The Opportunity of Failure

The control room was completely silent. A hiss of static was all that came over the loudspeaker. From the command module of the spacecraft there was no vocal response. It was January 27, 1967. Hundreds of technicians, engineers and leaders were slowly coming to grips with a grim reality. The three-man crew of Apollo 1, fully suited up and sitting on the launch pad to conduct a test, had just been burned to death. It was, to that point, the worst tragedy in the history of the space program.

Whether it is blamed on human error, faulty equipment, unexpected circumstances, acts of God or deliberate wrongdoing, failures happen all the time. Our culture has become acutely focused in failure on fixing the blame and less and less interested in fixing the problem. We can’t entirely avoid failure, though we want to. How then might we react to failure? One option is to simply walk away, accept it, and do something else. Or, as the case of the Apollo program, we might view failure as an opportunity to move forward:

Don’t quit. An investigation began immediately after the Apollo 1 tragedy. Top scientists were questioned. Procedures were poured over. Congressional hearings were initiated. Interestingly, though, at no point did anyone determine to cancel the Apollo program. With less than three years’ time remaining to meet President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the prevailing question was, could the deadline still be met?

More than anything the Apollo 1 fire galvanized the team to continue on. “If we had not had the Apollo fire, we would never have gotten to the moon,” said John Young who walked on the moon during the Apollo 16 mission. “The fire enabled us to get to the moon because then we went back and fixed the spacecraft right… It was a real lesson.”

Just weeks before his death, Grissom had told a reporter, “If we die we want people to accept it. We hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” Today the concrete launch platform where the accident occurred remains. Two plaques honoring the fallen astronauts are attached to the platform. One bears the Latin inscription Ad Astra Per Aspera (A Rough Road Leads to the Stars).[1]

Be ready to stop and learn. The most complicated machine ever conceived, the Apollo 1 capsule was also filled with problems. Issues included faulty radios, loose wires, flammable materials, an inwardly opening hatch, and the risks of flying in a 100% oxygen environment. But no engineer on the project spoke up. The historical success of the space program created a false sense of security within leadership. They had an unrealistic confidence that everything would come together because it had before. It took a tremendous failure for NASA to stop, step back, listen and learn.

Legendary Flight Director Gene Kranz commented, “Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung-ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Stop!’… We are the cause! We were not ready. We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.”[2]

Look for needed changes. The fact that the Apollo 1 disaster occurred on the ground was helpful to understanding what went wrong. All the evidence was sitting on the pad to be examined. The biggest change was to move from a pure oxygen environment to an air environment—which required a complete redesign of the capsule, air handling systems, and thousands of other components. “From a human safety perspective, I think because of the shock that the industry went through following the Apollo 1 fire, I think they set a great foundation and since the recovery from Apollo 1 I think people have been able to make good refinements,” said Bill Johns, chief engineer at Lockheed Martin for the current NASA Orion capsule.

Another major change was to redesign the spaceship’s hatch to open outward. Engineers designed the hatch to open in so that the pressure of the capsule in space would ensure it stayed closed. However, the Apollo 1 disaster showed this to be a major safety issue. Despite the engineers’ objections, the hatch was redesigned to give the crew a better opportunity to escape in an emergency. All spacecraft hatches open outward to this day.

Rebuild trust. “It was perhaps the defining moment in our race to get to the moon,” Kranz wrote of the fire aboard Apollo 1. “The ultimate success of Apollo was made possible by the sacrifices of Grissom, White and Chaffee. The accident profoundly affected everyone in the program. There was an unspoken promise on everyone’s part to the three astronauts that their deaths would not be in vain.”

Less than three years after Apollo 1 ended in disaster, Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon. Changes made to the spacecraft after Apollo 1 made it sturdier and safer. Thousands of spacecraft parts were changed, improved, adjusted. New plans in mission control expanded the team’s ability to deal with engineering problems during the mission. Better communication procedures ensured the astronauts and ground controllers were always on the same page. So many improvements came out of that disaster that the successful Apollo 11 mission was performed by a very different spacecraft, with a more highly trained crew and a more sharply honed support structure. In fact, had the Apollo 1 failure not occurred, we may have never made it to the moon. Before departing the lunar surface, the Apollo 11 astronauts left behind a reminder of their fallen colleagues—a commemorative medallion bearing the names of Grissom, White and Chaffee.[3]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-28-na-apollo28-story.html

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelperegrine/2022/01/16/apollo-1-and-the-courage-to-say-stop-were-not-ready/

[3] https://www.history.com/news/remembering-the-apollo-1-tragedy