17:40, Apollo 1 spacecraft
There had
been problems all day with communications between the ground and
spacecraft, which was only a few hundred meters away from the control center on the launch pad. As the countdown continued and more systems
were switched across to Apollo 1, at times it was impossible to make out
what the astronauts were saying. “I remember Gus Grissom got very
exasperated,” recalls Griffin. “He was really mad.”
“Jesus Christ,” Grissom exclaimed. "How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?"
After more than four-and-a-half hours bunched-up on
their couches in the cramped spacecraft, the count was once again put on
hold as the crew attempted to troubleshoot the communications system
and isolate the problem.
Finally, at 18:10, the countdown was held at T-10 minutes, ready for the final transfer to internal power.
18:31, 17:31 local time, mission control Houston
“They
stopped to fix the comm problems and we all stood up and most people
went to take a break,” says Griffin. “For some reason I left my headset
on and I heard a noise, kind of a static, then a quiet period of a
second.”
“Then,” he says, “I heard the word ‘fire’ from the crew and that was about all.”
Guidance
officer, Manfred ‘Dutch’ von Ehrenfried, was at a nearby console. “We
couldn’t believe what we were hearing,” he says. “Did you hear what I
hear? Did you hear that?”
It took us several minutes to figure out there had been a fire in the spacecraft – Gerry Griffin, Nasa
“I yelled at a couple of the guys,” says Griffin. “Hey, there’s something going on!”
“I
thought it might have meant a pad fire down on the ground or
something,” he says. “Then as one thing led to another, everyone came
back in and it took us several minutes to figure out there had been a
fire in the spacecraft.”
18:31 Cape Canaveral, Apollo 1 spacecraft
“Fire,
I smell fire,” the first indication from the capsule that something was
wrong. It is unclear whether the voice is Chaffee or White. “Fire in
the cockpit.”
Within seconds the fire had broken from its point of
origin, stretching in a wall of flames along the left side of the
module. The flames rose vertically and spread across the cabin ceiling,
scattering beads of molten nylon from straps and fastenings onto the
crew.
The next communication is indistinct, the only words that
can be made out with any certainty are “bad fire.” The transmission ends
with a cry of pain.
Fifteen seconds after the first report of fire, TV cameras on the pad show flames filling the command module.
“Then
you hear the pad people try to rescue the crew,” says Ehrenfried. “Then
it starts to sink in, this is really bad and we didn’t know how bad
until we heard on the communications loop: ‘We’ve lost them’.”
02:00, 28 January 1967
Seven-and-a-half
hours after the fire, the ground crew finished lifting the remains of
the crew from the capsule and work began on sifting through the wreckage
for the source of the fire. The interior of the spacecraft resembled an
incinerator – every surface was charred, blackened or melted. In their
efforts to rescue the crew, 27 men on the launchpad also had to be
treated for smoke inhalation and two were admitted to hospital.
Despite the potential conflict of interest, NASA was
given the go-ahead to carry out its own internal investigation into the
cause of the disaster, without outside political interference.
They tried to kill Grissom with the liberty bell 7 "incident" and that did not take. He was not a freemason. Who the fuck believes that NASA engineers did not know that filling a capsule with pure oxygen would end in a disaster?
