The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Television coverage was a key part of the public relations dividends of this flight. Wally had brusquely vetoed the first planned live TV broadcast because that day’s flight plan was overcrowded. (And he later revealed he was mad at Mission Control for launching them into high-altitude winds.) But soon he returned to his jovial self. He and Walt even held up professionally printed placards that quipped to the camera: “Hello From the Lovely Apollo Room High Atop Everything.”

For the first time in 23 months, America could see its astronauts in space again. Their competence, their humor, and the Apollo spacecraft’s sophistication went a long way to raise the national mood in an extremely troubled year. In the first eight months of 1968 there had been the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the May student revolt in Paris, the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August. These three grinning astronauts tumbling and pirouetting in their roomy spacecraft were just what the country needed to see.

After splashdown in the Atlantic less than a mile from the aircraft carrier Essex, NASA called the mission “101 percent successful.”

The Soviet program had expanded so much that it needed a new centre for cosmonauts. This was called Zvedezni Gorodok (Star Town). They tested a modified Soyuz/Proton disguised as a Zond craft. Zond were unmanned deep space probes.

Armstrong crashes in training

Aldrin and Armstrong were training as LEM pilots. After becoming competent on helicopters, they used something called a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) for this, calling it “the flying bedstead” because it was a wingless platform of struts and spherical propellant tanks built around a small vertically mounted jet engine. The astronaut sat in an ejection seat, operating a pair of hand controllers like those on the LEM. The trainer’s jet engine had computerized power settings that balanced earth’s gravity, allowing the hydrogen peroxide thrusters to simulate flight in the one-sixth G of the moon. On 6 May Armstrong crashed it. Aldrin:

On May 6, Neil Armstrong was flying the LLRV during routine training when the machine began to wobble and spin during his descent from 210 feet to the runway. He fought to regain control with the thrusters, but the platform sagged badly to one side and lurched into a spin. He had maybe a second to decide: if the trainer tipped completely over and he fired his ejection seat, the rocket charge would propel him headfirst into the concrete below. But Neil held on as long as he could, not wanting to abandon this expensive piece of hardware.

At the last possible moment, he realized the thruster system had completely malfunctioned, and he pulled his ejection handles. He was blasted up several hundred feet, and his parachute opened just before he struck the grass at the side of the runway. Neil was shaken up pretty badly, and the LLRV exploded on impact. Later it was determined that the thrusters system was poorly designed, allowing Neil’s propellant to leak out.

This was the second time Neil had ejected from an aircraft. The first had been in Korea, when he had nursed his flak-damaged plane back across American lines to bail out over friendly territory. Apparently Neil had waited to the bitter end, trying to make it to an emergency landing strip. His tendency to hang on to crippled flying machines had shown up again in 1962 when he had a flameout on the X-15 rocket plane out at Edwards. He’d ridden that stubby-wing aircraft almost down to the dry lake-bed before getting the engines lit. Neil just didn’t like to abort a flight.

Apollo 8 flies around the moon

Apollo 8 was the first spacecraft launched by the larger Saturn V booster. Jim Lovell had joined the astronaut program during Project Gemini and had flown on the Gemini VII and XII missions. Lovell: