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Science / Space Race

[September 28, 1969] Apollo’s New Muses (Women Behind the Scenes in the Apollo Programme)

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Seven years ago, the Journey published an article on the Women Pioneers of Space Science.  At long last, Kaye offers a much-needed update, this time focusing on the women who helped make Apollo 11's trip to the Moon possible…


by Kaye Dee

Classical literature tells us that the god Apollo was associated with the Nine Muses, the goddesses who inspired the arts, literature and science.

Our modern Apollo program also has its Muses – trailblazing women working behind the scenes in critical areas of the programme. They deserve to be better known, not just for their own impressive careers to date, but also as role models, inspiring girls and young women who might be interested in science, technology, engineering, mathematics or medicine, but are diverted away from them by the prevailing view that careers in these areas are for men, not women.

The famous ‘Dance of Apollo and the Muses’ by the Italian architect and painter, Baldassare Tommaso Peruzzi

As someone who has had to contend with these stereotypes myself, trying to establish a career in the space sector in Australia, I thought it might be interesting this month to delve into the stories of four of the women working behind the scenes in the Apollo programme: modern-day daughters of Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, Mathematics and the “exact sciences”.

The “Return to Earth” Specialist: Frances “Poppy” Northcutt

Every aspect of a lunar voyage involves moving objects – the Apollo spacecraft, the Earth and the Moon. Calculating the trajectories required for an Apollo mission to meet and go into orbit around the Moon at a particular date and time, is a mind-bending feat. But getting astronauts safely home from the Moon is even more important!

NASA’s specialist in the incredibly complex and precise calculations required to determine the optimal trajectories for the return to Earth from the Moon, minimising fuel and flight time, is Miss Frances Northcutt, who goes by the nickname “Poppy”. She is, perhaps, the only one of these ladies that you might have heard of (at least those of you in the United States), as she was such a “curiosity” during the press and television coverage of the Apollo-8 mission that she has been interviewed many times (and more on this below).

Born in 1943, Miss Northcutt earned a mathematics degree from the University of Texas, then commenced working at TRW in 1965 as a “computress”! Yes, that was her actual job title, although in Australia we’d have just called her a "computer" (a term applied here and in Britain to both men and women doing this kind of intensive calculating work). Miss Northcutt was placed at NASA’s Langley Research Centre, calculating spacecraft trajectories for the Gemini missions. She proved to be so talented in this area that within just six months TRW promoted her to engineering work with its Return to Earth task force, helping to design the computer programmes and flight trajectories to return an Apollo spacecraft from lunar orbit to Earth.

A simplified version of the Apollo lunar free return flight trajectories

Poppy Northcutt became the first woman to work in this type of role and was soon undertaking the intricate calculations involved in enabling the Apollo astronauts to travel around the Moon and come safely home. The Moon’s lower gravity changes parameters such as fuel usage, as well as the timing of manoeuvres, so the calculations are particularly tricky. Poppy identified mistakes in NASA’s original trajectory plan, performing calculations that reduced the amount of fuel used to swing around the Moon.

When NASA decided that Apollo-8 would become a lunar orbiting mission, the task force team, including Miss Northcutt, moved to Mission Control to instruct the flight controllers on the trajectory calculations and be available to make real-time calculations and course corrections in the event of unexpected incidents during the flight. Assigned to Mission Control's Mission Planning and Analysis room, Miss Northcutt and her team have been an integral part of Apollo-8, 10 and 11 and are now preparing for Apollo-12. She is the only female engineer in the teams that work in the backrooms of Mission Control in Houston, providing support to the flight controllers.

Poppy Northcutt working in the Mission Control support room during Apollo-8

Working Like a Man (but not being paid like one!)

“Computresses” in Miss Northcutt’s original position are classed as “hourly workers”, with their wages capped at working 54 hours per week (in other words, five nine-hour days). Their male counterparts were not only paid more (as we all know, female workers are generally paid between about half and two-thirds of the wages for a man doing the same job), they were also on salaries and paid overtime.

As an ambitious young woman, Miss Northcutt quickly realised that to earn the respect of her male colleagues and be considered a peer, she would have to work the same long hours they did – even if this meant that she was essentially working 10 or more hours a week for no pay!

A NASA promotional photo of Miss Northcutt at work in March this year. She presents herself as a diligent professional

Her talent and diligence paid off with her promotion to engineer, but, ironically, even though she was still being paid less than her male colleagues, Miss Northcutt tells the story that there was no normal mechanism to approve the pay rise she received with this jump from Computress! Her manager had to keep scheduling the highest possible raise as frequently as he could to bring her up to the full female rate of her new salary. 

During Apollo missions, when shifts last around 12 to 13 hours a day in Mission Control, Miss Northcutt usually commences her duty shifts for each mission around the time that the Apollo spacecraft, coasting towards the Moon, prepares to enter the lunar sphere of gravitational influence. During lunar orbit insertion she stands by to assist with new calculations, in the event of an emergency abort, and she reports for duty at Mission Control every day of the lunar phase of the mission and until the astronauts have returned safely to the Earth's sphere of influence. No one can say Poppy Northcutt isn’t pulling her weight, just like a man!

Sexism, Celebrity and Activism

As the only female engineer in Mission Control during the Apollo-8 mission, Miss Northcutt was such a “curiosity” that she received a lot of attention from journalists. While much of this coverage was not seen in Australia, from what I have heard from friends in America, I understand that many of the questions that she received were quite sexist – and even silly.

Miss Northcutt is a very pretty woman and dresses fashionably, so apparently ABC reporter Jules Bergman thought it was more important to ask about her potential to distract her male colleagues from the mission, than to ask about her crucial role: “How much attention do men in Mission Control pay to a pretty girl wearing miniskirts?” Would they have asked a male flight controller if the suit he was wearing turned the heads of the typing pool?! I gather that she gave him a polite brush off response.

A friend in the US took this photo from her television screen, giving me a glimpse of Mr. Bergman's interview with Miss Northcutt

It is bad enough when reporters focus on her appearance and ask her such inane questions, while she operates at the level of her male colleagues, for far less monetary reward. But Miss Northcutt has also reported an instance in which she discovered that the other flight engineers were covertly watching her on a video feed, from a camera trained on her while she was conducting equipment flight tests.

As a result of her personal experiences with sexism, Miss Northcutt has become a strong advocate for women’s rights, and has joined the feminist National Organisation for Women. Even in her early days at TRW, she worked to improve the company’s affirmative action and pregnancy leave policies. “As the first and only woman in Mission Control, the attention I have received has increased my awareness of how limited women’s opportunities are”, she has said. “I’m aware of the issues that are emerging. Working in this environment I can see the discrimination against women.”

TRW is happy to use Miss Northcutt's minor celebrity to promote itself, but not happy enough to pay her the same salary as her male colleagues!

However, while she is not pleased that much of the attention she has received has been focussed on her appearance, or treating her as a rare exception to the male-dominated world of spaceflight, Miss Northcutt has said that she recognises that being a woman visibly occupying a critical position in the space programme does send a very positive message to women and girls: a career in science and technology is possible if you want it – and are prepared to work for it!

Miss Northcutt has received letters and fan mail from around the world (including several marriage proposals, it seems!) She has said that she is motivated to continue to advocate for women’s rights in the workplace by the letters she has received from young women, who have said how much she has inspired them. 

Whoever Heard of a “Software Engineer”? Margaret Hamilton

The Apollo missions not only need precise trajectories for their lunar voyages – they also need software for their onboard flight computers, which control so many aspects of the flight. If you’re not familiar with this term, “software” describes the mathematical programmes that tell a computer how to carry out its tasks, and a “software engineer” applies the engineering design process to develop software for those different tasks.

The Director of Apollo Flight Computer Programming is Mrs. Margaret Hamilton Lickly, who prefers to be known professionally as Margaret Hamilton.I've heard that women in the United States who prefer not to be categorised by their marital status, are now starting to use the designation "Ms.". I don't know if Margaret Hamilton is using this new honorific, but it seems to me appropriate to apply it to her in this article. 

33-year-old Ms. Hamilton is another woman playing a crucial role in NASA’s lunar program. Not only is she a pioneer in software engineering, she even coined the term!


Like Miss Northcutt, Ms. Hamilton is also a mathematician, having studied at the University of Michigan and Earlham College. Shortly after graduating in 1958, she married her first husband, James Hamilton, and taught high school mathematics and French, before taking a job in the Meteorology Department at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) in 1959, a few months before the birth of her daughter.

Ms. Hamilton developed software for predicting weather, and in 1961 she moved to MIT’s Lincoln Lab for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project, adapting weather prediction software into a programme used by the U.S. Air Force to search for potential enemy aircraft. At the Lab, she was the first person to get a particularly difficult programme, which no-one had been able to get to run, to actually work! While working on SAGE, Ms. Hamilton began to take an interest in software reliability, which would pay dividends during Apollo-11’s lunar landing.

A Calculated Move

When Margaret Hamilton learned about the Apollo project in 1965, she wanted to become involved in the lunar programme, and moved to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was developing the Apollo Guidance Computer. She was the first programmer hired for the Apollo work project at MIT and has led the team responsible for creating the on-board flight software for both the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules. She also serves as Director of the Software Engineering Division at the Instrumentation Laboratory.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was installed on both the Command and Service Modules. Astronauts communicated with it using a numeric display and keyboard

While working on the Apollo software, Ms. Hamilton felt that it was necessary to give software development the same legitimacy as other engineering disciplines. In 1966, she therefore coined the term “software engineering” to distinguish software development from other areas of engineering. She believes that this encourages respect for the new field, as well as respect for its practitioners.

A page from the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer

On one occasion when her young daughter was visiting the lab, the little girl pushed a simulator button that made the system crash. Ms. Hamilton realised immediately that the mistake was one that an astronaut could make. While Ms. Hamilton has said that she works in a relationship of "mutual respect" with her colleagues, when she recommended adjusting the software to address the issue, she was told: “Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.” Yet during Apollo-8, astronaut Jim Lovell made the exact same error that her young daughter had!

While Ms. Hamilton’s team was able to rapidly correct the problem, for future Apollo missions protection was built into the software to prevent a recurrence. With her interest in software reliability, Margaret Hamilton insisted that the Apollo system should be error-proof. To achieve this goal, she developed a programme referred to as Priority Displays, that recognises error messages and forces the computer to prioritise the most important tasks, also alerting the astronauts to the situation.

In Part 2 of my series of Apollo-11 articles, we saw how, during the descent to the Moon’s surface, the Lunar Module’s computer began flashing error messages, which could have resulted in Mission Control aborting the landing. However, the Priority Displays programme gave Guidance Officer Bales and his support team confidence that the computer would perform as it should despite the data input overloads that it was experiencing, and that the landing could proceed.

Ms. Hamilton with this year's printout of the entire Apollo Guidance Computer software

Ms. Hamilton and her 100-strong team continue to work on developing and refining the Apollo flight software, and I’m sure that they will contribute to whatever future spaceflight projects NASA develops, stemming from Vice-president Agnew’s recently-delivered Space Task Group report to President Nixon.

“I’ve Got Rocket Fuel in my Blood”: JoAnn Morgan

Mission safety and reliability are, of course, critical, but Apollo-11 could not even have made the historic lunar landing if the mission had been unable to launch in the first place! When Apollo-11 lifted off, there was one lone woman in the launch firing team at Kennedy Space Centre’s (KSC) Launch Control Centre, who helped to ensure that would happen – Instrumentation Controller JoAnn Morgan.

JoAnn Morgan watching the lift-off of Apollo-11 from her station in Launch Control

Mrs. Morgan, who was born in December 1940, has described herself as a “precocious little kid” who loved mathematics, science and music, and wanted to become a piano teacher. However, after her family moved to Florida from Alabama, she was inspired by the launch of the first American satellite, Explorer-1, in January 1958, and its significant discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belts. It was the “opportunity for new knowledge” that space exploration represented that filled the teenager with a desire to be part of the new space programme.

Young JoAnn with one of her favourite books. As a child she loved to read and play with her chemistry set

Soon after, JoAnn saw an advertisement for two (US) Summer student internship positions, as Engineer’s Aides with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Cape Canaveral. As we know, job openings are often advertised separately for males and females, but this ad only referred to “students” (not “boys”), so she took the chance, decided to apply, and was successful thanks to her strong marks in science and mathematics.

So, at just 17, JoAnn Hardin, as she was then, began working as a University of Florida trainee for the Army at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. “I graduated from high school on the weekend and went to work for the Army on Monday. I worked on my first launch on Friday night” is how Mrs. Morgan describes the beginning of her NASA career. The Army programme she was working with became part of NASA when it was established in October 1958.

Supportive Male Mentors

While undertaking her degree in mathematics at Jacksonville State University, Mrs. Morgan continued her Summer internships with the NASA team launching rockets at Cape Canaveral. The young student’s potential did not go unnoticed, and she acknowledges that she received significant support in furthering her career from several senior NASA personnel, including Dr. Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket, Dr. Kurt Debus, the first director of Kennedy Space Centre and Mr. Rocco Petrone, Director of Launch Operations at KSC.

Mentors Kurt Debus, left, and Rocco Petrone, right, during the Apollo 7 flight readiness test in the blockhouse at Complex 34

Dr. Debus provided Mrs. Morgan with a pathway to becoming an engineer, and she gained certification as a Measurement and Instrumentation Engineer and a Data Systems Engineer, which enabled her to be employed as a Junior Engineer on the launch team. “It was just meant to be for me to be in the launching business,” she says. “I’ve got rocket fuel in my blood.”

As a young woman joining an all-male group, Mrs. Morgan was fortunate that (unbeknownst to her at the time) her immediate supervisor, Mr. Jim White, insisted that the men on the launch team address her professionally, not be “familiar”, and reportedly told them that “You don’t ask an engineer to make the coffee”! (Which, of course, is often a task that falls to the women in any office).

Professional Disrespect

Despite Mr. White’s efforts to create an environment of respect for his first female engineer, Mrs. Morgan has still described experiencing sexism and harassment, treatment similar to the experiences of Miss Northcutt. With no female restrooms in the launch blockhouses at Cape Canaveral, when she needs to use the restroom, she has to ask a security guard to clear out the men’s room so that she can enter. She has reported receiving obscene phone calls at her station (which disappointingly could only have come from colleagues).

However, like Miss Northcutt, while she has said that she sometimes feels a sense of loneliness as the only woman in the team, Mrs. Morgan “wants to do the best job she can” and works the same long hours as her male colleagues. In 1967, as the Apollo programme was ramping up, her dedication to her work had tragic consequences. The stress and long hours of her job contributed to her miscarrying and losing her first child.

The crowded interior of the blockhouse at Launch Complex 34, where Mrs. Morgan has often worked

Perhaps the most shocking example of professional disrespect and harassment (which could be considered an assault) that Mrs. Morgan has experienced was during a test being conducted at the blockhouse for Pad 34, where the first Apollo missions were set to be launched. When preparing to acquire some test results, she was actually struck on the back by a test supervisor, who aggressively told her that “We don’t have women in here!” She had to appeal to her own supervisor, Mr. Karl Sendler (who developed the launch processing systems for the Apollo programme) to confirm that she could remain. He told her to disregard the test supervisor and continue with her work (though it’s not clear if any action was taken against the offending supervisor).

On Console for Apollo-11

The unpleasant incident with the test supervisor prompted many of Mrs. Morgan’s colleagues and senior managers to come forward in expressing acceptance and respect for her as part of the team. Nevertheless, even though she has worked launches for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, received an achievement award for her work during the activation of Apollo Launch Complex 39, and been promoted to a senior engineer, Mrs. Morgan has frequently found herself rostered for the inconvenient evening shifts. Since her husband is a school teacher and band-leader, this hasn’t always allowed them a lot of time to be together.

Until Apollo-11, Mrs. Morgan was also not selected to be part of the firing room personnel for a launch, usually being stationed at a telemetry facility, a display room or a tracking site for launch. She found this very disappointing, as she always wanted to feel the vibrations from a launch that her colleagues described.

But her desire to experience the incredible shockwave vibrations of a Saturn-V lift-off was finally achieved with the launch of Apollo-11. Recognising that Mrs. Morgan is his best communicator, Mr. Sendler quietly obtained permission from Dr. Debus for her to be the Instrumentation Controller on the console in the firing room for Apollo 11! (This achievement also had the bonus of working day shifts, so that she has been able to spend more time with her husband).

Can you spot the lone woman in a sea of men? In this picture of the Launch Control firing room during Apollo-11, Mrs. Morgan is in the third row, just to the left of centre.

A successful launch is critical to each mission and Mrs. Morgan believes that her prime role in the launch of the historic mission will help to further her career within NASA. Although she has not received the same level of press and television attention as Miss Northcutt, she does hope that even the photos of her in Launch Control – a lone woman in a sea of men – will help to inspire young women to aspire to careers in the space programme, so that, at some time in the future, photos like the ones she is in now “won’t exist anymore.”

Making Packed Lunches for Astronauts: Rita Rapp

You could say that the astronauts are the most fragile component of each Apollo mission. Nutrition is important in keeping crews healthy and functioning during a flight, so space food has to be as appetising as possible, within the constraints of spaceflight and the weightless environment – especially as missions to the Moon, and future space stations and lunar bases will keep astronauts in space for longer and longer periods. 

Physiologist Miss Rita Rapp, head of the Apollo Food Systems team, has been looking after the astronauts' bodies – and stomachs – since she joined NASA in 1960. For the Apollo programme, she has developed the space food and food stowage system designed to keep the astronauts supplied with the right mix of calories, vitamins, and nutrients to enable them to function well in space. One of her goals has been to ensure that crews have something worth eating during their spaceflights.

Rita Rapp with some of her space food innovations that have greatly improved the space food menu for Apollo astronauts

Born in 1928, Miss Rapp studied science at the University of Dayton and then took a Master’s in anatomy at the St. Louis University Graduate School of Medicine. She was one of the first women to enrol in this school. Graduating in 1953, she took a position in the Aeromedical laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where she began assessing the effects of high g-forces on the human body, especially the blood and renal systems, using centrifuge systems.

In 1960 Miss Rapp joined NASA’s Space Task Group preparing for the Mercury manned spaceflight programme, later transferring to the Manned Spacecraft Centre in Houston. For the Mercury program, she continued her work on centrifugal effects on the human body. She also designed the first elastic exercisers for Mercury and Gemini missions, devised biological experiments for the astronauts to conduct in-flight, and developed the Gemini medical kit.

The first Gemini biological experiment, designed by Miss Rapp

From Aeromedicine to Space Food

In 1966, as the Apollo programme was ramping up, Miss Rapp joined the Apollo Food Systems team. Although she has continued to work on space health and hygiene projects, in her new role her primary focus became looking at systems for storing food onboard the Apollo spacecraft. Working with dieticians, and commercial companies, she has investigated the ways space food could be packaged and prepared, and become the main interface between NASA’s Food Lab and the astronauts.

Although she tries to use as much commercially available food as possible, Miss Rapp and her team are also continually experimenting with new recipes in the food lab, gradually replacing the earlier “tubes and cubes” style of space food used in Mercury and Gemini with meals that are closer to an everyday eating experience.

She has developed improved means of food preservation, such as dehydration, thermostabilisation, irradiation and moisture control, which allows for a wider range of foods to be suitable for spaceflight, and I have no doubt these useful technologies will find their way into commercial food preparation and onto our supermarket shelves in the not-too-distant future. 


Working with the Whirlpool Corporation, Miss Rapp has developed new forms of food packaging for Apollo, such as the spoon bowls, “wet packs” and cans for thermostabilised food. These containers enable astronauts to eat with more conventional utensils, instead of sucking food out of a tube or plastic bag. Creating a more natural, homelike eating experience is good for the astronauts’ morale and psychological health during missions. You can discover more about Miss Rapp's space food developments in my articles on the various Apollo missions. 

Miss Rapp takes great pride in providing the Apollo crews with the flavours and comforts of home. “I like to feed them what they like, because I want them healthy and happy,” she says. She takes note of their individual food preferences, often devises new recipes and prepares the individual meals of each Apollo astronaut separately. Her home-made sugar cookies, that she bakes herself, are a special favourite of Apollo crews, and additional supplies are included as snacks in the onboard food pantries of the Command and Lunar Modules. She also likes to provide the crews with special food “surprises”, such as the turkey dinner enjoyed by the Apollo-8 crew in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve last year.


Just the Beginning

The women of Apollo who I’ve discussed in this article are trailblazers for women’s participation in mathematics, engineering, and other technical aspects of spaceflight.  While they are not the only women in professional roles in the space sector, female participation in space careers, and in science, engineering, and technology more generally, is still very low.

I hope that by highlighting the exciting Apollo-related careers of the four women above, it will plant a seed in the minds of young girls reading the Journey that they, too, can aspire to careers in scientific and technological fields that are generally thought of only as careers for men. I also hope that growing levels of female participation in the workforce, together with feminist activism, will eventually consign the sexism, discrimination and harassment that women working in all careers experience at present, to the history books—though I won’t hold my breath on it happening any time soon.




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Science / Space Race

[March 16, 1969] Flight of the Space Spider (Apollo 9)

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by Kaye Dee

Riding on Apollo's Coat-tails
The Traveller recently referred to President Nixon’s 8-day European tour, but it would seem Mr. Nixon deliberately decided to pave the way by riding on the coat-tails of the general international applause accorded to the historic Apollo-8 mission. Shortly before he announced his own trip to Europe, the President personally dispatched Apollo-8 commander Colonel Frank Borman and his family on an eight-nation European goodwill tour. (The other Apollo-8 crewmembers, already in training as part of the Apollo-11 backup crew, were not available to participate in the tour.)


Departing on 2 February, Col. Borman, his wife Susan, and two sons undertook a 19-day tour, visiting the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (including West Berlin), Italy (including Vatican City), and Spain (like Australia, home to an Apollo Manned Space Flight Network station and a Deep Space Network facility): an itinerary very closely paralleling that later followed by President Nixon!

The Borman family meets the Royal Family and Col. Borman presents a picture of the Moon to the Pope during his goodwill tour of Europe

Col. Borman said that he was particularly gratified to make the journey because of a conviction that space efforts “can be a very positive force for creating better relations among the people of the world”.

A Long-Delayed Mission
But while Colonel Borman was embarking on his diplomatic mission, the crew of the long-delayed first test flight of the Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit were in the final stages of preparations for the Apollo-9 mission, which splashed down just a few days ago with all its objectives successfully completed. Intended to be Apollo-8, the mission was bumped later in the sequence due to a succession of technical delays in the development of the LM, the first manned spacecraft designed solely for operations in space.


Apollo-9’s main task was to qualify the LM for manned lunar flight, demonstrating that the craft could perform all the necessary manoeuvres required for a landing on the Moon. The flight was therefore intended to be very much a mission of “firsts” that would finally fully test-out the entire suite of hardware needed to accomplish a Moon landing mission. It would see the first flight of the complete Apollo Saturn vehicle – Saturn V launcher (AS-504 for this mission), Command Service Module (CSM-104) and Lunar Module (LM-3) – as well as the first docking and extraction of a LM from the Saturn S-IVB stage.


 
Putting the LM through its paces would involve the first flight tests of its upper and lower stages, with the first firings of their engines in space, and include the first rendezvous and docking between with the CSM and LM. The mission would also undertake the first spacewalk of the Apollo programme, to test the reliability of the Apollo A-7L space suit and the Portable Life Support System (PLSS) backpack, essential for lunar surface operations.

The Crew Who Waited
Original 1966 crew photo of Astronauts Scott, McDivitt and Schweickart. Their training for the flight that eventually became Apollo-9 commenced in January 1967, even before the Apollo-1 fire

Probably the best prepared mission crew to date, the Apollo-9 crew originally came together in January 1966, as the back-ups for Apollo-1, before being assigned as the first crew to fly the LM. Their 1,800 hours of mission-specific training was equivalent to about seven hours for every hour of their eventual flight!

With so much riding on a successful LM test flight, Apollo-9’s crew comprised two veteran Gemini astronauts and one rookie. Mission Commander Air Force Col. James McDivitt previously commanded the Gemini-IV mission, during which the first US EVA was conducted. Command Module Pilot Lt.-Col. David Scott, also with the US Air Force, was Pilot of Gemini-VIII, its flight cut short by the first US in-flight space emergency, but for which he undertook considerable EVA training.

Finally Go for launch! Astronauts McDivitt, Scott and Schweickart in their official Apollo-9 pre-flight crew portrait

The new kid on the block for Apollo-9 was LM Pilot Mr. Russell Schweickart, originally selected in the third group of astronauts in 1963. An experienced fighter pilot, serving with the U.S. Air Force and the Massachusetts Air National Guard between 1956 and 1963, Mr. Schweickart joined NASA as a civilian, from a position as a research scientist at the Experimental Astronomy Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Mr. Schweickart is nicknamed “Rusty” for his red hair (but in Australia, with our sense of humour, we’d have called him “Bluey”!).

Introducing Gumdrop and Spider
Because Apollo-9 would have two spacecraft from the same mission operating independently for the first time (unlike the Gemini VI-VII rendezvous, in which the two spacecraft were separate missions with their own callsigns), they each required separate callsigns for easy communications identification. NASA Administrators therefore finally lifted the ban on spacecraft names, which has been in operation since the beginning of the Gemini programme, permitting the crew to select their own names for the CM and LM.

The Apollo-9 CSM and LM being prepared for launch at Kennedy Space Centre

The astronauts chose “Gumdrop” for the CM, based on the shape of the capsule, which resembles the popular sweet, and “Spider” for the LM, given the spider-like appearance of the lander, with its four spindly legs. Unfortunately, it seems that certain NASA officials were not happy with these choices, feeling they were not dignified enough, so I hope they will not place restrictions on the names that can be selected for future missions, or force the crews to revert to dull numerical callsigns.

Patching Up
North American Rockwell artist Allen Stevens seems to be quite a favourite with the Apollo astronauts as a mission patch designer. He has designed the patches for Apollo-1, 7 and Apollo-9, and seems to have had a strong influence on the design of the Apollo-8 patch.

Stevens’ Apollo-9 patch evolved from a design he originally developed when Apollo-9 was still anticipated to be Apollo-8. The relatively simple concept depicts all the vehicle elements of the Apollo mission – the Saturn V in launch configuration, with the CSM and the LM flying separately as they would do during orbital test manoeuvres. In the final version of the design they appear against a mottled blue background that could represent either the Earth’s oceans or orbital space. Rather than show the CSM and LM docked together in orbit, as we often see them in NASA illustrations, Stevens chose to depict them in their on orbit ‘station-keeping’ positions, with the CSAM and LM facing each other, although this does give the impression that the CM is attempting to dock with the front of the LM!

Completing the design, the names of the crew and mission circle just inside the red-bordered edge of the patch, with the “D” in McDivitt’s name also filled in red. This is a nod to Apollo-9 being originally designated as the “D” mission in the sequence of Apollo flights prior to the Moon landing.

A Busy Moonport
Due to the long delay with the LM, preparations for Apollo-9 initially overlapped those of Apollo-7 and 8. By February, while the astronauts were spending long hours in mission simulators preparing for their flight, Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) was a hive of activity with Apollo-9 in the final stages of pre-launch testing, and advance preparations for Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 also underway (Apollo 10 is currently due for launch in May and Apollo 11 in July).  

In addition to Apollo-9’s launch preparations, the Apollo 10 spacecraft was moved from the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building (MSOB) to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for mating with its Saturn V launcher (above left); the first and second stages for the Apollo 11 Saturn V arrived, with the stacking of that launcher commencing in the VAB (above right); and the upper and lower stages of the Apollo 11 LM were also mated in the MSOB, in preparation for testing in the altitude chamber. NASA is really moving at a cracking pace to achieve a manned lunar landing this year!

An Unexpected Delay
The countdown for Apollo-9 commenced on 26 February, for a planned launch on the 28th. But fate stepped in to delay the crew’s trip to space just a bit longer! Ironically, despite their years of training for this mission, the astronauts pushed themselves so hard in their final weeks that, as launch day approached, they developed cold-like symptoms such as sore throats and nasal congestion.

Apollo-9's LM crew, McDivitt and Schweickart, training in the Lunar Module simualator

For NASA’s most complex manned mission to date, senior managers and flight surgeons wanted the crew to be in the best possible health for the 10-day flight. (They were probably also mindful of preventing a recurrence of the issues with the Apollo-7 crew, due to in-flight health problems). Consequently, the launch was rescheduled to 3 March to give the astronauts time to recover.

Finally on their Way!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once KSC medical director Dr Charles Berry finally cleared the crew for launch, Apollo-9 left the pad exactly on time at 16:00GMT on 3 March. Hopefully the smooth launch impressed Vice President Spiro Agnew (on right in the picture below), who was present in the Launch Control Centre in his new role as Head of the National Space Council, especially as President Nixon has asked his science adviser, Dr Lee Dubridge, to report on possible cost reductions within the US space programme.

To maximize the chances of accomplishing them, in case any problems forced an early return to Earth, the most critical mission tasks were scheduled for the first five days of the flight. So once the Saturn rocket’s S-IVB third stage and the CSM were safely in orbit, things moved quickly. During the second orbit, CM Pilot Scott turned the CSM and successfully docked with the Lunar Module, nestled in the Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter of the S-IVB stage. The linked spacecraft were ejected from the S-IVB, which was then remotely controlled to simulate Trans-Lunar Injection and eventually be sent into a solar orbit.

Demonstrating that the “probe and drogue” CM-LM docking assembly worked properly is another crucial step towards enabling the future Moon landing. If this system didn’t work, a lunar landing would not be possible.

Once the probe is inserted in the drogue it retracts and pulls the two spacecraft together so that a series of twelve latches locks them tight.

Burning Along
Six hours into the mission, the next task was to establish that the docked CSM-LM could be manoeuvred using the Service Module’s Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine. A five-second burn placed the CSM in an orbit of 125 by 145 miles, to improve its orbital lifetime. This short firing demonstrated the CSM guidance and navigation system’s ability to control the burn and showed that the LM’s relatively light structure could withstand thrust, acceleration and vibration.

Following the first sleep period on an Apollo mission during which all three astronauts slept at the same time, Apollo-9’s second day focussed on putting the SPS engine, and the CSM, to the test, through a series of three burns. The first burn, lasting 110 seconds, raised Apollo 9’s orbit to 213 miles and tested the structural dynamics of the docked spacecraft under conditions simulating a lunar mission. This involved gimballing (swivelling) the SPS engine to determine whether the spacecraft’s guidance and navigation autopilot could dampen the induced oscillations. The CSM remained very stable, with the oscillations damped within just five seconds.

Apollo spacecraft diagram key. CSM (right) and LM (launch configuration) docked. I – Lunar module descent stage; II – Lunar module ascent stage; III – Command module; IV – Service module. 1 LM descent engine skirt; 2 LM landing gear; 3 LM ladder; 4 Egress platform ("porch"); 5 Forward hatch; 6 LM reaction control system quad; 7 S-band inflight antenna (2); 8 Rendezvous radar antenna; 9 S-band steerable antenna; 10 Command Module crew compartment; 11 Electrical power system radiators; 12 SM reaction control system quad; 13 Environmental control system radiator; 14 S-band steerable antenna

The second SPS burn lasted 280 seconds, changing the orbit to 126 by 313 miles, while the short third burn, just 28.2 seconds, changed the plane of the spacecraft’s orbit. These orbital changes were designed to position Apollo-9 for better ground tracking and lighting conditions during upcoming mission activities.

Space Sickness Strikes
Entering the LM and checking out its systems was scheduled for flight day three, but planned operations were initially disrupted when space sickness reared its head. Flight surgeons still know little about this condition, which seems to affect some astronauts but not others, and some more than others.

A view inside Command Module Gumdrop

Both Col. McDivitt and Mr. Schweickart were affected, with McDivitt apparently experiencing some mild nausea. Mr. Schweickart, however, vomited in the CM and again later in the LM. When Col. McDivitt contacted the flight surgeons from the LM to report the medical situation, they were less than happy that the earlier incident had not been initially reported, as they could have treated Schweickart’s symptoms sooner.

Opening Up the LM
Although the initial bout of space sickness delayed the start of operations to clear the docking tunnel and access the LM, the astronauts were able to continue with the day’s activities, and both Commander and LM Pilot used the docking tunnel to make the first ever transfer between manned spacecraft without needing to spacewalk. With Lt.-Col. Scott remaining in the CM, and hatches between the Gumdrop and Spider closed, the LM’s communications and life support systems demonstrated that they were operating independently from the CM. Schweickart also deployed Spider’s landing legs (which had been folded for launch) into the position they would assume for landing on the Moon, giving the LM the appearance of its namesake!


A Jumping Spider!
During the nine hours they inhabited Spider, still docked to the CSM, Col. McDivitt and Mr. Schweickart conducted a major test of the Lunar Module’s descent engine, firing it for 367 seconds to simulate the pattern of throttling planned for a descent to the lunar surface. For the final 59 seconds of the burn McDivitt controlled the throttling, varying the thrust from 10 to 40 percent and shutting it off manually, marking the first manual throttling of an engine in space.

This burn, which demonstrated that the LM descent engine could manoeuvre the combined LM-CSM stack, was followed by an additional SPS firing after the LM crew returned to the CM. Together, these burns placed Apollo 9 into an orbit of 142 by 149 miles, ahead of the rendezvous exercises to be performed on day five.

Red Rover (Doesn’t Quite) Cross Over
The step-by-step testing program for Apollo-9 earmarked the fourth day of the mission for a spacewalk to test the reliability of the Apollo EVA suit and the PLSS backpack, necessary because it would be impractical and dangerous for astronauts to move across the Moon’s surface trailing umbilical lines connected to the LM. As the only EVA scheduled before the Moon landing, it was the single opportunity to test the PLSS operationally in space.

Astronaut Schweickart training for his planned EVA

Using the call sign “Red Rover”, “Rusty” Schweickart was originally scheduled to perform a two-hour EVA to simulate a space rescue technique in the event that a CM-LM docking could not be made, crossing from Spider to Gumdrop. This would have involved him exiting the hatch on the LM and making his way along the outside of the spacecraft to the CM hatch, where Lt.-Col. Scott would be standing by to assist access to the CM. However, the LM Pilot’s bout of space sickness led Col. McDivitt to initially cancel the EVA, due to the flight surgeons’ concerns about the dangers of vomiting in a spacesuit. This also meant the cancellation of a planned TV broadcast of the spacewalk itself, which would have been another first.

Wearing Golden Slippers
But with Mr. Schweickart feeling somewhat better by day four, a modified short EVA was substituted to enable the EVA equipment test to be carried out. After McDivitt and Schweickart again transferred to Spider, Mr. Schweickert climbed out onto the LM porch for a 37.5-minute EVA, exclaiming “Hey, this is like spectacular” as he stood in the void. For much of this time, the astronaut’s feet were held in gold-coloured restraints, nicknamed the “Golden Slippers”, but he was also able to move around the LM’s exterior using handholds to retrieve some experiments.

At the same time, David Scott, wearing a bright red helmet, made a stand-up EVA in Gumdrop’s hatch and both astronauts photographed each. Scott, too, retrieved experiments from outside the CM. Mr. Schweickart has said that he found moving around easier than it had been in simulations and was confident that he could have completed the spacewalk to the CM had it gone ahead.

The Spider Takes Flight

The key event in Apollo -9’s programme was the undocking and rendezvous tests scheduled for the fifth day of the mission. These manoeuvres would simulate all the activities required for a successful lunar landing and return to lunar orbit. With McDivitt and Schweickart in Spider, and Scott remaining in Gumdrop, the two craft undocked to commence a complex set of manoeuvres and burns of both the LM descent and ascent engines. These tests also carried a new element of danger. The Lunar Module has no ability to return to Earth on its own, since it lacks a heatshield: if something went seriously wrong its crew could end up stranded in space with no way home.

After 45 minutes separated but station keeping, an initial 24.9-second LM descent engine burn placed Spider into a 137 by 167 mile orbit; a second 24.4-second firing circularized the orbit around 154 by 160 miles, approximately 12 miles higher than Gumdrop. Over the next four hours, McDivitt fired the LM’s descent engine at several throttle settings, before lowering Spider’s orbit to begin a two-hour ‘chase’ to catch-up with Gumdrop. The LM descent stage was then jettisoned, and the ascent stage engine fired for the first time, lowering the LM’s orbit still further and placing Spider 75 miles behind and 10 miles below Gumdrop for the rendezvous manoeuvre.

Although it is planned that in future Moon missions, the Command Module pilot will conduct the rendezvous with a returning LM, for Apollo-9 Spider carried out the rendezvous, to demonstrate that the manoeuvre could be performed by either craft. Apart from this difference, the approach and rendezvous hewed as closely as possible to the current plans for lunar missions. Mission Commander McDivitt flew the LM close to Gumdrop, manoeuvring Spider so that CM Pilot Scott could see each side of the vehicle and inspect it for any damage. As he photographed the ascent stage, Scott joked “You’re the biggest, friendliest, funniest looking Spider I’ve ever seen.”

McDivitt then docked to the CM, guided by Scott, as Sun glare was interfering with his vision. Once Spider’s crew returned to Gumdrop, the ascent stage was jettisoned and remotely commanded to fire its engine to fuel depletion, simulating an ascent stage’s climb from the lunar surface. With the approach and rendezvous operation complete, the only major LM system that had not been fully tested during Apollo-9 was the lunar landing radar.

A Bit Camera Shy
Unlike the previous two missions, Apollo 9’s packed programme restricted the television broadcasts made by the astronauts. Spider was equipped with a Westinghouse b/w Lunar Surface Lunar TV Camera, identical to the one taken to be carried to the Moon’s surface on the first landing, as another equipment trial. This low-light “slow scan” camera produced a 320 line, 10 frames per second non-interlaced picture.

Only two broadcasts were from Spider. The first, seven minutes’ long, occurred on day three and showed Mr. Schweickart and Col. McDivitt working in the confined space of the LM. The second broadcast occurred shortly after the end of the EVA on the fourth day, with Spider’s crew still wearing their spacesuits.

The quality of this 15-minute transmission was much better than the previous day, and the crew treated viewers to a scene of Col. McDivitt eating. The camera was then pointed out the LM’s top window to show Gumdrop, then through one of the forward windows to glimpse one of Spider’s attitude control thruster quads and a landing leg. Finally, the view switched back into the cabin to show the LM’s instrument panel and a radiation detector. Once the LM ascent stage was jettisoned, on day five, there were no further broadcasts as the CM did not carry a television camera.

Cruisin' in Orbit
Once the crowded test schedule of the first five days was complete, the second five days of Apollo-9’s flight, intended to test the endurance of the CSM for the total length of a Moon landing mission, were quiet and relaxed by comparison.

Col. McDivitt thanked the Mission Control team for their work during the hectic first half of the mission and jokingly mused: “Might give you the impression that it might work, huh?” The crew sang a belated “Happy Birthdays” to Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., Director of Flight Operations at the Manned Spacecraft Centre, and Apollo 9 crew secretary Charlotte Maltese.

There were additional SPS burns on days six and eight to change the spacecraft’s orbit, with no major activities scheduled for the ninth day, although the astronauts made observations of the Pegasus 3 satellite, passing within 1,000 miles and 700 miles of Apollo 9 during two successive orbits. They also observed the LM ascent stage from about 700 miles away.

Observing the Earth
The main activity of the second half of the Apollo-9’s flight was the mission’s only formal scientific investigation, a programme of multi-spectral terrain photography, using four Hasselblad 70 mm cameras pointed out the CM’s round hatch window. This allowed photographs to be taken in four specific wavelengths of the visible and near infrared spectrum simultaneously.

Multi-spectral images. The same view of San Diego and parts of California in four different wavelengths

This experiment was designed to determine whether multi-spectral photography can be effectively utilised for earth resources programmes such as agriculture, forestry, geology, oceanography, hydrology, and geography. The results will help to refine the instruments for the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), due for launch in 1972, Landsat, and techniques for multi-spectral photography to be conducted aboard the Skylab space station in the early 1970s.

Altogether 127 complete four-frame sets of photographs were taken over California, Texas, other areas of the southern United States, Mexico, the Caribbean and the Cape Verde Islands. Astronauts also took more than 1,100 standard Earth observation photographs of targets around the world, using colour and colour infrared film and a handheld Hasselblad camera.

Apollo-9 astronauts' colour photograph of the North Carolina coast and a colour infra-red view of California's Salton Sea

Coming Home
Apollo -9 returned to Earth on 13 March (the 14th for us here in Australia), the tenth day of the mission. Re-entry was delayed by one revolution due to heavy seas in the primary recovery area, but Gumdrop splashed down safely in the Atlantic, within three miles of the recovery ship, the USS Guadalcanal, after a mission totalling 241 hours, 53 seconds – just 10 seconds longer than planned!

On board the recovery ship, the crew were treated to a share of a 350-pound cake baked in their honour. Now safely back in Houston for their flight debriefings, NASA’s attention – and the world’s – is already turning to Apollo-10, due to fly in May to test the LM around the Moon!

Ready for the Next Steps
While Apollo-9 might not have seemed as exciting a mission as Apollo-8’s epic lunar voyage, it was critical because it has simulated in Earth orbit, as far as possible, many of the conditions that the astronauts and their equipment will face when the lunar landing attempt is made. Beyond that first landing and its successors, there is the Apollo Applications Programme, and other developments such as the Skylab manned earth orbiting workshop. Everything that has been learned in space with Apollo-9 will be useful sooner or later in future space activities!

And you can bet we'll be covering each and every one of them here on the Journey…

Apollo-9 view of the Moon

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Science / Space Race

[January 22, 1969] NASA’s Christmas Gift to the World Part 2 (Apollo 8 continued)

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by Kaye Dee

Last month, I began this article just hours after the crew of Apollo 8 returned safely to the Earth from their historic mission around the Moon. But even while the mission was in progress, I felt that it might be best to wait to tell the story of the lunar flight in detail, until it could be illustrated with the photographs taken by Col. Borman, Major Anders and Capt. Lovell during their epic journey – images whose breathtaking full-colour views were only hinted at in the low-resolution b/w television broadcasts and the astronauts’ excited descriptions of what they were seeing during the mission.

"Oh my God!" is what Astronaut William Anders said just before he took this awe-inspiring photograph of the Earth rising over the Moon, as seen from lunar orbit. That was my exact response – and yours, too, I expect – on first seeing this incredible sight. I confidently predict that this amazing view will become one of the defining images of the Space Age

Now that we can see for ourselves the awesome sights that the Apollo 8 crew witnessed, I think I made the right call.

On Course for the Moon
We left Apollo 8 on the way to the Moon, after a successful translunar injection. Just 30 minutes later, the CSM separated from the S-IVB stage, which was ordered to vent its remaining fuel to change the stage’s trajectory. The S-IVB gradually moved away from the CSM and is now in orbit around the Sun.

Fuel venting isn't visible in this image of the jettisoned S-IVB stage, but small debris from the separation can be seen floating around it. Although Apollo 8 carried no Lunar Module, this shot shows the LM test article contained in the S-IVB stage

As the crew rotated their spacecraft to view the jettisoned stage, they had their first views of the Earth as they moved away from it—the first time human eyes have been able to view the whole Earth at once. The perspectives of the two images below, taken less than 45 minutes apart, help us gain an impression of how fast the Apollo spacecraft was travelling (around 24,200 mph).

Taken just around the time of TLI, this view from high orbit shows the Florida peninsula, with Cape Kennedy just discernible, and several Caribbean islands

The view of Earth after S-IVB stage separation. From the Americas to west Africa, and from daylight to night, for the first time humans could see their entire planet at a glance!

Mission Commander Borman has said that he thought this must be how God sees the Earth, while Astronaut Lovell felt he was driving a car into a dark tunnel and was watching the entrance dwindle into a distant speck! But perhaps Major Anders best summed up the awesome view: “How finite the Earth looks. Unlike photographs people see there’s no frame around it. It’s hanging there, the only colour in the black vastness of space, like a dust mote in infinity.”

On the way to the Moon, the CSM adopted the PTC (Passive Thermal Control) or “barbecue” mode tested on Apollo 7, slowly rotating the spacecraft to keep temperatures evenly distributed over its surface. As the CSM turned, every so often the Earth would appear in one of the windows, making the astronauts aware that they were travelling away from their home planet: it became steadily smaller, until eventually they could cover the whole Earth with a thumb.

Where No Man Has Gone Before
I’m stealing that wonderful Star Trek catch phrase because soon after the S-IBV jettison, Apollo 8 surpassed the altitude record set by Gemini 11 in 1966 and was truly setting out into that “new ocean” of space only previously traversed by unmanned probes.

The coast to the Moon was relatively uneventful, with only a few issues arising, including some window fogging, like that experienced on Apollo 7, and a bout of space sickness that it was initially feared might lead to the cancellation of the orbits around the Moon.

Col. Borman reported diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting (none of which you want to have in weightlessness, given the unpleasant consequences!) and both Lovell and Anders also said they did not feel too well. Dr Charles Berry, the medical director at Cape Kennedy, at first feared a 24-hour viral gastro-enteritis that might “play ping-pong”, with the crew re-infecting each other and leaving themselves too weak to carry out their complex tasks correctly. Fortunately, with longer sleep periods, medication and additional rest, the complaint cleared up and did not prove a showstopper for the mission. 

The first mission status report for Apollo 8, sent to the NASA tracking stations around the world, for release to local media. Dated some 19 hours after launch, it outlines some of the activities of the early part of the coast to the Moon

A slight course correction saw the large SPS motor fired for the first time, providing a check that the spacecraft’s main propulsion system was working correctly. Had there been any problems, Apollo 8 would not have gone into lunar orbit, but looped around the Moon to return to Earth.

Out of this World Broadcasts
About halfway to the Moon, at 31 hours and 10 minutes after launch, the astronauts conducted the first of six television broadcasts during the mission. Like Mission Commander Schirra on Apollo 7, Borman was apparently not in favour of television broadcasts – holding that the weight of the camera was better used for other equipment and additional food supplies – but was overruled by NASA.

For this first deep space show, the approach was light-hearted, with the opening scenes from the spacecraft showing Capt. Lovell upside down in the lower equipment bay making jokes about preparing lunch. Bill Anders played with his weightless toothbrush, with quips from Frank Borman about his crewmate cleaning his teeth regularly. Jim Lovell sent birthday wishes to his mother. The crew tried to show us the Earth through the one of the CM windows, but without a viewing monitor, they couldn't quite capture it in their camera's field of view.

Astronaut Anders shows us his toothbrush (top) and Jim Lovell wishes his mother "Happy Birthday" (bottom) during Apollo 8's first deep space broadcast

The astronauts were disappointed to find their view of the approaching Moon was washed out by the Sun’s powerful glare. It should have been a spectacular sight to see its cratered surface increasing in size and detail as they closed in, but they were not able to get good views of the Moon until they were relatively close. However, during their second television broadcast, 55 hours into the mission, the crew of Apollo 8 were finally able to capture the Earth through one of their spacecraft's windows.

While the resolution of the image may not have been very high, this first ever live view of our planet from 180,000 miles out in space was yet another step in science fiction being made into reality! During the 25 minute broadcast, there was a delightful exchange between Lovell and Anders, with Capcom Michael Collins in Houston, wondering what a traveller from another planet would think of the view of Earth from that distance, and whether they would imagine it was inhabited.

The Apollo 8 second broadcast view of the Earth as we saw it on television (above) and how Capcom Collins saw it on his monitors in Mission Control (bottom). Would alien visitors to our solar system think anyone lived there?



Moving into the Moon's Sphere of Influence
Shortly after their second broadcast, Borman, Lovell and Anders became the first humans to leave the Earth’s sphere of gravitational influence: they were 202,825 miles from Earth and 38,897 miles from the Moon. This move into the lunar gravity field meant that soon a decision would need to be made as to whether or not Apollo 8 would go into lunar orbit, or loop around the Moon and return directly to the Earth. So concerned was Col. Borman about any trajectory perturbations that would preclude the spacecraft from achieving lunar orbit that he even checked with Houston before dumping urine overboard!

A view of the Moon, finally visible as Apollo 8 approached and prepared to go into orbit

Then came the moment to go behind the Moon – and the decision whether or not to orbit. “Apollo 8 this is Houston,” Capcom Jerry Carr called. “At 68 hours 4 minutes you are Go for LOI (Lunar Orbit Insertion).” But the necessary SPS engine burn to change the CSM's trajectory from "free return" to lunar orbit had to take place above the far side of the Moon, where Apollo 8 would be completely out of contact with the Earth.

On 24 December, just on 69 hours after lift-off, Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon. Col. Borman was so impressed with the exact predicted timing of the loss of communication with the Earth that he joked about whether the Manned Space Flight Network had turned off its transmitters! But, in truth, the situation was very tense, as all the astronauts and Mission Control could do was wait and hope that all would go well with the burn to put Apollo 8 into lunar orbit. The Service Propulsion System engine had to work perfectly, or the astronauts would be in serious trouble.

The Manned Space Flight Network station at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, was tracking Apollo 8 as it went behind the Moon and received the first signals as it re-emerged, safely in lunar orbit

Fortunately, Apollo 8 slowed in response to the 4 minute 6.9 second burn – “Longest four minutes I’ve ever spent,” according to Capt. Lovell. This put the spacecraft into a 194 x by 69 mile orbit around the Moon after a Trans-Lunar Coast of 66 hours 16 minutes and 22 seconds.

Round (and Round) the Moon
Safely in orbit, the plan was for Apollo 8 to make 10 orbits around the Moon over a twenty hour period. Even though the far side of the Moon was first seen as far back as 1959, by the USSR's Luna 3, the first order of business was for the crew to observe the far side surface for themselves. The three astronauts were stunned by the crater-pitted Moonscape sliding below them, revealing a tortured terrain so unlike the familiar face of the Moon. Out of contact with the Earth, totally isolated from home, Borman, Lovell and Anders forgot their mission for a few moments to press their faces against the CM windows and soak up the sights!



The astronauts were not exactly impressed with the gritty, grey, plaster-like surface they observed as they orbited the Moon. Col. Borman described it as as “[looking] like the burned-out ashes of a barbecue,” while Capt. Lovell said “It’s like a sand pile my kids have been playing in for a long time. It’s all beat up with no definition. Just a lot of bumps and holes.” Major Anders felt the surface looked "whitish-grey, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.”

Jim Lovell's "sand pile" on the Moon!

Back on Earth Mission Control held its breath, waiting for Apollo 8 to re-emerge from behind the Moon and confirm that the SPS engine had performed as planned. But once the crew were back in contact with Earth, a packed routine of surface observations was quickly established: these images comprise the bulk of the more than 800 70 mm still photographs and 700 feet of 16 mm movie film that the astronauts took during the mission. Among their tasks, the astronauts observed Earthshine (the light reflecting from Earth shining on the dark face of the Moon) – which they found provided enough light to see surface features clearly – and took detailed photographs of the area within the Sea of Tranquillity where, all going to plan in the next few months, the Apollo 11 mission will make the first manned lunar landing.

On the second orbit, Apollo 8's 12 minute long third television broadcast was almost entirely dedicated to allowing us back on Earth to see the astronauts' view of the Moon. Even when it was difficult to see much detail in the views of the lunar surface passing below the spacecraft, this broadcast made us, as it were, part of the mission.

View of the Moon's surface during the third Apollo 8 television broadcast

Earthrise
Busy with lunar surface observations, during their first three orbits the Apollo 8 crew failed to even notice an incredible sight. It was not until their fourth orbit that the astronauts experienced perhaps the most sublime view provided by space exploration to date – the vision of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon!

On this fourth orbit, a navigation sighting meant that the CSM was rolled to look outwards into space instead of down towards the Moon's surface. As the lunar horizon came into view, the astronauts witnessed a magnificent sight – the cloud-mottled blue orb of the Earth swimming into their view. Awestruck, they scrambled so quicky to capture the vision that no-one is quite sure now who took which picture, although it seems that Col. Borman may have snapped the first black and white photograph, and Bill Anders a number of breathtaking colour images of the Earthrise.

Apollo 8's Earthrise images are usually published oriented with the lunar horizon at the bottom, as that is how we are used to seeing the Moon rising over the horizon on Earth. But the orientation of astronauts' orbit meant that they actually saw the Earth appearing to rise 'sideways', as seen in this original version of Major Anders' photograph

While Apollo 8 isn't the first space mission to capture the vista of the Earth rising over the Moon – that honour goes to Lunar Orbiter 1 – the impact of the superior quality and colour of the astronaut's photographs is profoundly inspiring, and Major Anders' evocative Earthrise image is already well on its way to becoming the most reproduced image of the Space Age so far.

This spread from the 15 January issue of the Australian Women's Weekly is just one example of thousands of magazine and newspaper articles already featuring the Earthrise photograph and Apollo 8's other amazing pictures

I'm so moved by the Earthrise image that I find it hard to put all my feelings into words, but perhaps those I quoted above from Astronaut Anders go some way to expressing them, as do Captain Lovell's similar thoughts on the view: “The vastness up here of the Moon is awe inspiring. It makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the blackness of space.”

This view of the living Earth in the immensity of the Cosmos truly brings home to us the fragility and isolation of our home planet and its finite resources, providing the visual encapsulation of the expression "Spaceship Earth" popularised over the past few years by Buckminster Fuller among others. The environmental movement needs to utilise the power of this image to help encourage us all to be better stewards of the Earth and preserve our environment, so necessary for our survival, for future generations.

"Something Appropriate"
Acutely aware of the historic nature of the Apollo 8 mission, NASA wanted the astronauts to “do something appropriate” for their fourth television broadcast. Due to occur on the ninth lunar orbit, this finale to Apollo 8’s time at the Moon was scheduled for late evening on Christmas Eve in the United States (comfortably at lunchtime on Christmas day for us here in Australia). The program was to be transmitted via satellite to 64 countries (where it was seen or heard by an estimated one billion people!), so it was a major global event, comparable to 1967’s Our World broadcast.

What would be appropriate for such an international audience? The astronauts wanted to present something spiritually significant and memorable, but not overtly religious, that would be relevant at Christmas to both Christians and the millions of non-Christians who would be tuning into the broadcast. It seems that the wife of a journalist (I’m sorry, I don’t know her name) suggested that they read from the opening of the Book of Genesis, which has meaning for many of the world’s religions and expresses concepts relevant to many other faiths. The crew liked this idea and planned to incorporate it into their broadcast. A view of the Moon seen by the audience on Earth while the crew of Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis

The fourth telecast from Apollo 8 began with the astronauts talking about their impressions of the Moon and the experience of being in lunar orbit. Following some views of the lunar terrain, described by the astronauts as they passed over, Major Anders said that the crew had a message for everyone on Earth. In turn, Anders, then Capt. Lovell and finally Col. Borman read the first 10 verses of Genesis, as we watched the Moon’s surface pass by, with a view through one of the CM windows. Borman then ended the broadcast with “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.” I watched this transmission at lunch with my sister’s family: it left us all profoundly moved.

Families around the world gathered on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day (depending on where you were!) to watch Apollo 8's broadcast

Set Course for Earth
Two and a half hours after the end of the fourth television broadcast, on Apollo 8’s tenth lunar orbit, it was time to perform the trans-Earth injection (TEI). This manoeuvre was even more critical than the one which had brought the CSM into orbit around the Moon: if the SPS engine failed to ignite, the crew would be stranded in lunar orbit. Like the previous SPS burn, this critical firing had to occur above the far side of the Moon, once again out of contact with the Earth. Despite all the telemetry indicating that the SPS was in good shape, tension was high while the spacecraft was behind the Moon, but the burn was perfect and Apollo 8 re-emerged exactly on schedule 89 hours, 28 minutes, and 39 seconds after launch.

It was Christmas Day, and when voice contact was restored with Houston, Lovell announced to the world, “Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus” – apparently for the benefit of one his sons, who had asked before the flight if his father would see Santa while visiting the Moon.

A view inside the Command Module, during the fifth Apollo 8 television broadcast

At about 100 hours and 48 minutes after launch, Apollo 8 crossed back into the Earth’s sphere of influence and began gradually speeding up. After the astronauts carried out the only required midcourse correction at 104 hours into the mission, the crew had some time to relax before their fifth television broadcast. During this 10 minute transmission, they gave viewers a tour of the spacecraft, showing how they lived in the weightless environment. An image from the fifth broadcast taken directly from a monitor at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station. It shows Bill Anders demostrating how to prepare a meal

A Christmas Dinner to Remember
After the broadcast, the crew were finally free to tuck into their Christmas dinner – and found a surprise in their food locker. It was a specially packed Christmas dinner wrapped in foil and decorated with red and green ribbons! A gift from Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton, the special meal included dehydrated grape drink, cranberry-applesauce, and coffee, as well as a new “wetpack” containing turkey and gravy. Also hidden with the surprise dinner, the astronauts found small presents from their wives.

Slayton also included three miniature bottles of brandy with the meal, although Borman decided that they should be saved until after splashdown!

The astronauts thought the food was delicious, more like a TV dinner, and much more appetising than the food they had been eating on the mission. In fact, the crew had found their meals so unappealing that they had been under-eating throughout the mission, so their turkey dinner was a real morale booster.

The new “wetpack” container is breakthrough in space food development: a thermostabilized package that retains the normal water content of the food, which can be eaten with a spoon. I’ll have to write more soon about space food, as the new meals and menus that are being developed for Apollo lunar missions are a real breakthrough in astronaut nutrition.

The Final Leg
The return cruise to Earth was the quietest part of the mission for the crew, giving them time to rest after an eventful historic mission. Around 124 hours into the flight, the astronauts broadcast their sixth and final telecast, showing the approaching Earth during a four-minute broadcast.



The crew also had time to take more spectacular photographs of the Earth, such as this image of Australia as they homed in towards their eventual splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Re-entry is the most dangerous phase of any spaceflight, and Apollo 8 marked the first time that a manned spacecraft had returned from the Moon, re-entering the atmosphere at 24,695 miles per hour! The spacecraft had to enter the Earth’s atmosphere at an angle of 6.5 degrees, with a safe corridor only 26 miles wide – there was very little margin for error! 

After jettisoning the Service module and turning the CM around so its heat shield was facing in the direction of flight, Apollo 8 entered the atmosphere, deceleration hitting the astronauts with forces up to 7 Gs, and temperatures outside the spacecraft reaching 5,000 degrees.

Apollo 8's re-entry, captured by one of NASA's Apollo Range Instrumented Aircraft that operate as airborne tracking stations

Ionized gases around the spacecraft caused a three-minute communications blackout period. But Apollo 8 came through and safely deployed its three main parachutes, splashing down in the dead of night local time, in the North Pacific Ocean, southwest of Hawaii, home safe after a momentous mission which even the crew had rated themselves as only having a 50% chance of a successful return!

Map of Apollo 8's splashdown area

Recovered by the USS Yorktown, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were in excellent health after a flight of 147 hours. They returned to Houston for several weeks of debriefing, but he success of their flight means it is now clear that the likelihood of meeting President Kennedy’s goal of a Moon landing before the end of the decade is much higher: Lt.-General Phillips, head of the Apollo programme, has already said there is a slim chance Americans could land on the Moon with Apollo 10 in May or June – one flight earlier than presently planned

After their recovery, the Apollo 8 astronauts addressed the USS Yorktown's crew, very glad to be home!

“You Saved 1968”
As I noted at the beginning of the first part of this article, 1968 was a year that saw much upheaval around the world. Yet Apollo 8 allowed the year to end on a hopeful note, with its technical triumph of the first manned mission to the Moon, its awe-inspiring views of the Earth from space, and the deeply moving “Genesis broadcast”. Its impact has been beautifully summed up in a telegram from an anonymous well-wisher to Col. Borman which simply said, “Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.”

< For the influence and impact of their mission, Time magazine has chosen the crew of Apollo 8 as its Men of the Year for 1968, while Life has selected the post-TLI image of the Earth for the cover its 1968 retrospective issue.

The Apollo 8 astronauts have been honoured for their successful mission with ticker tape parades in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C; they have spoken before a joint session of Congress, and been awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal by President Johnson. Has Apollo 8 won the Space Race for the United States? I think it's too early to say, especially in light of the recent Soyuz 4 and 5 missions. But NASA is certainly giving the Soviet Union a run for its money!
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Science / Space Race

[December 28, 1968] A Christmas Gift to the World – Part 1 (Apollo 8)

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by Kaye Dee

Commentators are already referring to 1968 as the most turbulent year of the 1960s. We’ve seen civil unrest and sectarian violence; uprisings and brutal repression; new wars and intensification of old ones; political turmoil and assassinations; drought, famine and natural disasters, just to note some of the tragedies and strife dominating the headlines.

 
Yet this “worst of times” has still ended on a high note, thanks to NASA’s Christmas gift to the world – the Apollo-8 mission to the Moon.

 
As I write, the first daring spaceflight to the Earth’s nearest neighbour was completed only a few hours ago, splashing down in the early hours of the morning here in Australia. I’m tired but elated at the successful conclusion of the mission and the safe return of the crew. This historic mission has taken another crucial step in turning the ancient dream of reaching for the stars into reality, vindicating the inspiration that readers of the Journey draw from science fiction.

Taking the World on the Journey
Thanks to the growing number of communications satellites now linking the world, almost three quarters of humanity has been able to participate vicariously in Mankind’s greatest space adventure to date. Apollo-8’s voyage has been vividly described to us through pictures, voice and the printed word by the world's journalists, and live from space by the astronauts themselves in their broadcasts during the mission.

The Earth seen through a window of the Apollo-8 Command Module during the second television broadcast en route to the Moon. I can't wait to see the much higher resolution, full colour pictures!

While we here in Australia may have missed out on some of the live broadcasts from space for technical reasons, people in Europe, the Americas, Asia and, it seems, even the nations of the Warsaw Pact have seen the view of the Earth from greater distances than ever before, live from the inside of the Apollo-8 Command Module. Around the world, spirits have been lifted and the public inspired by the courage of the Apollo-8 crew and the successful completion of their mission. I expect that, like me, many of you reading this will have been moved by the solemn reading from the Book of Genesis, a sacred text to three great religions, from lunar orbit on Christmas Day. It was a moment truly evoking “peace on earth and goodwill to men” – the spirit of Christmas – at the end of a fraught year for the world.

The Moon seen through a window of the Apollo-8 Command Module while the crew read the opening words of the Book of Genesis

I think that the full impact of Apollo-8’s mission will take some time to emerge, especially once the photographs of the sights that the astronauts described to us during their flight become available to the public in the coming weeks. For this reason, I have decided to break my coverage of Apollo-8 into two parts. The first, today, will describe the background to the mission. Once NASA begins to process and release the photographs and films taken during the flight, the second part of my mission coverage will explore the lunar flight itself in more detail, illustrated by what I’m sure will be the magnificent images captured by the crew.

From Earth Orbit to Lunar Orbit
Originally planned as an Earth orbiting mission to check out the Lunar Module (LM) necessary to land astronauts on the Moon, delays in that vehicle’s development resulted in a radical change to the Apollo-8 mission profile.

As early as August, Apollo Programme manager Mr. George Low, suggested the idea of converting the first crew-carrying flight of the mighty Saturn 5 rocket into a flight to the Moon without a LM. His initial circumlunar flight concept soon became transformed into an even bolder proposal for a lunar orbit mission, as a counter to a possible lunar flight by Soviet cosmonauts, for which the Zond-5 and 6 missions are thought to be a precursor.

  A telex sent to NASA's Manned Space Flight Network at the conclusion of the Apollo-7 mission, which refers to the future lunar mission

With the successful test flight of Apollo-7, the daring plan for Apollo-8 to orbit the Moon was publicly announced on 12 November. A successful flight around the Moon would demonstrate that a manned lunar landing was achievable, and hopefully beat the USSR to placing the first humans into orbit around the Moon. 

Swapping Crews
Director of Flight Crew Operations, Mr. Deke Slayton, planned early for the proposed change in the mission profile, bumping the original Apollo-8 crew to Apollo-9, since that crew had been training hard for the mission to check out the Lunar Module. Instead, the original Apollo-9 crew – Colonel Frank Borman, Captain James Lovell and Major William Anders, who had been training to test the Lunar Module in cislunar space, became the astronauts destined to fly the first manned mission to the Moon. While the new crew for Apollo-8 was announced on 19 August, the potential lunar flight plan was initially kept secret.

The Apollo-8 crew in front of the Command Module simulator. L-R Col. Borman, Major Anders, Capt. Lovell

40-year-old Col. Borman, the mission commander, and Command Module (CM) Pilot Capt. Lovell (only 11 days younger than Borman), had previously flown together on the Gemini-7 mission, during which they set a long-duration record of 14 days in space. Lovell went on to command Gemini-12, while Borman served as the astronaut representative on the Apollo-1 Fire Investigation Board. The combined space experience of these two seasoned mission commanders undoubtedly played an important role in the success of this critical NASA mission.

Rookie astronaut Major Anders, the third member of the crew, is a former US Air Force fighter pilot. He holds an advanced degree in nuclear engineering and was selected as part of NASA’s third astronaut group, with responsibilities for dosimetry, radiation effects and environmental controls. Despite its lack on this flight, Anders was designated as Lunar Module Pilot and assigned the role of flight engineer, responsible for monitoring all spacecraft systems.

Uniquely Symbolic
The unique design of the Apollo-8 mission patch has a simple elegance that perfectly symbolises the flight. The shape of the patch recalls the gumdrop shape of the Apollo CM, while the red figure 8 circling the Earth and Moon represents both the number of the mission and the free-return flight trajectory for a lunar mission.

Captain Lovell claims credit for the basic design of the patch, developing it during a flight from the Apollo spacecraft manufacturing facility in California back to Houston, after learning about the change in mission assignment.

However, he may have been inspired by earlier patch designs by Allen Stevens, who has previously been responsible for the Apollo-1 and Apollo-7 patches. Mr. Stevens used the CM shape on some of his early designs for Apollo-7. His design for the original Apollo-9 patch – that Col. Borman and his crew had apparently approved – also included a CM-shaped frame and was repurposed as an alternative Apollo-8 lunar mission design.

I’ve heard it suggested that the figure-8 design element, representing mission number and lunar trajectory, may also have been influenced by the similar use of an 8 symbol to indicate a circumlunar trajectory on documents from the Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD) at the Manned Spaceflight Centre. 

This logo from NASA's MPAD may have inluenced the Apollo-8 patch design. What do you think?

Rumour has it that the Apollo-8 crew wanted to name their spacecraft, but –maintaining its long-held ban on such names – NASA would not allow it. Had they been given permission to do so, Columbiad (after the massive cannon that fires a projectile spacecraft to the Moon in Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon) might have been the name the crew selected.

Countdown to a Historic Flight
The un-manned Apollo-6 Saturn 5 test flight in April experienced major problems, including severe pogo oscillation while the first stage was firing, two second-stage engine failures, and the failure of the third stage to re-ignite in orbit. Resolving these issues was a priority before Apollo-8’s Saturn-5 launcher, AS-503, could leave the ground carrying human passengers.

Pogo oscillation was a serious concern: it could not only hamper engine performance, but the g-forces it created might even injure a crew. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre (MSFC) investigated the problems and determined the cause to be the similar vibration frequencies of the engines and the spacecraft, creating a resonance effect. AS-503 was therefore fitted with a helium gas system to absorb some of the vibration.

Similarly, MSFC engineers determined that fuel lines rupturing when exposed to vacuum and a mis-wired connection were the cause of the engine shutdowns. The use of suitably modified fuel lines on Apollo-8’s launch vehicle prevented these issues recurring.

The fact that the Saturn-5 thundered off Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Centre exactly as scheduled months earlier is a tribute to the 5,500 technicians and other personnel working behind the scenes to ready the launch vehicle and spacecraft for flight. Preparations for the launch were considered among the smoothest in recent years, although two equipment issues arising during the dress rehearsal countdown threatened to delay the commencement of the formal launch countdown on 16 December.

The historic first mission to the Moon was scheduled to launch at 12.51 GMT 21 December. This specific date and time would allow the crew to observe the site in the Sea of Tranquillity, where the first Apollo landing was planned to touch down, at the ideal Sun elevation of 6.7°, with shadows throwing the cratered lunar terrain into sharp relief.

As a precaution, the 103-hour countdown commenced a day early to allow time for the correction of any unseen snags and keep the lift-off on schedule. Computerised systems, now a feature of the need to support the incredible complexity of the Saturn 5 launcher, provided comprehensive data to the launch controllers giving the “go”/”no go” calls prior to launch.

The computerised Launch Control Room at Kennedy Space Centre, about three hours before launch

Avoiding the Flu – and Radiation Poisoning
With the so-called Hong Kong Flu epidemic sweeping the United States, NASA was taking no chances with the crew’s pre-launch health (especially following the issues created by astronaut Schirra’s head cold during Apollo-7). The astronauts were kept in isolation in quarters at the Kennedy Space Centre for more than a week before the flight and were immunised against the influenza virus – along with anyone likely to come into contact with them.

Emerging from pre-flight isolation into history, the Apollo-8 crew walk out to the astronaut transfer van, ready for their spaceflight

The astronaut’s pre-flight medical examination collected data for comparison with their post-flight examination. Since the Apollo-8 crew has been the first to pass through and beyond the protection of the Van Allen radiation belts, this comparison of pre- and post-flight medical data will reveal any physical changes or health effects resulting from the first human flight beyond Earth orbit.

Basic cross section of the radiation belts around Earth (not drawn to scale). The outer belt is composed of electrons, the inner belt comprises both electrons and protons.

Major Anders’ expertise in dosimetry and radiation effects has undoubtedly been relevant to this aspect of the mission, as each astronaut wore a personal radiation dosimeter which could return data back to NASA’s flight surgeons. The spacecraft also carried three passive film dosimeters recording the cumulative radiation to which the crew were subjected. Initial indications are that the radiation dosage received by the astronauts was at an acceptable level and should not preclude future missions to the Moon.

Apollo’s “Sun Screen”
Beyond the Van Allen Belts, the Apollo-8 crew was travelling in the realms of the intense and deadly radiations of deep space, particularly the streams of charged particles spewed out into the Solar System from solar flares. The astronauts would have been seriously at risk from radiation poisoning if a major solar event occurred during their spaceflight.

To ensure astronaut safety during lunar missions, NASA has established the world-wide Solar Particle Alert Network (SPAN). Stations in Houston, Texas, the Canary Islands, and Carnarvon, Western Australia, provide a 24-hour watch on the Sun, to spot dangerous solar activity. SPAN stations are operated by the US Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA), which also collects data from twelve satellites that monitor for deadly solar flares. This space-based early-warning system is comprised of four sun-orbiting Pioneer spacecraft (including Pioneers 6, 7 and 8 carrying cosmic ray detectors developed by Australian physicist Dr. Ken McCracken) and eight Earth-orbiting Vela nuclear test detection satellites.

The ESSA SPAN facility in Carnarvon, Western Australia, equipped with both optical and radio telescopes to observe the Sun

ESSA aims to give NASA at least 24 hours’ warning of major solar eruptions, providing enough time enough to delay a launch or alter an orbit to protect the astronauts. Fortunately for Apollo-8’s important flight, the Sun smiled kindly and there was no dangerous solar activity, but future Apollo missions may be grateful for the early warning provided by NASA’s “Sun screen”.

The Whole World was Watching
Television coverage of Apollo-8’s launch was the most extensive to date. The BBC, going “live” for the first time from Cape Kennedy, provided coverage to 54 countries, across Europe and beyond in 15 languages, in a broadcast whose complexity must have rivalled its role in the Our World satellite project. Seven television networks in Britain, the United States, Japan, Canada and Mexico, provided live coverage of the launch, with NASA’s ATS-3 satellite over the Atlantic providing transmissions to Europe and ATS-1 over the Pacific, serving Japan and the Philippines. Even the Communist nations of Eastern Europe were apparently able to watch the launch, although we in Australia could not.

All eyes were trained on the sky at the crowded press site at Kennedy Space Centre as Apollo-8 lifted off

To the Moon, Alice!
When Apollo-8 launched on 21 December, Gemini veterans Borman and Lovell found the ride “less demanding than Gemini from a ‘g’ standpoint, because it didn’t reach the high ‘gs’”, they had experienced on their earlier missions. However, the ride to orbit was still “powerful and noisy… and the stagings were really kind of violent.”

Apollo-8 entered Earth orbit with the third stage still attached, its engine needed for the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) burn to put the spacecraft on course to the Moon. For a little over two and a half hours every system of the Command Service Module (CSM) was thoroughly checked out in orbit, to ensure it was fully operational.

Staff at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in Australia mark the first time humans have ventured beyond Earth orbit. The fine print of their sign reads:“In space: Borman, Lovell, Anders. On the ground: Hicks, Cross, Holland.”

Then Mission Control gave Apollo-8 the crucial permission call “You are Go for TLI”. The S-IVB stage’s engine sent the first human mission to the Moon on its way out of Earth orbit, with the spacecraft reaching escape velocity (25,000 mph) in just five minutes! As it left the Earth, Apollo-8 was placed on a “free return” trajectory, that would ensure that lunar gravity would slingshot the spacecraft around the Moon and back to Earth in the event of a failure of the CCSM’s powerful onboard engine. An amazing voyage was underway!

I am going to pause my recap of Apollo-8 at this point, and will take it up again in January, when what I anticipate will be amazing photographic imagery from the flight to the Moon and back becomes available. Please join me then. In the meantime, let me wish everyone on the Journey a Happy New Year' looking forward to an exciting 1969 – knowing that the Moon is now within our grasp!

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Science / Space Race

[November 4, 1968] A Mysterious Mission (Soyuz-2 and 3)

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by Kaye Dee

Just over a week ago I wrote about the Apollo-7 test flight – America’s successful return to space after the tragedy of the Apollo-1 fire. Just days after Apollo-7’s safe splashdown the Soviet Union also launched its own return-to-flight mission, Soyuz-3. As the Traveller noted in his recent commentary, like Apollo-7, Soyuz-3 represents the recommencement of the Russian manned spaceflight programme following its equally tragic loss of Soyuz-1 last year.

This is reported to be the official Soyuz-3 mission patch. It was apparently intended to be worn by Cosmonaut Beregovoi or at least flown during the mission, however it ia not clear if it was actually used

As readers know, the Soviet space programme is secretive about its activities. Soyuz-3, which was launched on 26 October, has been particularly mysterious for a crewed spaceflight. The mission was preceded by the launch of the un-manned Soyuz-2, although that launch was not announced until after Soyuz-3 was in orbit. What can we make of the little we know so far about this flight, which had a duration of just a little under four days?

New Cosmonaut, New Spacecraft
We know from information released or gleaned at the time of Soyuz-1 that this new Soviet spacecraft is large, capable of carrying at least three cosmonauts – although on this mission, just as with Soyuz-1, there appears to have been only one man aboard, Colonel Georgi Beregovoi.

Although not previously known to be a member of the Soviet cosmonaut team, Col. Beregovoi is a distinguished World War Two veteran, who was awarded the decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1944. After the war he became a test pilot and is said to have joined the cosmonaut team in 1964. At 47, Beregovoi now becomes the oldest person to make a spaceflight, taking the record away from 45-year-old Apollo-7 commander Capt. Wally Schirra only weeks after he achieved it.

The few images of the Soyuz spacecraft available indicate that, unlike the Apollo Command Service Module, it has three sections: a ‘service module’ containing life-support and propulsion systems; and two other modules – one roughly bell-shaped and the other, attached to it, spherical – which both seem to be crew accommodation, given that press releases from the TASS newsagency have described the spacecraft as “two-roomed”.

The bell-shaped section seems to be the part of the spacecraft in which the crew return to Earth, protected by a heatshield. Interestingly, the service module supports a solar panel on either side, which must be folded within the launch shroud and extended once in orbit. The use of solar panels suggests that the USSR does not have the same fuel cell technology as NASA. However, it is also possible that the Soyuz is intended for missions in Earth orbit with an appreciably longer duration than a short trip to the Moon and back, as solar panels would be more efficient than fuel cells for that purpose.

NASA experts assume that, like Apollo-7, Soyuz-3 has been modified and/or re-designed over the past 18 months to address whatever issues have been identified as the cause of the loss of Soyuz-1. It is generally believed that Kosmos-238, which made a four-day flight in August, was an uncrewed Soyuz test flight in advance of the first mission with a crew on board.

How Many on Board?
Speculation and rumours abound as to how many cosmonauts were actually on board Soyuz-3. Official Soviet sources give the name of only one cosmonaut, the aforementioned Col. Beregovoi. However, a report in the armed forces newspaper, Red Star, has caused speculation that more than one cosmonaut may have been intended to be involved in the mission. In referring to the “crew” of Soyuz-3 the article used the plural when it spoke of cosmonauts who were planning to fly with Beregovoi.

Colonel Beregovoi during his training at Star City

Reporting about a meeting at the cosmonaut training centre “Star City” near Moscow, to mark the end of Soyuz-3’s training period, the Red Star article described a speech to the meeting by Colonel Beregovoi then said, “Others followed him. They spoke about the great work they had done and thanked their comrades. These in their turn wished them a happy flight, a good launching and a soft landing”. While this report could be taken to imply that more than one other person was expected to accompany Beregovoi on his flight, it may be that the “others” referred to were the mission’s back-up cosmonauts, since Soviet spaceflights apparently have two back-up crews.

Cosmonaut Beregovoi on the launchpad, apparently alone

An additional vague hint that there might be more than one cosmonaut aboard came Soyuz-3 came from a TASS news agency release referring to Beregovoi as the “commander” of the ship, a term that would seem unnecessary if he was the sole occupant of the spacecraft. Rumours with a more conspiracy-minded flavour have also suggested that one of Col. Beregovoi’s live broadcasts from space was filmed in such a manner that, while an empty seat could be seen on the cosmonaut’s left side, whatever was to his right was not visible, potentially concealing the presence of another crewmember. However, the angle may simply have been the result of a fixed camera, located to give whatever the Soviet mission controllers considered to be the best view of the spacecraft interior.

More than a Rendezvous?
The pre-occupation of Western observers with the possibility that there were other, unidentified cosmonauts on board Soyuz-3 stems from the comparatively basic activities reported as being carried out during the mission. True, the flight is assumed to have been a shakedown test along the same lines as Apollo-7, but the American craft nevertheless flew with a complete crew of three, including a designated Lunar Module pilot, even though a LM was not available for the mission. Yet the large Soyuz has officially flown with only a single crewmember. Does this mean that the Russians were still uncertain about the flightworthiness of the spacecraft and did not want to risk more than one life on the test flight? Or was a more ambitious mission planned that did not eventuate?

Apollo-7 carried out a range of complex manoeuvres and experiments during its test flight, while the only significant activities reported about Soyuz-3 were that it made two rendezvous with the automated Soyuz-2. Yet, an ambitious programme of spacecraft dockings and crew transfers had supposedly been planned for Soyuz-1 had that mission not struck trouble, and since October last year the USSR has apparently perfected the techniques of automated rendezvous and docking through the flights of Kosmos-186-188 and Kosmos-212-213.

Was an actual docking between Soyuz-2 and 3 planned, in addition to the rendezvous manoeuvres, with one or two additional crew members from Soyuz-3 transferring to the automated craft to return from orbit? Did the Soviets keep the presence of additional cosmonauts on Soyuz-3 secret to save face in the event that such a docking and crew transfer failed? Even if Beregovoi was alone in Soyuz-3, was it planned for him to dock with Soyuz-2 to demonstrate that a pilot could accomplish a manual docking, similar to the capabilities demonstrated by the crew of Apollo-7? TASS press releases about the mission were ambiguously worded and extremely light on detail, so – as usual with the Soviet space programme – it may be a very long time before we have answers to these questions.

The Mission as Reported
Although not announced until after the launch of Soyuz-3 (though my friends at the WRE report that it was detected by Western space tracking networks), the automated rendezvous target Soyuz-2 was launched on Friday 25 October, the day before the manned mission. Precision launch timing then placed Soyuz-3 into an orbit within seven and a half miles of its rendezvous target.

According to TASS, during its first orbit, Soyuz-3 “approached’’ to within 656 ft of Soyuz-2 using “an automatic system”, following which Cosmonaut Beregovoi manually effected a closer rendezvous. A second rendezvous was carried out on 27 October. This has puzzled Western space experts, who have said that they could see no immediate reason for such comparatively simple manoeuvres, which do not appear to represent any appreciable advance in Soviet space capabilities.

Soyuz-2 was remotely commanded to return to Earth after just three days. In what was presumably another demonstration of the Soyuz spacecraft’s redesigned landing system, TASS reported that the spacecraft’s re-entry was slowed by parachutes and cushioned “with the use of a soft-landing system at the last stage”.

It is unclear what activities Col. Beregovoi undertook during his final two days in orbit. Official TASS bulletins said only that the cosmonaut was “going ahead with his flight programme”, which apparently included conducting “scientific, technical, medical, and biological experiments and research”. The “research” may possibly have included observations of the Earth for meteorological and intelligence gathering purposes. The cosmonaut also made live television broadcasts from Soyuz-3, during one of which he provided a brief “tour” of the spacecraft interior. In a short, three-minute broadcast, Beregovoi was also shown thumbing through his log-book and adjusting his radio communications cap.

A still from the three-minute brodcast from Soyuz-3 showing Colonel Beregovoi

The flight was repeatedly said to be “proceeding normally”, with the Colonel “feeling fine” and the spaceship “functioning normally”. We did learn that Soyuz-3 moved to a new orbit after Soyuz-2’s de-orbit, and that the cosmonaut’s daily routine included 25 minutes of morning exercise before breakfast, but whatever else the mission may have actually accomplished remains a mystery.

Back to Earth
After almost exactly four days in space, Soyuz-3 returned to Earth, landing safely on the snowy steppes of Kazakhstan near the city of Karaganda. TASS reported that “After his landing, Georgi Beregovoi feels well. Friends and correspondents met him in the area of the landing”. The cosmonaut has since been reported as saying that his landing was so easy he hardly felt the impact at all.

Following his safe return, Col. Beregovoi was flown to Moscow, where he received a red-carpet welcome, an instant promotion to Major-General and the award of the Order of Lenin. At the ceremony, the Soviet party leader, Mr Brezhnev, devoted most of his 15-minute speech to praise of the Soviet manned space programme, describing Soyuz-3 as a “complete success”. He said that the mission had brought nearer the day when “Man will not be the guest but the host of space”. He also offered a word of praise to the Apollo-7 astronauts, referring to them as “courageous”. 

A Step on the Way to the Moon?
So, what was the purpose of the Soyuz-3 mission? Dr. Welsh’s recently-mentioned comment that Soyuz and Zond spacecraft are different vehicles and that the Russians are not yet ready to attempt a lunar mission, seems to be borne out by statements from Soviet academician and aerospace scientist, Prof. Leonid Sedov, during a visit to the University of Tennessee Space Institute on 31 October-1 November. Prof. Sedov has said that the USSR would reach Moon from a space station in Earth orbit but would not conduct manned lunar space operations within the next six months. He indicated that Zond-type satellites would circumnavigate other planets and return and told the university audience that Soyuz-3 was part of a “programme to develop operations around the Earth”.

Prof. Sedov on an earlier visit to the United States in 1961 at the time of the USSR's first manned spaceflight

Mastering the techniques of rendezvous and docking would certainly be necessary to establish the orbiting space station from which a Soviet Moon mission would be launched, but Sedov’s comments leave unanswered the question of why a docking between Soyuz-2 and 3 was not attempted during the mission – unless an attempted docking did fail.

Awards All Round
Despite their testiness during the flight, the overall success of the Apollo-7 mission has been recognised by the presentation of NASA’s second highest award, the Exceptional Service Medal, to the crew at a ceremony in Texas on 2 November, presided over by President Johnson. During the ceremony, the President said the United States was “ready to take that first great step out into the Solar System and on to the surface of the nearest of the many mysterious worlds that surround us in space.” He noted that Apollo-7 had logged more than 780 man-hours in space, which is more than has been logged “in all Soviet manned flights to date”.

Left: Former NASA Administrator James Webb speaking at the Apollo-7 awards event, at which he also received NASA's highest award. Right: After the formal ceremony, President Johnson (second from left) chats with Apollo 7 astronauts Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham.

At the same ceremony, President Johnson presented the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the space agency’s highest award, to recently-retired NASA Administrator James E. Webb, for his outstanding leadership of NASA from 1961-1968. 

NASA has also recently indicated that it will make a decision on the plans for the Apollo-8 mission on 11 November. The space agency has listed the alternatives for the December mission as: an Earth orbital mission deeper into space; a circumlunar fly-by; or a lunar orbit mission. These are all exciting prospects, but I'm hoping that NASA will choose the boldest option and go for a lunar orbit mission. To have human eyes see the Earth from the Moon for the very first time would be a Christmas present indeed!

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