Accidents and Coincendence

On this day (well what's left of it. For me it's 11pm) in 1967 the crew of Apollo 1 died in a fire aboard their spacecraft on the launch pad. Good and bad came from this though. The deaths of these three men prompted a huge investigation and helped make space flight much safer. The bad was the program was delayed. I have conflicted feelings about this era of space travel. The space race with the Soviet Union pushed development very quickly. That was a good thing because it provided motivation to explore space and further science. It was bad because sometimes we pushed too fast.

Also on a side note, my mother knew Ed White (in the center). His younger brother had pilot training at an air force base in Big Spring, Texas, where my grandfather was stationed. She remembers him and his younger brother coming over for dinner sometimes. I just find it amazing that she knew this man. She described him as just a normal guy, which he was (even though a few years earlier he became the first human to make an EVA - or spacewalk - outside a space capsule).

I wouldn't exactly call these men hero's. I'd just call them men, as they were. Men with the guts enough to ride fairly untested rockets into space and then come back down.