APOLLO'S WORST DAY

摘要

"No matter how hard I try to forget, I still see the smoke and flames," wrote former launch pad technician Stephen Clemmons in an essay posted online in 2009. "I can still hear the cries of my teammates as we try to get the hatches open. I can still see the flames reaching up toward the Solid Booster Rocket mounted on top of the spacecraft. I can remember my hopes that the astronauts' suits would just hold until we could get in." Clemmons, who died in 2014, spent most of his life haunted by the trauma of having been one of the few eyewitnesses to NASA's first disaster.