• Apollo I: "A Rough Road Leads to the Stars"

Apollo I: "A Rough Road Leads to the Stars"

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a hero as: "A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life."

Growing up a country boy, I looked up -- literally -- to the heroes who rode their silver wings into my imagination. I was a grown man before I boarded an airplane for the first time, so maybe it was the excitement of the unknown that captivated me.

Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart were larger than life even years after their deaths.

The Allied pilots of World War II and the tales of dogfights with squadrons of Japanese and German fighters -- especially those valiant men of the Royal Air Force who challenged Hitler's Luftwaffe in the skies over Britain -- were the image of heroism to millions of stateside kids.

After the war, pilots like Chuck Yeager danced past the sound barrier and then pushed that thin layer of atmosphere just short of outer space. How quickly my generation realized that the world of Flash Gordon was becoming more science and less fiction.

When John Glenn and his Mercury spacecraft orbited the Earth three times on Feb. 20, 1962, I had a new hero of Lindbergh stature. At the same time, our nation found itself in a race for the moon.

All of our success in the new Space Age had a lot of us amateur observers believing that, unlike many of our World War II heroes, these astral pilots always came back alive.

Then, 45 years ago this Friday -- Jan. 27, 1967 -- we were jolted to reality when our heroes didn't fly into the sunset and then come back to land safely. During a test launch of Apollo 1, the first mission in the series of flights that would take a manned expedition to the moon, there was a catastrophic flash fire.

There was time only for a desperate cry: "We've got fire in the cockpit!" Seventeen seconds later, the three brave crew members -- Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee -- were dead. Apollo 1 would have been Grissom's third mission and White's second.

Above: Hero astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee pose in front of their Apollo 1 launch vehicle at the Kennedy Space Center in 1967. Photo courtesy of NASA.

It would have been an easy leap to national despair. Would our country ever reach John F. Kennedy's visionary goal of being the first nation to put a man on the moon? What was the purpose if we were to lose more of our best, brightest, most courageous heroes?

But then, in the same breath, the answer came back to us: Despair is the death knell of dreamers. Reality may have been a blow to our naive innocence, but it could not rein in the pioneering spirit that drives mankind always toward the horizon.

So, the heroes of Apollo 1 did not die in vain.

It was a short 30 months later that Apollo 11's lunar module Eagle landed and Neil Armstrong took his "giant leap for mankind."

While the launch complex where Grissom, White and Chaffee lost their lives has long since been dismantled, the launch platform still stands at the site.

On that platform are two memorial plaques dedicated to the memories of these three heroes.

The first plaque reads, in part: "They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind's final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived."

The second plaque reads: "In memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice so others could reach for the stars. Ad astra per aspera (A rough road leads to the stars). Godspeed to the crew of Apollo 1."

Amen.