“But at the same time, I think the community can take a lot of pride in the advancements that he was part of in the program, and ultimately the sacrifice he made,” said Young.įor his part, Steve Grissom admits the anniversary of the moon landing comes with a bittersweet feeling of pride, a feeling of what could have been for Indiana’s Gus Grissom. The Grissom family knows life would have been much different if Gus Grissom had become the first man on the moon. The whole town of Mitchell would have been different. “Even Neil Armstrong has stated he was the victim of circumstance, even Neil himself knew if Gus had been around, it would have been Gus Grissom on that first flight to the moon.” Steve Grissom still lives in Mitchell. He says Neil Armstrong himself told him before his death that NASA wanted his cousin to become the first man on the moon. “They wanted, they knew they wanted someone associated with the Mercury program to be the first on the moon,” said Steve Grissom. “We’ve heard from the astronauts and the consensus was he probably would have been on this first flight to the moon if the fire hadn’t occurred,” said Young. It was NASA’s first fatal accident and it forced a total reexamination of the entire Apollo program. Grissom died along with astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee in 1967 when fire erupted in their capsule while on the launch pad during a flight test. Less is shown about the tragic accident that ended Grissom’s career and his life. The museum contains an amazing amount of memorabilia and artifacts from the Hoosier astronaut, including one of his spacesuits and one of his space capsules.
“It was just natural with that level of experience, you would want that level of experience going up on that first flight to the moon,” said Mark Young, Director of the Grissom Memorial Museum in Mitchell. Grissom was also a key member of Project Gemini, a precursor to the Apollo program. He was the country’s most experienced astronaut, the commander of Apollo 1 and seemingly first in line to become the first man on the moon. – Before Neil Armstrong’s one small step and one giant leap, and long before the Apollo 11, there was Gus Grissom. The astronaut from Mitchell, Indiana, was one of the Mercury 7 – NASA’s very first team of spacemen. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. After the Congressional investigation, North American wound up firing a large number of its Apollo Division upper managers and engineers.and hired their replacements away from Martin.This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Grissom and Alan Shepard both lobbied for the contract to go to North American. He said he believed that NASA might not have trusted him and was likely upset with Grissom’s outspoken frustration with the technical difficulties in the Apollo program. But a few years earlier, he was also one of the NASA managers most responsible for ignoring the recommendation to award the contract to Martin. Scott Grissom believed that NASA didn’t want his father to be the first man on the moon after his botched Liberty Bell 7 landing. I've often thought it ironic how George Low has been so highly lauded for taking over the Apollo Office after the fire and getting the mission back on track. Their training mission was officially assigned the name Apollo 1 in their honor. They were simply overruled by the NASA management who were all winged aircraft engineers, former pilots, or otherwise tunnel visioned for North American. Note: Three astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire while training in the capsule for the first crewed Apollo flight. The systems engineers were unanimous that Martin was the best choice. When the bids were all evaluated and scored, Martin came out in first place, and North American far down the list.fourth or fifth. North American should have never won the contract to build the Apollo spacecraft. Deke Slayton has written and said many times that Gus Grissom would have been the first man on the moon had he not been killed.
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