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Message:: [QUOTE="TheNickelGuy, post: 8322251, member: 20201"]1967 Three Gallant MenApollo 1Sterling Silver Franklin MintNational Commemorative Society [ATTACH=full]1474399[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1474400[/ATTACH] On 27 January 1967Apollo 1 was sitting on the launch pad atop a Saturn 1B rocket at Cape Canaveral.The Apollo 1 crew commander, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, was an Air Force veteran of the Korean War. He was among NASA's first group of seven astronauts, the Mercury Seven. Grissom was America's second person in space in 1961. Fellow spaceflight veteran Ed White, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, was the first American to make a spacewalk, on Gemini 4 in 1965. Roger Chaffee was a seasoned Navy lieutenant commander who joined the program in 1963.Although a rookie in space, he had spent years supporting the Gemini program, most publicly as CapCom on Gemini 4. Now getting a chance to fly after five years in the program, he said, "I think it will be a lot of fun." The crew was practicing the Launch procedure for the actual flight the following month.The morning of the test, the crew suited up and detected a foul odor in the breathing oxygen, which took about an hour to fix. Then the communications system acted up. Grissom vented at 6:30 p.m. "How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between three buildings?" With communications problems dragging on, the practice countdown was held.Suddenly, at 6:30:54, an unidentified electrical arc ignited the Command Module’s pure, high-pressure pure oxygen atmosphere that was being used to replicate conditions in orbit. Then at 6:31 p.m. came a frightening word from the spacecraft: "Fire."The fire engulfed the interior capsule and the astronauts’ efforts to open the hatch and escape were in vain. Less than a minute later all three had perished. [ATTACH=full]1474401[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]

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