The Apollo 1 Launchpad fire: Recalling to Grissom, white and Chaffee

Men and women have been shot into space from the surface of the earth over the past fifty years - enough that now much of the public in general considers space missions as relatively safe, memorization efforts. Projects that, inconceivably complex and technically nuanced as establishing an SUV of State size of the itinerant art laboratory on the surface of Mars - without breaking it, can still attract the attention of the world. For many people, however, when it comes to missions manned as the discontinued program of space shuttle flights to and from the international space station, the thrill is far away.

But the business of space exploration is not and has never been, surely. Explosions, fires, parachute failure and other disasters have left dozens of astronauts, cosmonauts, pilots and crew worker dead and wounded over the years. Some (Challenger and Columbia, for example) are spectacular, terrifying disasters. Others are smaller, quieter, calamities, but for any involved person who survives, wounded or not, experiences life-changing.

Here, on the anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the history of NASA and its first public tragedy - LIFE.com remembers astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who died in a fire inside your module's command on a platform from Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967. As Jeffrey Kluger time (the author of Apollo 13) wrote once, when three astronauts are commemorated:

Test pilots can feel immediately if they are working with a good vehicle or a bad one, and the crew of the Apollo 1... I knew almost immediately that they had been assigned to a scoundrel. By late 1966, the last ship robust Gemini, two men had flown, and NASA was the deployment of the ships Apollo three men who, finally, men to the moon. The spaceship was sweet machines, but in test - runs on the platform, which were a disaster. Fried electrical, communications died, repairs and improvements were late to arrive... More worrying, however, was the insistence of NASA in continue using pure oxygen to 100% in their atmospheric systems - a flammable explosive gas that had worked very well so far in the Mercury and Gemini ships, but that could ignite like gasoline in the presence of both an errant spark... Early one Friday night, when the Apollo 1 astronauts locked up in the spaceship for a session of practice outside of the pad, just a spark escaped a wire frayed along the seat of Grissom. In less than a minute, the three men were dead. For a time, it seemed, the Apollo program would also perish.

The program, of course, survived and less three years after the 1967 fire launchpad, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the Moon and back - leaving human footprints on the lunar surface, in what some consider the triumph firm 20th century.

Ralph Morse - time & life Pictures/Getty Images

Workers in the North American aviation installation CSM-012 "Block I" command module, the type in which Grissom, white and Chaffee died.

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