_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [61]
“I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “Because of Apollo 8’s success, we’re now on an ambitious schedule. There will be two more test flights, and then a landing will be attempted with you guys—with Apollo 11.”
Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins grinned like Tennessee mules eating briars. The stoic Armstrong, a devotee of Zeno who was unmoved by joy or grief, stood without expression. Armstrong’s lack of reaction to the news was what Deke expected, but he also knew Neil was pleased.
“You’re it, guys,” Deke told them again. “That is, of course, if we pull off successful missions with nine and ten.”
If was the operative word.
The first if on the runway was to fly that buglike creature called the lunar module, or LM. Its job was to take two members of the three-astronaut crew down to the lunar surface, serve as the moonwalkers’ home base, and then bring them back to the command ship in lunar orbit. It would be Apollo 9’s job to take the LM into Earth orbit and see if it could fly.
And if Apollo 9 did its job, there was Apollo 10. It had to pull off a full dress rehearsal. It had to fly the Apollo command ship, the service module, and the LM linked together into moon orbit, then undock the LM from the command ship and fly it to within nine miles of the lunar landscape. From there they would return to dock again with the Apollo 10 command module for their flight home.
Deke really didn’t see any way of avoiding all the potential pitfalls. But, if the job were to get done, it would be like eating an elephant, one bite at a time.
TWELVE
Highway to the Moon
It appeared to be from another world. Certainly not a vehicle a sane person would ride in. It was covered in gold aluminum foil, and with its bristling antennas and four spidery legs, it looked like something out of a Japanese monster movie.
In fact, it was the first true spacecraft. It was Apollo’s lunar module, and it could operate only in space. Returning through Earth’s atmosphere, it would burn to a cinder.
Five days after Apollo 9 slipped into Earth orbit, commander Jim McDivitt and crew members Dave Scott and Rusty Schweickart opened hatches in the docking tunnel that linked the Apollo to the LM. McDivitt and Schweickart drifted through the tunnel and sealed themselves off from Dave Scott in the command module. Scott’s job was to keep Apollo 9’s systems purring and wait for the LM flyers to return.
McDivitt and Schweickart ran down the lunar module’s checklists, made sure every system was ready, and then undocked the ugly vessel, becoming the first to fly a craft designed to fly only in the vacuum of space. The astronauts had to fly the LM back to the Apollo command ship if they wanted a ride home.
Now, with two individual craft in space, NASA had to chuck one of its useless rules—naming spaceships. Flight controllers needed names for transmission clarity. The Apollo 9 crew decided to call the LM what it looked like, Spider, and the cone-shaped command module Gumdrop. The kids liked that one.
First on Spider’s flight plan was the testing of its rocket thrusters, and they fired and spat out the amount of thrust asked for, and McDivitt and Schweickart knew they had a winner. They then set Spider’s maneuvering rockets for a distance burn. The thrusters burned for the time needed to take them to a point 113 miles away from Scott and the command ship.
There, they were truly alone, ready for the highlight of the lunar module’s test—the “break apart” of Spider’s two stages. The bottom part of the lunar module was the descent stage. It would be used to lower astronauts onto the moon’s surface. Then, when the astronauts were ready to leave, the top part, the ascent stage, would be ignited to return its crew to a rendezvous with the command ship in lunar orbit.
McDivitt and Schweickart triggered the ascent engine, leaving the descent stage with Spider’s landing legs behind, and they executed the series