More than 50 years ago, a fire killed three Apollo astronauts. My grandfather was there.

It was a hot, humid day when my grandfather, James D. Gleaves, began his morning routine on July 18, 1967. He kissed his wife and two young daughters goodbye, pulled out of the driveway of his trailer just east of Orlando, Florida, headed west on Route 50, then hopped on the parkway toward Florida’s east coast. After that, Gleaves abandoned his daily routine. Instead of reporting to Cape Canaveral for his job as a mechanical lead technician at North American Aviation, he went to a dock at nearby Port Canaveral and stepped onto a tugboat traveling to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

As the tugboat churned up the Banana River, Gleaves watched over an object that represented one of the darkest days in NASA’s history: a large, white metal storage container that held what remained of the Apollo 204 command module, which had caught fire six months prior. The launchpad accident had killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. And it was an accident that Gleaves had witnessed firsthand.

On this day, however, the mood was relaxed as Gleaves, along with fellow North American employee Harvey Renshaw and NASA engineers Charlie Stevens and Bob Reed, journeyed north. Gleaves fondly remembers dangling his feet off the side of the slow-moving boat, waving to curious onlookers ashore. “There was a big ole paddlewheel on the back of the boat,” he says. “We sunbathed and fished all the way up there.”

The trip lasted five days, five hours, and 15 minutes, but the terrible incident that had placed Gleaves aboard the tugboat had spanned less than a minute earlier that year—on the evening of January 27. The launchpad fire was catastrophic on myriad levels. Not only had it taken the lives of three astronauts, it had also undermined confidence in NASA’s ability to meet President John F. Kennedy’s end-of-decade moonshot vow. The tragedy raised fundamental questions on how to ensure safety on crewed space missions, a challenge that continues for NASA to this day.

For Gleaves, being a part of the small crew that delivered the Apollo 1 space capsule to Langley was the final episode in a string of events that included him frantically working to save the men trapped inside the spacecraft he had helped manufacture. Gleaves’ involvement also included disassembling the command module piece by piece during the subsequent investigations.

For years, my grandfather never spoke about the tragedy. But now, 56 years later, after showing his family the site of the accident for the first time, he’s sharing memories of what happened that day at Launch Complex 34.

“I thought we were all dead.”

Gleaves began his career working as a “labor grade 12” mechanic at North American Aviation, where he was later promoted to lead mechanical technician. On January 27, he found himself in the white room (the small clean room astronauts pass through before entering a spacecraft). The white room was attached to a 60-foot-long, cantilevered swing arm suspended 320 feet above the ground, and Gleaves was there in advance of a scheduled “plugs-out” test to see if the spacecraft would operate on internal power after being detached from all cables and umbilicals. The mission was expected to launch in February. 

The day before the fire, Gleaves had worked with other technicians at Launch Complex 34 to install the boost protective cover, which shrouded the entire command module—including the inward opening hatch—and would insulate the spacecraft from aerodynamic heating during launch. When his work was completed, Gleaves took one of the two high-speed service elevators used by pad workers down to ground level, where he drove off the lot, the service lights on the tower switching off for the night behind him.

At 1 p.m. the next day, Chaffee, White, and Grissom entered the command module. At 2 p.m. the hatch was closed behind them and they began a simulated countdown. The exercise had been delayed throughout the afternoon as the Apollo team worked to troubleshoot technical problems, including a glitchy microphone. At 6:30 p.m., the countdown remained on hold at T minus 10 minutes. The astronauts were running through their checklist.

When the clock on the blockhouse wall flashed 6:30:03, Gleaves was on the umbilical outside the white room with L.D. Reece, a North American quality control inspector. Then—at four ticks past 6:31 p.m.—a voice cried out. “We have a bad fire!” a crew member, probably Chaffee, screamed, as the inertial platform in the capsule indicated movement. More cries for help came from within the command module as panic consumed those in the white room.

Gleaves and Reece were still waiting on the signal to pull the plug on the umbilical when they heard the commotion. Donald O. Babbitt, North American’s pad leader at the time of the fire, was at his desk as the temperature and pressure increased inside the command module. He yelled for Gleaves and the other workers to “get them out of there!” Gleaves charged in first, followed by Reece and two mechanical technicians, Stephen B. Clemmons and Jerry W. Hawkins.

As Gleaves opened the white room door, he yelled to his co-workers, “Let’s get the men out!” while making his way through the smoke-filled room. The chaos of what happened next became fixed in his memory.

Technician Gary Propst yelled for someone to blow the hatch. Just 14 seconds after the first call of “fire,” the cabin pressure had increased from 17 to 29 pounds per square inch. The command module was at a breaking point as the men inside were surrounded by flames that spread under their couches. Then, a sound—later likened by Gleaves to a firecracker exploding in a tin can—rang out. The vessel meant to carry Grissom, White, and Chaffee into space had ruptured.

Gleaves and the others had anticipated the explosion, and they hurried to exit the white room through the cloud of smoke, but they hadn’t been quick enough. The force of the blast shoved Gleaves into one of the doors. He quickly staggered to his feet, as a horrible burning smell entered his nostrils. Looking up, he saw balls of fire shooting from the command module’s open access and tumbling down over the launch escape system’s nozzles.

“When the fire blew us up against that door and there wasn’t anything we could see but fire and debris, I had one thought, ‘What are my daughters going to do now?’ ” says Gleaves. “I thought we were all dead.”

Despite the danger, the technicians in the white room worked to open the three-layer hatch, using a one-half-inch Allen wrench that had been welded into a T-handle. It fit all three of the layers, each containing a ratchet drive system that moved the latches in or out to open or close the door. It would take 22 full turns of the tool to pry open each layer.

The men worked frantically in shifts, taking intermittent breaks on the swing arm for fresh air before going back inside. At one point, Gleaves fell to his knees after he had opened the boost protective hatch. He was nearly unconscious from smoke inhalation, and Babbitt ordered his co-workers to pull him out.

Reece and Clemmons were able to open the next hatch shortly after, when Reece picked it up and walked out onto the swing arm, where he tossed the hatch to the side in what the other men described as an incredible feat of strength.

After a short break, Gleaves went back in to assist. The hatch’s inner layer had been partially opened, but it was stuck. Gleaves grabbed the scalding hot hatch with his bare hands and shook it violently, but it wouldn’t move. He told the men to stand back as he gave it a kick, which sent the hatch thudding into the cabin behind Chaffee’s couch. It had been just five and half minutes after the initial cry for help.

Reece, donning an ill-fitting gas mask, took a flashlight and peered into the darkness. The other men held his legs as he slowly lowered himself into the capsule. Suddenly, a wheezing sound made him call out for what he thought was one of the astronauts gasping for breath. He removed his mask only to realize that the sound was oxygen still flowing from one of the command module feed lines.

As he backed out of the capsule, he looked at the other men, shook his head, and began to cry. “They’re dead,” said Reece. “They’re all dead.”

The next thing Gleaves knew he was on the swing arm, still stunned from the 15-minute ordeal. He looked down to notice his shoes gone. His hands throbbed from trying to remove the hatch and his lungs were inflamed. He was helped down from the tower. On the ground, a fleet of ambulances provided oxygen to those who needed it as smoke continued to billow into the sky.

“J.C. McConnell escorted me down to the ground level and sat with me in the ambulance,” says Gleaves. “Then Babbitt came down. Right after the fire, 27 of us ended up in the dispensary.” Gleaves and Babbitt, who had both inhaled vast amounts of toxic fumes during the rescue attempt, were required to stay overnight in the hospital.

“Go Fever”

Events moved quickly after the fire. The following Sunday, Gleaves was resting at home when a knock came at the door. He was summoned back to the Cape for questioning by his colleague and friend, Leroy West, a fellow North American employee. Though he was still recovering from smoke inhalation, Gleaves sat down with NASA’s director of launch operations Rocco Petrone and the Langley Research Center’s director, Floyd L. Thompson.

After giving his statement, Gleaves returned to work and was part of the massive team disassembling the command module in the pyrotechnic installation building. He remembers the diligence involved. If a screw was to be removed, the North American supervisor needed to write an engineering order specifying the tool to be used, each step needing approval from the already-convened Apollo 204 review board, which was chaired by Thompson.

The review board would eventually conclude that the key cause of the fire was the pure oxygen atmosphere inside the command module, pressurized at 16.7 pounds per square inch. An electrical arc from frayed wires likely sparked the conflagration, which had burned hotter than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it consumed what investigators would determine was an excess of flammable materials. The fire lasted less than a minute. The astronauts had suffocated from carbon monoxide and other lethal gases.

An ensuing New York Times editorial criticized NASA for putting the three astronauts “into what even a high school chemistry student would know was a potential oxygen incendiary bomb, one needing only a spark to initiate catastrophe.” It seemed as if the drive to win the space race had created a culture of recklessness and what space historian Andrew Chaikin later identified as “perceptual blindness” to design flaws. NASA, for instance, had rejected recommendations for a mixed atmosphere inside the capsule, deciding that pure oxygen would be lighter and easier to maintain. To save labor costs, wires were bundled by machine. Astronauts had noticed some of the wires were frayed.

“While Grissom complained long and loud behind the scenes about many of the problems with his spacecraft, he likely tolerated the bad wiring because he, NASA, and its contractors were at that time firmly in the grip of a deadly malady called ‘Go Fever,’ ” wrote George Leopold in his 2016 biography of Grissom, Calculated Risk. “Grissom and his crew were gambling that the growing list of problems with the spacecraft would somehow be fixed in time for the February launch.”

Gleaves, who acknowledges that a “go fever” mentality had set in at the time, nevertheless insists that safety was always pushed as a priority by team leads. Still, he had observed cavalier behavior among some workers. Men siphoned off the pure alcohol used to purge the environmental control unit and took excessively long breaks. He witnessed a wrench and other worksite debris tumbling out of the command module during one of many stability tests.

He also acknowledges he hadn’t received any emergency training that would have prepared him for the fire until after the tragedy. “Then, after the fire, they sent us to firefighting training sessions, taught us how to use Scott-Air Paks [an open-circuit and self-contained breathing apparatus],” he says. “They didn’t do that before the accident.”

Deadlines for each development stage that were tied to monetary incentives for North American also proved to be a factor in the lead up to the accident. “The bad thing was NASA would establish milestones that you would meet come hell or high water, even though there were systems that weren’t finished and checkout that wasn’t finished,” says Gleaves. “But of course North American wanted to meet that milestone because it came with a huge incentive.”

Remembrance

After Gleaves and the tugboat crew arrived at Langley, the remains of the capsule were lifted off the ship and transported to a secure storage unit (where they remain to this day). Gleaves joined Renshaw in a rental car that took them to the Norfolk airport, where they boarded a direct flight home. Gleaves slept in his own bed that night, a welcome change from the tugboat cabin. In his eyes, that chapter of his life was now closed.

The men who attempted to save the three astronauts attained a certain amount of celebrity status within North American and NASA in the year following the fire. Gleaves, however, was no fan of the attention, and only begrudgingly traveled to Washington, D.C., to accept NASA’s medal for exceptional bravery in October 1967.

Gleaves had never interacted with the astronauts before the accident, but he did meet Grissom’s and Chaffee’s wives. “I think we were headed for the limousine after the medal ceremony and [Mrs. Chaffee] came running out and thanked us for what we tried to do,” he recalls.

A North American Aviation video documented the medal ceremony. Noticeably missing from the footage was Gleaves, who had asked the cameraman, as politely as he could, to leave him out of it. My grandfather had always been a humble man who disliked pomp and circumstance.

It wasn’t until 50 years later, in 2017, that Gleaves reconnected with the devastating events of the fire. He took his grandchildren to Kennedy Space Center for a private tour of the newly opened Apollo 1 exhibit. Afterward, for the first time since the fire, he walked on the concrete slab formerly known as Launch Complex 34.

Gleaves hadn’t achieved closure on that day in 1967, when he had helped deliver the command module to Langley. Sharing the experience with his family did that. 

Matthew Beddingfield is a whistleblower attorney and writer who works in Washington, D.C. He is the grandson of James D. Gleaves, the mechanical lead technician for North American Aviation during the events of the Apollo 1 (204) tragedy.