A cura di @MostroDeiBiscotti.

Il 27 gennaio 1967 un incendio scoppiato all’interno del modulo di comando della capsula Apollo 1 durante una simulazione sulla rampa di lancio al Cape Kennedy Air Force Station uccise gli astronauti Gus Grissom, Edward White e Roger Chaffee, selezionati dalla NASA per iniziare il Programma Apollo.

A distanza di cinquant’anni, un dettagliato articolo su Ars Technica ricostruisce gli eventi di quel giorno e le conseguenze che l’incidente ebbe sul programma spaziale statunitense.

Inside the Houston-based Mission Operations Control Room halfway across the country, Chris Kraft listened in. Already a national figure by then for his masterful control over flight operations, Kraft had directed all of the Mercury flights and many of the Gemini missions. Since those missions he moved up to management, but Kraft had returned as flight director for the first Apollo mission.

Half a century later, the painful memories remain. “I was on console the day it burned,” he explained, sitting in his second-floor den, just a few miles from the control center that now bears his name at Johnson Space Center. “I heard their screaming voices in the cockpit of the spacecraft,” Kraft recounted.

Un secondo articolo su Scientific American fornisce ulteriori spunti e ricorda la morte del cosmonauta Valentin Bondarenko, prima vittima del programma spaziale sovietico, avvenuta in circostanze simili ma gestita in modo differente dall’agenzia spaziale sovietica:

Parallels between the Apollo 1 crew’s and Bondarenko’s deaths are obvious, but how each space agency dealt with the deaths was very different. Grissom, White, and Chaffee were each given very public funerals in accordance with their respective military traditions. Bondarenko’s death was kept secret, his identity covered by a pseudonym. Not until 1986 did the world hear the true story of his death.

La documentazione ufficiale relativa alla storia dell’Apollo 1 è conservata sul sito della NASA. In italiano è disponibile un breve articolo di Paolo Attivissimo.

 

Immagine da Wikimedia Commons.