Astronaut’s Daughter Finds Solace and Mission

Sheryl Chaffee Marshall was just 8 when she lost her handsome, young father in a grisly fire.

“Your father’s not coming home anymore,” her mother said.

“Oh? You’re getting divorced?” the girl asked apprehensively.

It was a blur after that.

Thirty years of blur and pain and confusion.

Only recently has Chaffee Marshall come to grips with the death of astronaut Roger Chaffee, who was trapped along with Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Edward White II inside their burning Apollo 1 capsule on a Florida launch pad Jan. 27, 1967.

What has helped her profoundly in carrying on her father’s spirit, she said, is working for NASA. She’s an administrative specialist in safety and mission assurance.

“People can’t believe that I’m working out here,” she said. “ ‘Why would you work for NASA? This is where your father was killed. Why are you working for NASA?’ ”

Why indeed?

At 6:30 p.m. that distant Friday, Chaffee, Grissom and White were strapped in a capsule 218 feet above the ground at Launch Complex 34. They were ready for a countdown test for the first manned Apollo flight, itself a warmup for the moon missions.

The cabin was pressurized with pure oxygen and equipped with a hatch that would have taken at least 90 seconds to open.

“We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” cried out a voice believed to be Chaffee’s.

The flash fire was later traced to a bruised or broken wire under Grissom’s couch. Investigators theorized that the wire contacted metal, creating sparks that ignited the nylon netting used to line the cabin to keep things from floating in weightlessness. The pure oxygen fueled an inferno.

All three died in seconds, asphyxiated by toxic gases.

When Chaffee Marshall went to work at Kennedy Space Center as a clerk in 1983, 16 years after the fire, she had no aspirations, just two sons and the need for a job. She told few people who she was; she wanted no special treatment or attention.

“I hadn’t worked anywhere longer than six months, so when I came out here I was like, ‘OK, well, if it lasts a year I’ll be happy,’ ” she said. “As time went on, it became serious. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’m trying to even go out and promote NASA more because I’m scared. I really am scared for the future of the space program.

“It’s evolved into something that I feel like my father would be proud of,” she added.

Chaffee, a Navy lieutenant commander, was 31 when he died. He was the rookie on the crew, the one who had yet to fly in space.

Grissom, the second American in space, had Mercury and Gemini missions. White, the first American spacewalker, had Gemini experience. Chaffee had Apollo 1.

Chaffee Marshall likes to think her father would have gone to the moon had he lived and that the 12 men who did reach the lunar surface gained by her father’s death.

“The fact that I went to the moon,” said Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, “I’ve got to look back at Gus, Ed and Roger.”

The charred capsule has been in locked storage at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., despite requests from the Chaffees and others to put it on display.

NASA has held no Apollo 1 observances since the late 1960s. A memorial ceremony scheduled for last Monday at the space center was privately arranged.

The most egregious oversight, for Chaffee Marshall, was the 20th anniversary in 1987. It fell one day before the first anniversary of the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger. NASA went all out to honor the seven dead Challenger crew members and almost ignored the Apollo 1 men.

Chaffee Marshall had to order her own memorial wreath for display next to NASA’s flowers for the Challenger crew.

Once or twice a year, Chaffee’s 38-year-old daughter drives out to Complex 34, isolated off at one end of at Cape Canaveral Air Station. She goes with her husband, Andy Marshall, or friends, never alone.

Stenciled in fading black block letters on the dilapidated launch pedestal are the words, “Abandon in Place.”

“That’s where I can remember my father,” she said. “I remember him as living, not as dying there. It’s where he worked.”

And it’s where she works, openly now and with pride.

“I had to come to grips with what happened and accept it and learn to live with it,” she said. “And I think this was my way of doing it, working out here and getting involved. I cannot imagine being bitter for 30 years.”