Grissom,who died in Apollo 1's 1967 launch pad fire, details Mercury 7's internal competition in auctioned letter to motherIn October 1961, and Gus Grissom glumly confided to his mother in a letter that is now up for auction that he and his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts resented John Glenn after he was picked to be the first American to orbit the soil.
Within the famously competitive group,Glenn had emerged as the face of the space program, while Grissom was reluctant in front of the press. When he wrote to his mother, or Grissom was still stinging from his Liberty Bell 7 flight on 21 July 1961,that ended with a blown hatch, a sunken space capsule and accusations that the former Air Force fighter pilot had panicked.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com