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To the Moon! 50th Anniversary Year Starts
This is the 50th anniversary of Americans reaching the Moon, fulfilling President Kennedy’s challenge, to reach the Moon and safely return, before the end of the 1960s. The first man set foot on the Moon, 20 July 1969. This week marks the beginning of the methodical series of Apollo missions that led up to Apollo 11.
On 11 October 1968, Apollo 7 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying a full crew, to simulate the crew going to the moon. The lunar module was not yet ready for live testing, so that component was not included. The three-man crew was Walter M. Schirra, Jr., commander, Donn F. Eisele, command module pilot, and Walter Cunningham, lunar module pilot.
Apollo 7 was the first American manned mission since the catastrophe of Apollo 1, where the crew ( Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee) had been burnt to death, trapped in their capsule on the launchpad, when a fire raged out of control in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. Apollo 7 took off with a nitrogen-oxygen cabin atmosphere, to prevent another catastrophic fire.
The Apollo 7 crew orbited Earth, doing laps until they had passed all the Soviet cosmonaut mission hours combined. They successfully tested maneuvers and components needed for the lunar mission. They even made the first live television broadcast from space. Finally, they successfully executed their reentry maneuver, and safely splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, on 22 October 1968.
Of the Apollo 7 crew, only Walt Cunningham is still with us. He lives in Texas, and will celebrate the Apollo VII 50th anniversary at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, Dallas Love Field, Saturday, 20 October 2018. His crew set America ahead of the Russians, and as the baton passed from one Apollo mission crew to the next, American astronauts never gave back the lead.
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Published in Science & Technology
Thanks for this post. Here’s my friend Bill Mellberg, who died way too young, with Walt and his wife three years ago.
The Saturn 1B is just the coolest looking rocket. I have loved rockets all my life, but aesthetically they are basically tubes with one pointy end. Not the 1B. Its first stage is eight Redstones glued to a central Jupiter. It was faster and easier to develop the booster that way, with tooling that already existed for Redstone and Jupiter, while designing the massive Saturn V. And it is just the slickest looking manned spacecraft ever. Especially when they replaced the four squared-off fins on the Saturn 1 with those eight gorgeous swept delta fins on the 1B. I have built six of them in various scales over the years. I was going to do a big Mercury Redstone as my winter building project, but I may have to do a 1B instead. It would be a much bigger time commitment; the only thing that’s really challenging on the MR is the escape tower.
My collection of autographs of the Apollo Moonwalkers.
Thanks for sharing. I wrote with some trepidation, knowing the knowledge base in Ricochet.
Perhaps a series of posts, through to the moon landing anniversary, are in order, in the course of the 50th anniversary year.
Cunningham’s autobiography, “All American Boys”, is a good read. It suffers, like many books, from a lack of fact checking. Writing about the launch of Alan Shepard in May 1961, he states that, “the Russian Sputnik still circled above us, giving off those electronic beeps”. The transmitter on Sputnik 1, launched in October 1957, worked for 22 days and the satellite burned up three months later. These types of mistakes drive me crazy. See my review of Simon Winchester’s new book for other examples of this with respect to space history. https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RYT8V9Z4ZG30N/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0062652559
What did you think of Rise of the Rocket Girls?
I’m a bit tired of the women/minorities never got their due theme. It’s doubtless true at times but it took a long time for my Dad to get proper recognition for his work on GPS. See my exchange here. http://insidegnss.com/letters-timation-developers-honor-draws-fire/
And the argument continues with a new documentary which is scheduled to be released in November.
What I took from that short, imperfect book was the willingness to underwrite repeated risk and failure. We lack that today in large government funded programs.
There was a similar message in a bio of Charley Bossart. He designed the Atlas and was a family friend. In the 30s and 40s he worked on a number of airplanes. Many of these projects were canceled but the experience he gained was invaluable when he switched to rockets.
My uncle Stan Smith, who was an engineer for Bell, used to say that engineering was a matter of making the right mistakes.
General Hyten, STRATCOM Commander, agrees at 27:04, and says we need to get back to underwriting risk in development.
Disagree. Look at how social welfare programs have worked over the decades. Risk and failure, risk and failure, risk and failure.
General Hyten introduced my 2016 talk with my coauthor at AF Space Command.
Bookmarked for later viewing.