VICTOR GLOVER - When I think about the legacy of human space exploration, it's just amazing to actually be a part of it, to know that it runs right up to and through me. It's pretty humbling. And, we spend a lot of time thinking about some of the tragedies that we've had to deal with.

GRIER WILT - Risk is a consequence of progress. We're in a very, very similar phase in our program as we were back in Apollo 1. By storytelling, hearing from the people who lived those experiences, Apollo, Columbia, Challenger, that can be more in the forefront of our mind and we can be really understanding that our decisions have consequences.

MARK KIRASICH - Apollo really changed a generation because it inspired a lot of people. Apollo taught us that it's not impossible to set audacious goals.

(INDISTINCT)

VICTOR GLOVER - You know, standing where we are looking out on the horizon and having Orion and SLS in development, having SpaceX and Boeing vehicles in development, is an interesting time. It reminds you of all of those stories that you've heard about the care that it took to create Apollo and all the vehicles leading up to that.

NORMAN CHAFFEE - Everybody knew the risk but I think we, as young guys most of us considered ourself, you know, we were able to leap tall buildings at a bound and we were bulletproof and we were gonna get it right. The appreciation of the risk and the hazards is always there. But, that was the first time we had had a problem that had cost us a life other than a plane crash.

SY LIEBERGOT: I think on Apollo 1 it was just a matter of fact that we had gotten away with so much on Mercury and on Gemini that we just went ahead did business as usual. And, it bit us finally.

CHRIS KRAFT - We were having all kinds of technical problems with the spacecraft. This machine was really a poor one. Poor from the standpoint of design, poor from the standpoint of checkout, poor from the standpoint of control, of the safety of the systems, the wiring, communications were bad. But, we were willing to go ahead. That was a mistake, a very, very serious mistake. Gus was very upset all the time about not being able to talk to the blockhouse. He used to say that, "How the hell are you gonna do this, how you gonna do space flight if you can't even talk to me from the pad to the blockhouse?"

CHRIS KRAFT - Now, we'd been going all day. I wasn't at my console all day. I went back to my office it was going so slow. There was a sudden jolt in our headsets of something had happened. We heard an explosion. We heard people's voices screaming.

[Astronaut] - Fire in the cockpit!

CHRIS KRAFT - Both inside and outside the spacecraft.

[Astronaut] - We got a bad fire! We’re burning up! 

CHRIS KRAFT - And, then there was dead silence. First thing I can, came through my mind was my God it'll take us a long time to get over this. I knew that we were in deep serious trouble, but I didn't know that the astronauts had been killed but I had an inkling that that was the case. It was a pretty horrible feeling knowing that they were dead and knowing what had happened, knowing that we really had a, we all had been a party to putting the pilots in that position.

WALT CUNNINGHAM - To this day, it's my personal opinion that they haven't actually pinned down precisely where the spark came that ignited things at 100% oxygen. Because we also didn't have all fireproof material in there then like we did later. The whole crew was gone in less than 20 seconds.

CHESTER VAUGHAN - It was clear that a lot of the materials in hindsight that we had inside the spacecraft shouldn't have been in there. I mean, they're too likely to burn. Everything is combustible in a high pressure oxygen environment. In this case the pressure was only a few PSI above ambient, but it was pure.

NORMAN CHAFFEE - I've seen people with, technicians walk into a high oxygen environment where they forgot they were smoking and smoked a cigarette and you walk in and poosh, it just, that cigarette would go up and, you know, burn their face.

SY LIEBERGOT - Quite frankly, I heard a tape of it. It was 13 seconds. That's all it took. I never got the screaming out of my mind.

ROD LOE - Another hard thing to see, I remember walking into a building down there and it was refrigerated. I remember it being very cold. But, the three suits were laid out over here with tarps over 'em. It was sort of a gruesome sight.

NORMAN CHAFFEE - I think I always had good confidence that we would overcome that terrible problem on Apollo 1 and be able to bounce back and luckily we did.

CHRIS KRAFT - The top management in NASA, Bob Gilruth, George Lowe, the people in Washington realized when that fire happened we were in a situation where we had to be, we had to change everything. Everything had to be changed to make sure that we were doing our best. So, he brought the top people of those organizations together and said, "What do we gotta do "to fix this machine?" That's what we did. That was a hell of a job. It took a change in people, a change in thinking. It'd take a change in culture to make that happen. And, I don't think we would've ever had the opportunity to do that if the fire hadn't happened. If we'd have just kept going and the fire hadn't happened, I think we'd would've been making mistake after mistake after mistake and I think we would've killed a lot more people actually in flight had we not done that.

NORMAN CHAFFEE - That really, really brought it home to us that, you know, we gotta do our job right and we can't tolerate any waiving of requirements or cutting the corners.

WALT CUNNINGHAM - We knew that that mission, that the first mission was very important. If this mission failed, it's not gonna fail because of me. We were not there for the fun of it. We were not there just for the notoriety of it. We were there to help an objective along that, as we look back on it today, is probably the greatest accomplishment of the 20th century.