Book Review: William “Atomic Bill” Laurence and the Warping of Science Journalism

By George Leopold

Before there was Breaking News, hourly “bombshell” revelations and clickbait, there was Vincent Kiernan’s radioactive subject, the New York Times science writer and propagandist William “Atomic Bill” Laurence.

Kiernan chronicles the rise of Laurence as a gumshoe reporter beginning in the 1930s to his vaunted status as an atomic “oracle” among colleagues after a decade of documenting development, testing and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Comfortable with his insider status, Laurence soon resorted to “atomic plagiarism” while covering American tests in the South Pacific, copying Pentagon news releases fobbed off as reporting. Other reporters took note—and umbrage. 

In the end, the author judges that Laurence the atomic cheerleader was a mere “science writer,” not a science journalist. That trend continues to the present.

You could make the case that reporters like Laurence contributed to the defeat of fascism by reporting and analyzing facts. Instead, as Kiernan shows, Laurence used his pre-World War II dabbling as a playwright and dramatist to juice his wartime reporting on otherwise dry science topics. Laurence’s ostensible goal was educating readers about the miracles of technology, but too often he succumbed to what the author calls the “razzle-dazzle of science.” The dean of the science writers quickly determined from his lofty perch that there was profit and access to power in embellishing the mysteries of physics and other scientific pursuits.

If truth be the first casualty in a war, then journalists-for-hire like Laurence were the foot soldiers who abdicated their responsibility as truth-tellers to power.

The key was more Eureka! moments and fewer mathematical formulas.

Kiernan, a former colleague, has previously chronicled the rise of embargoed journalism, a pernicious news management tactic used by science journals to maximize publicity. The practice has transformed peer-reviewed science into a hype machine designed to give incremental advances the patina of yet another a scientific breakthrough. As journalism professors instruct, untroubled by deadlines and the need to generate “traffic,” Resist Break-Through-itis! 

Kiernan demonstrates that Laurence was the original practitioner. What’s more, “Laurence kept secrets,” the author notes, thereby endearing himself to his government handlers while becoming a political operative.

Science writing is mostly about using analogy and straightforward prose to help readers understand increasingly complex subjects. You can’t fake it; there are innumerable traps and ways to get the story wrong. And those Eureka! moments remain few and far between. Most scientific and technological advances result from years, often decades, of painstaking work conducted by researchers laboring in obscurity. 

But today’s page-view obsessed media, gaming the Google algorithm to move up the search engine rankings, more often than not overplay scientific advances, embracing “break-through-itis.” It was Laurence and his front-page stories in the Times and elsewhere about early fission research at Columbia University that laid the groundwork. The trumpeting of scientific research and the marketing of dubious technological advances has become the journalistic norm.

Kiernan delivers an unsparing account of Atomic Bill’s machinations, and the Times’enablement, documenting Laurence’s career as a shameless promoter of atomic power while downplaying the horrific effects of radiation on A-bomb victims. In so doing, he shed any pretense of journalistic integrity or search for the truth. 

In describing Laurence’s willingness to lay the foundation for decades of misinformation about the dangers of nuclear radiation, Kiernan acknowledges contemporaneous concerns about a bloody stalemate with Japan that drove A-bomb decision. Nevertheless, the author found “no suggestion that Laurence had any qualms about providing a false cover story for the government.”

As the U.S. military sought to downplay radiation dangers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Laurence also went along with news management schemes choreographed by the head of the Manhattan Project, Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves. This was the price Laurence was more than willing to pay for exclusive access to the government’s atomic secrets.

Atomic Bill describes how Laurence was an eager participant in Groves’ plan to control the A-bomb narrative. Along with timing the release of President Harry Truman’s announcement of the Hiroshima attack to maximize coverage in morning and afternoon newspapers, Groves unleashed a torrent of previously classified material. Again, Laurence played ball in exchange for access.

Kiernan’s account also illuminates the journalistic reality of America’s largest and most influential media outlets: On matters of national security, including momentous events like development of the A-bomb and the military decision to use it twice against Japanese civilians, the so-called liberal media nearly always falls in line to support government policies. The latest example being the largely unvetted New York Times coverage of alleged Iraqi nuclear weapons.

The author also demonstrates that the politicization of science and the embrace of alternate “facts” in many ways has its origins in the hucksterism of writers like William Laurence.

Those methods also refined the Yellow Journalism tactics employed during the rise of the American Empire at the beginning of the last century as well as slavish media support for the Vietnam War until well after it was too late. If truth be the first casualty in a war, then journalists-for-hire like Laurence were the foot soldiers who abdicated their responsibility as truth-tellers to power.

By the 1960s, riding his reputation as an eyewitness to U.S. atomic tests and the obliteration of Nagasaki, Laurence had hooked up with New York City urban planner and infamous “power broker” Robert Moses. The profitable publicity partnership designed to promote and bankroll the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair ultimately proved a career killer, and Laurence was forced to resign from the Times.

Atomic Bill and his wife Florence spent their last years isolated in Mallorca, largely abandoned by their powerful benefactors. After years in the limelight, Laurence was reduced to what he was: a small, petty man selling his services to the highest bidder. 

The author is no match for his subject as a dramatist. That’s all to the good. As a veteran science journalist, educator and critic, Vincent Kiernan does what any author should strive for: telling an important story in a compelling way.

Atomic Bill: A Journalist’s Dangerous Ambition in the Shadow of the Bomb, by Vincent Kiernan, Cornell University Press, (Publication date: Nov.15, 2022).

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–George Leopold is executive editor of The Ojo-Yoshida Report and author of Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom.

John Houbolt, the Engineer Who Charted our Course to the Moon

(The following originally appeared in my space blog for EE Times.)

NASA is looking for new ways to return humans to the moon via a project called Artemis. In their wisdom, agency management had the good sense recently to invite a talk by a chronicler of the original moon landing program, Project Apollo, and one that efforts’ greatest and most unsung engineering heroes.

His name was John Houbolt, and his was a voice in the wilderness.

Houbolt, trained as a civil engineer, arrived at NASA at the dawn of the Space Race. That training acquainted him with the central limiting factor in spaceflight: weight. The Soviets were running circles around NASA as a U.S. president, seizing on a single 15-minute suborbital flight in May 1961, proposed a U.S. moon landing by the end of the decade.

John Houbolt kept running the numbers.

NASA’s immediate challenge after President John F. Kennedy’s moon landing speech: By what “mode” could humans be launched to the lunar surface, then brought home? Our German rocket scientists in Huntsville, Alabama, wanted to go big, via a mode dubbed “direct ascent.” Unresolved was how a huge lander could be guided down to the lunar surface, then lift off? How would the astronauts climb down a structure resembling a water tower? Before anyone else within NASA’s Space Task Group, Houbolt concluded direct ascent wouldn’t work. The numbers simply did not add up, nor did the physics.

(Nor would another mode, Earth orbit rendezvous, requiring multiple launches to assemble a lander in low-earth orbit.)

Reducing the weight, mastering orbital mechanics, Houbolt instead proposed a weight- and money-saving approach called LOR, for lunar orbit rendezvous. The design engineers and mathematicians at NASA’s Langley Research Center, initially thought Houbolt a “crank,” out of his depth.

“His numbers lie!” the legendary spacecraft designer Maxime Faget told Houbolt in front of his colleagues.

A lesser engineer would have slunk away in disgrace. Wounded, Houbolt persisted.

In the course of his LOR crusade, the engineer built a “globe gadget” to demonstrate the intricacies of rendezvous. It consisted of a store-bought globe and a small ball at the end of a piece of coat hanger representing the rendezvous target. It was rudimentary, but effective: The visual aid, along with minority reports and dogged determination, helped Houbolt, make the case for LOR during a series of NASA design meetings and aerospace conferences.

In his account of Houbolt’s quest and the bureaucratic twists and turns that was the story of LOR, author William Causey documents a legacy of engineering integrity, career-risking perseverance and an unshakeable belief that numbers do not lie.

That, and the fact that one determined individual can change the course of history.

The confrontation with Faget (of whom, some of the early astronauts remarked, stood for “Flat-Ass Guess Every Time”) steeled the obscure Langley engineer. In November 1961, jumping NASA’s chain of command, Houbolt fired off a memo to Robert Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator, forcefully—some thought impertinently— making the case for LOR.

In his declaration to Seamans, Houbolt acknowledged he was risking his career, yet felt compelled to advocate for LOR. “Houbolt didn’t say, ‘I think it’s one way.’ He didn’t say, ‘It’s the best way.’ He said, ‘I think it’s the only way’,” Causey notes.

Miffed, Seamans nevertheless decided to take a closer look at LOR. By mid-1962, Houbolt’s pain-in-the-neck persistence had paid off. The Huntsville rocketeers led by Wernher von Braun, at long last acknowledged that LOR was in fact the only mode by which to reach the moon by Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline. Houbolt’s mode also saved billions of dollars in an endeavor that would cost nearly $25 billion, along with the lives of three Apollo astronauts in a 1967 launchpad fire.

After Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, Wernher von Braun scanned the gallery at Mission Control in Houston. The cigars had been lit, flags waving, Kennedy’s technological deadline had been met. We had done what we said we would do.

Spotting Houbolt in the gallery, von Braun saluted the engineer who had crunched the numbers and clung tenaciously to a sound engineering concept for exploring the solar system while risking his career. Precisely what von Braun said is unclear, but it amounted to this: John, we wouldn’t have made to the moon and back without you.

Causey mentioned Houbolt’s globe gadget during NASA lecture. It was a story the Artemis engineers needed to hear. The author may have gotten through to them: One program engineer suggested rebuilding Houbolt’s globe gadget. Indeed, Globe Gadget 2.0 would be a fitting tribute to the engineer who risked all to reach another world.

And it must just help us return.

Off the Beaten Path, New Space Museum Preserves Our Greatest Adventure

(Editor’s note: I had the pleasure in mid-March of attending the grand opening of the Gus Grissom Center at Bonne Terre, Missouri, an hour or so south of St. Louis. Here’s my report for EE Times.)

Earl Mullins gives new meaning to his home state of Missouri’s motto: Show Me.

A few years back the space enthusiast approached Lowell Grissom, the astronaut Gus Grissom’s younger brother, declaring he was going to establish a space museum in middle-of-nowhere Missouri. He wanted Lowell to dedicate it.

Lowell was unimpressed. “Good luck with that!” he thought, putting the encounter out of his mind.

A few years later, Lowell received a call from Earl Mullins. The museum was ready to be dedicated. Like the astronauts he reveres, Earl did precisely what he said he would do. Lowell Grissom was impressed, and helped open the doors to the Space Museum in the old mining town of Bonne Terre, Missouri.

A few weeks back, Mullins opened an expanded museum in a renovated building on Bonne Terre’s main drag. Lowell Grissom was there again along with the legendary astronaut’s son, Scott, to dedicate the Gus Grissom Center.

What Mullins has created is a resting place for five decades of space exploration artifacts collecting dust in NASA’s attic and—in one case—at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Mullins and a group of former McDonnell Aircraft engineers, their children and friends volunteered over the last several years to create a first-class museum that perfectly captures the essence of the American space program and what it all means.

What the Grissom Center illustrates is an indomitable pioneering spirit, the need to explore our solar system while accepting risks and overcoming barriers.

Mullins is emphatic on one point: He could have located his space museum and the Grissom Center up the road in St. Louis. There he would have benefitted from more foot traffic and even made a few bucks on a sure-fire money loser. But Earl has not forgotten his roots, wants desperately to help his community by creating an attraction folks around the country will come to see.

Every town needs a citizen like Earl Mullins of Bonne Terre, Missouri.

Click here to see what the museum founder and curator has created.

 

Boeing 737 Max: Another Instance of ‘Go Fever”?

The cautionary tale that is the Boeing 737 Max saga illustrates once again what happens when technical managers bow to competitive pressures–in this case the Airbus A320neo. Boeing managers reportedly pressured engineers in Renton, Washington, to come up with a design for a longer-range version of Boeing’s workhorse 737 to meet the challenge from Airbus. Along with a faulty airframe design, those engineers added a software autopilot known as MCAS that has so far been implicated in the deaths of 346 people in two 737 Max crashes.

To many, this looks and smells like a repeat of the group-think curse known as “Go Fever” that killed Gus Grissom and his Apollo 1 crew mates.

I interviewed a veteran software engineer and instrument-rated pilot named Greg Travis who posted a damning critique of Boeing’s 737 Max design. Travis, who resides just up the road from Gus Grissom’s hometown, notes the haunting parallels between the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger accident and the two Boeing 737 Max crashes.

My story was published in EE Times, and has sparked a heated debate about engineering ethics and the Boeing Co.’s potential liability.

Dominic Gates of the Seattle Times also has done stellar reporting on the flawed analysis and failed FAA oversight during development of the 737 Max. Gates’ story is here.

Boeing 737 Max 8 cockpit (via Bloomberg)

 

The debate over Boeing’s 737 Max continues on the web site Hacker News.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard from many readers who say they will not board a Boeing 737 Max regardless of any updates to the MCAS system.

Betty Grissom, 1927-2018

We begin at last to appreciate how the spouse held things together, allowing her partner in life to pursue great things.

This was Betty Grissom’s life through all those years with the Air Force and NASA, the sacrifices she made for her husband Virgil, known to history as Gus. Then, after 21 years of marriage, Gus was gone in a flash, and Betty soldiered on for nearly 52 more until her death over the first weekend of October 2018. She raised two sons alone, surviving long enough to see two grandchildren graduate from Gus’s alma mater, Purdue University.

Betty Grissom was a survivor, deeply resentful of her treatment at the hands of the space agency, isolated after her lawsuit against the builder of the machine that killed her husband and his Apollo 1 crew in January 1967.

Part of that ship went on display at the Kennedy Space Center 50 years after the fire on Pad 34. It seemed Betty was at last satisfied with the permanent Apollo 1 exhibit, partly because it was worked out with a real astronaut, KSC Director Robert Cabana, rather than a NASA pencil pusher. As always, Betty kept her counsel.

She appeared once again for the ceremony at Pad 34 commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the death of her husband and the others in January 2017. Her son Mark wheeled her to the front row. It would be her last trip to Cape Canaveral.

Back at the hotel in Cocoa Beach, we all drank a toast to Gus, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Betty arrived last. Mark Grissom wheeled his mother through the hotel lobby directly to the dining room. After half of a century, Betty was exhausted and in no mood to socialize. When last seen, she dined alone. I bought Mark a gin and tonic.

Betty Grissom’s life was of course mostly toil, sacrifice and tragedy, a small-town woman thrust into the limelight, utterly unprepared for its requirements. The burden of history. When asked about her treatment at the hands of NASA, she seldom held back. On one occasion she turned to Mark and demanded, “You backing me up on that, right?”

Tom Wolfe, chronicler of the Space Age and no friend of the Grissom clan, underestimated the authentic Gus and Betty, they with their “unsophisticated Hoosier grit.” Unsophisticated in their ability to play the PR game, to deliver sound bites, to self-promote? Perhaps. With the Grissoms, what you saw is what you got. And, when it counted, that was always more than enough.

There is another way to remember the lives of Betty and Gus Grissom: They were ordinary folks who through hard work, dedication and selflessness did extraordinary things.

Elizabeth “Betty” Lavonne Moore Grissom of Mitchell, Indiana, was 91. She will be interred near her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.

That honor is the least the country can do for Betty Grissom.

 

Q&A: The paperback edition of Calculated Risk

Here’s a link to a discussion about the paperback edition of Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom, released by Purdue University Press on September 15, 2018.

The updated and revised paperback edition includes a new Afterword with my account of the NASA’s Days of Remembrance at the Kennedy Space Center in January 2017. During the ceremonies, the space agency unveiled an Apollo 1 exhibit that includes the scorched hatches from Grissom’s Apollo command module. The exhibit also includes photos of Gus Grissom first published in Calculated Risk.

Gus Grissom has been part of my life for the last decade. I have strived to document the pioneer’s countless contributions to the great American effort to explore our solar system. I have also endeavored to explain the steep price paid by Gus’ family. I thank all of them for their assistance in telling Virgil I. Grissom’s story.

More than most, Gus understood the risks associated with space exploration. Confronted with what turned out to be insurmountable difficulties, he soldiered on. As the astronaut Michael Collins observed, Gus had a love of machines, had to understand their workings, master them. This he did. Through Grissom’s unfailing efforts, humankind reached the moon and looked back at our fragile Blue Planet.

That unforgettable sight made the terrible sacrifice “worth the risk.”

 

The future of space electronics

Below is a link to my latest for EE Times on the future of space electronics, which appears to be moving away from expensive, radiation-hardened circuits as off-the-shelf chips and even servers demonstrate the ability to withstand the effects of ionizing radiation in space.

Those advances could help ensure that space computers function properly on a manned (or women-ed) trip to Mars.

Read my story here.

‘First Man’ and the Men Before

You’ll be hearing plenty in the next few weeks about the upcoming film First Man based on James Hansen’s definitive biography of Neil Armstrong. Scheduled for release this fall, First Man starring Ryan Gosling as the first human to set foot on the moon is among a long list of documentaries and books timed to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the first lunar landing.

The golden anniversary in December of mankind’s first trip around the moon on Apollo 8 and the steppingstone flights that paved the way to Neil Armstrong’s boot print at Tranquility Base will be a celebration of one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Those who risked their hides to make those historic flights will be remembered for their courage and pioneering spirit.

As well we should.

Amid the celebrations, we should also recall the astronauts who paved the way for the first lunar explorers, those who embraced the risks of spaceflight and died in a great national effort they deemed worthy of that risk.

There will be passing references to the crew of Apollo 1—Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee—in the forthcoming films and books about the triumph of Neil Armstrong. You will hear a brief recounting of the facts surrounding the causes of the launch pad fire that killed Grissom’s crew in January 1967, the reckoning that followed, the bitter lessons learned. The rise from the ashes. And the determination by NASA to ensure the deaths of Grissom and his crew would not be in vain.

At this point in the standard narrative, their sacrifice is largely forgotten as each Apollo flight in 1968 and 1968 moves another step closer to Armstrong’s achievement.

As Gus Grissom’s biographer, it has been my intention to ensure that his incalculable contributions are not forgotten, that the tragic deaths of the crew of Apollo 1 were the price exacted in the quest to reach another world. They understood the risks and chose to continue.

It was the forgetting that prompted me to write a biography of Gus Grissom. The stories of the moon walkers are well known. An Academy Award-winning director has filmed Neil Armstrong’s life story. By contrast, Gus Grissom, the blue-collar astronaut, a working-class hero to many, got a bum rap in that most famous chronicle of the Space Race, The Right Stuff.

It is therefore heartening to hear, according to director Damien Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer, that the film version of First Man also addresses the human toll of the Space Race, not simply a series of successful Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights—punctuated by one disaster along the way. Lives were lost, families shattered in the effort to reach another world. Armstrong, like Gus Grissom, faced his own trials along the way.

I argued in the first edition of Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom that NASA needed to move beyond the forgetting and display his charred Apollo spacecraft in a dignified way. To its credit, the space agency figured out a way to do just that in a way that mostly satisfied the families of Grissom, White and Chaffee.

I was there when a new Apollo 1 exhibit was christened at the Kennedy Space Center on the 50^th anniversary of the fire. NASA at last did right by the crew. Some of the photos of young Gus Grissom published in my book are included in the KSC exhibit.

A revised and updated edition of Calculated Risk will be reissued this fall from Purdue University Press. While the second edition contains new material, the story of Gus Grissom’s life is more concise and, we believe, readable. A new afterword recounts NASA’s “Days of Remembrance” during which some of the men who went to the moon paid tribute to the crew of Apollo 1. All understood they stood on the shoulders of Grissom, White and Chaffee.

As Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins noted during the NASA remembrance, “We reached the moon because of Apollo 1, not in spite of Apollo 1.”

All should remember those who reached the moon as well as those who died trying as we observe the 50^th anniversary of the first lunar landing.

Pay It Back: From Charlie to John to Gus

Charlie Bolden was already there when I climbed the hill to Section 3 at Arlington National Cemetery. We gathered there along with astronaut families and NASA brass to mark another anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. (NASA’s annual Day of Remembrance also observes the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters.)

Retired Marine Corps Major Gen. Charles Bolden Jr. seldom missed a wreath-laying ceremony while serving for eight years as NASA administrator. Bolden didn’t have to make the trip up the George Washington Parkway to Arlington on this finger-freezing late January day. He came anyway for the same reason we all did: To honor the sacrifices of Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, Edward White (buried at West Point) and the doomed shuttle crews.

Bolden and his wife Alexis (Jackie) arrived ahead of two busloads of dignitaries who had stopped first to lay wreaths at the memorials to the shuttle astronauts. A NASA photographer introduced us, and I mentioned to Bolden I had written a biography of Gus Grissom.

Retired from public service, the former astronaut also is thinking about writing books. He has a story to tell: Along with running the space agency during a transition from the space shuttle to a nascent commercial space industry, Bolden commanded two shuttle missions and flew four times in space, logging more than 680 hours in orbit. Among his many accomplishments was deploying the Hubble Space Telescope.

Like Gus Grissom during the Korean War, Bolden flew 100 combat missions over Vietnam.

As we waited near the head stones of Grissom and Chaffee, we talked about books and publishing. He asked whether I had interviewed the recently departed John Young, the only astronaut to fly in space with Grissom. (I didn’t, but relied heavily on Young’s 2013 memoir, Forever Young, written with James Hansen, the biographer of Neil Armstrong.)

The Apollo ceremony was delayed. The wind continued to howl across the rise that is Section 3. Bolden warmed to the subject of the intrepid yet inscrutable John Young, the astronaut’s astronaut (a sobriquet often used to describe Young’s mentor, Gus Grissom).

Young, who went on to head the Astronaut Office, was remembered for often looking at his shoes when he spoke. On one memorable occasion, he lifted his gaze and looked Bolden square in the eye, a day the astronaut in training never forgot.

Bolden was flying Deke’s Slayton’s T-38 from Patrick Air Force Base near Cape Canaveral to Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston. It was a straight shot over Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. The trainer is known to be a gas hog at low altitude, and Bolden recalled controllers at Patrick hesitating to allow him to climb to cruising altitude.

The fuel gauge moved rapidly to the left.

Bolden thought about diverting, then convinced him self he could make it. As he approached Ellington, the pilot realized it would be close, very close. He declared an emergency and hightailed it to the east-west runway at Ellington. There was about a gallon of fuel in the tank when he rolled to a stop.

Gas consumption was closely monitored at Ellington. Bolden was told to report to John Young’s office. This day, the normally taciturn Young raised his steely eyes while dressing down the future astronaut. Glaring at the rookie, the astronaut boss warned in so many words, If you do that again your ass will be out of here!

Charlie Bolden got the message. He forged a distinguished career as an aviator and astronaut, and then guided the space agency through a rocky transition toward what many hope will be a new era of solar exploration.

As the dapper Bolden recalled Young’s anger—or was it a “teachable moment?”—I couldn’t help thinking how much Gus Grissom, the hot refueling champion at the Apollo astronauts’ El Paso “turnaround” filling station,[1] would have relished this war story.

Bolden, like the rest of us, showed up on a windswept winter’s day to again honor his astronaut comrades. He did so because those who have survived to share stories of the Space Age understand they could not have done it without the pioneers buried at our feet.

 

 

[1] Walter Cunningham, (The All-American Boys, New York, iBooks), 2004), 87.

At EAA: ‘Gus Grissom and What’s Wrong With The Right Stuff’

It took a mere six decades to finally attend the Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA) annual fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, twenty miles down the road from my hometown. For one week, Wittman Field in Oshkosh is the nation’s busiest airport.

There I received an enthusiastic welcome from a standing room-only audience for a presentation entitled, “Gus Grissom and What’s Wrong With The Right Stuff.” My intent was to address the misconceptions about the end of Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 flight in July 1961, describe the aftermath and demonstrate how the astronaut endured harsh criticism, eventually moving beyond what he considered the “hatch crap.”

My audience of aviation enthusiasts appreciated what Gus endured and understood the contributions and ultimately—the sacrifice—Grissom and his Apollo 1 crew made on behalf of the nation. I emphasized Gus’s engineering expertise, his passion for machines, the need to master their workings.

This is how we reached the moon by the end of the 1960s, and I stressed Gus’s view of himself as a pioneer. He cared not a whit about personal prestige, but understood that the nation that reached the moon first would reap enormous international prestige.

In this, the 50^th anniversary year of the Apollo 1 fire that kill Grissom and crewmates Ed White and Roger Chaffee, EAA also paid tribute to the Apollo program along with Project Gemini and Mercury. Grissom contributed mightily to all three programs as an original Mercury Seven astronaut, the first human to fly twice in space aboard Gemini 3 and as commander of the maiden flight of Apollo. Grissom’s Gemini flight also marked the first time astronauts actually flew their spacecraft, changing its orbital path using a series of thrusters. Finally, Grissom and crewmate John Young conducted the first controlled reentry.

I focused the end of my presentation on the sacrifice of the Apollo 1 crew and the great paradox of the Space Race: The U.S. likely would not have reached the moon by the end of the 1960s had the launch pad fire not occurred. The Apollo spacecraft was completely overhauled, and eventually carried 24 humans to the moon and brought them home.

Legendary NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz described the aftermath of the fire and meeting he convened with a group of “young pup” controllers who had yet to endure a disaster comparable to the Apollo 1 fire.

Asked about the meeting during an EAA panel discussion,* Kranz recalled:

I started off talking about the fact that we ought to assume responsibility because we were behind the power curve in our work at Mission Control, the control center wasn’t ready, the training process wasn’t working: Nobody really had done their job. And I think across the board from the standpoint of program we all had to assume responsibility for [the Apollo 1 fire] and the loss of the crew. [“Tough and competent” became the watchwords). Tough, meaning accountable, and in the case of Apollo 1 what we failed to do.

“I was on the console of the shift before that accident and there are things I think I could have done….”

The no-nonsense Kranz, razor sharp as ever, was among the first at NASA to own up to his mistakes and move immediately to fix the Apollo command module. He understood viscerally that he could not let down Gus Grissom and his crew—they would not have died in vain.

I closed my presentation on Gus Grissom with this:

There was a passion – almost of love of mechanical objects in the sky. Gus had to master them. He did so, dying the process. If any flyer ever possessed that unshakeable faith in one’s own infallibility – that thing called The Right Stuff – it was Virgil I. Grissom of Mitchell, Indiana.

Thanks to EAA for inviting me to speak, and thanks especially to long-time EAA member and Gus Grissom admirer Terry Coakley for his persistence in securing a slot for me among the many speakers and authors appearing at this year’s fly-in.

I’ll share more pictures shortly from my talk and book signings in Oshkosh.

(*Editor’s note: EAA panel discussion on Apollo begins at approximately 1:46:00 on the link to the YouTube video posted above.)