How Long Beach Remembers Apollo 1

Forty-five years ago today, the nation was honoring three Apollo 1 astronauts in memorials in Houston, Arlington National Cemetery and West Point. They had died horribly four days earlier at Cape Canaveral (then called Cape Kennedy), when a fire broke out in their space capsule during a launch simulation and they were trapped inside. If you know the names of the oil islands just off our coast, then you know their names: Grissom, White and Chaffee.

There's more about the tragedy in the accompanying gallery and at the NASA website.

A fourth island, Island Freeman, is named after the first fatality among NASA's astronauts, Theodore Freeman, who died in a 1964 jet crash.