxygen either; both are required in order to produce fire. Why do we then say the fuel is burning but not the oxygen? Just a thought...

Because oxygen is much more common than fuel on Earth's surface.

This is what progress looks like. This is what it takes.

I disagree, but won't downvote.

Failing fast is a virtue. Failing catastrophically is a disaster.

We work fastest when we trust our tools. When our tools fail us, we're forced to revisit them entirely, which slows us down. Incorporating a margin for error and defending in depth are ways to move forward efficiently.

Blue Origin's motto has the right tack. "Step by step, ferociously."

Killing our best and brightest after they express concerns about their safety? I hope that's not what it takes.

I guess what was meant was: "progress means sacrifices and sometimes people die". Nobody killed them on purpose...