OSIRIS-REx and the Enduring Legacy of Apollo 1

Last night I watched the launch of OSIRIS-REx from the Kennedy Space Center with friends and family – a beautiful, exhilarating event! It lifted off at 7:05 pm Eastern with the sun low on the horizon. I could see the vehicle for several minutes as it arched over the Atlantic Ocean through a clear blue sky. With binoculars you could see the solid rocket booster separate and fall away from the main part of the Atlas V after its propellant was spent. It was magnificent!

We still have several critical and high-stress activities to get through on the mission (a two-year cruise; an Earth gravity assist; an asteroid touch and go; and reentry of the sample return capsule into the Earth’s atmosphere) but space launches are always fraught with risk and even after almost 60 years since the start of the space-age, rockets still invariably fail. Just a week before our launch SpaceX lost a rocket and payload during a static test at a launch pad less than two miles south of ours. Getting our spacecraft safely into space was a huge deal. I’m now certain about (at least as certain as we can get in the space exploration business) what I’ll be doing for the next four years as we fly out to asteroid 101955 Bennu; survey and study it; and snatch an interesting sample to bring back to Earth. It’s an important milestone to me personally and as I sat there watching OSIRIS-REx lift off the pad I couldn’t help but be amazed at how two events that would impact my life, separated by almost 50 years in time, could take place less than five miles from one another.

The night before the launch I went with a colleague to see OSIRIS-REx on the launch pad lit up brilliantly by spotlights. On our drive back out of the Center we stopped by Launch Complex 34. In the darkness there I quietly reflected on the last six years, back to when I first became involved with OSIRIS-REx, and ruminated on where I was standing.

Launch Complex 34 is an abandoned launch site that hasn’t been used in over 47 years but it’s a quiet place to sit and reflect and listen to the ocean crash on the beach. It also offers a peaceful view of the OSIRIS-REx pad. While I stood there outside my car I thought about how six years ago OSIRIS-REx was just a proposal. It wasn’t even a mission yet, just an audacious idea that generated a lot of excitement at NASA. Back then I was still spending almost all of my energy and expertise supporting another flight program, the James Webb Space Telescope project, but decided if NASA headquarters selected the OSIRIS-REx proposal for implementation, then I was going to do everything I could to make the mission a success. Sitting there looking back at our rocket, all systems go, waiting for the launch window to open the next day, I thought about all the challenges overcome and the long hours put in to make sure every part was as good as it needed to be. It was somewhat surreal to be sitting there because if it wasn’t for what happened at Launch Complex 34, it’s very possible that I wouldn’t have been there in the first place or have the privilege to be a part of such a talented team and pioneering mission.

When I was in the second grade I took a class trip to Jefferson Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan to visit the Grand Rapids Public Museum. At the museum they had a small astronomy and outer space exhibit as well as a planetarium – and I was just blown away by all of it! Even after we left and I went back home I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I had seen. Shortly thereafter, I decided that space exploration was undoubtedly my life’s calling. I can still remember the motorized solar system display with exaggerated colors that had Mercury spinning around the Sun about as fast as it could go while Pluto appeared to not move at all (Pluto was still a planet then). The planetarium show was amazing and introduced images and ideas to me that I had never thought about before. There was also a wall set-up in honor of a local Apollo astronaut, Roger B. Chaffee, and the museum’s planetarium was named in honor of him. In the display case were a number of personal items and a model of the Apollo spacecraft. It impressed me that someone from the area where I was from was a real space explorer. It was all so exciting. It wasn’t until I came home and started talking about what I had seen that I learned that Roger Chaffee had been killed in the Apollo 1 fire during a test on the pad, the launch pad at Launch Complex 34. My mother had to explain it to me. He never made it into space.

The sad realization of what happened to my new local hero didn’t deter me in the least from wanting to know all about outer space. In fact, the Apollo 1 crew’s sacrifice just drove home the point to me that space exploration was a bold and noble undertaking, worth the lives, treasure and sacrifices it invariably takes. I started checking out all the books I could get at my local public library on space and space exploration. One lucky day during summer vacation I found a copy of …On Course to the Stars, a book about Roger Chaffee co-written by his father, in the library’s used-book sale section for 25￠. I couldn’t believe my luck and was thrilled on my bike ride back home but also dumbfounded at how the library could sell something to me for a quarter that I considered priceless. My visit to the museum took place during the late 1970s, more than ten years after the Apollo 1 tragedy, so in retrospect I can understand why the library decided to get rid of the book but at the time it seemed almost sacrilegious.

The excitement and wonder for outer space that grabbed me as a child at the Roger B. Chaffee planetarium never left me and I consider it a pivotal moment in my life. Every now and then I wonder what it was about that particular age, that particular day and the particular things that I saw that had such an effect on me. If any of the conditions had been a little bit different, would the outcome have been the same?

Just a few months prior to that event I had to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up for a class project. So perhaps the question was still on my mind. I ended up drawing a picture of a person working on cars and wrote that I wanted to be an automobile mechanic. I didn’t know any professional mechanics at the time but most of the adult males in my life spent their evenings and weekends working on some kind of car project. I also really liked cars (still do) and figured if people worked on cars for fun, then it must be a great job to have. I thought it certainly beat being a physician which is what I wanted to be up until second grade when I realized working with sick human bodies was not appealing to me at all.

If I hadn’t made the trip to the museum that day, I’m sure I still would have gone on to study physics and later develop a specialty in optics but I often wonder if I would have been so committed to space exploration. Before and during my time in graduate school I worked for a terrific company doing applied research. We developed new automotive cameras and sensors that have just now started to become standard equipment in most mid to high-end automobiles. I enjoyed that job a lot and liked my colleagues as well. I started considering staying there forever until upper management started to do inexplicable things that put our research into disarray. When NASA showed an interest in hiring me about the same time, it was an emotionally easy decision to leave that work and company behind. Even though I had to take a cut in pay, going to work for NASA fulfilled a former second grader’s dream.

After coming to NASA, visiting the Apollo 1 pad was always on my list of things to do. But until recently, all my trips to Kennedy Space Center were too hectic to allow me enough time to do it. Fortunately, in support of OSIRIS-REx I ended up going down to Kennedy on eight different occasions and at last was able to get to the Apollo 1 site. When I found it I was surprised at how lonely and abandoned it was – even though it’s not that far off a busy road. There is very little of the launch infrastructure left. There are two plaques commemorating Apollo 1 attached to the remaining concrete launch pedestal. There are also three benches off to the side of the concrete launch pad with the names of each Apollo 1 astronaut and a blue kiosk with faded pictures of Launch Complex 34 and the Apollo 1 astronauts. The whole area feels like a forgotten memorial. There aren’t any signs to help you find it.

That first visit to Complex 34 reminded me a little bit of my first trip to Arlington National Cemetery. The first time I went there, visiting the graves of Roger B. Chaffee and his Apollo 1 commander were a high priority for me. I went to the visitors’ center to find out where they were, but after about 20 minutes of waiting in a slowly moving line I decided that it couldn’t be that hard to find them on my own by just asking around. When I headed out into the cemetery the few workers that I could find had no idea where the graves were. The last one I talked to directed me toward the generic astronaut memorial that is near the Tomb of the Unknown Solider. I couldn’t believe that no one who worked there seemed to know where the two Apollo 1 heroes’ graves were! How soon people forget.

On a subsequent visit to Arlington I was able to find the graves of Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom (Ed White, the third Apollo 1 crewmember is buried at West Point). They are in a scenic location and I was encouraged when I found several pebbles there on their headstones as testimonies to other peoples’ recent visits. Similarly, after I made a few more visits to Launch Complex 34 I started to see a few other visitors as well. Usually they would come by themselves. They could have been United Launch Alliance (ULA) employees, SpaceX employees or other NASA civil servants or contractors. I don’t know. No one ever disturbed the silence. Most of them looked younger than me though and I was encouraged that the legacy of Apollo 1 is still being recognized by following generations.

Many of the senior leaders on the OSIRIS-REx project have told me what inspired them to get into the space business was watching the Apollo program and the landings on the Moon when they were children. That must have been such a great thing to witness live! I have wondered whether we would have made it to the Moon without the Apollo 1 fire. If the Apollo 1 crew had gone into space but died there or some other crew died during a follow-on mission, would the program have pressed on to land people on the Moon? The Apollo 1 fire didn’t just painfully bring to the forefront the issues with an oxygen-rich atmosphere under high pressure, electrical wiring and flaws with the escape hatch. Other problems with the Apollo 1 command module were also identified and corrected as a result of the ensuing investigation – undoubtedly reducing the risk to future crews. If an Apollo crew had perished in space, it would have been much more difficult to determine the root cause and necessary corrective actions. Perhaps being the signature goal of a beloved martyred president would have been enough to save the Apollo program from premature cancellation but the longer the flight hiatus lasted and the longer the investigation dragged on, the more likely the program would have been cancelled if a fatal accident had occurred in space. Would there even be an OSIRIS-REx if there hadn’t been an Apollo?

Those of us who work in space exploration today owe much to those who came before us. We get to do really amazing things now quite regularly because they made the miraculous routine – and recovered so ably from failures. To those astronauts, cosmonauts and test pilots who made the ultimate sacrifice we owe a tremendous debt. It’s important to keep their memories and values alive to inspire and remind all of us about what great endeavors require. Back in Western Michigan they still give out a generous Roger B. Chaffee college scholarship every year to a local high school student. Roger Chaffee’s nephew and other family members take great care to keep the scholarship going as a tribute to his memory. I was honored to be the speaker at one of their scholarship banquets a few years ago and grateful to contribute to keeping the Apollo 1 legacy alive.

As I stood watching the OSIRIS-REx launch, less than 100 yards over my left shoulder was the Apollo/Saturn V Center which houses a Saturn V rocket and other Apollo memorabilia. Inside that building they have a display honoring the Apollo 1 crew that contains personal items from the astronauts. Roger Chaffee’s wristwatch is displayed there. As I watched our spacecraft head out I thought about the former Apollo 1 launch pad and how spectacular the OSIRIS-REx launch would have been from there. Just like it has ever since the late 1960s, Complex 34 sits as a silent witness as we continue to expand our intellectual borders. Exploration continues all around it. Less than three miles south of the pad is the site where SpaceX currently lands the first stage of their spent rockets, a particularly exciting capability of our newest launch vehicles. OSIRIS-REx hasn’t done anything too remarkable yet. The Atlas V rocket OSIRIS-REx rode into space is about as tried and true as it gets. But right now the mission is on track to do wondrous things, some first of their kind things for NASA, in just a few years. We can hardly wait to get to Bennu and prove ourselves worthy of the rich legacy we have inherited. We are focused on doing the job right and inspiring the next generation of explorers that come after us. It is a humbling but exciting time!

Dr. Brent J. Bos is a research physicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and is currently supporting the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission as the Optics Discipline Lead and TAGCAMS instrument scientist. The views expressed herein are solely his and should not be construed or interpreted as an official position of or an endorsement by NASA.