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Apollo 1 Essay

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Apollo 1 Essay
Apollo One is the name given to the AS-204 spacecraft after it was destroyed by fire during a training exercise. January 27, 1967 the crew of Apollo commonly known as Saturn 204 began training for the first Apollo mission. On this mission they were going to orbit Earth, they were scheduled to launch February 21. The AS-204 mission was scheduled for the first quarter of 1967, having already missed a target date for the last quarter of 1966. The shuttle was placed on launch pad 34 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was sitting on a Saturn 1B rocket.
The shuttle was set on a launching pad as if they were going to launch it, but it wasn’t fueled. It was a simulation test to go through the launching actions. Astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom the second American astronaut to fly into space, Edward H. White II the first American astronaut to "walk" in space, and Roger B. Chaffee a "rookie" astronaut on his first space mission. They began the process at 1:00PM. From the beginning they had a lot of problems (including communication failures); this delayed their practice run until 5:40PM. At 6:31PM they finally heard a voice …show more content…
The first Saturn V launch (uncrewed) in November 1967 was designated Apollo 4 (no missions were ever designated Apollo 2 or 3). The Apollo 1 Command Module capsule 012 was impounded and studied after the accident and was then locked away in a storage facility at NASA Langley Research Center. The changes made to the Apollo Command Module as a result of the tragedy resulted in a highly reliable craft which, with the exception of Apollo 13, helped make the complex and dangerous trip to the Moon almost commonplace. The eventual success of the Apollo program is a tribute to Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, three fine astronauts whose tragic loss was not in
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