ABSTRACT
Space flight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity and neglect. Somewhere, somehow screwed up. It could have been a design in build or in test, but whatever it was, should have caught it. On January 27, 1967 a tragedy struck the preparations for Apollo that was unprecedented in the history of the manned space flight programme. No missions were designated Apollo 2 or 3. To honour the widows’ wishes, the crew of the fatal fire retained the Apollo 1 mission number. As there had been three Apollo/Saturn Ib unmanned flights prior to the tragedy, the numbering picked up with Apollo 4. The Apollo 4 mission was the first launch of the Saturn V booster and carried a command and service module (CSM) combination into a 190 km Earth orbit. After two orbits, the third stage fired again to push the craft into an elliptical orbit.
