In 1964, after the family moved to Houston, Roger Chaffee began his astronaut training. This included not only further flight training, but also survival training for failed land or water landings, as well as the study of the lunar surface, since the third group of astronauts had to prepare for the moon landing. The training sessions also included EVA (spacewalk) training in a large pool of water.
When astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett died in a plane crash on February 28, 1966, Roger Chaffee had the honor of carrying See’s coffin at the funeral, along with other colleagues.
One of Chaffee’s first major assignments was to serve as a communications assistant on the Gemini 4 mission in June 1965. He also flew a mission with Gus Grissom as a support pilot on an unmanned Saturn 1B mission to photograph its launch.
Shortly after the Gemini 8 flight with Neil Armstrong and David Scott in March 1966, NASA announced the crew members for the first manned Apollo mission. Gus Grissom was named commander, with Ed White as chief pilot and Roger Chaffee as pilot. The mission was scheduled to launch in the spring of 1967.
During the next few months, the crew in Downey, California, learned inside and out about their Apollo spacecraft CSM-012, which was assembled at the factory there.
However, since the Apollo spacecraft had not yet reached the same level of maturity as its Gemini predecessors, the launch was postponed and further tests were scheduled.
One of the most important tests took place on January 27, 1967, at Cape Canaveral. The entire crew—Edward H. White, Roger B. Chaffee, and Gus Grissom—took their places in the command module to conduct a plug-out test. During the test, however, the interior of the capsule caught fire. Due to the use of pure oxygen at a slight overpressure as the capsule’s atmosphere, the fire spread to all flammable materials within seconds. The internal pressure of the capsule was immediately and significantly increased by the computer-controlled oxygen supply. All three astronauts perished because the hatch could not be opened quickly enough, either from the inside (due to the excessive internal pressure from the fire) or from the outside (due to the lack of rescue teams directly at the capsule). The hatch was subsequently completely redesigned, and more than a thousand other modifications were made to the spacecraft and its construction.
Chaffee was buried in Section 3 next to Gus Grissom at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C., with a state funeral.