I'm John Batchel with Bob Zimmerman, my longtime good colleague and the author of The Story of Apollo 8, Genesis,

the first man flight to another world. It is January, 1967. Apollo 1 is on the launch pad being checked out by three senior astronauts.

And then, Bob, this catastrophe is easy to remember for all of us who were watching at the time

because it was a blow to NASA.

It was a blow that had not been expected.

They weren't actually blasting off. What happened,

Bob, in Apollo 1? It's interesting, John, but this was a case where they were not careful,

and that's why the failure happened. This was a launch pad dress rehearsal countdown.

The three astronauts, Gus Griss from the commander,

Ed White, who is also an experienced astronaut,

he had done the first space, American Space Walk,

and Roger Chaffey, who had never flown in space before.

These guys were in the capsule in their spacesuits,

and they were doing with mission control the equivalent of a dresser capsule countdown,

preparing for the first

Apollo mission, unmanned mission in orbit, hopefully in 67.

And at some point, there was a spark in the capsule, and within less than a minute and a half,

those three men burned to death, suffocated mostly, was the oxygen burned.

And there was no, the heat killed them as well as the lack of oxygen.

They were dead within 75 seconds.

And at that moment in time, there was a sudden wake up at NASA that there's a problem.

We did something that's wrong.

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