Download The Apollo 1 Disaster: The Controversial History and Legacy of the Fire that Caused One of NASA's Greatest Tragedies AudioBook Free
"There's always a opportunity that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course; this can happen on any journey; it can happen on the previous one as well as the first one. So, you merely plan as best you can to manage all these eventualities, and you also get a well-trained team and you also go journey." (Gus Grissom, December 1966) The Apollo space program is the most well-known and famous in American record, but the first successful landing of men on the moon, during Apollo 11, experienced complicated roots seeing back over a decade; it also involved one of NASA's most infamous tragedies. Getting on the moon presented an excellent goal all alone, but the government's urgency in building the Apollo program was actually brought about by the Soviet Union, which put in much of the 1950s departing the United States in its dust particles (and rocket energy). In 1957, at the same time when people were concerned about communism and nuclear war, many People in the usa were dismayed by information that the Soviet Union was efficiently launching satellites into orbit. Among those concerned was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose space program was obviously lagging a couple of years behind the Soviets' space program. From 1959-1963, the United States worked toward adding satellites and humans into orbit via the Mercury program, but Eisenhower's supervision was already building programs for the Apollo program by 1960, per year before the first Russian orbited the Earth and two years before John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
