The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

On 4 July the Soviets were preparing a fully manned flight test of their lunar landing system involving both their new G-1 booster and a Proton booster. The G-1 would carry a 50-ton unmanned composite lunar spacecraft into orbit, while the Proton would launch a Soyuz carrying three cosmonauts. Their mission would be to rendezvous and dock with the lunar payload. While the G-1 booster was being fuelled an American satellite was observing it when an electrical short ignited fuel in the third stage and almost 3,000 tons of propellant exploded. Naturally the mission was cancelled.

Aldrin would take an Apollo I mission patch and Soviet medals honouring the deceased cosmonauts, Gagarin and Komarov, to leave behind on the moon:

The commander of the LEM was next to the hatch so it was practical that he should be the first to walk on the moon.

Apollo 11: the eagle has landed

On 16 July 1969 Wernher von Braun prayed during the final moments of the countdown for Apollo 11. Aldrin:

“T minus ten, nine…” The voice from the firing room sounded calm. I looked to my left at Neil and then turned right to grin at Mike. “Four, three, two, one, zero, all engines running.” Amber lights blinked on the instrument panel. There was a rumble, like a freight train, far away on a summer night. “Liftoff! We have a liftoff.”

It was 9:32 am.

Instead of the sudden G forces I remembered from the Titan that launched Gemini XII, there was an unexpected wobbly sway. The blue sky outside the hatch window seemed to move slightly as the huge booster began its preprogrammed turn after clearing the tower. The rumbling grew louder, but was still distant.

All five F-1 engines were at full thrust, devouring tons of propellant each second. Twelve seconds into the flight, the Houston Capcom, astronaut Bruce McCandless, announced that Mission Control had taken over from the firing room at the Cape. We were approaching Max Q, one minute and 20 seconds after lift-off. It felt like we were at the top of a long swaying pole and the Saturn was searching the sky to find the right trajectory into orbit.

“You are go for staging,” Bruce called.

Neil nodded, gazing at the booster instruments on his panel. He had a tuft of hair sticking out from the front of his Snoopy cap that made him look like a little kid on a toboggan ride. “Staging and ignition,” he called. The gigantic S-IC burnt out and dropped away toward the ocean, 45 miles below us.

Oddly enough the S-II’s five cryogenic engines made very little noise, and the Gs built gently. Three minutes into the flight, the escape tower automatically blasted free, dragging the boost protection cover with it.

Now that the cover was gone, we could look out and see the curved Atlantic horizon recede. Six minutes later, we could clearly make out the division between the arched blue band of Earth’s atmosphere and the black sky of space. The S-II dropped away and the single J-2 engine of our S-IVB third stage burned for two and a half minutes before shutting down. A Velcro tab on the leg of my suit fluttered in the zero G. Apollo 11 was in orbit.

Above Madagascar we crossed the terminator into night. While Neil and I continued our equipment checks, Mike removed his helmet and gloves and carefully floated down to the lower equipment bay to check our navigation system by taking star fixes with the sextant. We had to be sure our linked gyroscopes – the “inertial platform” – were working well before we left Earth orbit.

Two hours and 45 minutes after lift-off we were into our second orbit, just past orbital dawn near Hawaii. We were strapped tightly to our couches, with our gloves and helmets back on. Restarting the third-stage cryogenic engine in space was risky. The temperature of liquid hydrogen was near absolute zero, but the engine’s plume was hot enough to melt steel. It was possible that the damn thing could explode and riddle our spacecraft with shrapnel.