On November 9, 1967, a Saturn V rocket, unmanned and bearing the Apollo 4 name, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was part of the legendary Apollo missions, the series launched with President Kennedy’s famed 1961 speech before Congress where he declared that America would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. And while it was technically the fourth Apollo mission, it was the first successful flight to carry the historic name.
The Apollo program was the third and final NASA-led effort towards putting a man on the moon. The first space program, Project Mercury, had commenced in 1958 and was largely tasked with putting a man in space. The second program, Gemini, was intended to help understand space travel and develop techniques and technologies to put towards Apollo’s goal of a moon landing. For government programs, these missions had such evocative names, largely because of Dwight Eisenhower, who upon hearing plans to call the Mercury missions “Project Astronaut” and the Air Force’s initial program name of “Man in Space Soonest,” instructed NASA to pick something more evocative.
Falling back on their old ways, NASA named the first flight of the Apollo program AS-201, which was a suborbital mission to test early aspects of the command module. It was the first of three flights in 1966, AS-201 through AS-203, which were all unmanned and tested individual aspects of what would later comprise a complete spacecraft. Apollo was the first of the space programs to have a three-person capacity in the command module. This complement was necessary for the various responsibilities of landing and then taking off from the surface of the moon. And so, AS-204 would be the first mission to carry a full complement of three astronauts in a suborbital test of the new command module. The astronauts chosen for this mission, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, decided to dub this first manned Apollo mission “Apollo 1.”
Then disaster changed everything. While the three astronauts were sitting on the launch pad, strapped in and ready for launch, a fire sparked in the command module. A number of design flaws that made it difficult for the astronauts to escape the module quickly, along with an oxygen rich artificial atmosphere, conspired to kill all three of them before help could arrive. It was a dark day for the space program, and manned flights were put on hold indefinitely until the fire could be investigated. While protocol called for the mission to be unnamed as it didn’t even launch, the widows of the three astronauts campaigned NASA to consider this flight Apollo 1.
Out of respect for the astronauts who had given their lives, NASA agreed to officially honor this botched flight as Apollo 1. This threw a wrench into their naming convention, however, as if they were now considering all flights, successful or no, as Apollo missions, they would have to reconsider the flights that had already happened. In reality, they ended up making a compromise. They decided to consider the successful unmanned flights of AS-201 through AS-203 as the first three Apollo missions, although they wouldn’t be retroactively altering the names. This meant that the next flight to go up, the first test of the behemoth Saturn V rocket, was dubbed Apollo 4. Thus, Apollos 2 and 3 don’t exist in the historical record, and Apollo 1 is more of a ceremonial name than anything else.
Ultimately, it was Apollo 11 that made the Apollo program a household name in America. Apollos 4, 5, and 6 had been unmanned and were meant to ensure the Saturn V was safe for manned flight, while Apollos 7,8, and 9 began to involve manned orbits of Earth and tested live docking procedures for the lunar landing module. Apollo 10, which has become known as the dress-rehearsal for the landing, actually circled the moon and performed all aspects of the mission aside from landing. NASA famously short-fueled the lunar lander on that mission to ensure the astronauts wouldn’t break with the mission plan and land on the moon. Had they done so, they wouldn’t have had enough fuel to get back home. Finally, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 successfully touched down on the surface of the moon, fulfilling President Kennedy’s promise, and ensuring that the astronauts of Apollo 1 hadn’t died in vain.