The Grand Rapids boy who flew to Apollo 1 — and the planetarium that carries his name

A barnstorming pilot’s son built model airplanes on a card table in a Grand Rapids living room and told anyone who’d listen he was going to fly one for real. Roger Bruce Chaffee was born here on February 15, 1935, joined the Boy Scouts at thirteen and made Eagle, and graduated fifth in his class from Central High in 1953. From a card table in west Michigan, the line ran straight up: aeronautical engineering, the Navy, and in 1963 a seat in NASA’s third astronaut class.

He drew the third chair on Apollo 1, the first crewed flight of the program meant to land Americans on the moon. He never flew it. On January 27, 1967, during a routine “plugs-out” test on the launch pad in Florida, an electrical fire swept the sealed capsule in seconds. Chaffee died alongside Gus Grissom and Ed White. He was thirty-one, and he had never been to space.

Grand Rapids did what hometowns do with grief — it pointed it upward. The Public Museum renamed its domed planetarium the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium, and to this day kids tip their heads back under that dome to watch the same stars he chased. There’s a crater named for him on the far side of the moon, too, in a cluster honoring the Apollo 1 crew, which is a strange and fitting kind of permanence: a boy who never reached space now has a piece of it that bears his name forever.

The planetarium sits along the Grand River downtown, and on a clear show night the projector throws a sky over the whole room. Somewhere in it is the moon, and on the side you can’t see from Earth, a crater spelled C-H-A-F-F-E-E.