NARRATOR: The moon is
a necessary first step
for exploration of the planets.
To fly them there and return
them safely in this decade
is the goal of NASA's
project Apollo.
The early missions of Mercury
and the experience from Gemini
have brought this country to the
next major milestone, the first
Apollo 3-manned spaceflight.
These are the men
to fly that mission,
command pilot Virgil Grissom,
Mercury, Gemini, and now
Apollo.
His third time into space,
one of the original seven
astronauts.
The senior pilot
Edward White, he
will be remembered for his
spacewalk during Gemini 4.
White has been specializing
in the computers
and training for the
upcoming mission.
Astronaut Roger Chaffee will
man the third Apollo seat.
He has been concentrating on
the flight plan and experiments.
ROGER CHAFFEE: I think
everybody in the space program
has been asked this 50 times.
And it's probably
the toughest question
to answer and not sound, shall
we say, corny with the answer.
It's a new phase of exploration.
It's-- you might say, and sound
a little trite, it's there.
We'd be neglecting our duties as
people, as human beings, if we
didn't try to investigate it.
We're improving our
engineering capability.
We're building
new equipment that
has untold number
of uses in fields
that we can't even
conceive of today.
The scientific aspect,
I don't think anybody
can predict what
it's going to be.
Things that we'll find there.
Some of the basic
geologic things
that we might find there that
have long since been destroyed
by weather on
Earth might give us
more insight into the
birth of our universe,
the birth of our solar system.
INTERVIEWER: You flew on--
on Mercury, flew on Gemini,
now you're flying on Apollo.
Does the law of averages,
so far as the possibility
of a catastrophic failure,
bother you at all, sir?
VIRGIL GRISSOM: No,
you sort of have
to put that out of your mind.
There's always a
possibility that you
can have a catastrophic
failure, of course.
It's going to happen
on any flight.
It can happen on--
on the last one as
well as the first one.
So you'll just plan,
as best you can,
to take care of all of
these eventualities.
You get a well-trained
crew, and they go fly.
