Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

One of the many quotes from Carl Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot, referring to an image sent back to Earth of the Earth from 4 billion miles away as the Voyager 1 spacecraft exited the solar system in 1990.

Of all the places and circumstances in which one or a group of ones could become marooned, we often forget that the human race is itself in a precarious spot on our pale blue dot, except for the rare occasions where we manage to escape via rocket ship to explore a little, and a space mission fails to go exactly as planned.

Welcome to Marooned, stories of the catastrophically Lost. I'm Jack Luna. This is Aaron

Hable. The Apollo program's mission goals were establishing the technology to meet other national

interests in space, achieving preeminence in space for the United States, carrying out a program of

scientific exploration of the moon,

developing human capability to work in the looter environment. Apollo 1, the first man

mission of the Apollo program, created in the hopes of one day touching an American foot to the

moon, didn't crash, didn't even make it off the ground, but in a horrifying circumstance,

it did burn. Three astronauts were

killed on January 27, 1967, when during launch rehearsal, an electrical fire broke out in their capsule,

a high-oxygen environment, and within a matter of seconds, astronauts Virgil Gus Grissom,

Ed White, and Roger Chafee were lost. Poisonous fumes

were what directly killed them, not the 1,400-degree or so fire that had started. Still,

shouts were heard and hands could be seen grasping at the hatch in the 10 seconds it took for it to be

over. And Jack, it was almost all over for the Apollo program as a result.

But as we all know, that wasn't the case as eventually the Apollo 11 mission would result in a

manned moon landing on July 20th, 1969. The sacrifice of those in the inaugural mission and all that was

learned from that travesty culminating in one small

step for man. And another note here, Jack, this wasn't technically the first one, but because of the

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