ABSTRACT
To overtake the Soviet Union's successes in space, between 1957 and 1961, President Kennedy, in May 1961, pledged Congress that America would, by the end of the decade, land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. Back on 27 January 1967, on Complex 34 at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, three men were sealed in the Apollo 1 command module on the top of a Saturn rocket. The Space Agency was also criticized for failing to advise Congress of the shortcomings of North American-Rockwell Corp, the prime contractor, which had been the subject of a secret report in 1965. In 1986 television showed the almost standard picture of the latest space shuttle blasting off from the Kennedy Space Centre. The investigations that followed identified the 0-rings as the immediate cause of the disaster.
