On the evening of 27 January 1967, three astronauts sat strapped into their command module at Launch Complex 34, Cape Kennedy. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were running a countdown rehearsal for Apollo 1, the first crewed Apollo flight, due to launch on 21 February. As on launch day, the hatches were sealed and the cabin was filled with pure oxygen at slightly above sea-level pressure.
The rocket had no fuel in it. Because of that, NASA’s history office notes, the test had been considered non-hazardous and was not reviewed by the relevant safety organizations. No provisions had been made for rescuing the crew.
At 6:31 p.m. a flash fire broke out in the cabin. Within seconds the pressure vessel cracked. The astronauts tried to open the inner hatch, which opened inward and took 90 seconds even under ideal conditions; with the pressure inside, it could not be opened at all. The pad crew fought dense smoke and heat to reach the outer hatches. By the time they got them open, all three men were dead.
The review board’s 3,000-page report could not name a specific source of ignition. It found evidence of arcing in wires under Grissom’s couch, more flammable material in the cabin than was allowed, and the oxygen atmosphere that let the fire spread so fast. NASA replaced the hatch with one that opened in three seconds and tightly restricted what could burn inside a spacecraft.
Gene Kranz was then a flight director and a branch chief in Mission Control in Houston. Half a century later, in testimony to a Senate subcommittee, he said “many of us lived through that 18 seconds.”“The crew could have called it off. I could have called it off,” he said. Nobody, he went on, had said stop.
What his team did next, by his account, was sit down together. “We sat down after we finished and wrote up the searing impressions we had in such a fashion that we would never go through this again,” he told the senators. They called the document The Foundations. In a 2014 speech, Kranz described it as “a values statement” covering “such things as discipline, confidence, responsibility, toughness, teamwork.” Toughness, his written statement said, entered the team’s vocabulary after the fire, meaning “we are forever accountable for our actions, what we do, or, in the case of Apollo 1, what we failed to do.”
He said in 2019 that he still got requests for the document every day, and was surprised to find it on the walls of Fortune 500 companies.