Two seconds later, Chaffee—whose responsibility it was to maintain contact with the ground in an emergency—said, in a calm, disciplined voice, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.” A few miles away, inside a control room on Merritt Island, one of the North American engineers monitoring the test looked up from his notes. He turned to the man at the next console. “Did he say, ‘Fire’?” he asked. “What the hell are they talking about?”
