Today is the first of three grim anniversaries in late January and early February (within a week of each other) of the deaths of American astronauts. On this day in 1967, Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom were incinerated on the launch pad in a ground test of the Apollo capsule.

Jim Oberg has more on these closely-timed anniversaries, in which he makes a compelling case that none of them were "accidents" but that all were avoidable, and that we've been lucky that we aren't commemorating even more astronaut deaths. Here's what I wrote a year ago (in which I criticized NASA's reluctance to send a Shuttle to Hubble, a subject on which nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind).

[Update a little after noon]

OK, my dear friend Tim Kyger is whining at me in email that they didn't die from their burns--they died from asphyxiation. True enough.

I didn't explicitly say that the burns killed them, but I did imply it, and probably "incineration" is too strong a word for the degree of the burn damage to their bodies. The point remains that they died from a fire (and their deaths, like those of their later colleagues in the Shuttle) were avoidable.

The Apollo 204 crew was not "incinerated" on the launch pad. They died due to smoke inhalation/lack of oxygen. Their burns, however, were severe but survivable in 1968.

All of the tragedies and setbacks we have witnessed in space exploration have seemed senseless, avoidable, and unnecessary. Yet I think NASA has taken valuable lessons from their big three accidents (ignoring their other spaceflight casualty, Mike Adams in the X-15) that may have pevented further spaceflight disasters.

The Apollo 1 fire forced NASA and North American Aviation to totally re-assess and redesign the capsule. Over the course of their investigation they came up with myriad faults that went corrected by the time Apollo 7 flew. We got a better spacecraft after the Apollo fire, and I don't know if we could have gotten that kind of thorough review if there hadn't been a fatal accident.

It seems that the lessons of Challenger were partially heeded and partially forgotten. The SRB problem finally got fixed, and NASA revised its flight schedule and dropped any illusions about routine, safe flight with the current shuttle system. The lessons about schedule pressures affecting the judgement of the people in charge of safety was ignored by the time Columbia was last launched, and I suspect that the lesson is still being ignored to some degree--by the people who think we can finish the space station in its current form while still retiring the vehicle by 2010.

If we end up making it to the moon again, we may be asking ourselves whether we would be here if the Columbia hadn't perished. The performance of the shuttle over the next five years and our course of action to the moon and beyond will be history's meterstick for judging NASA's performance in learning another hard lesson.

I always get a bit miffed when I hear the "they didn't learn their lesson" bromide from armchair quarterbacks and 20-20 hindsighters when they talk about the individual Shuttle accidents.

I was involved in Shuttle related safety issues professionally for a short while, and it's been my experience that if an issue is raised it will be fairly dealt with. Often to the point of bringing in the people who's butts are on the line, the astronauts, in to give a final okay.

The problem here is that for this technology, the virtual scenareo space contains literally hundreds (if not thousands) of potentially fatal errors for any given flight/system/environment combination. It subsequently becomes problematical to pick out the correct set of decisions from that space time after time and never make a mistake.

When you build something huge and complex, which is both cost limited and pushes the technological envelope, you are going to have accidents and failures. This is particularly true for something like the Space Shuttle, which is using rockets to put things into orbit. As I recall, the best unmanned rocket powered vehicle has a reliability in the 98 percent range. Given a doubling of reliability for a manned system like the Shuttle and you get an expectation value of about one accident every 100 launches. And given that the Shuttle must ALSO return to earth, it's systems must do something no unmanned rocket does. Ergo,you would expect an even higher expectation of failure to bring it to a safe landing.

When it does fail, when a miscalculation is made, as it is destined to do, you have people looking to make political statements (e.g. Al Gore) and expressions of ego (Hell, even I could coach better than that!) with file drawers full of analysis and reports to wave in front of the public. But this ignores the fact that there were many many other potentialities, reports, analysis and conclusions which were acted upon and found to be correct.

So if you really feel the need to blame someone, I have a suggestion. I suggest you blame the people who made the wrong decision but with in a very limited decision space. I suggest you blame those who took out the crew escape system based on cost. Given the above reliability figures, it seems pretty obvious that they were automatically dooming at least 2 crews to death over the life of the program.

E.T.

I suggest you blame those who took out the crew escape system based on cost. Given the above reliability figures, it seems pretty obvious that they were automatically dooming at least 2 crews to death over the life of the program.

Yes, just as an auto company automatically dooms a certain number of people over the life of the program by making the cars affordable.

It was never realistic to put an escape system in that vehicle. People need to accept that spaceflight is dangerous. The real people to blame are those who chose the fundamentally wrong approach to getting humans and cargo into space thirty years ago, but they didn't know any better.

"It was never realistic to put an escape system in that vehicle."

If you mean that building an escape capsule into the design would not allow it to meet it's payload goals, I agree. Since the mission goals it was designed to accomplish were originally to cost $14 Billion and NASA was "forced" to maintain the same mission while scaling it down to a $5 Billion price tag to keep their ricebowls filled. The NASA decision makers were faced with two alternative choices:
1. Cancel the Space Shuttle project and go in some other direction.
2. Lie.

They chose #2. This decision involved some unintended consequences, like the death of 2 shuttle crews and the effective end of manned space exploration. But if one is looking for the guilty parties responsible for the Shuttle accidents (not saying that's a good idea at this point) then you could do worse than checking out the NASA leadership circa 1970.

E.T.

Remembering Eddie White is painful. He was a high school chum when we both lived on Wright-Patterson AFB, and again in Washington, many years ago. I was thrilled to see him tethered outside the capsule, with the Earth spinning behind. One more time-- RIP