The tragic end of Apollo 1 shook NASA to its core. The astronauts weren’t hundreds of thousands of miles away when the accident happened; they were on the ground, within feet of the ground crew and the engineers, and yet they still died. The road to the stars was a rough one, and the Apollo team needed no reminder of the risk. They redesigned the spacecraft, fixing flaws that had been exposed by the disaster and redoubling their focus on every possible detail of the next nine missions, each a step in the stairway to the Moon. The ascent to the Moon landing was predicated on the belief that
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