Feb 10 1967
From The Space Library
Three Apollo astronauts died in Jan. 27 flash fire at KSC because some engineer, technician, or inspector had gotten careless," former Astronaut Donald K. Slayton, MSC Director of Flight Crew Operations, told employees at General Motors AC Electronics Div., Milwaukee, where Apollo guidance and navigation equipment was manufactured. Slayton urged workers: "Take a good sharp look at your job. Are you giving everything you've got? Now you know somebody's life depends on it." An MSC official later reported that Slayton's speech had not been intended for publication. Slayton emphasized that he was not trying to affix blame for the Apollo accident, but was just trying to make workers ultraconscious of the importance of their jobs. (UPI, W Star, 2/10/67; UPI, WJT, 2/11/67)
Time magazine considered the question "Why Should Man Go To The Moon?" and concluded: "The moon itself may not be a particularly valuable piece of real estate. But neither is a flight to the moon an end in itself; the moon is no more than a way station on a route that scientists have only begun to map. And there is no doubt that man is going to make the trip some day. . . . "The moon is a challenge that the US. has already taken, a milestone that US. astronauts are already looking beyond. . . . The real object is for the US. to develop the capability of voyaging confidently to the limits of man's imagination and ingenuity. The value of such voyages will always be unpredictable. But the history of the human race, said famed Norwegian Explorer Fridtjof Nansen, `is a continual struggle from darkness toward light. It is therefore to no purpose to discuss the uses of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.' " (Time, 2/10/67)
Astronaut Donn F. Eisele, in Columbus, Ohio, to receive a "Governor's Award" for increasing the prestige of the state, told AP he was opposed to "an unrealistic, arbitrary" chronological date for reaching the moon. He favored a "technical" date, which he explained to mean "as soon as we're ready, when we have performed sufficient missions to be ready, when the spacecraft is ready." (AP, NYT, 2/12/67,31)
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