Says NASA, Space Firms ‘Don’t Care’ : Grissom Widow Offers Advice--Sue

The widow of astronaut Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom, who died in an Apollo spacecraft accident, urged the families of crew members killed in the Challenger explosion to file lawsuits, saying NASA and space contractors “don’t care anything about you.”

“They don’t care about me, financially or morally,” said Betty Grissom.

Her remarks were contained in a copyright story in the Houston Chronicle today.

Grissom and astronauts Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in 1967 when a fire erupted inside their Apollo 1 spacecraft while they were conducting tests on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center.

Betty Grissom said she would have received no financial judgment for her husband’s death if Houston attorney Ronald D. Krist had not filed a last-minute lawsuit for her in 1972. The suit resulted in a $350,000 award from North American Rockwell, the Apollo prime contractor.

Krist, now representing Cheryl McNair, widow of Challenger astronaut Ronald McNair, filed suit last fall against Morton Thiokol, the manufacturerof the solid rocket booster blamed for the Challenger accident. He also represents the parents of two other Challenger crew members.

Justice Department officials recently announced that four Challenger families had agreed to a settlement of about $1 million apiece in return for not suing the federal government.

“That’s still kind of cheap,” she said. “I don’t want to give the Challenger families advice, but they might learn something from my experience.

“I got smart after 20 years. I should have found it out sooner. I didn’t know anything about the statute of limitations, and all of that.”

She advised the Challenger families, “I’d file a lawsuit, because I know right now that they don’t care anything about you.”

“I think the general public has gotten behind the Challenger tragedy, in sympathy and understanding that it may not have had for the Apollo 1 fire, because Christa McAuliffe the schoolteacher was aboard,” she said.

“But we didn’t have a schoolteacher on Apollo 1. We had military men.”

Grissom said her husband had graduated from Purdue University and that the university gave her two sons scholarships, “or else we would never have made it.”

The two other Apollo widows received payments of $125,000 apiece from North American Aviation as a result of her legal action.