July 16th marked the 44th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 – our first manned mission to land on the moon. Today, the 20th marks the anniversary of the landing.
I came to the realization this year that the space race occurred 40 years ago and just because I was very familiar with how that era unfolded, you kids only have little snippets of understanding. So this year I will give my own little history of the space race. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe you’ll even read it.
I grew up with the space race. When the Russians launched Sputnik-1 in 1957 I was 9 years old. In the same year the Russians launched Sputnik-2 with a live dog in it. The dog only survived a few hours but it showed the Russians were out to show up the West by claiming space firsts.
I watched our space program grow and logically decide how to get to the moon. We Structured a 3 phase program. Mercury – a 1-man capsule to demonstrate manned space flight. There were about 15 unmanned flights to prove all systems (including some ugly failures). The first 2 missions were only 15-minute sub-orbital flights using a single-stage Redstone rocket as the booster.
This was the era of the original 7 astronauts. Each mercury capsule was named with a 7. The first orbital flight by John Glenn came in February 1962 in Freedom 7– almost a year after the Russians accomplished their first orbital flight.
There were 6 Mercury flights, the last one orbited the earth for just over a day. Each mission was covered from launch to splashdown on radio and TV. The shorter flights were covered full-time. It was an exciting time and I watched and listened as much as was possible. This was before live TV transmission was possible from anywhere in the world. All the reporting was done from information radioed in and using mock-up and models in the TV studio.
After Mercury came Gemini, a two-manned vehicle that was used to demonstrate, in Earth orbit, the maneuvers necessary to get to the Moon . Gemini accomplished rendezvous and docking and was the first use of fuel cells in our space program. Another goal of Gemini was to prove mans endurance in space was sufficient for a lunar mission. The longest mission lasted 14 days.
The last Gemini Mission was in Nov 1966. That was my freshman year at FIT and this was the first launch I witnessed, Gemini launches were not spectacular. The booster was a converted Titan ICBM. The military rocket was designed to be launched from silos. Unlike the smoky trail we are used to seeing behind a rocket as it rises off the pad the Titan’s plume was almost invisible. The military designed it that way for low observability . So the view of the rocket from the Canaveral Pier was rather disappointing for me. I did see it but it wasn’t what I expected.
In Jan 1967 the 3-man crew of Apollo I died in fire in their capsule as they trained for their mission. While the flaws in the Apollo capsule were being fixed (during the latter-half of 1967 and early 1968) the US proceeded with unpiloted test launches of the Saturn 5 launch vehicle and the Lunar Module . Apollo 1's mission was later accomplished on Apollo 7 in Oct 1968. The eleven-day mission was a total success, and we were back on schedule with our lunar mission schedule. I got to see most of these launches. As the launches became more commonplace we would go up to one of the causeways that had a site line to the launch and have launch parties – essentially camping out overnight (yes, beer was consumed by some) to assure a good spot from which to watch the launch. The launches were very popular events.
The US still believed the Russians were going to try to get men to the moon before us. The Russians were having development problems with their Zond spacecraft. They did successfully circumnavigate the moon in 1968 with an unpiloted Zond but the craft had difficulty on reentry in Earth’s atmosphere and was destroyed (the Russians claimed that was the plan). The Russians did put a scare in us when the next Zond mission transmitted voice signals back to earth on its way to the Moon. It turned out that this craft carried 2 tortoises not people (the Russians really knew how to jerk our chain). It did return successfully however so it appeared the Russians might be ready to send men on the next flight. As it turned out their next mission was unmanned and encountered pressurization issues in reentry.
We experienced problems with the development of the Lunar Module (LM) so NASA shuffled the Apollo launch schedule and designed an orbital lunar mission with no Lunar Module. This is how Wikipedia describes that mission: Apollo 8 launched on 21 December 1968, and became the first human-crewed spacecraft to leave low-Earth orbit and go to another celestial body, the Moon. On 24 December Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to enter into orbit around the Moon. They orbited ten times, and transmitted one of the most watched TV broadcasts in history, with their Christmas Eve program from lunar orbit, that concluded with a reading from the King James Bible's Book of Genesis. A few hours later, the crew performed the first-ever Trans-Earth injection (TEI) burn, to blast the Apollo 8 spacecraft out of lunar orbit and on to a trajectory back to the Earth. Just over two days later, on 27 December, Apollo 8 safely splashed down in the Pacific, completing another first: NASA's first dawn splashdown and recovery.
I was home for Christmas after a 24-hour drive up I-95 sharing the drive with 4 other guys from school. Of course I was watching the TV broadcast. This was also the mission that produced the first pictures of Earth from “deep space” the famous blue marble picture.
The following March, LM flight, rendezvous and docking were successfully demonstrated in Earth orbit on Apollo 9, and the full lunar EVA suit was tested outside the LM.
Apollo 10 was launched in May 1969. This mission went to the Moon and flew the LM to within 50,000 feet of the lunar surface. Can you imagine those guys getting so close to the surface and not being allowed to land? It just shows how cautious we were with the lives of our astronauts.
I started working at KSC in June of 69 in the Launch Vehicle Test Conductors Office. That story I’ve already told. I literally had a front row seat to the Apollo 11 launch on July 16. I didn’t own a camera at that time but I could have taken some memorable pictures.
It wasn’t common knowledge at the time but the Russians had attempted a launch of their moon rocket on July 3 1969, 2 weeks before our moon shot. The unmanned rocket hit the pad after an engine shutdown, destroying itself and the launch facility. This eventually led to the Russians cancelling their program.
The Apollo story is pretty well known from this point on with six Moon landings, The program returned 842 pounds of lunar rocks and soil to Earth.
I worked at KSC all summer and was doing engineering aid tasks for the Apollo 12 and 13 launch vehicles. I actually got to stick my head in a service door at the top of the 2nd stage of Apollo 13 and touch the top of the fuel tank. So my fingerprints got launched with Apollo 13. I had nothing to do with the problems that Apollo 13 had.
So that’s my story. It only took me 4 days to write this a little at a time. Now you know why I’m not blogging much. It takes me a long time!
