Page 9 - Apollo 1 News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> reporter: i talked to tony hayward, the ceo of bp, and he told me that he compares this disaster to apollo 1. it's never happened before to them. trying feats never tried before. there's no guarantee of success. here we are over two weeks after the disaster originally happened. so the natural question was -- what's your plan b? >> do you have something ready to go just in case this fails? >> well, the ready to go is, of course, containing the spill to the maximum extent possible and then a further operation on the blowout preventer which will probably take two to three weeks to bring into p...

Have main engine start, four, three, two, one and liftoff, liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower. >> but we also remember the dangers and sacrifices. apollo 1, the challenger and columbia. president obama unveils the next step. a new focus later this afternoon. we want to talk more about nasa's future and the past. in dallas, maryanne webber. she flew two shuttle missions and she's in arlington, vermont. space historian and journalist. roger hannaberg. let's go ahead, mary ellen and start with you, 297 orbits around the earth. just for a moment tell us all what...

Downrange. >> and we also remember the dangers and the sacrifices apollo 1, the "challenger" and "columbia." those are all memories burned into our collective memories. the pages of nasa's past. today, president obama unveils the future and the new focus. a lot of people wondering where it fits in. cnn's john zarrella is there live. president obama will be there to talk about the future of the space program. and there's been a lot of criticism. >> reporter: yeah, there sure has, kyra. what you're saying about nasa, a lot of people will tell you nasa is at its best when the space agency has a d...

But they will have the ability to get a great deal of forensic evidence what may have physically what happened to the airplane by looking at how the structureed tore or came apart. to see if there was any fire damage. to see if there was any damage that happened to the aircraft before impact. all traffic investigators are trained to do that with ferrous and non-ferrous met it is as well as electrical wiring as well. the accident reminds me of problems we had and issues with the apollo 1 bad fire. astronaut frank borman said that nasa suffered a failure imagination. they could never imagination...

Astronaut, not a cosmonaut, would be the first to fly around the moon. >> it was one of the big gambles that nasa at the direction of the president took in order to establish that america was better than the soviet union. >> a big gamble indeed. and for all, it was less than two years before that apollo 1 demonstrated just how complex every mission was. nobody knew that better than frank hormen, the point man in the apollo investigation. nasa tapped him to man the latest mission. >> i was called back, will you volunteer to take apollo 8 to the moon? i said, yes, we would be happy to. we found ...