Starfall

First edition, published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, with a dust jacket designed by Walter Harper.

Betty Grissom’s account, written with journalist and former aerospace executive Henry Still, of her marriage to Virgil “Gus” Grissom from their Mitchell, Indiana courtship through his Mercury and Gemini flights to the January 27 1967 Apollo 1 fire and its aftermath, including her lawsuit against North American Rockwell, builders of the Apollo spacecraft. The prologue frames the fire against the failed Vanguard TV3 satellite launch of December 6 1957, reconstructing the Apollo 1 accident second by second from the two wires that touched beneath Grissom’s couch to the astronauts’ deaths, before returning to Gus’s Indiana boyhood.

The book’s 20 chapters carry the story past the fire into its investigation and legal aftermath, closing with “Storefront Lawyer,” “Fifteen Seconds,” and “A Half Ton of Rocks.” Photographs, gathered after page 128, include a Wide World Photos print of Gus and Betty with sons Scott and Mark.

The acknowledgments thank Johnson Space Center director Christopher Kraft, astronauts Deke Slayton, Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Jack Schmitt, NASA public affairs officer John McLeaish, historians James Grimwood and Sally Gates, sons Scott and Mark Grissom, and attorney Ronald Krist.