I don’t know how to write this entry.

I heard it on the radio on my way home from work yesterday — Friday, January 27th. The announcer said there had been an accident at Cape Kennedy during a ground test. Fire in the Apollo spacecraft on the launch pad. The crew — Grissom, White, Chaffee — were unresponsive. By the time they got the hatches open, all three were dead.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road. I just sat there. I don’t know how long. The radio kept talking and I stopped hearing it. I was just sitting in my car on Route 7 watching the traffic go by.

Gus Grissom is dead. Ed White is dead. Roger Chaffee is dead.

The spacecraft wasn’t even going to launch yesterday. It was a plugs-out test — a simulation to verify that the spacecraft could function on its own power, without ground support. They were buttoned up in the capsule, fully pressurized, running through checklists. There had been communication problems earlier in the day. One of the last things Grissom said on the radio, frustrated, was: “How are we going to get to the Moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings?”

Those may have been the last words anyone heard him say.

At 6:31 in the evening, a fire started inside the spacecraft. In the pure oxygen atmosphere they used — which they’ve always used, since Mercury — the fire spread in seconds. The cabin pressure spiked. The inner hatch, which opens inward and requires the pressure to be equalized to open, could not be opened. The crew was trapped inside for the seconds and minutes it took for the fire to do what fire does in a pure oxygen environment.

Ed White, they say, tried to open the hatch. The hatch that you cannot open when the pressure is building, not dropping. He died trying to open it.

I have been sitting here at my desk for the past hour trying to figure out what to write, and all I can think is: I knew who these men were. I had been following them, writing about them, thinking about what they might accomplish. Grissom who survived the sinking capsule and came back for more. White who told McDivitt it was the saddest moment of his life to come back inside. Chaffee who was thirty-one years old and hadn’t flown yet and had a wife and two children and his whole story still in front of him.

I sat with Betty last night and we didn’t say much. The kids had gone to bed. We watched the news for a while and then we turned it off because there wasn’t anything new to learn, just the same facts being repeated. Three men are dead. The spacecraft caught fire. They couldn’t get the hatch open.

I don’t know what this means for the program. I suppose the program will stop for a while. They’ll have to figure out what went wrong. They’ll have to fix it. But right now all I can think about is three men who accepted all the risks of going to the Moon and died in a spacecraft that was sitting on the ground, during a routine test, without even leaving the Earth.

Gus Grissom. Ed White. Roger Chaffee.

I don’t have anything else to say today.