The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

At exactly 11:00 am on March 3, Apollo 9 lifted off with Jim McDivitt commanding, Dave Scott as command module pilot, and Rusty Schweickart sitting in the center couch as lunar module pilot. This would be the first manned test of the lunar module. Once again the huge crowd assembled at the Cape was physically and emotionally overpowered by the thunder of the booster.

For the crew however the first stage S-1C burn was very smooth – “an old lady’s ride,” McDivitt called it. But staging to the S-II was a real bumper-car jolt. Violent pogo oscillations developed seven minutes into the second-stage burn. The jolting continued through the third-stage ignition, but less than 12 minutes after liftoff the linked S-IVB and Apollo spacecraft became the heaviest object ever placed in orbit.

McDivitt’s crew wanted to prevent spacesickness. Frank Borman’s crew had had it, so they tried to control their head movements and took Dramamine. These precautions helped, but they still felt dizzy and nauseous as they moved about the spacecraft.

A couple of hours later they were feeling better and had separated the CSM from the S-IVB third stage. Scott then deployed his command module’s docking probe and thrust the spacecraft neatly around to line up with the conical drogue that was nestled at the top of the lunar module. The latches all snapped properly into place. Just over three hours into the mission, they were hard-docked with the LM. Dave Scott then backed the two docked spacecraft away from the third stage and thrust well clear of the slowly tumbling white booster.

As they worked through their long flight plan, dizziness came in waves. But they had plenty of work to keep them occupied. They had to equalize the pressure between the CSM and LM cabins and prepare the connecting tunnel that would allow McDivitt and Schweickart to move from the CSM into the lander. At one point on the night side of their third orbit, Rusty glanced out and shouted, “Oh, my God, I just looked out the window and the LM wasn’t there.”

Dave Scott began laughing and kidding his crewmate. Dave reminded Rusty that Jim McDivitt was already up in the tunnel and the missing LM was simply hidden by the absolute darkness of orbital night. When Scott fired the SPS engine to boost the combined spacecraft to a higher orbit, he commented, “The LM is still there, by God!”

They were all surprised at how slowly the spacecraft accelerated, but that was understandable because it was carrying almost 16 more tons of mass – the fully fueled LM. Over the next several hours, they repeatedly fired the engine, moving the docked spacecraft through the complex orbital maneuvers that would be needed for the LOR.

The crew was so confident in their spacecraft that they all slept during the same “night” period. On waking, however, Rusty Schweickart was hit by a sudden bout of nausea. He and Jim McDivitt were putting on their spacesuits for the transfer over to the LM. Luckily, Rusty found a nearby barf bag. Pulling on the bulky pressure suit was no fun in the weightless cabin, and Jim McDivitt also went through some dizzy spells as he tugged at all the tubes and Velcro tabs.

Rusty then experienced brief vertigo as he floated up through the tunnel into the LM and ended up staring down at the lander’s flight deck. When he recovered he began flipping switches to power up the lander preparing it for free flight. Jim McDivitt joined him soon after. The LM was noisy with chattering fans and strange, gonglike rumbles. Unlike the command module, the lander was ultralightweight. Jim McDivitt later said it felt like tissue paper.

With no warning, Rusty Schweickart vomited again. McDivitt became alarmed because Rusty was due for an EVA on the porch of the LM later that day. If he got spacesick while wearing a bubble helmet, he could choke on his own vomit. Jim did the right thing and called for a private medical consultation on a “discreet” radio channel to Houston. The hundreds of reporters at the center had a field day making up sensational rumors when they were cut out of the loop.

Now that McDivitt and Schweickart were aboard the LM, the lander began to feel like a separate spacecraft, not just an impersonal hunk of hardware. They referred to it by the name they’d chosen for this mission, Spider; the command module became Gumdrop, an evocative description of its shape.