Apollo 1 Ethical Violations Essay

The Space Race began when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space in 1957. The United States’ answer to this was the Apollo program. While the Apollo program did have successful launches, such as the Apollo 11 launch that landed Americans on the moon, not every launch went as smoothly. Fifty years ago, a disaster occurred that shook the Apollo program to its core. On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 command module was consumed by a fire during one of its launch rehearsal tests. This led to the death of three astronauts, Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, Edward Higgins White, and Roger Bruce Chaffee. The fire was caused by a number of factors, most of which were technical. These causes range from the abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere of the

spacecraft to the prevalence of flammable Velcro. All of these causes are avoidable with a reasonable amount of research and foresight. There were also specifications of the spacecraft that did not help the fire spread, but these specifications prevented the astronauts from being able to survive the emergency. Regardless of whether the events caused the fire to spread or led to the death of the astronauts, all of the events had something in common. The events could have been prevented if the astronauts’ safety had been held at the forefront of the spacecraft design. Fortunately, this led to the redesigning of the spacecraft in order to ensure the safety of the astronauts and prevent a disaster such as the Apollo 1 Fire from ever happening again.
Introduction

On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 spacecraft was undergoing a test which would determine whether or not the spacecraft could operate only relying on internal power (Moskowitz, 2012). Unfortunately, during this test a fire erupted in the Command Module (Moskowitz, 2012). This fire led to the deaths of Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, Edward Higgins White, and Roger Bruce Chaffee. When the investigation team looked into the causes of the fire, they noticed many hazardous conditions. All of the hazardous conditions could have been avoided if the safety of the astronauts had been considered foremost in the design and launch of the spacecraft. These findings and acknowledgements of flaws concerning safety led to NASA redesigning the spacecraft to be safer for the astronauts. Throughout this report, an overview of the Apollo 1 fire, the technical causes of it, the ethical dilemmas concerning the technical causes, and the ramifications of the fire will be discussed.

Ethical Issues

Although the issues that caused the Apollo 1 fire are technical, there is an abundance of ethical issues that can be discussed concerning them.

To correctly assess the ethical violations, one needs only to consider the safety of the astronauts as the top priority during the launch. With this perspective, it is easy to see the ethical violations that occurred during this launch test. Inside of the Apollo 1 Command Module, there were many flammable materials present(Moskowitz, 2012). In a closed space, an abundance of flammable material is incredibly dangerous. Even if NASA had considered and fixed this issue, there are numerous other reasons the fire was able to be as dangerous as it was. The atmosphere of the spacecraft was one hundred percent oxygen (Moskowitz, 2012). Oxygen is a highly flammable gas, so once the fire started, the oxygen helped it quickly spread. Having a pure oxygen atmosphere in any situation where there both humans present and any chance of a fire starting is a severe ethical violation. The combinations of both the flammable materials present and the oxygen atmosphere meant that as soon as a fire occurred, the astronauts’ only chance of survival was to escape the module. Unfortunately for the astronauts, the hatch that they needed to use to escape was inward-opening (Moskowitz, 2012). The fire had been raging for long enough to cause the pressure inside of the cabin to be significantly increased (Moskowitz, 2012). The high pressure caused by this fire

led to the astronauts not being able to get the hatch open (Moskowitz, 2012). Through sheer lack of foresight, NASA had created the perfect storm of dangerous situations for the astronauts inside of Apollo 1. It seems as if NASA had not even considered the possibility of a fire occurring during the launch. To further cement the concept that NASA had not kept the safety of its astronauts in mind when preparing the launch test, the Apollo 204 (designated name of Apollo 1) Review Board determined that “the test conditions were extremely hazardous” and that “adequate safety precautions were neither established nor observed for this test” (“Findings, Determinations And Recommendations,” n.d., points 2 and 5). The Board also reached the conclusions similar to some of those previously mentioned, but the two points mentioned are all that are needed to grasp how dangerous and ethically wrong Apollo 1 was (“Findings, Determinations And Recommendations,” n.d.).

Consequences

Fortunately, NASA learned from their mistakes and redesigned many of the aspects that caused the Apollo 1 fire to be so disastrous.

NASA decreased the prevalence of flammable material inside the Command Module (Moskowitz, 2012). Along with the removal of flammable material, NASA also ensured that the materials inside the spacecraft were less, if at all, flammable (Moskowitz, 2012). NASA substituted many materials with less flammable, more protective material and included a portable fire extinguisher in the spacecraft (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). A specific example of this substitution is the use of a wire insulation that has a coating “so fire-resistant that it can't burn even when put in a pure oxygen environment” (Moskowitz, 2012, paragraph 13). As noted previously, the atmosphere in the spacecraft being one hundred percent oxygen was an important factor in the spreading of the fire. To solve this issue, NASA performed flammability tests which led them to the conclusion that having a mixture of sixty percent oxygen and forty percent nitrogen in the module’s atmosphere would reduce the chance of an Apollo 1 repeat happening (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). This mixture would be less flammable than the one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere, but the one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere could still be used as the spacecraft left Earth’s atmosphere without the risk of combustion (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). This led to NASA adopting a method where they slowly replaced the

atmosphere inside the cabin with oxygen until the one hundred percent oxygen mark was reached (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). The inward-opening hatch design was replaced with an outward-opening one. This new hatch would be able to be opened “from inside in seven seconds and by a pad safety crew in 10 seconds”(“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d., “Cause of the Apollo 1 Fire”). This means that not only is the hatch able to be opened in a high pressure atmosphere, but the hatch can also be opened much faster than the original inward-opening hatch(“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). The changes did not stop at problems within the spacecraft. Launch Complex 34, the launch site of Apollo 1, underwent changes that allowed it to better handle emergency situations such as the Apollo 1 fire (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). Aside from the corrections NASA has made, there is also a memorial service held for the fallen astronauts ( Weitering, 2017). On January 31, 2017, the “Day of Remembrance” for the Apollo 1 incident, NASA held a ceremony at the grave two of the astronauts were buried at, honoring the astronauts ( Weitering, 2017). Another way fallen astronauts are honored is the Space Mirror Memorial, shown in Figure 1 below, located at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida (Home Page of The Astronauts Memorial Foundation,” n.d.). The names of the fallen astronauts are engraved into the memorial, and one can find the names of Grissom, White, and Chaffee on the memorial (“Those Honored,”n.d.).

Figure 1. (Image of the Space Memorial, n.d.)

Conclusions

The Apollo 1 fire is a disaster that will go down in NASA’s history as one of the most tragic incidents NASA has ever been a direct cause of. There was a plethora of technical causes that led to the death of the three astronauts inside the Apollo 1 during its “plugs out” test. Each of these causes was entirely preventable if NASA had just considered the safety of their astronauts beforehand rather than rushing to launch Apollo 1 as fast as possible. Fortunately, NASA has done its best to fix all of the issues that led to the disastrous fire. Even with all of these changes, it is impossible to guarantee that future incidents will not happen, but that is not what is important in these situations. What is of utmost importance is that the lives of the astronauts are considered above progress in space exploration.