Ellington Air Force Base, Houston, Texas, June, 1966.

This classic 1966 NASA photo shows Apollo 1 astronauts Edward White, Roger B. Chaffee and Virgil Grissom training to exit from their craft. Yup, they floated in a swimming pool at the Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Texas. It wasn’t exactly a perfect simulation of what they’d be facing during the actual egress at the end of a real mission, even if they encountered the best of circumstances. But the best wasn’t what they encountered. A cabin fire during a launch-pad test in January of 1967 killed all three men and no American astronaut would by blasted into space for another 20 months while NASA scientists worked their way through the variety of errors that led to the disaster.

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White, Chaffee and Grissom in 1966: “There’s always the possibility you have a catastrophic failure.”