Portrait of the Apollo 1 prime crew for first manned Apollo space flight, Edward H. READ MORE: The Deadliest Disasters of the Space Race Clad in their spacesuits and carrying their portable air conditioning packs like office workers toting briefcases, the astronauts crossed the 218-foot-high catwalk with vistas of the blue Atlantic waters washing up on the white beaches of Cape Canaveral before climbing inside their command module perched atop a massive booster rocket. With 25 days left before the scheduled launch, the crew of Apollo 1 climbed out of a NASA van into sparkling Florida sunshine on January 27, 1967, and ascended the tower of launch pad 34 for a routine simulated launch test. In spite of orders from Shea, the flammable materials were never removed from the Apollo 1 command module. “The country had gotten complacent.” Perhaps NASA had gotten complacent as well. “Success had become almost routine for us,” NASA flight director Gene Kranz wrote in his book Failure Is Not an Option. In spite of the incredible danger inherent in space travel, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had launched 16 manned space flights in its Mercury and Gemini programs without a single casualty.
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