Re: Apollo 11: A Night to remember

Mark Carver wrote:

One might argue that NASA's greatest achievement was returning the
Apollo 13 crew back safely after the explosion.

It is often forgotten that there was more hidden drama throughout
Apollo 12, and that until the final minutes of the mission it wasn't
known if any of the astronauts would survive.

Apollo 12 was struck twice by lightning as it launched, knocking many
systems out. The crew resisted the temptation to abort, reset the
systems, and made a normal ascent to orbit. However, there was a
strong fear that the circuits that fired the re-entry parachutes had
been damaged, and there was no way of verifying their condition.

With the spacecraft in earth orbit, a decision had to be made to either
proceed with the mission or return to earth (there was also an option
on all Apollo missions to carry out a secondary earth-orbital mission,
but this wasn't really applicable in the circumstances, being designed
to cover the event of problems in making Trans Lunar Injection). The
decision was time-critical as the Saturn IVB engine could only be fired
up to a maximum of four earth orbits into the mission.

The school of thought that said "If the parachutes don't work they're
dead whether they go to the moon or not" prevailed, but carried with it
the risk of losing two astronauts on the lunar surface, followed three
days later by losing the third in the Pacific.

Given the loss of public interest that was already apparent following
Apollo 11, and NASA's always difficult fight for funding, such an event
could have ended the programme. Had it been followed by the events of
Apollo 13 it would almost certainly have done so.

Happily, the mission went almost perfectly (Alan Bean pointing the TV
camera at the sun aside).

.

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