Recovery

The crew released their restraints and began to power down the spacecraft while the recovery forces swung into action. A typical recovery force had five helicopters deployed from a US Navy aircraft carrier that was stationed at the spacecraft’s aim point. As spacecraft crews and their support teams gradually improved their re-entry guidance and landing became more accurate, recovery planners began to worry that the CM might make a hard landing on the carrier itsellj so for later missions, the carrier stationed itself a few kilometres to one side of the aim point. Each of the five helicopters had a specific task in the recovery. One was intended to photograph and later televise the splashdown from close quarters. Another had little more to do than be a radio relay between the CM, the helicopters and the ship. Two further helicopters had frogmen on board whose task was to drop into the sea and attach a flotation collar around the spacecraft that would both stabilise it and provide a platform for the exiting crewmen. They also recovered the detached parachutes if possible. The fifth helicopter carried a ‘Billy Pugh’ rescue basket with which it would pluck the three crewmen, one by one, off a life raft next to the spacecraft and into the helicopter to be taken to the ship.

Inside the spacecraft, the crew charged a gas-powered counterbalance for the main hatch in preparation for opening. After the Apollo 1 fire, the two-piece inward-opening hatch of the Bloek-I spacecraft was replaced with a single unified

hatch that could quickly be opened outwards. A problem with this arrangement was that while sitting upright on Earth, the heavy door had to move upwards against gravity as well as outwards by a crewman weakened by a long period in space and so an ingenious counterbalance arrangement was added that was powered by compressed air bottles.