January 27, 1967

3 Responses to January 27, 1967

1. NortonPete says:

   January 27, 2008 at 2:40 pm

   I recall this awful day. One has to wonder about an escape hatch that opened inward and 100% pressurized oxygen above 15psi.
   How could the hatch ever open?

   This was back in a time when Astronauts were just “test pilots”.

   Igniting something in pure oxygen was a basic high school chemistry lab, what a shame. Gus was a real character.

   These men were true heroes. RIP and thanks for your sacrifice.
2. Maggie says:

   January 27, 2008 at 9:53 pm

   From a very early age I knew what the word “pioneer” meant. My Mother’s parents had survived WWI in Europe, and survived the crossing to the United States to start from nothing with their families, until they met and married. I suppose their spirit ran through my blood in that aspect.

   Barely out of my toddler training-pants I recall sitting in my Grand-Dad’s living room chair while he was toiling away down at the railroad yard. I would watch the Mercury rocket ships take off from Cape Canaveral. I didn’t quite know what the hell it was all about. All I knew was it was the most awesome thing to watch. Glenn, Cooper, Carpenter, Shepard, Slayton, Armstrong … My very first heroes to my young mind of mush that fed my dreams and fantasies through my entire childhood.

   January 27, 1967 I was nearly nine-years-old. Mom and Dad had a black and white TV that got 2 or 3 local stations. I remember this quite well. In addition to feeling the dread of the horrific deaths of the three Astronauts, (Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee) on NASA Cape Canaveral Launch Pad 34, I guess I was a bit mature beyond my years and felt a deep dark pit in my gut that all those magnificent men, those pioneers, in their white space suits and patches would never again board another rocket ship and shoot off the face of the Earth to see out into space, to witness, what I could not see from the ground in our terrestrial night sky as I lay on the blanket on our back yard. When NASA bravely continued the Apollo Space Program I was elated, to say the least. I watched every launch, and every splash down (the Navy Frogmen plucking the Astronauts out of their cramped capsules and into those rubber rafts … every space walk and every moon walk.

   While the boys and girls in my grade school classes drew pictures of themselves as priests and nuns (I attended Catholic school), or doctors and nurses … I literally horrified the nuns by drawing myself in space suits, so much so the Sister who was principle saw fit to have me and the parish priest in her office for, what I now see was a “deprogramming” of sorts. Their strident (and sexist) opposition only made my dream grow stronger. I studied hard in high school my advanced math and science classes, and aimed hard to study a science field in college that could possibly get me into the space program at some level … ANY level. I just wanted to be a part of it. But on December 19, 1972 Apollo 17 splashed down and the Apollo space program seemed to just slide into the shadows … to the lackluster end of the joint American Russian Apollo-Soyuz Earth orbital missions that ended in 1975. By the time of my high school graduation in 1976 I was disillusioned by many things going on in my personal life and in the world, but MOST especially by the lack of space flight in my human awareness and dreams … and I took a giant leap off my path I had paved since grade school. I suppose you could say I was rebelling against everything in my life.

   On April 12, 1981, just ten days shy of my 23rd birthday (the age of my oldest daughter right now), (STS-1) the first Space Shuttle flew. Oh! The mixed emotions I had that day. My eyes flooded with bittersweet tears. I was so damn happy we were flying again, and that sense of wondrous hope for what we might find and learn in the great unknown returned … but I felt so damned left behind. I still do …
3. Gaius says:

   January 27, 2008 at 10:12 pm

   We sent men to the moon once. Now our politicians squabble over how best to bind us here to earth and a nanny state.