Those Ideals for Which They Lived
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This week we remember two tragic events in spaceflight, the fire onboard Apollo 1 and the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Many of us remember that awful day in 1986 - Monday, January 28 - when the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff. Millions were watching the liftoff because of all the attention given to the “first teacher in space,” Christa McAuliffe.
All seven members aboard were killed and most likely did not die until they hit the Atlantic at over 200 miles per hour. One of the most tragic memories of that sad day was not just the actual disintegration of the shuttle itself, but watching Christa McAuliffe’s parents on national television realize that they were witnessing the death of their daughter.
You may recall it was human error that lead to their deaths. A leaky “O-ring” seal on the solid rocket booster lit into the giant external tank full of oxygen and hydrogen. Seventy-three seconds into liftoff the breach was made, the tanks were torn apart, and the rest is history.
That event was highly publicized, but few Americans know of the fate of Apollo 1 back on Friday, January 27, 1967.
Back then, the cold war was in full swing and so was our determination to “beat the Russians” in getting to the Moon. By 1966 we were readying our Apollo missions, the actual spaceflights that would take us all the way out to the Moon, land us there, and take us back. It was quite the amazingly ambitious endeavor.
The first Apollo missions were never meant to take us there; they were intended to work out the bugs of liftoff and communications and all the other annoying little things that first needed to be perfected.
Alas, the very first Apollo met with tragedy, and not in flight, but on the ground. The Command Module, packed with the three astronauts, Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee, was on the pad for nothing more than testing and training. Their compartment was pumped full of pure oxygen under higher than normal pressures, when a spark from somewhere ignited the cabin. The three astronauts were violently killed in the flash fire.
It was a preventable accident with many problems - many of them glaring - which were corrected for future Apollo missions.
Such is the nature of exploration. Some will die as pioneers to new places. The challenge is to make human error as small a factor as possible.
Let’s remember them all this week. As the plaque for the Apollo 1 victims reads, “They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind's final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.”
Posted by Mark Ritter at 2009.01.26 08:12 PM | Comments (0)
