Sixty years ago, a confident, yet beleaguered president, John F. Kennedy, strode into the House of Representatives to address Congress on what he called “Urgent National Needs.” JFK had delivered his first State of the Union address on January 30, but now he felt the American public needed to hear from him again.
The previous month, Kennedy had been humiliated with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and now he sought to inject some life back into the American consciousness, to get the focus of his administration back on track, and that was aggressively confronting the Soviet Union and winning the Cold War. And one vehicle to do that, he believed, was the budding space race.
Only twenty days before the president’s address, America had put its first man in space, a short sub-orbital flight by Alan Shepard that lasted but 15 minutes; now Kennedy was throwing down the gauntlet, only this time it was the new frontier of space. The Soviets were ahead of the Americans at that point, but Kennedy set a long-range goal he knew the Russians would never be able to achieve, a destination that sent shockwaves through NASA and the astronaut corps: The Moon.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,” the president said. To win the battle of space, he concluded, “I believe we should go to the moon.”
From that important moment, America seemed to be off and running, headed for a rendezvous with destiny on the lunar surface. NASA, momentarily shell-shocked by the announcement, soon dug in its heels and came up with a comprehensive program and a timeline to accomplish JFK’s ambitious goal by the end of 1969.
Project Mercury, with its objective of putting a man in space and orbit the earth, ended in May 1963, two years after Kennedy’s speech. Project Gemini, which would perfect techniques essential for a lunar flight, began in March 1965 and ended in November 1966.
In those two pioneering programs, totaling 16 manned flights, America surpassed the Soviets and were ready to take aim at the moon. And there was still three full years remaining on the clock.
Then tragedy struck. Five years and eight months after Kennedy’s stirring words, on January 27, 1967, as the United States was just weeks away from inaugurating its moon program – Project Apollo – with the first flight of a new spacecraft, a disastrous fire broke out inside the capsule as it sat on the launch pad during a routine simulation, killing the crew of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Everything immediately came to a halt.
The moon program was shelved for the foreseeable future, as NASA had to determine what caused the tragedy and ensure that it would never happen again. Kennedy’s deadline certainly hung in the balance, while the possibility existed that a landing on the moon might never be reached.
The space agency, though, rolled up its sleeves and went to work. The disaster was investigated thoroughly, reports were written, recommendations were made, and the spacecraft was re-designed. Important safety features were added and what came out of the tragedy of Apollo 1 was a spacecraft capable of making a lunar flight.
On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy put the nation on a path to the moon, but it was the tragedy of Apollo 1 that ensured the goal would be met. Without the fire, and the remaking of the Apollo spacecraft, America was poised to fail in its quest for glory in space. But because of the sacrifice of Grissom, White, and Chaffee, America planted its flag on the lunar surface before the end of the decade.
Today, more than half a century later, the legacy of Apollo 1 endures, and with the robust efforts of SpaceX, which is poised to send astronauts to the moon in the very near future, the lessons learned on that tragic day endure as well.
Ryan S. Walters 
Leave a Reply