Progress Report on Apollo Program

It is a great pleasure to be here today and to greet you hardy suMvors of the pool party. I will do my best to avoid loud noises and bright colors during my status report. Since the last SETP Symposium, the Apollo Program has been quite busy in a number of different areas. (Figure 1) My problem is to sift through this information and to talk only about those things of most interest to you. First, to review briefly our hardware, we are talking about two different spacecraft and two different boosters. (Figure 2) The Command Module is that part of the stack which makes the complete round trip to the moon. Attached to it is the Service Module, containing expendables and a 20,000 pound thrust engine for maneuverability. The Lunar Module will be carried on later flights and is the landing vehicle and active rendezvous partner. The uprated Saturn I can put the Command and Service Modules into earth orbit; the Saturn V is required when the Lunar Module is added. Since the last symposium, we have flown the Command and Service Modules twice and the Lunar Module once, all unmanned. Apollo 4, the first Saturn V flight, was launched in November 1967. (Figure 3) The Saturn V did a beautiful, i.e. nominal, job of putting the spacecraft into earth parking orbit. After a coast period, the third stage (S-IVB by McDonnell Douglas) was ignited a second time, achieving a highly elliptical orbit. The Service Module engine was then used to trim this orbit to the desired apogee of 9700 miles. On the way back downhill, a second burn along the velocity vector drove the Command Module into the atmosphere at approximately the Same speed (36,500 ftlsec) and flight path angle ( 7 O ) as would be experienced during a lunar return. The spacecraft came through this test in excellent condition, even though it had intentionally been subjected to a thermal gradient across its heat shield which was more severe than the nominal case. Maximum G during reentry was between 7 and 8, measured hypersonic I/d was .37 at a trim angle of 25O, and maximum heat shield surface temperature was 5200OF. All in all, it was a near perfect flight with no surprises. (Figure 4) This is how the world looks from over 9000 miles up. This is the same view our crews will have prior to entry on the lunar flight and this is the point at which we would like to get a navigational fix, measuring the angle between a landmark and a star. As you can see it is quite likely that no suitable landmarks will be visible, and we shall have to rely on horizon measurements, which are less accurate. COLLINS