The Apollo flights: a brief history

AN ALPHABET OF MISSIONS

Owen Maynard, one of the engineers who had been designing manned spacecraft for NASA from the beginning, reduced the task of reaching the Moon to a series of missions that, one by one, would push Apollo’s capability all the way to the lunar surface. These missions were assigned letters of the alphabet: А, В, C, etc. Managers believed that if the lunar goal was to be realised, each mission would have to be accomplished, with some missions possibly involving more than one flight.

• An А-mission would be an unmanned test of the Saturn V rocket to rate it for manned flight and test the ability of the Apollo command module to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere safely.

• A В-mission would take an unmanned lunar module up into space for a workout. It would be launched by a Saturn IB launch vehicle.

• A C-mission would be an Earth orbital test of the CSM with a crew, again using the Saturn IB.

• A D-mission would be a full manned test in Earth orbit of the CSM and LM Apollo system, launched by a Saturn V.

• An E-Mission would see NASA move away from the Earth with another full test of both spacecraft, this time in an orbit that would reach much higher than any manned spacecraft had previously flown, in order to test the combination away from Earth where navigation, thermal control and communications would be different.

• An F-mission would be a full dress rehearsal of a flight to the Moon, carrying out every manoeuvre except the actual landing. This would give crews in the spacecraft and the people in mission control their first operational experience of lunar orbit.

• The G-mission would attempt to land on the Moon. Its goal would not extend much beyond the landing itself, as the two-man crew of the lander would take only one short walk on the lunar surface.

W. D. Woods, How Apollo Flew to the Moon, Springer Praxis Books,

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7179-1 2. © Springer Science+Business Media. LLC 2011

This was the plan, but circumstances altered the manner in which these mission were achieved. Three further mission types were later envisaged by the planners.

• An H-mission would maximise the capabilities of the basic lander to enable a crew to make two forays outside their craft on foot, and to deploy a suite of science instruments on the surface.

• An I-mission would have used only the CSM for a month-long stay in an orbit whose ground track would include the lunar poles. Cameras and other remote-sensing instruments built cither into the side of the service module, or aboard an instrumented module docked onto the CSM. would have mapped the entire Moon. However, no such mission was ever flown.

• A J-mission was the final type to enter the planners’ lexicon and would use an uprated Saturn V and LM to extend surface operations to three days. In the event, the CSM included remote-sensing instruments and the LM delivered a little electric car to enable its crew to venture much further around the landing site and explore areas with multiple scientific objectives.

When Kennedy’s challenge was made. NASA had barely dipped its toe into space with the Mercury programme. Before an advanced spacecraft like Apollo could head for the Moon, the agency had to address a lot of basic questions about how to fly in space. The Gemini programme was its classroom. Across two hectic years of 1965 and 1966, ten increasingly ambitious flights were launched at bi-monthly intervals to test techniques for Apollo; in particular controlled re-entry, rendezvous, docking, spacewalking and long-duration flights. Its achievements placed America ahead in the space race for the first time, and as ‘Go-fever’ gripped the agency, NASA looked forward to getting the Apollo programme flying in the new year of 1967.

The bulk of this book deals with the steps involved in flying to the Moon rather than the sequence of the flights themselves. However, to give the reader a historical perspective the following is a resume of what each flight achieved.