Space Rocket History Archive

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Lovell toggled the “master arm” switch to On and glanced around to see if everything else was in order. Guidance control was set to “Primary Guidance”; thrust control was on “Auto”; engine gimbals were enabled; the propellant quantity, temperature, and pressure looked good; the ship was maintaining the correct attitude. Homepage with pictures.

Aquarius, can you see any stars yet? Homepage with pictures

Kraft wanted to fire the descent engine now, get the ship back on its free-return slingshot course, and when it emerged from behind the moon and reached the PC+2 point, execute any maneuvers that might be required to refine the trajectory or increase its speed. Homepage with pictures.

Cronkite did not look good. He called Schirra over and thrust a sheet of wire-service copy at him. Schirra scanned the text hurriedly, and with each sentence his heart sank. This was bad. This was worse than bad. This was . . . unheard of. He had a thousand questions, but there wasn’t time to ask…… Homepage with pictures 

EECOM, Sy Liebergot looked away from his monitor; the end, he knew, was at last here. Liebergot, through no fault of his own, was about to become the first flight controller in the history of the manned space program to lose the ship that had been placed in his charge. Homepage with pictures.

As near as Lovell could tell, it would be a while before the ship’s endgame would play out. He had no way of calculating the leak rate in the tank, but if the moving needle was any indication, he had a couple hours at least before the 318 pounds of oxygen were gone. Homepage with pictures

By the time Flight Director Kranz heard Lovell’s report, of “Houston, we’ve had a problem. ” three controllers had reported related problems. Kranz was wondering which problem Lovell was reporting, as he started relaying the long list of warning indications from the spacecraft displays. Homepage with Pictures

Swigert: I believe we’ve had a problem here! CapComm: This is Houston. Say again, please. Lovell: Houston, we’ve had a problem. Homepage with Pictures:

As Lovell prepared for the thruster adjustments, Haise finished closing down the LEM and drifted through the tunnel back toward the command module and Swigert threw the switch to stir all 4 cryogenic tanks. Homepage with Pictures

Milt Windier’s team at mission control quickly reviewed the status of the remaining four engines, ran the computations for the new engine cutoff times, and passed them to the crew. Homepage with Pictures

During the Apollo era, North American-Downey built the Apollo Command & Service Module. After each completed spacecraft, Nasa conducted formal reviews of the build paper work before each vehicle was accepted for flight. Homepage with pictures.

Lovell completed four space flights and is one of only three men to travel to the Moon twice. Lovell accrued over 715 hours spent in space, and he saw a total of 269 sunrises from space on his Gemini and Apollo flights. Homepage with pictures.

At thirty-six, Haise was the youngest member of the crew of Apollo 13, and his black hair and angular features made him seem younger still. Homepage with Pictures.

John Leonard Swigert Jr. aka Jack Swigert was born on August 30, 1931 in Denver, Colorado to parents John Leonard Sr. and Virginia Swigert. Homepage with Pictures.

Just before the mission began things started to go wrong. The weekend before launch Charlie Duke, the backup lunar module pilot, came down with a case of German measles. Homepage with pictures.

Targeted for touchdown on the third lunar landing was a place known as the Fra Mauro range, a stretch of rugged, Appalachian-type mounds 110 miles east of the Apollo 12 landing site. Homepage with pictures.

Ten days ago, their Saturn V rocket had blasted Bean and his crew mates out of earth’s gravitational pull. Now their home planet was pulling them back at more than 24,000 miles per hour, twelve times faster than a high-speed rifle bullet. “Boy,” said Bean, “we are really hauling!” Homepage with pictures

Dick Gordon opened the tunnel to Intrepid, saw his companions floating in a dirty cloud of moon dust, and slammed the hatch closed. He called out, “You guys ain’t gonna mess up my nice clean spacecraft!” Homepage with pictures

After a total of 31.6 hours on the moon, the Lunar Module ascent stage fired for about 7 minutes placing Intrepid into an orbit of 10 miles by 54 miles. Homepage with pictures

Conrad and Bean now walked north, up Surveyor Crater’s 14 degree slope. Fatigue set in as Pete and Al walked up the crater wall. The hand tool carrier was nearly full of rocks now and Bean felt the full weight of it. Homepage with pictures

Surveyor 3 was now to their right, 300 feet away, gleaming in the morning sunlight. Antennas and sensors still reached upward from its tubular frame, just as they had on April 20, 1967, when the spacecraft thumped onto the moon amid blasts from its braking rockets. Homepage with pictures.

The problem with running into the sun was it was so bright that Conrad and Bean could not see the moon’s surface features until they were right on top of them. Homepage with Pictures

While Conrad led the way, Bean watched the ground for something interesting. It wasn’t easy to do field geology while running, and on the moon. Homepage with pictures

Pete and Al could not hear the excited shouts of the geologists in the back room down the hall from mission control, but they knew they had found something significant. Homepage with pictures