Word: grissom
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Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died by fire on Cape Kennedy's Pad 34 because some of the best engineering talent in the U.S., hypersensitive to the perils of space, failed to recognize the grave dangers of a simulated flight only a couple of hun dred feet above the ground...
Since the flash fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee last January, the Apollo program has been at a mournful standstill. Eyes previously trained on the moon have turned during the past three months to minutely attentive investigation of what went wrong, and why. "The accident makes you take a good hard look at your strengths and weaknesses," explained a NASA man last week. "But there is no intention in all this to find fall guys...
...that no absolutely precise blame will ever be fixed. But it does list two or three possible causes-all of them involving electrical malfunctions-and states that the trouble almost certainly started in or near one of the wiring bundles located to the left and just in front of Grissom's seat on the left side of the cabin. It was a spot visible only to Chaffee in the right-hand seat...
...most Americans, the muffled drums and the somber eulogies were the only form of tribute left to offer Grissom, White and Chaffee. But to the stunned technicians of the Apollo program, there could be no more fitting service to the astronauts-the quick and the dead-than an exhaustive in quest on the burned-out spacecraft. To that end, a board of inquiry, headed by Floyd L. Thompson, director of NASA's Langley Research Center near Hampton, Va., embarked on an excruciatingly intricate search to discover the cause of the fatal blast...
...missions grow more ambitious and more complex, the price tag will rise. And so, inevitably, will the cost in human life. Grissom, White and Chaffee will certainly not prove to be the last casualties. But the astronauts themselves have always been among the first to argue that though the risks are high, the value of space conquest is incalculably greater. The possibilities and rewards that wait for man on the infinite frontiers of space are limited only by the human imagination...