The Apollo 1 Fire: A Case Study in the Flammability of Fabrics

This January marked the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. On Jan. 27, 1967, the interior of NASA’s AS-204 command module (CM), occupied by American astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Ed White, caught fire during a rehearsal of its scheduled Feb. 21 launch (Fig. 1). By the time the ground crew was able to open the hatch, the three astronauts had perished. On April 24, 1967, NASA announced that the flight would be officially re-designated “Apollo 1.” In this case study, we conduct a basic horizontal flame test, patterned after the protocols set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to measure the ignitability of solids. The laboratory activity is a complementary exercise to the vertical flame test described in our previous article that examined the initial source of fuel for the fire that destroyed the massive German zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937. Combining techniques from both case studies gives students a quantitative understanding of how the flammability of materials is tested and how a forensics approach to physics can be used to understand significant historical events.