Word: grissoms
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...hour ride of Anders, Borman and Lovell marked the apogee of a decade-long effort. It involved 300,000 engineers, technicians and workers and 20,000 contractors, and it cost $33 billion. The quest also cost the lives of three fellow astronauts: Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, who had died on the launching pad the previous year. Some critics sneered at the outpouring of ingenuity and treasure. A "moondoggle," one detractor labeled the Apollo 8 flight. A Congressman termed it a "garish spectacle." It could be seen -- and was -- as history's most elaborate form of escapism...
...their part, are no longer as willing to provide unquestioning -- and unpaid -- support for their spouses' career ambitions, a once hallowed given of corporate, academic and political life. Even the military can no longer count on blind obedience from officers' wives. Indeed, two women recently complained that brass at Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana warned them that their husbands' chances of promotion would be jeopardized unless they quit their civilian jobs. Following an investigation, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger this month forbade commanders to intrude in the careers of military spouses...
...explosion that destroyed Challenger inevitably evoked memories of an earlier tragedy in America's space program. On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire erupted in the first manned Apollo spacecraft as it sat atop its Saturn 1-B rocket during a test at Cape Kennedy. The blaze killed Virgil ("Gus") Grissom, 40, Edward White, 36, and Roger Chaffee, 31, who until last week were the only astronauts to perish aboard a U.S. spacecraft...
...Grissom, the second American in space, White, who made the first U.S. space walk, and Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, had been scheduled to run through a simulated Apollo launch. Suited up, they clambered into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream...
...fire occurred in a natural atmosphere, the three might have had time to escape. But the blaze flashed through the pure oxygen in seconds. Even then the astronauts might have had a chance if they could have blown out Apollo's hatch by touching off explosive bolts. But Grissom was firmly opposed to the use of such bolts. Splashing down in the Atlantic in his Mercury capsule 5 1/ 2 years earlier, he had nearly drowned after its hatch bolts somehow blew prematurely, filling the craft with water...