Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

Approaching Gumdrop in the darkness, McDivitt fired his thrusters to maneuver, “illuminating the LM cabin like the Fourth of July.” Dave Scott watched the fireworks, carefully matching what he saw with the radar data on his computer display. The final approach and docking went smoothly as Spider and Gumdrop were joined again, and the two men in the LM had completed their most critical maneuver. The lunar module, which had been the program’s bottleneck for years, had just performed flawlessly in space.

Apollo 10 was a full-scale rehearsal of the moon landing expedition, flown by Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young. They made two orbits of the moon and flew the LEM less than 50,000 feet above the surface.

In January 1969, the Soviets still needed to test their re-entry module before they were ready for a circumlunar fly-by. On 14 January Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 made a rendezvous which included an EVA transfer.

On 4 July the Soviets were preparing a fully manned flight test of their lunar landing system involving both their new G-1 booster and a Proton booster. The G-1 would carry a 50-ton unmanned composite lunar spacecraft into orbit, while the Proton would launch a Soyuz carrying three cosmonauts. Their mission would be to rendezvous and dock with the lunar payload. While the G-1 booster was being fuelled an American satellite was observing it when an electrical short ignited fuel in the third stage and almost 3,000 tons of propellant exploded. Naturally the mission was cancelled.

Aldrin would take an Apollo I mission patch and Soviet medals honouring the deceased cosmonauts, Gagarin and Komarov, to leave behind on the moon:

The commander of the LEM was next to the hatch so it was practical that he should be the first to walk on the moon.

On 16 July 1969 Wernher von Braun prayed during the final moments of the countdown for Apollo 11. Aldrin:

“T minus ten, nine…” The voice from the firing room sounded calm. I looked to my left at Neil and then turned right to grin at Mike. “Four, three, two, one, zero, all engines running.” Amber lights blinked on the instrument panel. There was a rumble, like a freight train, far away on a summer night. “Liftoff! We have a liftoff.”

It was 9:32 am.

Instead of the sudden G forces I remembered from the Titan that launched Gemini XII, there was an unexpected wobbly sway. The blue sky outside the hatch window seemed to move slightly as the huge booster began its preprogrammed turn after clearing the tower. The rumbling grew louder, but was still distant.

All five F-1 engines were at full thrust, devouring tons of propellant each second. Twelve seconds into the flight, the Houston Capcom, astronaut Bruce McCandless, announced that Mission Control had taken over from the firing room at the Cape. We were approaching Max Q, one minute and 20 seconds after lift-off. It felt like we were at the top of a long swaying pole and the Saturn was searching the sky to find the right trajectory into orbit.

“You are go for staging,” Bruce called.

Neil nodded, gazing at the booster instruments on his panel. He had a tuft of hair sticking out from the front of his Snoopy cap that made him look like a little kid on a toboggan ride. “Staging and ignition,” he called. The gigantic S-IC burnt out and dropped away toward the ocean, 45 miles below us.

Oddly enough the S-II’s five cryogenic engines made very little noise, and the Gs built gently. Three minutes into the flight, the escape tower automatically blasted free, dragging the boost protection cover with it.

Now that the cover was gone, we could look out and see the curved Atlantic horizon recede. Six minutes later, we could clearly make out the division between the arched blue band of Earth’s atmosphere and the black sky of space. The S-II dropped away and the single J-2 engine of our S-IVB third stage burned for two and a half minutes before shutting down. A Velcro tab on the leg of my suit fluttered in the zero G. Apollo 11 was in orbit.

Above Madagascar we crossed the terminator into night. While Neil and I continued our equipment checks, Mike removed his helmet and gloves and carefully floated down to the lower equipment bay to check our navigation system by taking star fixes with the sextant. We had to be sure our linked gyroscopes – the “inertial platform” – were working well before we left Earth orbit.

Two hours and 45 minutes after lift-off we were into our second orbit, just past orbital dawn near Hawaii. We were strapped tightly to our couches, with our gloves and helmets back on. Restarting the third-stage cryogenic engine in space was risky. The temperature of liquid hydrogen was near absolute zero, but the engine’s plume was hot enough to melt steel. It was possible that the damn thing could explode and riddle our spacecraft with shrapnel.

The TLI burn began silently. But as the acceleration load went from zero to 1.5 Gs, our cabin began to shake. The Pacific tilted beneath us. Six minutes later, the burn stopped as abruptly as it had started, and my limbs began to rise once more in weightlessness. McCandless said the TLI burn had been excellent. We were travelling at a speed of 35,570 feet per second and were passing through 177 nautical miles above Earth. “Looks like you are well on your way now,” he added.

Next Mike had to carry out the “transposition and docking” maneuver he’d practiced hundreds of times in simulators. With the flick of a switch, Mike blew the explosive bolts and separated the CSM from the skirt holding us to the Saturn’s third stage, which contained the LM. At this point the CSM and LM were free of each other. Mike thrust ahead at slow speed and then used his hand controller to rotate us a complete 180 degrees. The big booster stage topped by the awkward-looking LM froze in place against the Pacific backdrop. Mike didn’t hesitate at all to gawk at the view. A few moments later, he moved our conical command module until the triangular probe at its apex was nestled firmly in the doughnut-ring drogue on the roof of the LM. We heard a reassuring clank and a whirring bump as the 12 capture latches snapped into place, forming an airtight tunnel between the two spacecraft.

We were kind of bizarre looking now with the bulletlike CSM wedged into the cement-mixer LM. Also, the bulky white tube of the S-WB was still firmly attached to the LM, and we couldn’t separate until we’d completed a long checklist. Finally, I was able to call, “Houston, Apollo 11, all twelve latches are locked.”

I looked out my window and could make out the cloud-covered mouth of the Amazon. Even at this speed, there was no way to actually sense Earth receding, but if I glanced away from the window then looked back, more of the planet was revealed. The next time I stared out, I was startled to see a complete bright disk. We were 19,000 miles above Earth, our speed slowly dropping as Earth’s gravity tugged at us and the distance grew.

Flying steadily this way may have given us a nice view of Earth, but it also meant that one side of the spacecraft was constantly in sunshine, while the other was in darkness. You can’t do this for very long because in space the sun’s heat will literally broil delicate equipment and burst propellant tanks on the hot side, while on the shaded side the gear will freeze in the deep cold. We had to begin the “barbecue roll” slowly on our long axis so that we would distribute the sun’s heat evenly. Mike fired the thrusters and tilted the spacecraft, making us perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, that invisible disk of Earth’s orbit about the sun. Most people probably thought Apollo 11 was shooting toward the moon like a bullet, with its pointed end toward the target. But actually we were moving more like a child’s top, spinning on the nozzle of our SPS engine.