Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

On October 11, 1968, Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham tested the Apollo 7 Command Service Module (CSM) in a low Earth orbit; eleven days later they plopped down in the Atlantic Ocean. The media applauded the mission wildly, the president phoned his congratulations to the crew, and NASA declared that the flight had more than achieved its objectives. Inside the Agency, flight planners set about the task of sending Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders to the moon just sixty days later.

Unlike the Gemini spacecraft, the Apollo program went back to using an escape tower. Aldrin:

Apollo 7, the first manned Block II CSM, lifted off perfectly with the ignition of the Saturn IB at 11:00 am on October 11, 1968. This was Wally Schirra’s third flight and the first for Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele. Their ride on the Saturn IB booster was bumpy for the first few minutes, and on ignition the S-IVB second stage gave them a good kick in the pants. The new mixed-gas cabin atmosphere in this Block II command module, composed of 40 percent nitrogen and 60 percent oxygen, also worked well. After a short time in orbit the nitrogen had been vented and the crew were breathing pure oxygen at a safe, low cabin pressure.

The flight’s principal objective was to check out the CSM, especially its big service propulsion system (SPS) engine. The crew worked their way into the flight plan slowly, trying to avoid the spacesickness that could ambush an overeager astronaut. As he had on his Mercury and Gemini flights, Wally Schirra managed to combine the precision of an experienced flight test engineer with the zaniness of a fraternity boy. After firing the SPS engine for the first time, Wally shouted, “Yabadabadoo!” just like Fred Flintstone.

After several more firings to modify their orbit, they made a mock rendezvous and docking with the S-IVB stage before settling down for a rigorous orbital test flight of the CSM. Under zero-G conditions, the command module seemed very roomy. They could float into odd corners to “sit” or sleep. Unfortunately, several of their many windows were fogged up with condensation or streaked with soot from the escape tower’s solid rockets. Nobody got spacesick, but they all caught bad colds, the result of an ill-conceived hunting trip in the Florida marshes with racing driver and car dealer Jim Rathman. But they had practiced the mission in simulators so many times over the past months that their performance was flawless.

Over the next 10 days, Wally and his crew adapted to the spacecraft’s quirks, like sweating coolant pipes, banging thrusters, and a rudimentary sanitation system. Walt Cunningham and Schirra even accomplished feats of weightless gymnastics in the spacious lower equipment bay below the crew couches.

Television coverage was a key part of the public relations dividends of this flight. Wally had brusquely vetoed the first planned live TV broadcast because that day’s flight plan was overcrowded. (And he later revealed he was mad at Mission Control for launching them into high-altitude winds.) But soon he returned to his jovial self. He and Walt even held up professionally printed placards that quipped to the camera: “Hello From the Lovely Apollo Room High Atop Everything.”

For the first time in 23 months, America could see its astronauts in space again. Their competence, their humor, and the Apollo spacecraft’s sophistication went a long way to raise the national mood in an extremely troubled year. In the first eight months of 1968 there had been the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the May student revolt in Paris, the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August. These three grinning astronauts tumbling and pirouetting in their roomy spacecraft were just what the country needed to see.

After splashdown in the Atlantic less than a mile from the aircraft carrier Essex , NASA called the mission “101 percent successful.”

The Soviet program had expanded so much that it needed a new centre for cosmonauts. This was called Zvedezni Gorodok (Star Town). They tested a modified Soyuz/Proton disguised as a Zond craft. Zond were unmanned deep space probes.

Aldrin and Armstrong were training as LEM pilots. After becoming competent on helicopters, they used something called a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) for this, calling it “the flying bedstead” because it was a wingless platform of struts and spherical propellant tanks built around a small vertically mounted jet engine. The astronaut sat in an ejection seat, operating a pair of hand controllers like those on the LEM. The trainer’s jet engine had computerized power settings that balanced earth’s gravity, allowing the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to simulate flight in the one-sixth G of the moon. On 6 May Armstrong crashed it. Aldrin:

On May 6, Neil Armstrong was flying the LLRV during routine training when the machine began to wobble and spin during his descent from 210 feet to the runway. He fought to regain control with the thrusters, but the platform sagged badly to one side and lurched into a spin. He had maybe a second to decide: if the trainer tipped completely over and he fired his ejection seat, the rocket charge would propel him headfirst into the concrete below. But Neil held on as long as he could, not wanting to abandon this expensive piece of hardware.

At the last possible moment, he realized the thruster system had completely malfunctioned, and he pulled his ejection handles. He was blasted up several hundred feet, and his parachute opened just before he struck the grass at the side of the runway. Neil was shaken up pretty badly, and the LLRV exploded on impact. Later it was determined that the thrusters system was poorly designed, allowing Neil’s propellant to leak out.

This was the second time Neil had ejected from an aircraft. The first had been in Korea, when he had nursed his flak-damaged plane back across American lines to bail out over friendly territory. Apparently Neil had waited to the bitter end, trying to make it to an emergency landing strip. His tendency to hang on to crippled flying machines had shown up again in 1962 when he had a flameout on the X-15 rocket plane out at Edwards. He’d ridden that stubby-wing aircraft almost down to the dry lake-bed before getting the engines lit. Neil just didn’t like to abort a flight.

Apollo 8 was the first spacecraft launched by the larger Saturn V booster. Jim Lovell had joined the astronaut program during Project Gemini and had flown on the Gemini VII and XII missions. Lovell:

On the morning Apollo 8 was launched, December 21, the doubts and the acrimony were at least outwardly forgotten. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were sealed in their spacecraft just after 5:00 am in preparation for a 7:51 launch. By 7:00 the networks’ coverage began and much of the country was awake to witness the event live. Across Europe and in Asia, audiences numbering in the tens of millions also tuned in.

From the moment the Brobdignagian Saturn 5 booster was lit it was clear to TV viewers that this would be like no other launch in history. To the men in the spacecraft – one of whom had never flown in space before and two of whom had ridden only the comparatively puny, 109-foot Gemini-Titan – it was clearer still. The Titan had been designed originally as an intercontinental ballistic missile, and if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself strapped in its nose cone – where nothing but a thermonuclear warhead was supposed to be – it felt every bit the ferocious projectile it was. The lightweight rocket fairly leapt off the pad building up velocity and G forces with staggering speed. At the burnout of the second of its two stages, the Titan pulled a crushing eight G’s, causing the average 170 pound astronaut to feel as if he suddenly weighed 1,360 pounds. Just as unsettling as the rocket’s speed and G’s was its orientation. The Titan’s guidance system preferred to do its navigation when the payload and missile were lying on their sides; as the rocket climbed, therefore, it also rolled 90 degrees to the right, causing the horizon outside the astronauts’ windows to change to a vertigo-inducing vertical. Even more disturbing, the Titan had a huge range of ballistic trajectories programmed into its guidance computer, which aimed the missile below the horizon if it was headed for a military target or above the horizon if it was headed for space. As the rocket rose, the computer would continually hunt for the right orientation, causing the missile to wiggle its nose up and down and left to right, bloodhound-fashion, for a target that might be Moscow, might be Minsk or might be low Earth orbit, depending upon whether it was carrying warheads or spacemen on that particular mission.