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White was as honed for space as any astronaut could hope to be. The son of a retired Air Force major general, he once recalled that his father took him on his first airplane ride when he "was barely old enough to strap on a parachute," let him take the controls as soon as they were airborne. White naturally gravitated to West Point, graduated in 1952, earned a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan, became a jet pilot. He married a petite blonde he met on a West Point football weekend; they had a son and a daughter.
An archetypical all-American boy, White was quietly religious, unashamed-Ŧ patriotic and ruggedly athletic. At West Point, he starred in soccer, set an Academy record in the 400-meter hurdles, just barely missed qualifying for the 1952 U.S. Olympic team. Zealous when it came to physical fitness, White jogged a couple of miles every morning to keep in shape, shinnied a 40-foot rope in his backyard on weekends, usually bicycled the three miles between his Houston home and the NASA Space Center. To his fellow astronauts, it came as no surprise when White took along a gold cross, a St. Christopher medal and a Star of David on his 62-orbit Gemini 4 flight, explaining afterward that they were "the most important thing that I had going for me."
Roger Chaffee, the rookie of the Apollo team, joined the Navy after his graduation (aeronautical engineering) from Purdue in 1957, logged more than 1,800 hours flying time in jets before becoming an astronaut in 1963. During training for the Apollo mission, the boyishly handsome Chaffee came to be especially close to Grissom, at times even seemed to ape some of Gus's mannerisms. Though he prudently stayed in the shadow of his more experienced crewmates, Chaffee shared their burning ambition to land on the moon; in the den of his Houston home hangs a map of the lunar landscape. Last summer, after watching a spectacular launching of a Saturn rocket at Cape Kennedy, Chaffee, father of two, turned to his wife Martha, and exclaimed: "It's going to be a beautiful sight. I can't wait to take a ride on that bird."
Ready & Waiting. The impact of three deaths aboard a "bird" raised anew the question of whether the conquest of space is really worth the cost —in lives or in money. Congressional support has been relatively lukewarm recently, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials considered themselves lucky to get a $5.05 billion budget proposal from the President this year.
But NASA backers are convinced that the race for the moon will continue. Said California Democrat George Miller, chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee: "This is a tragedy; nevertheless, it is one of the hazards that take place. Remember, every new aircraft has cost lives of test pilots, and the pilots know it. I am certain that if Grissom, White and Chaffee could come back, they would be the first to urge that the program go on."