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There is a second Apollo capsule waiting to be shipped to Cape Kennedy from North American Aviation's plant in Downey, Calif. There is also a back-up crew—led by Navy Captain Walter Schirra—to man the shot. But there is certain to be a long delay, for scientists must be absolutely certain that the cause of the fire is not a congenital weakness in the ship. Beyond that, it will take months to get the new capsule thoroughly tested and in position atop her Saturn 1-B. The earliest possible date that Apollo 204 could be rescheduled is late summer. Nevertheless, though the entire moonshot schedule will lag far behind expectations, there is no possibility that it will be canceled.
Because It's There. Surveyor I and Lunar Orbiter II have illumined the moon as being little more than an ugly grey rock pile. So why send a man to see for himself? The geologist wants it done because he hopes to find clues to when and how the earth came to be. The biologist wants to know if there are any vestiges of existence there that might solve the riddle of what life really is. The astronomer hopes that a definitive look at the moon could help unlock the secret of how the solar system was formed. The astronaut wants to go because it is there.
New as it is in the history of mankind's progress, the conquest of space symbolizes one of man's oldest, most basic drives: the hunger for knowledge, the lure of every new frontier, the challenge of the impossible. And that is the legacy left behind by Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee— just as it was by men like Marco Polo, Magellan, Charles A. Lindbergh and Explorer Robert Falcon Scott, whose Antarctic memorial bears an inscription from Tennyson's Ulysses: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
The line is as fitting an epitaph for those who have died as it is a raison d'etre for those who will continue to seek and find.
* Three others—Charles Bassett, Elliot See Jr. and Theodore Freeman—died in jet-plane crashes. The Soviets are known to have had only two cosmonaut casualties: one in a high-altitude parachute jump that is required of all space trainees, the other in an auto accident.