Restart shuttle: Fwd: NASA Observes Day of Remembrance -- A year earlier chamber fire s/b wake up!

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: January 29, 2015 at 9:05:07 PM CST
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: NASA Observes Day of Remembrance

A good article on Apollo 1 if you would like to no more about the most probable ignition source of the fire just let me know, as I was on the investigation team responsible for investigating the wiring. Also one thing not mentioned is the technicians at the pad were grabbing gas masks located at the pad, but they were only good to filter out N2O4/MMH propellant fumes. On the loop I was hearing guys talk about grabbing the gas masks and then reports of them passing out. Reflections of that evening being in the MCC on the EPS console in the SSR monitoring the test still bother me.

Something that is never mentioned in the articles on Apollo 1 is that almost a year earlier, April 1966, at the vendor AiResearch during qualification testing of the Apollo Command Module Environmental Control System (ECS) in a chamber at 5 psi pure oxygen a fire occurred destroying the ECS. This should have been a wake-up call on the hazards of testing in pure oxygen and materials compatibility. The NASA Investigation Board Report was Classified. Since I still had my files from investigating the cause of the fire I have been putting together lessons learned case study, so information about this will not be totally lost.

Gary
281-433-7735

January 26, 2015
RELEASE 15-012

NASA Observes Day of Remembrance
NASA will pay will tribute to the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well as other NASA colleagues, during the agency's annual Day of Remembrance Wednesday, Jan. 28.
NASA's Day of Remembrance honors members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other agency senior officials will hold an observance and wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Following the wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington, various NASA centers will hold remembrance events for their employees. Kennedy Space Center in Florida will hold a brief ceremony, led by center deputy director Janet Petro, at 10:30 a.m. at the Space Mirror Memorial, located on the grounds of the visitors complex. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will hold a candle lighting ceremony led by center director Patrick Scheuermann and astronaut Robert "Hoot" Gibson at 9 a.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 29.
The agency also is paying tribute to its fallen astronauts with special online content available at:
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/DOR2015/
Images of the Day of Remembrance commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery will posted online at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/
-end-
Allard Beutel
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2191
allard.beutel@nasa.gov

AmericaSpace
For a nation that explores
January 27th, 2015
'Fire in the Cockpit': Remembering the Sacrifice of Apollo 1
By Ben Evans

After the first cry from Roger Chaffee (left), even super-fit Ed White (center) was unable to even fully release the first bolt from the command module's inner hatch before he was overcome by fumes. The most likely origin of the fire was somewhere beneath the seat of Gus Grissom (right). Photo Credit: NASA
Almost five decades have now passed since one of the worst tragedies in the history of U.S. human space exploration. Alongside the loss of Challenger during ascent and the demise of Columbia during re-entry, the fire which tore through the command module of Apollo 1, during a "plugs-out" systems test on the evening of 27 January 1967, killing astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, played a pivotal role in refocusing awareness of the inherent hazards of launching humans away from the Home Planet and fundamentally reshaped America's future goals in space. Forty-eight years later, it still remains remarkable that from the ashes of tragedy, the NASA family was able to recover, rebuild, and—fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's pledge—land a man on the Moon by the decade's end.
Today, Pad 34 stands as a gaunt concrete and steel hulk. Overgrown by bushes, weeds and a few wild pepper trees, it steadily decays in the salty Atlantic air. A faded "Abandon in Place" sign adorns one of its legs, whilst close to its base are a pair of plaques, memorializing one of the darkest days in NASA's history. The first reads simply "Launch Complex 34, Friday 27 January 1967, 1831 Hours" and dedicates itself to the first three astronauts of Project Apollo. The second pays tribute to their "ultimate sacrifice" that January day, long ago. Close by are a trio of granite benches, one to honor Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
Each year—and today will likely be no exception—NASA invites the families of the three men to visit the spot and reflect upon the tragedy which engulfed them with horrifying suddenness that Friday. To pause at Pad 34 and consider its significance is to consider the astonishing ability of Project Apollo to rebound from such a tragedy and plant human bootprints in lunar dust, just 30 months later.
Haunting view of the deserted Pad 34 site, seen through the doorway of what was once the blockhouse. Here, on 27 January 1967, America's goal of reaching the Moon was placed in jeopardy in the most tragic way. Photo Credit: NASA
Yet the "Block 1" version of the Apollo spacecraft, in the mind of both Grissom and his backup, Wally Schirra, was a sloppy and unsafe machine. Both men had spent months overseeing poor performance and low standards on the part of prime contractor North American, and, by the fall of 1966, just months before the launch of Apollo 1, hundreds of technical problems remained unresolved: a faulty glycol pump in the environmental control system, leaky thrusters, coolant glitches, bad wiring, and inadequate software, to name but a few. Grissom's crew was so angry that they prepared a mocking photograph of themselves, heads bowed in prayer over a model of their spacecraft. "It's not that we don't trust you," Grissom scornfully explained, "but this time, we've decided to go over your head!" On 22 January 1967, shortly before flying to the Cape for a launch pad test, he plucked a lemon from a tree in his Houston backyard, flew it to Florida in his luggage, and hung it over the Block 1 spacecraft's hatch.
To be fair, North American had faced their own technical challenges. NASA had mandated that the Apollo command module should operate a pure oxygen atmosphere—an extreme fire hazard, admittedly, but infinitely less complex than trying to implement an oxygen-nitrogen mix, which, if misjudged, could suffocate the men before they even knew about it. In space, the cabin would be kept at a pressure of about a fifth of an atmosphere, but from ground tests would be pressurized to slightly above one atmosphere. This would eliminate the risk of the spacecraft imploding, but at such high pressures there remained the danger that anything which caught fire would burn almost explosively. At an early stage, North American objected to the use of pure oxygen, but NASA, which had employed it without incident on Mercury and Gemini, overruled them.
The Apollo 1 spacecraft is depicted atop its Saturn IB booster at Pad 34. Photo Credit: NASA
The choice of pure oxygen had not been made lightly. NASA knew that a two-gas system, providing an Earth-like mixture of 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, pressurized to one bar, would reduce the risk of fire. Moreover, a mixture of this type avoided many other troubles associated with pure oxygen—eye irritation, hearing loss, and a clogging of the chest, for example—but the complexities of building such a system threatened to make it prohibitively heavy. The astronauts' space suits complicated the issue yet further. "To walk on the Moon," wrote Deke Slayton, then-head of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate (FCOD), in his autobiography, Deke, "you needed to get out of the spacecraft … and with a mixed-gas system you'd have to pre-breathe for hours, lowering the pressure and getting the nitrogen out of your system so you didn't get the bends. Of course, if there was a real emergency and you had to use the suit, you'd really have been in trouble."
Other worries surrounded Apollo's hatch: a complex device which actually came in two cumbersome pieces: an inner section, which opened into the command module's cabin, overlaid by an outer section. North American wanted to build a single-piece hatch, fitted with explosive bolts, but NASA felt that this might increase the risk of it misfiring on the way to the Moon. By adopting an inward-opening hatch, cabin pressure would keep it tightly sealed in flight … but notoriously difficult to open on the ground. As the hands of fate turned on Apollo 1, pure oxygen and an immovable hatch, coupled with a mysterious ignition source, would spell death for Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
With a pessimistic air of foreboding, the three astronauts crossed the gantry at Pad 34 on the afternoon of 27 January 1967. According to their secretary, Lola Morrow, all three men were unusually subdued and in no mood for the so-called "plugs-out" test. (Morrow herself scornfully referred to Project Apollo as "Project Appalling.") The previous evening, their backup crew—Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham—had sat aboard the spacecraft for a "plugs-in" test, with Apollo dependent upon electrical power from ground support equipment and the hatch left open. After emerging from the test, Schirra took Grissom to one side. He hated the Block 1 design. "If you get the slightest glitch," Schirra told his friend, "get outta there. I don't like it."
Metaphorically and literally, Apollo 1 left America's human space program burned and blackened. Photo Credit: NASA
Communications with the nearby blockhouse, manned by astronaut Stu Roosa, caused difficulties from the start. Grissom was so frustrated that he even asked Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) manager Joe Shea, at breakfast, to sit in the cabin with them and gain a manager's perspective of the problems. Shea weighed up the pros and cons of rigging up an extra headset and squeezing himself, in shirtsleeves, into Apollo's lower equipment bay, but decided against it. Even Deke Slayton considered sitting in the cabin with them, but elected to remain in the blockhouse to monitor the progress of the test.
Grissom took the commander's seat on the left side of the cabin and quickly became aware of a foul odor—it smelled like sour buttermilk, he said—and technicians scrambled to the spacecraft to take air samples. Nothing was found to be amiss. Roger Chaffee climbed aboard, taking the right-side seat, and Ed White entered last, plopping into the center seat. The command module's hatch was closed, the Saturn IB boost cover was sealed and pure oxygen was steadily pumped into the cabin.
As the afternoon wore on, niggling problems hindered the test. A high oxygen flow indicator triggered the master alarm, time and time again, and communications with Roosa were so bad that at one point Grissom exploded: "How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" At 4:25 p.m. EST, a problem arose with a live microphone, which could not be switched off. NASA Test Conductor Clarence "Skip" Chauvin later recalled that communications were so bad that he could hardly hear the astronauts' voices. Eventually, the test was put on hold at 5:40 p.m. Forty minutes later, after more communications headaches, controllers prepared to transfer Apollo 1 to its internal fuel cells … whereupon the countdown was halted, yet again.
Suddenly, and without warning, controllers noticed the crew's biomedical readings jump. This was a tell-tale indicator of increased oxygen flow in their space suits. At the same time, around 6:30:54 p.m., other sensors registered a brief power surge aboard Apollo 1. Ten seconds later came the first cry from the spacecraft.
It was Roger Chaffee's voice.
It was just one word.
"Fire!"
Apollo 1 was tasked with an Earth-orbital mission of up to 14 days to evaluate the "Block 1″ command and service modules. Image Credit: NASA
In the windowless blockhouse at Pad 34, Deke Slayton heard Chaffee's call and glanced over to a monitor which showed the Apollo 1 command module's hatch window. What normally looked like a dark circle was now lit up, almost white. Frantic calls were now emanating from the spacecraft: "We've got a fire in the cockpit," yelled Chaffee. "Let's get out. We're burning up!" Finally, there came a blood-curdling scream.
On the first floor of Pad 34, technician Gary Propst could clearly see Ed White on his monitor. The astronaut's arms were raised over his head, fiddling to open the heavy two-piece hatch. Propst could not understand why the men did not simply blow the hatch, little realizing that its inherent design made it impossible for them to do this. Instead, White had to use a ratchet to laboriously release six bolts spanning the circumference of the inner section of the hatch. Years later, astronaut Dave Scott wrote in his autobiography, Two Sides of the Moon, that during training, he and White weightlifted the hatch over their heads whilst lying supine in their Apollo couches. Now, in the few seconds he had available before being overcome by smoke, White barely had chance to begin loosening the first bolt.
Tragically, it made little difference. In normal conditions, it would require 90 seconds at best, and even the super-fit White had been unable to do it in less than two minutes during training. However, fire was gorging Apollo 1 and the accumulation of hot gases sealed the hatch shut with tremendous force. No man on Earth could possibly have opened the hatch under such circumstances.
Investigators would later discover that the fire began somewhere under Gus Grissom's seat, on the left side of the cabin, perhaps in the vicinity of some chafed and unprotected wiring. Once sparked in Apollo 1's pure oxygen atmosphere, it fed hungrily and quickly exploded into an inferno. Other combustible objects—including Velcro pads, nylon nets, polyurethane pads, and paperwork—fanned the flames. The astronauts themselves had taken a Styrofoam block into the cabin to relieve the pressure against their backs, but this exploded like a bomb in the pure oxygen. "At such pressure, and bathed by pure oxygen," wrote Grissom's biographer, Ray Boomhower, in Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut, "a cigarette could be reduced to ashes in seconds and even metal could burn."
The cumbersome, two-piece hatch of the Block 1 design was extensively modified in the aftermath of the tragedy. Photo Credit: NASA
At length, pressures exceeded Apollo 1's design limits and the capsule ruptured at 6:31:19 p.m., filling the Pad 34 white room with thick smoke. By now, the poisonous fumes had asphyxiated the three astronauts to death. A few meters away, pad leader Don Babbitt sprang from his desk and barked at lead technician Jim Greaves to get the men out of the command module. But it was hopeless. The waves of heat and pressure were so intense that the would-be rescuers were repeatedly driven back. "The smoke was extremely heavy," Babbitt later recalled. "It appeared to me to be a heavy thick grey smoke, very billowing, but very thick." None of the pad crew could see far beyond the end of their noses, and they had to run their hands over the outside of the boost cover to find holes into which they could insert tools to open the hatch.
No less than 27 technicians were treated that evening by the Cape's dispensary for the effects of inhalation. Don Babbitt had to order Jim Greaves outside at one point, lest he pass out. Firefighters eventually opened the hatch and the would-be saviors beheld a hellish scene of destruction: by the flickering glimmer of a flashlight, they could see little but burnt wiring and an incinerated interior. According to firefighter Jim Burch, it took a few seconds before the ethereal calmness convinced them that Grissom, White, and Chaffee were gone. It was 6:37 p.m., five and a half minutes since Chaffee's initial shout. America's dream of landing on the Moon was in tatters. Choking over the phone to Deke Slayton, Babbitt could not find the words to describe what he saw.
Slayton and flight surgeon Fred Kelly arrived at the base of Pad 34 minutes later. They realized that it would take hours to remove the dead men from Apollo 1, because the heat had caused everything to melt and fuse together. Moreover, there remained a very real risk that the heat could accidentally trigger the Saturn IB's escape tower and the pad was cleared of all personnel. Not until the early hours of the 28th were the bodies removed. None of them had suffered life-threatening burns and all had died from asphyxia when their oxygen hoses burned and their suits rapidly filled with poisonous smoke.
In his autobiography, Slayton described it the "worst day" of his career, and even the normally teetotal astronaut Frank Borman admitted that he went out and got drunk after the accident. "I'm not proud to admit it," Borman once said, "but … we ended up throwing glasses, like a scene out of an old World War One movie." The wives of the three dead men—Betty Grissom, Pat White, and Martha Chaffee—later sued North American for its shoddy spacecraft. Each received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation in 1972.

Copyright © 2015 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

NASA Marks Space Disaster Anniversaries with Day of Remembrance
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | January 28, 2015 07:00am ET

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger's STS-51L mission, which ended in tragedy shortly after launch on Jan. 28, 1986. They are (from left to right): Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Michael Smith and Ellison Onizuka.
Credit: NASA View full size image
NASA is honoring its fallen astronauts with a special day of remembrance Wednesday (Jan. 28), the 29th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy.
Space agency officials are conducting ceremonies at several different sites around the country during the annual event, to pay tribute to the three crewmembers killed in 1967's Apollo 1 fire, the seven astronauts lost when Challenger exploded in 1986 and the seven crewmembers who died when the shuttle Columbia broke apart upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere in 2003.
"NASA's Day of Remembrance honors members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery," agency officials said in a statement. "NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other agency senior officials will hold an observance and wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia from 9 to 10:30 a.m. [EST] Wednesday." [NASA's Fallen Astronauts: A Photo Memorial]
Various NASA centers are also hosting their own observances, officials added. The deputy director of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, for example, will lead a brief ceremony at the facility's visitor center at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT), and Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will hold a candle-lighting ceremony at 10 a.m. local time (11 a.m. EST; 1600 GMT).
Apollo 1 astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee posing in front of Launch Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. All three were killed when a fire blazed up in their capsule during a ground test on Jan. 27, 1967.
Credit: NASA
View full size image
The Apollo 1 fire, NASA's first mission-related tragedy, occurred on Jan. 27, 1967. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were inside their crew capsule at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, conducting a test of the vehicle, which was scheduled to launch on an orbital mission less than a month later. A fire broke out, and all three crewmembers were killed.
The next spaceflight disaster came 19 years and one day later. On Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger disintegrated just 73 seconds after blasting off, killing Francis "Dick" Scobee, Ronald McNair, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Greg Jarvis and Connecticut teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was supposed to be the first teacher in space.
The accident investigation revealed that an O-ring in one of the orbiter's two solid rocket boosters failed on that cold morning, allowing hot gas to escape and causing the shuttle's huge external fuel tank to explode.
NASA grounded the space shuttle for nearly three years in the wake of the Challenger tragedy, returning the vehicle to flight in September 1988 with the STS-26 mission of the shuttle Discovery.
The shuttle fleet flew without any serious incidents for another decade and a half. Then, on Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia broke apart as it was gliding back to Earth after a 16-day space mission. All seven astronauts aboard were killed: Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, David Brown, Michael Anderson and Ilan Ramon, who was Israel's first astronaut.
Investigators later determined that Columbia sustained damage during launch, when a piece of foam insulation broke off the external fuel tank and careened into the orbiter's left wing. The impact breached Columbia's heat shield in that spot, allowing hot atmospheric gases to infiltrate the wing during re-entry.
Another lengthy pause in shuttle operations followed this disaster. The next return-to-flight mission, also flown by Discovery, came in July 2005.
This image of the STS-107 shuttle Columbia crew in orbit was recovered from wreckage inside an undeveloped film canister. From left (bottom row): Kalpana Chawla, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon. From left (top row): David Brown, William McCool and Michael Anderson.
Credit: NASA/JSC
View full size image
The space shuttle was grounded for good in July 2011, after flying 135 orbital missions over the course of 30 years. NASA currently relies on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get its astronauts to and from the International Space Station but is encouraging the development of private American spaceships to take over this role. Astronaut taxis being built by SpaceX and Boeing should be ready to start flying crews by 2017, representatives of both companies say.
NASA officials aren't the only people who are pausing Wednesday to reflect on the risks involved with human spaceflight and to honor the memories of those who gave their lives for the cause. For example, European Space Agency astronaut Sam Cristoforetti sent out this note Tuesday (Jan. 27) to her 293,000 Twitter followers:
"May the memory of such a dark time in our past enlighten the future with wisdom and compassion. ‪#RemembranceDay"

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