The redemption of Gus Grissom

Gus Grissom

Lieutenant Colonel Virgil “Gus” Grissom, USAF was many things in life. He died at the all-too-young age of 40 in the disastrous Apollo 1 capsule fire in 1967 along side Lieutenant Colonel Ed White, USAF (the first American to walk in space) and Lieutenant Commander Roger Chaffee, USN. Before that, Gus had been an aviation cadet with the US Army Air Forces during World War II (though he entered the war too late to earn his wings or see combat), a graduate of Purdue University, an officer in the US Air Force (from 1950), a fighter pilot, Korean War veteran (where he flew 100 combat missions and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross), test pilot, and finally an Astronaut.

Selected as one of the “Mercury 7”, Grissom made his first flight into space as the second American and third human to leave the comforts of our atmosphere and venture into space (behind Soviet Yuri Gagarin and American Alan Shepard). He’d later fly on Gemini 3 (the first manned Gemini mission) as the mission commander before his fateful assignment to Apollo 1.

It was on that first launch though that Grissom would earn a negative reputation, largely due to the book and later movie The Right Stuff. Grissom’s capsule, Liberty Bell 7, had the emergency explosive hatch prematurely open after touchdown, just seconds after the US Navy rescue helicopter had arrived on station to bring Grissom aboard. While Grissom was saved, Liberty Bell 7 was lost, but it would be found and raised in 1999.

The book and movie paint this episode as a deliberate action on Grissom’s part, possibly due to a panic. Grissom denied these claims (a combat-tested test pilot would not be prone to panic, that’s the sort of thing they specifically were testing to weed out) and the historical record from NASA does not fault Grissom. The narrative from the book and the movie apparently carry more weight in the court of public opinion and so the question has continued to dog the reputation of Grissom. A new look into the circumstances was recently published that might put this to rest.

NPR reports;

Static electricity may have been to blame

George Leopold, who wrote a biography of Grissom, and Andy Saunders, a space photo expert and author, write in Astronomy magazine that they believe the mystery can be put to rest once and for all.

The researchers say that before his 2020 death, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant John Reinhard, who was co-pilot of the recovery helicopter sent to retrieve Grissom and the Mercury capsule, said he remembers seeing something unusual just before a pole was extended to cut an antenna on the spacecraft as part of the procedure to latch onto the capsule.

“When I touched the antenna there was an arc,” Reinhard said. “At the same time, the hatch came off. It could be that some static charge set [the hatch] off.”

Static electricity is a known issue for spacecraft following reentry. The authors note that salvage expert Curt Newport, who recovered Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 capsule from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1999, has said that the hatch mechanism on the capsule likely contained mercury fulminate, a compound that can be detonated by a static charge. A NASA manual “makes several references to static electricity as a safety concern,” Leopold and Saunders write. “The manual also urges designers to ‘prevent inadvertent initiation’ of spacecraft pyrotechnics by ‘electrostatic discharge.'”

Francis French and Colin Burgess, write in their book Into That Silent Sea that “the astronaut had to activate a switch in order to arm the mechanism. … a recovery loop on top on the capsule became the trigger. When the recovery helicopter’s hoisting cable was hooked onto the loop, the pressure created by lifting the capsule fired the mechanism and blew the hatch off.”

Leopold and Saunders say their analysis of enhanced footage corroborates Reinhard’s sequence of events — that the hatch activated before the helicopter hooked onto the capsule (shown by the grainy footage below, they say).

They conclude that the arc Reinhold observed was an electrical discharge that caused the hatch firing mechanism to malfunction.

The sinking may have sealed Grissom’s fate years later

Years after his Mercury mission, Grissom — a test pilot who had flown 100 combat missions during the Korean War before joining NASA — was chosen to command the first two-person flight of the Gemini program. He was slated to do the same for Apollo 1 when he and two other astronauts were killed in a fire that swept through their capsule during a ground test.

With Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 flight in mind, engineers designing the Apollo spacecraft opted to omit an explosive hatch on it and instead install a manual hatch which could only be opened by ground crew. Tragically, some speculate that may have prevented Grissom and his crewmates, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, from getting out of their Apollo 1 spacecraft during the sudden pad fire that killed them in 1967.

Category: Air Force, Historical, NASA, Science and Technology