What are the grisly details of the Apollo 1 disaster; Physiologically, what happened to those men on that day; how quickly did they die?
I always assumed they burned to death completely until I read about the effects of blast overpressure. The cockpit was pressurized with pure oxygen at 16.7 psi which is 2 psi higher than athmospheric pressure. Roughly 8 seconds after astronaut white’s assumed cry of pain after a 5 second transmission at 6:31:06.2; qouting wikipedia “The intensity of the fire fed by pure oxygen caused the pressure to rise to 29 psi (200 kPa), which ruptured the Command Module’s inner wall at 6:31:19 (23:31:19 GMT, initial phase of the fire)”
This is a PSI difference of 15. I would compare this to blast overpressure experienced in explosive blasts. I would think this would’ve killed them instantly am i wrong? Would they be dead before this point; alive after it possibly? I can’t imagine what the effects would’ve been in a sealed area like this; being in the pressurized container itself that is being ruptured seems quite a violent event to me. Wikipedia is vague on this; maybe an answer from doctors or scientists might be more effective at subsiding this morbid curiosity of mind. Did their suffering end 23 seconds in or not? What kind of injuries might they sustain?
They say they asphyxiated in some sources; I find this somewhat hard to believe that they asphyxiated in 23 seconds and somehow survived the pressure event i mention. I believe this might be more of a happy ending story than what really went down. The wikipedia article itself contradicts itself by saying that asphyxiation would have occurred after the suits oxygen supplies and the suits themselves were burned through exposing the crew to the toxic environment; and I’m definitely hearing screams of pain in the recording… These men definitely burned an awful lot before they died :(; What I’m trying to determine is how exactly that happened and what all injuries they sustained before they bought the farm. I know this is morbid sorry.
A very specific question to ask might be: What would happen to a person stuck inside a 100% oxygen pressure vessel that is engulfed in flames for 23 seconds and then explodes with the forces involved with a 15 PSI pressure event?
The problem with blast overpressure is that it’s a shock wave, i.e. a step-change in pressure traveling through the environment. So not only does it subject a body to an extremely rapid pressure rise, it can also subject part of your body to extremely high pressure for a split-second before the shock wave arrives at the rest of your body. So imagine a bomb going off a short distance in front of you, six feet above the ground. The shock wave arrives first at your head. Now you have 20 psi pushing your face back, but the shock wave hasn’t arrived at your body yet; presto, broken neck (and shattered sinus bones) because your head is violently shoved backward while your body is not.
In Apollo 1, the pressure rise took a comparatively long time (13 seconds), and so at all times would have been felt uniformly all over their bodies. If it had instead happened within a second or so, they might have ruptured their eardrums (sort of like rapidly diving into deep water), but their bodies still wouldn’t have been injured by the pressure change. Being exposed to 30 psi absolute isn’t injurious in itself; at the recreational SCUBA dive limit, a diver experiences 73.5 psi (58.8 psi above atmospheric) with no issues. World-class competitive free divers go to much greater depths (and experience much greater pressures) without issue.
Smoke inhalation and searing hot combustion products may have rapidly interrupted the oxygen exchange process in their lungs, which definitely could have resulted in rapid asphyxiation.
The sudden release of pressure as the cabin walls/door seals failed wouldn’t have done much damage to the occupants’ bodies, since they are mostly incompressible. If their ears had equalized during the pressure buildup, then the sudden loss of pressure might have ruptured their eardrums (though they were likely unconscious/dead already at this point). Bear in mind that the capsule didn’t explode like that dude’s head in Scanners; the contents of the capsule weren’t scattered all about.
Without actually seeing an autopsy report, my guess would be that during the 23 seconds the astronauts breathed enough superheated air to scorch their lungs, which then filled with fluid – in short, asphyxiating them. At that point, their hearts may or may not have still been beating, but they were dying, if not clinically dead.
FWIW, in the book* Apollo 13,* it is mentioned that someone grabbed the leg of one of the dead Apollo 1 astronauts and the skin did *not *slough off as is the case with some burn victims. The author writes, “It was fumes, not flames, that claimed this man” (if I recall the words correctly.)
Third-degree burns on 100% of your body takes a while to kill. David Kirwan suffered this sort of injury trying to rescue his dog from a hot spring in Yellowstone, and survived until the following morning. So even if the Apollo 1 crew had sustained massive third-degree burns, that surely wasn’t the thing that killed them.
Everything I have read says that it was the smoke that killed the astronauts.
Their suits provided enough thermal protection that they were dead from asphyxiation before they could be serious burned.
Really, I thought the capsule was underpressured. The atmosphere would be about 5psi pure oxygen; so when the fire started, they could not open the hatch (outward) because of the outside pressure on it. I really don’t think a 16psi pure oxygen atmosphere would burn for much more than a second or two before everything went “Woof!”. I do wonder if 5 times normal O2 partial pressure is verging on toxic? (14.7x.2=3psi O2 pressure)
In USE in space it would be about 5 psi. On the ground went with ground pressure 15psi give or take.
That’s what made it dangerous and thats what exacerbated the fire. Pure 02 at a low density/pressure vs pure O2 at 3 times that.
Pure O2 is safe to breath at one atm at least short term for humans. Scuba divers will go to 2 atm on it to decompress sometimes. Or more, but at some point you increase your risk of not common but possible seizures. The seizures themselves aren’t so dangerous because if you reduce your exposure, you generally come out of it.
The problem with seizing is that it happens while you are diving, so you generally drown while thrashing around.
To test for leaks, the CM was overpressurized to 16.something PSI. It should have been able to handle 1 ATM + 5.5 PSI when on the pad.
Oh, and the inner hatch opened INWARD. As the pressure built up during the fire, there was less and less of a chance of White getting that hatch open. And FTR, during emergency egress drills, 90 seconds was considered to be a good time.
