January 27 · This Day in America
It is only a rehearsal. No rocket, no launch — just three astronauts sealed inside the Apollo 1 command module on Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy, running a routine "plugs-out" test for a flight a month away. Gus Grissom, who flew one of the first Mercury missions. Ed White, the first American to walk in space. Roger Chaffee, who has never flown and never will. The cabin is pure oxygen. A spark finds a frayed wire near Grissom's seat, and in seconds the capsule is an inferno. The hatch opens inward; it cannot be opened in time. All three men are gone in under a minute. The country grieves, and then it does the hard, unglamorous thing — it stops, it investigates, it rebuilds the spacecraft from the inside out. The men who later walked on the Moon rode hardware made safe by what was learned in that fire. The mission patch they never wore is on the lunar surface still.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1973
In Paris, the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government sign an agreement to end the longest war America had yet fought. U.S. forces would withdraw within 60 days; the prisoners of war would come home. The peace would not hold — Saigon fell two years later. But for the Americans counting days in Hanoi cells, the signatures on that page were the sound of the door unlocking.
Source: visit.archives.gov