Gus Grissom

Grissom was born in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana, in 1926, the son of a railroad signalman. He married his high-school girlfriend, Betty Moore, in 1945, right after his first stint in the Army Air Forces ended, and used the G.I. Bill to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Purdue in 1950. He joined the new Air Force, won his wings, and flew 100 combat missions over Korea in F-86 Sabres, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross before he turned 26. Back home he taught other pilots to fly, then talked his way into the Air Force's test pilot school at Edwards, the proving ground for men who wanted to fly something faster than anyone had built yet.

NASA picked him as one of the Mercury Seven in 1959, and he flew Liberty Bell 7 on a suborbital hop in July 1961 — a flight that nearly killed him when the hatch blew open at splashdown and the capsule sank with him still half in the water, his suit filling and losing buoyancy before a helicopter got him out. NASA cleared him of triggering it, but the question never entirely went away. He flew again on Gemini 3 in 1965 with John Young, the first astronaut to make a second trip, and jokingly named the capsule Molly Brown after the unsinkable Broadway character, a dig at his own reputation. NASA then made him commander of the first Apollo mission, where he was blunt in public about the spacecraft's problems, telling a reporter they were arriving in bushelfuls.

On January 27, 1967, during a routine pad test at Cape Kennedy, a spark in damaged wiring ignited the pure-oxygen atmosphere inside the sealed Apollo 1 capsule. Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee had no way out: the hatch he had once been wrongly suspected of blowing open too easily was, this time, a hatch that opened inward and could not be forced against the internal pressure fast enough. All three men died of asphyxiation within seconds of the fire starting. Grissom had been complaining about the spacecraft for months and, five days earlier, had hung a lemon on the simulator as a joke about how badly it worked. Deke Slayton, who ran the astronaut corps, later wrote that if anyone had walked on the Moon first, he had wanted it to be Grissom.

Grissom was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on January 31, 1967, beside Chaffee, with White laid to rest separately at West Point. The fire forced NASA to redesign the Apollo hatch so it could be opened from inside in seconds rather than minutes, a fix that came only after three men had already died testing the old one. Congress gave his family the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978. His name now sits on an Air Force base in Indiana, a crater on the far side of the Moon, and an asteroid, and he has been played on screen four times, most memorably by Fred Ward in The Right Stuff.

Gus Grissom's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Liberty Bell 7 mission
  Second Mercury flight, a 15-minute suborbital hop 1961
• Multi-axis hand controller invention
  Developed for Gemini and Apollo rendezvous and docking 1965
• Gemini 3 mission
  First astronaut to fly in space twice 1965
• Apollo 1 mission
  Command module test that ended in the pad fire 1967

• April 3, 1926 aged 0 Born in Mitchell, Indiana
• July 6, 1945 aged 19 Marries Betty Moore
• February 1950 aged 23 Graduates from Purdue with a degree in mechanical engineering
• April 13, 1959 aged 33 Selected as one of the Mercury Seven
• July 21, 1961 aged 35 Flies Liberty Bell 7, the capsule that sinks after splashdown
• March 23, 1965 aged 38 Flies Gemini 3 with John Young, his second spaceflight
• January 22, 1967 aged 40 Hangs a lemon on the Apollo simulator in protest
• January 27, 1967 aged 40 Dies with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire
• January 31, 1967 aged 40 Buried at Arlington National Cemetery

• Ed White 1930–1967
  Gemini 4 astronaut who performed the first American spacewalk, dying in the Apollo 1 fire. died beside him in the Apollo 1 fire
• Deke Slayton 1924–1993
  One of the original Mercury Seven who later directed astronaut selection and flew on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. wanted him on the Moon first
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. fellow Mercury Seven astronaut
• Frank Borman 1928–2023
  Commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the Moon, and later CEO of Eastern Air Lines. investigated the fire that killed him