On January 27, 1967, an Indiana astronaut died in a fire on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy. Sixteen months later, the Air Force renamed its Indiana base after him.
A Pirep featured story · KGUS Grissom Aeroplex, Peru, IN
On the afternoon of January 27, 1967, three astronauts were strapped into the Apollo 1 command module on top of a Saturn IB rocket at Cape Kennedy Launch Complex 34 for what NASA called a "plugs-out" test; a full launch rehearsal with the spacecraft on its own power. The cabin was pressurized to 16.7 psi with pure oxygen. Ed White was the senior pilot. Roger Chaffee was the rookie. The commander was a 40-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Colonel from Mitchell, Indiana, named Virgil Ivan Grissom. Friends called him Gus.
A spark, probably from frayed wiring under Grissom's seat, ignited the oxygen atmosphere just after 6:31 PM. The fire reached two thousand degrees within seconds. The inward-opening hatch was impossible to crack against the pressure spike. The three men were incapacitated within seconds.
Grissom was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, selected in April 1959 along with Alan Shepard and John Glenn. He had flown the second American spaceflight in July 1961, a suborbital arc in Liberty Bell 7 that ended badly when the capsule's explosive hatch fired on its own after splashdown and the spacecraft sank, nearly drowning Grissom. He flew Gemini 3 in March 1965, which he nicknamed Molly Brown after the Broadway musical's unsinkable Titanic survivor. He was almost certainly going to command one of the early Apollo lunar flights.
The Air Force had owned a base about 150 miles north of the Indiana town where Grissom grew up. Opened in 1942 as Naval Reserve Aviation Base Peru, transferred to the Air Force in 1954 as Bunker Hill Air Force Base, it was a Strategic Air Command field that flew B-47s and Mach-2 B-58 Hustlers. On May 12, 1968, sixteen months after the fire, the Air Force renamed the base for him.
Today the base is Grissom Air Reserve Base, home to the largest KC-135 Stratotanker wing in the Air Force Reserve, sharing its runway with civilian general aviation. Mitchell, Indiana, where Gus Grissom grew up, is 150 miles south of the airfield that now bears his name.