40 Years

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo I fire, which took the lives of the three astronauts, Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger Chaffee. No launch was planned for January 27, 1967; instead, the plan was for a launch simulation that would test whether the Apollo spacecraft would operate nominally on internal power, detached from all cables and umbilicals ("plugs-out"). If the spacecraft had passed this and subsequent tests, it might have been ready to fly by February. The fire is believed to have been caused by a spark somewhere in the capsule's 50 km (31 miles) of wiring. Due to the pure oxygen inside the capsule (which was at a pressure of 15 psithe fire was quickly out of control. A similar March 1961 incident had previously claimed the life of Soviet cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko when a fire started in the pure oxygen atmosphere in the isolation chamber he had been occupying, a calamity the USSR concealed from the public for years. A quote from Grissom is on the plaque attached to the abandoned Pad 34: "The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

January 27th, 1967, was also the date my parents got married.

(With thanks to Wikipedia for the quick history.)