It must have seemed to the review board easier for a man on the pad to get through to the White House than to reach a local authority in time of an emergency. Report of Apollo 204 Review Board , p. 5. The only non-government person on the original board, Dr. Frank Long of Cornell Univ., a member of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, soon resigned because of the press of other activities and was replaced by Van Dolah. The review board ignored and a congressional committee later vehemently rejected the hypothesis of Dr. John McCarthy, NAA Division Director of Research, Engineering, and Test, that Grissom accidentally scuffed the insulation of a wire in moving about the spacecraft. This theory that a scuffed wire caused the spark that led to the fire still has wide currency at Kennedy Space Center.
Men differ, however, on the cause of the scuff.