It was supposed to be a routine launch pad test. But from the Apollo 1 command module came a panicked voice saying, «Fire in the cockpit», according to The Associated Press. Exactly 40 years later, the three Apollo astronauts who were killed in that flash fire were remembered Saturday for paving the way for later astronauts to be able to travel to the moon. The deaths of Virgil «Gus» Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee forced NASA to pause in its space race with the Soviet Union and make design and safety changes that were critical to the agency's later successes. «I can assure you if we had not had that fire and rebuilt the command module ... we could not have done the Apollo program successfully,» said retired astronaut John Young, who flew in Gemini 3 with Grissom in 1965. «So we owe a lot to Gus, and Rog and Ed. They made it possible for the rest of us to do the almost impossible.»
