Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee accounted for three of seven total accidental deaths leading up to the 1969 moon landing. Each one had a life and story, such as Grissom’s wife Betty working late as a telephone operator to help put her husband through college on the G.I. Bill while he studied mechanical engineering.
When the fire broke out under the astronauts’ craft, Chafee got on the radio and said, “Hey, we’re burning up,” as The New York Times cites. White opened the hatch to escape, but by then the interior of the craft had been flooded with pure oxygen at a pressure slightly higher than Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, the fire underneath the craft ate through the oxygen-rich air inside, and the three men asphyxiated before they could be rescued. Their burns, it’s reported, were survivable.
After the accident the men’s bodies were transported to a nearby medical facility. Photographers took pictures of the scene and the astronauts inside their vessel, but these photos have thankfully never been released. Per NASA, autopsies conducted by the Air Force recorded “asphyxia from carbon monoxide and other toxic gases resulting from the fire” as the men’s official cause of death.
On The New York Times, Sonny Witt, 45th Space Wing director of operations for Division 1 at Patrick Air Force Base, said of the astronauts’ families, “They are the ones that lost the husbands and brothers and fathers. Mistakes were made, and they paid the price.”
