A Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

So it had been with every Mercury flight, so was it to be with each of the ten Gemini missions, from Gemini 3 to Gemini 12, thrusters failing, short circuits, electrical problems, control systems affected, cooling systems failing to cool, overshot landings, missed rendezvous, computer failures, fading fuel cell batteries, transponders running out of power, engine abort because of a dropped plug, Armstrong in direct peril in Gemini 8 when the capsule began to whirl around frantically at sixty revolutions a minute, face-plates on EVA suits fogged up, eyes irritated by antifogging mixture, defective turbopumps – yes, mixed into all the triumphs of the Mercury and Gemini programs were the flaws whose reason could be found and the flaws which defied reason, and then the total of all these triumphs and all these ruptured taboos, all the flaws which had been corrected and all the luck which had been gathered, blew up into one vast moment when a machine to everyone’s horror might even have developed a psychology of its own, for Spacecraft 012 mounted on top of Uprated Saturn I booster Number 204 during a pilot-manned check-out had a fire in the cockpit at 6:31 in the evening on January 27, 1967, there out on Launch Complex 34 at Kennedy Space Center and before the hatch was opened, the crew, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were dead.