On paper, Virgil Gus Grissom's career looks defined by two catastrophes: a sunken Mercury capsule and the Apollo 1 fire. This episode argues the record tells a different story. Growing up in Mitchell, Indiana, Grissom picked fruit and delivered newspapers, pivoted from basketball to swimming when he was too short for the team, and caught the aviation bug on a ride in a lawyer's private plane. After a desk-bound stint in the Army Air Forces at the end of World War II, he earned a mechanical engineering degree at Purdue while his wife Betty worked night shifts as a telephone operator, then flew 100 combat missions in an F-86 Sabre over Korea and asked for 25 more.

The hosts follow him through the Lovelace Clinic screening for Project Mercury, where he argued his hay fever was irrelevant because there is no pollen in space, and through the Jul ...