I remember very well the Apollo I fire and the loss of Grissom, Chafee and White. It was the day before my birthday, and it was a shock to the nation. But it was different than the later losses of Challenger (a quarter of a century ago tomorrow) and Columbia (seven years on Monday), because they were Cold-War warriors, and, unlike today’s human spaceflight program, what they were doing was important to the nation. So instead of shutting things down for years, as we did with the Shuttle each time, they overhauled the management at the contractor (even though it was really NASA’s fault) and a little less than two years later, we had sent men around the moon, and won the space race.