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The Apollo 1 crew died in the parking lot of

May 19, 2017 by Katherine Berry

The Apollo 1 crew died in the parking lot of the Space Station at Columbia on March 16, 1969, three weeks before the planned flight from Cape Canaveral. As the spacecraft became visible through the shuttle's orbiter to the Earth, Grissom was seen by a single human eye, which sent an image of his body back down to Earth. In the aftermath of the crash Grissom's son, Robert, became the only American to survive the descent, along with many others. He died on a stretcher in the trunk of the Apollo 1 vehicle on June 12, 1971. A few days later, on May 29, 1972, Grissom died shortly after arriving at the International Space Station, in the center of a massive explosion that sent the astronauts from the station to the other side of the globe.

The mission's first three astronauts, Fred H. White, Edgar Mitchell, and Buzz Aldrin, were taken to the Kennedy Space Center in Columbia, where they flew a test flight of the Lunar Module and returned to earth. After Apollo 1 was safely sent back to Earth on a Soyuz, the astronauts flew a lunar-orbit test flight of the Gemini IV spacecraft on August 17, 1973. As they took off on the Gemini V spacecraft, the Apollo crew was seen from space. It was only the Apollo 2 astronauts aboard the Apollo 1 vehicle whose last flight was on December 18, 1975, that took them into orbit. Their last flight on a Soyuz, during the late 1970s, was on March 9, 1976.

While the Apollo 2 crew was still in space in 1973, they flew another lunar-orbit test flight on the lunar module on April 12, 1976. This was the first of three Apollo crew to be sent back to Earth for a second time. In his first test flight on the lunar module, John Glenn climbed to the top with the Lunar Module, the last known lunar landing site. The first Apollo crew to successfully land on the surface of the Moon was NASA's first lunar lander, the Apollo 1 Lunar Mounting System (LMMS, pronounced "M-m-s"). The LMMS successfully landed on the lunar surface on April 27, 1977. Three months later, in May 1977, NASA's first lunar landing, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), was launched and recovered by the MRO at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

As the Apollo crews took off on the landing pad on the moon, they left behind their own lunar cargo. As part of the mission's first