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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<HTML>
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<title>Chariots For Apollo, ch12-6</title>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
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<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<p>
<h2>Setting the Stage</h2>
<p>
From a technical standpoint, Apollo 10 could have landed on the moon. It
probably would have - with some offloading of fuel to shed a little
weight - had the flight been scheduled for the last few weeks of the
decade. There were, however, good reasons for waiting until the next
mission for a landing. Only two lunar modules had flown, and both those
flights had been in earth orbit. NASA managers wanted to see how the
lander's guidance and navigation system would behave in the moon's
uneven gravity fields while the craft was within rescue range of the
command module. Further, helium ingestion, which had caused
<cite>Spider's</cite> descent engines to chug, would have to be
investigated before a lunar module landed on the moon. Flight control
also wanted a chance to review operation, tracking, and communications
procedures of both vehicles while they were actually in the vicinity of
the moon. The crews and controllers had been through many simulations,
but it would take a real mission to give them the confidence they
needed. Apollo 10 was to be a dress rehearsal, complete with a cast that
included a lunar module capable of a lunar landing.<a href =
"#source35"><b>35</b></a><p>
The basics of the mission plan had been conceived in the spring of 1967.
When, the next autumn, Low and his men outlined the alphabetical
sequence of the route to the moon, Apollo 10 was assigned the
"F" role, a lunar-orbit flight with all components. Toward the
end of 1968, the mission planning and trajectory analysis people in
Houston, led by John Mayer, Tindall, and Carl Huss (all veterans dating
back to Mercury), buckled down to work out the refinements.<p>
One feature was a two-phase lunar-orbit insertion maneuver introduced on
<cite>Apollo 8.</cite> The vehicle would begin the first revolution of
the moon in an egg-shaped orbit, to avoid an unsafe pericynthion (known
in earth orbit as a perigee - that is, the lowest point). If the service
module engine fired too long and slowed the speed too much on the first
burn, that part of the circuit must not be so low that the spacecraft
would crash into the lunar surface. On Borman's mission the engine had
fired for an excess of almost five seconds. On the next burn, to
circularize the orbit, the duration of the firing was adjusted to keep
the craft a safe distance above the moon. "Weren't we smart?"
Tindall asked his colleagues, when this became a standing procedure for
Apollo 10 and the lunar landing missions that followed.<p>
As first planned, the lunar module on Apollo 10 would simply pull away
from the command module and return for rendezvous and docking; but in
December 1968 Tindall and the mission planners began campaigning to put
the descent propulsion system through a real test down near the surface,
where the landing radar could be fully checked. Moreover, they plotted
the path so the lunar module crew could fly close enough to look for
landmarks and take pictures of the site selected for the first landing.
Tindall wanted them to go even farther - almost to touchdown - and then
to fire the ascent engine to get back to the command module in a hurry,
as though there had been an emergency. He had a fair hearing, he later
said, but the mission planners did not think they had enough experience
in the lunar environment to attempt this maneuver on the lander's first
moon flight. Tindall reluctantly agreed. And there were many more
procedures to be decided on and worked out before the flight plan became
"final" in April 1969.<a href = "#source36"><b>36</b></a><p>
When LM-4 arrived in Florida during October 1968 (the descent stage on
the 11th and the ascent stage on the 15th), the Kennedy Space Center
inspection team led by Joseph M. Bobik found it was a much better
machine than LM-3; they had very little to grumble about. NASA was also
quite satisfied with CSM-106<a href = "#explanation1">*</a> and with
North American's performance in its checkout and delivery to the Cape on
25 November 1968.<a href = "#source37"><b>37</b></a><p>
Although the contractors had shipped excellent spacecraft, preparations
at Kennedy did not go lickety-split from the assembly building to the
launch pad. Staying out of the way of <cite>Apollo 9</cite> preflight
activities delayed testing several days. And during maintenance to the
Launch Control Center, the electrical power was cut off to replace a
valve. The Apollo 10 launch vehicle's pneumatic controls sensed the
power cutoff, opened some valves (the normal failure mode for these
components), and dumped 20,000 liters of fuel (RP-1 - similar to
kerosene) on the pad. Besides losing the propellant, the fuel tank
bulkhead buckled. Technicians applied extra pressure to the tank, which
removed all but a few wrinkles. Later the vehicle preparation team
lowered a man inside to inspect the tank; he could find no further
damage. Tests of the stage through the first week in May 1969 revealed
no loss of structural integrity.<a href = "#source38"><b>38</b></a><p>
Actually, neither spacecraft nor booster preparations held up the launch
a single day, although adjustments in the launch date for other reasons
probably helped the hardware teams to maintain schedules. On 10 January,
NASA changed the anticipated sendoff from 1 to 17 May to fit the lunar
launch window (optimum position of the moon in relation to earth for
this mission) and to provide more time for crew training. Then on 17
March Phillips postponed the liftoff till the second day of the launch
window (to 18 May), so the crew could get a better look at candidate
landing sites.<a href = "#source39"><b>39</b></a><p>
LM-4 and CSM-106 went through their flight readiness reviews on the same
day, 11 April, with very nearly the same men passing on the lunar module
in the morning and the command and service modules in the afternoon.
During the lander review, a suggestion was made that the descent
engine's chugging during McDivitt's flight might have been a form of
pogo, but Low told Phillips that Faget's engineers had found no such
indication. On 16 May, Phillips assured Mueller that all hardware would
be ready for the mission two days later.<a href =
"#source40"><b>40</b></a><p>
On 13 November 1968, NASA had announced that the prime crew for Apollo
10 would be Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan, with Gordon
Cooper, Donn Eisele, and Edgar Mitchell as backups, and Joseph Engle,
James Irwin, and Charles Duke as the support team. Coming from
understudy roles on <cite>Apollo 7</cite> in the leap-frogging crew
selection methods that had evolved during Gemini, the Stafford group was
the first all-veteran crew sent into space by the Americans.<a href =
"#explanation2"><b>**</b></a> Stafford had flown two missions
(<cite>Gemini VI</cite> and <cite>IX</cite>), Young two (<cite>Gemini
III</cite> and <cite>X</cite>), and Cernan one (<cite>Gemini
IX</cite>).<p>
The Apollo 10 crew had about 5 hours of formal training for each of the
192 hours it would spend on the lunar-orbital trip. Completely satisfied
with the training program ("down to the nth degree," as
Stafford later said), the crew was especially pleased with the time
spent in the simulators. Putting Stafford and Cernan in the lunar module
simulator and Young in the command module trainer and then linking them
with mission control provided situations remarkably like those faced
during actual missions. They had four or five such sessions in the
Houston simulators. When they arrived at the Cape, they would practice
rendezvous maneuvers in no other way. During the more than 300 hours
each man spent in the simulators, other tasks - such as reentry, launch
abort, transearth injection, and translunar injection - were also
studied. That this was a veteran crew was readily apparent in later
remarks about such training aids as planetariums (Cernan said they had
been looking at the stars for five years) and the centrifuge (Stafford
said he had not been in one since <cite>Gemini III</cite>).<a href =
"#source41"><b>41</b></a><p>
Stafford's crew picked its flight patch in March. The patch displayed
two craft flying above the lunar surface, with a Roman numeral X and the
earth in the background. The astronauts also selected their call-signs,
"Charlie Brown" for the command module and
"Snoopy"<a href = "#explanation3"><b>***</b></a> for the
lander. Julian Scheer, NASA's public affairs administrator, greeted
these nicknames, as well as those of <cite>Spider</cite> and
<cite>Gumdrop</cite> for <cite>Apollo 9,</cite> with raised eyebrows. He
wrote Low that something a little more dignified should be picked for
Apollo 11, the mission scheduled for the first lunar landing.<a href =
"#source42"><b>42</b></a>
<p>
<hr>
<p>
<a name = "explanation1"><b>*</b></a> CSM-105 had been assigned as a ground test spacecraft in May 1968.<p>
<a name = "explanation2"><b>**</b></a> During all phases of Apollo -
seven more lunar flights, three Skylab missions, and one Apollo-Soyuz
Test Project flight - there was only one other all-veteran crew: Neil
Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins on <cite>Apollo
11.</cite><p>
<a name = "explanation3"><b>***</b></a> These names - of a small boy and
a beagle - were borrowed from the popular comic strip
"Peanuts," created by Charles L. Schultz. Schultz' drawings
were also used by NASA to promote manned space flight safety awareness.
Persons making notable contributions in this field were given
"Silver Snoopy Award" pins by the astronauts.
<p>
<hr>
<p>
<a name = "source35"><b>35</b>.</a> Low to NASA Hq., Attn.: Phillips, 26
Oct. 1968; Lewis R. Fisher, telephone interview, 10 Feb. 1976; Robert V.
Battey, telephone interview, 5 March 1976; Owen G. Morris, telephone
interview, 5 March 1976; NASA, "Project: Apollo 10," press
kit, news release 69-68, 6 May 1969, p. 2; William J. Bennett memo,
"Apollo Mission F Summary," 16 April 1968, with encs.; Michael
Collins, <cite>Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys</cite> (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1974), p. 326.<p>
<a name = "source36"><b>36</b>.</a> Carl R. Huss memo, "Abort
considerations relating to LOI targeting for elliptical orbits," 20
Sept. 1967; MSC, "Apollo 10 Technical Crew Debriefing," 2 June
1969, pp. 18-1, 18-2; Albert P. Boysen, Jr., memo for file, "Notes
of Apollo Flight Program Review at NASA Headquarters on September 21,
1967, Case 310," 24 Nov. 1967, with enc.; Low to Phillips, 8 Feb.
1969, with enc., Tindall, "Two-Stage LOI looks good after C’,"
5 Feb. 1969; Tindall memos, "F Rendezvous Mission Techniques,"
15 Nov. 1968, and "Proposal to add something nice to the F
mission," 2 Dec. 1968; Tindall, telephone interview, 11 March 1976;
Tindall memos, "Some decisions regarding lunar landmark tracking on
the F and G missions," 10 Jan. 1969, and "F/G rendezvous
Mission Technique - mostly F," 11 Feb. 1969; MSC, "Flight
Operations Plan, Mission F," 30 Jan. 1969; Elvin B. Pippert, Jr.,
T. R. Lindsey, and W. M. Anderson, "Apollo 10; Apollo
AS-505/CSM-106/LM-4: Final Flight Plan," MSC, 17 April 1969; Warren
J. North letter, "Revision A to the Apollo 10 Final Flight
Plan," 5 May 1969, with encs.<p>
<a name = "source37"><b>37</b>.</a> Joseph M. Bobik to Chief, Apollo
Spacecraft Office, KSC, "LM 4 Receiving Inspection," 20 Nov.
1968; Gay, Weekly Activity Reports for 9–15 Oct. and 20–26 Nov. 1968;
Low memo for record, "Structural test program," 20 May 1968;
Gilruth to Phillips, 16 Dec. 1968.<p>
<a name = "source38"><b>38</b>.</a> Mueller Reports, 10 March, 28 April,
and 5 May 1969; Seaton, Weekly Status Report, 1 May 1969.<p>
<a name = "source39"><b>39</b>.</a> Seaton, Weekly Status Report, 10
Jan. 1969; Mueller Reports, 13 Jan. and 17 March 1969; Phillips TWX to
MSC, MSFC, and KSC, Attn.: Low, James, and Middleton, 17 March 1969;
NASA, "Apollo 10 Launch Date," news release 69-41, 17 March
1969; Phillips TWX to KSC, MSFC, and MSC, "Apollo 10 and 11 FRR
Planning Dates," 17 Feb. 1969.<p>
<a name = "source40"><b>40</b>.</a> James A. York, secy., minutes of
meeting, LM-4 FRR Board, 11 April 1969; Brendle, minutes of meeting, CSM
106 FRR Board, 11 April 1969; Low to Phillips, 12 May 1969, with encs.,
Maxime A. Faget to Mgr., ASPO, "Descent Propulsion System POGO
possibilities," 12 May 1969, and Joseph N. Kotanchik to Dir.,
Engineering and Development, and Mgr., ASPO, "Spacecraft
POGO," 13 Sept. 1968; Phillips to Apollo 10 FRR Board,
"Confirmation of Flight Readiness for the Apollo 10 Mission,"
16 May 1969.<p>
<a name = "source41"><b>41</b>.</a> MSC news release 68-81, 13 Nov.
1968; Apollo 10 press kit, pp. 3, 65; Gilruth to NASA Hq., Attn.:
Mueller, "Flight crew training summaries," 12 May 1969;
"Apollo 10 Debriefing," pp. 20-1 through 20-15.<p>
<a name = "source42"><b>42</b>.</a> Donald K. Slayton to Dir., MSC,
"Proposed Apollo X patch," 13 March 1969, with enc.; NASA,
"The Flight of Apollo 10, May 18–26, 1969," 2 June 1969, p. 3;
Julian Scheer to Low, 18 April 1969.
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