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Aviation History
1969
1969 - 0049.PDF
FLIGHT International, 2 January 1969 APOLLO 8: MEN AROUND THE MOON THE GREATEST TECHNICAL EXPERIMENT ever made—in terms , of effort and money—ended at I651BST on Friday. December 27, with the splashdown of the Apollo 8 com mand module in the Pacific. For astronauts Frank Borman. James Lovell and William Anders, deep personal satisfaction; for America, an event of rarely equalled national prestige; for the world, man's first-ever interplanetary flight. It is almost incredible that a mission of the complexity of Apollo 8 could have run so smoothly and been so free from technical snags. Indeed the main worry, at least in the early stages of the flight, was the health of the crew. While Apollo 8 is therefore hailed as a triumph for the advocates of manned flight—the philosophy of human eyeballs attached to human brains, as Anders put it—the incident serves to bring home the "weakest link" nature of the brain/eyeball combina tion. A premature termination of the flight would have lost valuable time, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and produced little of scientific value. The corresponding cost for an abort during, say. a 900-day manned flight to Mars does not bear thinking about. Launch day, Saturday, December 21, began quietly for the astronauts with a call at 0836BST (0236 local time at Cape Kennedy). After a final physical check-up and breakfast the crew was sealed in the command module at 1034BST in preparation for launch, scheduled at 1351BST. The final checks were then made. During the countdown which had begun earlier that week a number of faults had sriown up, but were rectified without serious loss of time or affecting the count down (which had three planned "holds" built-in to cater for just such problems). One of these periods was used to rectify a fault in the lox/liquid hydrogen supply to the three fuel cells (a British invention) which provide the 28V d.c. supply aboard the spacecraft. A liquid oxygen tank used to supply the cells was found to be contaminated with nitrogen and had to be drained, purged and refilled. The minutes ticked by uneventfully on final countdown. There were no snags and the omens were good: fog and cloud forecast for the area had cleared away in good time—launch director Rocco Petrone had been concerned that low cloud would prevent the rocket from being observed for possible trouble during the first 2,000ft; Hong Kong 'flu had not struck (the astronauts had been vaccinated); and even the Sun, approaching its II-yearly maximum of sunspot activity, was quiescent. Apollo 8 continued in go condition. The final 20min or so of countdown were televised to a breathless world; among personalities at the Cape were astronaut John Glenn, who flew America's first manned space craft Mercury 7 all of seven years ago. and Charles Lindbergh. At T-6sec the five F-l engines of the first stage ignited, built up to thrust, and were checked. At T. 1351 GMT and 0751 EST. Apollo 8 lifted from Pad A. Complex 39. one-sixth of a second late. Immediately after lift-off the vehicle was canted away
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