A Ringside View of the Moon Shots, Part 7: A Forgotten Press Corps Casualty

Space beat reporter John Wasik as he appeared in Steve Milner's book Cape Kennedy: America's Spaceport. (Courtesy of Steve Milner)

Unable to Stop Apollo 1, John Wasik Didn’t Live to See Apollo 11

By Steve Milner
Contributing Writer

Lost in the many celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of our nation’s first manned lunar landing–the Apollo 11 mission–is a tragic story about a young man, a space aficionado and skilled journalist, who didn’t live to see this unprecedented event…even though he spent his life thinking and writing about it. He was John Wasik, a self-taught reporter whose fascination with our early space program fostered professional and personal friendships with the Original 7 Mercury astronauts. His life revolved around our space program, which he regularly wrote about in his column in the Titusville, Florida, Star-Advocate newspaper.

John grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, about 14 miles north of the U.S. Navy’ Groton Submarine Base. He married his high school sweetheart and served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a court reporter, after sustaining a non-combat recurring condition that resulted in severe headaches during the rest of his life. This illness ended his military career, which also included Air Force service.

He always wanted to be a journalist, and combined with his love of the fledgling American space program, he reasoned it would be a good fit to move to the Cape area to satisfy these two dreams. But while earning his new stripes as a civilian in the fast-paced space world, his marriage fell apart, and his four children remained with their mother. And somewhere along this path he met cute, smart and outgoing Rickie Glover who, at 21, was seven years younger than he was. Initially, she typed a hand-written book manuscript for John, who brought it to her home on several occasions. She lived there with her retired military family, who quickly wondered about his intentions. Were his hand-written notes a ruse to see her? It’s possible it was. (I never asked John about the timeline of these events—his marriage, divorce and his new relationship with Rickie.)

When I relocated in the Cape Kennedy area in November 1964 as a freelance reporter, I knew very little about the space program as I was trying to break into a new journalism career. Quickly realizing my shortcomings in this area, John took me under his wing as we covered numerous unmanned rocket launches and other space-related events. In doing so, John frequently advised, explained and simplified complicated space terms for me, and also introduced me to astronauts and to other current and former Spaceport icons.

Our friendship eventually evolved from these instructional beginnings, and we later roomed together at two separate apartment complexes, located in the City of Cape Canaveral. (It would be a few more years until the Spaceport reverted to its original name, Cape Canaveral, after President John Kennedy’s family gave NASA permission to do so. The City of Cape Canaveral had kept its name after President John Kennedy’s assassination.)

During this time John spoke a lot to me about Rickie, whom I had never met, before her parents financed her relocation in England to sharpen her horseback-riding skills, first as a student, and later as an instructor. They hoped this 3,000-mile separation would end her relationship with john.

It would be more than a year that they would be apart, but John never stopped pursuing Rickie—staying in touch with her via regular mail. At some point she decided to return to the Cape area and to go back to work at the Spaceport for the same company where I eventually was a NASA public affairs contractor. John drove the 900 or so miles straight-through to Philadelphia to pick Rickie up at the airport, and I rode as a passenger with him there. He didn’t trust me to shift the gears on his Pontiac Trans Am muscle car. While en route, I clearly remember while we were driving at night after a heavy snowstorm had hit North Carolina, John spotted a large tractor-trailer, seemingly stranded on the other side of Interstate 95. Without hesitating, he told me to wait in the car, as he ran across the deserted highway, to see if the driver was okay. Fortunately he was and had stopped to rest.

John’s quick action portrayed his humanitarian side, often lost on others due to his usually perceived brashness that some thought was arrogance. That might have been the case in some circumstances, but combined with his good looks, resourcefulness and perseverance–these were assets that helped him when he was pursuing a news story.

I wanted to see my parents who lived in Philly, and this was a good opportunity for me to do it. Then, the three of us drove back to the Cape area, where she and John moved in together, to the dismay of her parents.

After a few months Rickie and her parents came to terms, and she and John were soon married. I attended their wedding and was glad to see that John had fulfilled one of his dreams. Later that year I married my Penn State sweetheart, Enid. The Wasiks and the Milners socialized occasionally—that is, until Rickie was killed during her second skydiving jump with a local group in Rockledge, just south of the City of Cocoa on the Florida mainland. Understandably, John grieved about Rickie a great deal, compounded by the fact he had encouraged her to take up skydiving.

He blamed himself for her death, exacerbated a few months later when he felt responsible for not being able to stop a launch pad test of a new Apollo 1 spacecraft. It was during this test that astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and rookie Roger Chaffee died in a fire that quickly engulfed their untried Block 1 spacecraft, which didn’t contain a quick-opening hatch.

This photograph shows Apollo 1's Command Module (known then as Apollo 204) a day after the fire that took the lives of Air Force Lieutenant Colonels Virgil "Gus" Ivan Grissom and Lt. Col. Edward Higgins White II, and Navy Lt. Cdr. Roger Bruce Chaffee. The photograph was taken in the White Room at Launch Complex 34. The exterior effects of the intense heat of the flash fire can be seen. An investigative board was promptly set up to examine the accident and identify the cause of the fire. The final report gave the results of the investigation as well as detailed suggestions for major design and engineering modifications,revisions to test planning, manufacturing procedures, and quality control. (NASA photograph via Wikipedia)

John and I were having dinner when we heard about the fire and rushed to the NASA News Center, located atop the Cocoa Beach Cape Royal office building, a 10-story structure a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean. The next 24 hours would be surreal ones, as the media, NASA officials and public affairs officers dealt, with great difficulty, with the onslaught of non-stop news queries from around the world. But people had to know information about this tragedy, even preliminary facts, as we fielded repetitive telephone calls from seemingly everywhere imaginable.

This undated photograph shows the NASA News Center, from which most news of space program activities at Kennedy Space Center reached the outside world. (Courtesy of Steve Milner)

Following their autopsies, the astronauts’ caskets were loaded aboard an Air Force transport plane at the Cape’s airstrip. And those of us who had fielded many difficult news queries about their deaths somberly switched from our earlier roles, and grieved with others who had gathered for their tearful send-off. Grissom and Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery and White at his alma mater, West Point. At that time there were rumors that NASA wanted all three buried at Arlington, until White’s widow prevailed and he was taken to West Point for burial.

Earlier, on the day of the early evening Apollo 1 fire, John had pleaded with NASA officials to postpone this test, based on detailed information he had received from a former North American Aviation quality control employee, Thomas Baron, who claimed their spacecraft contained numerous, potentially life-threatening manufacturing flaws. But the test went on as planned, followed by a stunned nation that reflected on these first-related spacecraft deaths. (Several astronauts had been killed in aviation accidents.)

Before the fire, Baron had approached a few reporters with his unproven claims about the new Apollo spacecraft’s shoddy workmanship. But only John believed him, and he went on record with NASA about it.

Following the launch pad accident, Baron testified, unsuccessfully, before Congress and was considered only as a fired, disgruntled former employee. A quality control co-worker also debunked his claims before Congress, as well as the blue ribbon panel that was set up to investigate the fire. Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman played a key role in this investigation, literally moving into North American Aviation’s California facility that was building an improved spacecraft, a Block 2 version of the one in which the three astronauts perished.

After the Apollo 1 fire, NASA changed the spacecraft’s life-support environment, replacing its pure oxygen system with a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. The Space Agency also mandated the installation of a quick-opening, explosively activated hatch that opened outwardly, versus the earlier one that required about 90 seconds to manually open inwardly. Numerous other on-board changes were made, and the Block 2 spacecraft safely carried astronauts throughout the Apollo and Skylab Programs.

Ironically, Baron and his family were later killed at a local Florida railroad crossing, which some people said was a suicidal collision with an oncoming train, due to his being depressed after the poor reception he received at the Congressional hearing.

To this day I still wonder if NASA had listened to Baron, and to John’s sincere pleading to stop the fatal Apollo 1 spacecraft test, if this tragedy could have been avoided.

After the Apollo 1 fire, John purchased Grissom’s Corvette from a local dealer, legendary NASCAR driver Jim Rathmann, who had “loaned” this car, and others, to astronauts during their Florida training. Supposedly, John was arrested at the Cape while driving Grissom’s Corvette at a high rate of speed and pointing a gun at his head in a suicidal manner. But the police record made no mention of his allegedly pointing a gun at his head, noting, instead he did have a gun in his vehicle’s glove compartment—which he regularly carried. Of course, it was illegal to bring an unauthorized firearm onto a Federal installation.
 
John remained depressed over his wife’s death, and those of Grissom, Chaffee and White, while outwardly maintaining a normal composure. And during his very difficult, ongoing mourning period, he planned to commit suicide the same way Rickie accidentally died…in a parachute accident. One story circulated that he had cut his parachute’s key internal life lines prior to his jump. Another story was that he had removed his parachute while descending over the same location where Rickie was killed.
 
These tragic Romeo-and-Juliet-like lovers are buried next to one another in the Cape area, with tombstones reflecting their life-long interests: Rickie as a horseback rider, and John as a space and aviation enthusiast.

In laying out the suit in which he wanted to be buried, he put an original Apollo pin in his suit lapel—a pin that an astronaut had given to him. I was called by his family to pick up his four-drawer file cabinet containing space reference materials John wanted me to have. And that’s when I saw a copy of the book I had written a year earlier, entitled Cape Kennedy, America’s Spaceport. In it he had penned a message to his children to look at page 201 in the book’s press section. It showed John in a flight suit, leaning, almost cavalierly, on the needle-like speed Indicator nose of an Air Force fighter plane he was about to fly in as a rear-seat passenger.

The past intersects with the future on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. In the foreground is what remains of historic Launch Pad 34; in the distance behind it is Space Launch Complex 37 whence NASA's Orion spacecraft made its first flight test. In January 1967, a fire erupted on the Pad 34 during a preflight test, taking the lives of the Apollo 1 crew, NASA astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. (NASA photo by Ben Smegelsky/ KSC-2015-1180 via Kennedy Space Center/Flickr)

I often wonder if my makeshift time capsule consisting of a small plastic medicine bottle containing John’s obituary is still buried where I had left it at the Space Center’s press site five decades ago, three-and-a-half miles from the Apollo 11 launch site. In my heart I felt John’s spiritual presence at this historic launch.

Editor's Note: In addition to serving as public affairs officer for 17 years at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Steve Milner was also a public affairs contractor with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Cape Canaveral during the manned Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs.