I wrote ten days ago that I was worried about Apollo 1. I am not going to feel any vindication about that.

Three men are dead.

Gus Grissom. Ed White. Roger Chaffee. Last night, during the plugs-out test on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. A fire started inside the capsule at 6:31 PM. The pure oxygen atmosphere made it explode into an inferno within seconds. The capsule hatch could not be opened from the inside quickly. By the time the pad crew fought through the smoke to open it from outside, all three men were dead. It took five minutes to get the hatch open. Five minutes.

I heard the news this morning on the radio and sat at the kitchen table and couldn’t move for a while. Betty came in and saw my face and sat down next to me and took my hand and we didn’t say anything for several minutes.

Ed White. Who floated outside Gemini 4 and said it was the saddest moment of his life to come back in. Who described the universe as beautiful and didn’t want to leave.

Gus Grissom. Who they blamed for Liberty Bell 7 and who was wrong — who flew Gemini 3 perfectly and was going to fly Apollo and prove everything. Who hung a lemon on the spacecraft because he was right to be worried.

Roger Chaffee. Twenty-nine years old. His first spaceflight. He was going to the Moon. He was training for the Moon.

I’m angry in a way I haven’t been at this program before. Not at the astronauts. Not at NASA in any generalized way. At the specific failures that killed them: the flammable materials in a pure oxygen environment, the hatch that couldn’t be opened from inside, the wiring problems that Grissom complained about, the schedule pressure that pushed the program past what the hardware was ready for. These were known problems. Grissom knew. Some of the engineers knew.

They died on the launch pad. Not in space. Not on re-entry. On the ground, during a test, while three men were sitting inside a machine that was supposed to keep them alive.

The program will go on. It has to go on — to stop now would make their deaths meaningless in the worst way. But it can’t go on the same way. The hatch has to be redesigned. The flammable materials have to be replaced. The wiring has to be redone. The quality control at North American Aviation has to be reformed.

These things will happen. There will be an investigation. There will be redesign. There will be delays.

I hope the people responsible for what happened — not the astronauts, not God, but the specific decisions that produced the specific conditions that killed these three men — have the reckoning they deserve.

Gus was right. He was right to be worried. He told his wife the program could be set back two years by an accident. He was right about that too.

I’m going to be quiet for a few days.