Apollo 1 Ethical Violations Essay

The Space Race began when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space in 1957. The United States’ answer to this was the Apollo program. While the Apollo program did have successful launches, such as the Apollo 11 launch that landed Americans on the moon, not every launch went as smoothly. Fifty years ago, a disaster occurred that shook the Apollo program to its core. On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 command module was consumed by a fire during one of its launch rehearsal tests. This led to the death of three astronauts, Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, Edward Higgins White, and Roger Bruce Chaffee. The fire was caused by a number of factors, most of which were technical. These causes range from the abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere of the

To correctly assess the ethical violations, one needs only to consider the safety of the astronauts as the top priority during the launch. With this perspective, it is easy to see the ethical violations that occurred during this launch test. Inside of the Apollo 1 Command Module, there were many flammable materials present(Moskowitz, 2012). In a closed space, an abundance of flammable material is incredibly dangerous. Even if NASA had considered and fixed this issue, there are numerous other reasons the fire was able to be as dangerous as it was. The atmosphere of the spacecraft was one hundred percent oxygen (Moskowitz, 2012). Oxygen is a highly flammable gas, so once the fire started, the oxygen helped it quickly spread. Having a pure oxygen atmosphere in any situation where there both humans present and any chance of a fire starting is a severe ethical violation. The combinations of both the flammable materials present and the oxygen atmosphere meant that as soon as a fire occurred, the astronauts’ only chance of survival was to escape the module. Unfortunately for the astronauts, the hatch that they needed to use to escape was inward-opening (Moskowitz, 2012). The fire had been raging for long enough to cause the pressure inside of the cabin to be significantly increased (Moskowitz, 2012). The high pressure caused by this fire

NASA decreased the prevalence of flammable material inside the Command Module (Moskowitz, 2012). Along with the removal of flammable material, NASA also ensured that the materials inside the spacecraft were less, if at all, flammable (Moskowitz, 2012). NASA substituted many materials with less flammable, more protective material and included a portable fire extinguisher in the spacecraft (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). A specific example of this substitution is the use of a wire insulation that has a coating “so fire-resistant that it can't burn even when put in a pure oxygen environment” (Moskowitz, 2012, paragraph 13). As noted previously, the atmosphere in the spacecraft being one hundred percent oxygen was an important factor in the spreading of the fire. To solve this issue, NASA performed flammability tests which led them to the conclusion that having a mixture of sixty percent oxygen and forty percent nitrogen in the module’s atmosphere would reduce the chance of an Apollo 1 repeat happening (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). This mixture would be less flammable than the one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere, but the one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere could still be used as the spacecraft left Earth’s atmosphere without the risk of combustion (“APOLLO 1 The Fire,” n.d.). This led to NASA adopting a method where they slowly replaced the