The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

After departing from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39A at 4:03:02 pm EST the astronauts followed the normal routine of extracting the Lunar Module from its launch housing. As Stu Roosa skillfully brought the Command Module in to the Lunar Module docking cone, the astronauts confidently waited for the thud of the latches biting, and green light to confirm a hard dock. To their surprise, even though they appeared to have made solid contact, there were no thuds from the latches and no green light! They had bounced off! It was unbelievable. This was the first time the Americans had a docking failure at their first attempt.

Roosa called in, “Houston, we’ve failed to secure a dock.”

A surprised Houston responded with, “Roger, Kitty Hawk. You’ve got a go for another attempt.”

The flight controllers sat up and began to think about possible causes and how to overcome this new development. They looked around for the specialist engineers, and the engineers began to look for their ground replicas and procedures. If there was something wrong and they were unable to dock, this would be the end of the lunar landing part of the mission, and possibly all further Apollo missions as there were already authoritative voices calling for an end to any more lunar flights in case tragedy struck – quit while ahead! Then to their dismay they heard Roosa’s frustrated voice after the second attempt. “Houston – we do not have a dock. We’re going to pull back and give this some thought.”

At the critical moment Mission Control discovered the replica docking system could not be found. Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft explains, “Previously we’d always had a docking probe and drogue available at the Control Center, as well as experts on the system, but now there were frantic calls for assistance and the absent docking system had to be hurriedly located to understand what might be going on thousands of miles out in space.”

Three times over the next hour they tried docking without success, while the replica in Mission Control never failed. “It’s possible there is some dirt, or debris, in the latches,” suggested an engineer, and as fuel was beginning to run down, they decided to try a “do or die” attempt by coming in fast, ramming the probe and drogue together and hitting the switch for a hard dock, bypassing the normal procedure of a soft dock first. Hopefully any possible foreign matter would get dislodged.

Roosa: “Houston – we’re going in.”

Houston: “Good luck, Kitty Hawk.”

Houston could only stand by and listen. Out in space Roosa glanced at Shepard and saw the Icy Commander – angry. “Stu, just forget about trying to conserve fuel. This time… juice it!” Shepard growled at him.

The three men held their breath as Roosa gunned his ship and the Command and Service Module obediently leapt forward and slammed accurately into the Lunar Module. The crew steeled themselves for the rebound but the latches dropped into place and a green capture light glared at them from the control panel.

“Got it!” yelled the crew in unison.

Now Smilin’ Al turned from his instrument panel and quietly announced, “We have a hard dock.”

Roosa keyed his transmit button, and tried not to shout in glee, “Houston, we have a hard dock.”

Another crisis in the Apollo Program passed into history and the mission continued to follow the flight plan until they went into orbit around the Moon and it was time to land. Following normal procedures they initiated a computer practice run to land. The computer program started all right, but then without warning, flung itself into an abort mode to return back to Kitty Hawk without landing.

Shepard called out, “Hey, Houston, our abort program has kicked in!”

Every try produced the same result, and every check could find no errors. The lunar landing was put on hold while ground trials and evaluations finally found the problem to be a faulty abort switch, so they yanked computer specialist Donald Eyles out of bed in Massachusetts to write a new program to accommodate this faulty switch, and transmitted it up through the tracking stations to the spacecraft circling the Moon. Shepard, itching to be doing something but only able to wait, anxiously watched Ed Mitchell load and check out the computer, then called with relief, “Houston – we’ve got it. We’re commencing with the descent program.”

“Antares, you have a go,” replied the Houston Capcom.

It was close. There were fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes before having to abort and return to Kitty Hawk without landing. The next fright came as they approached the surface. The landing radar refused to lock on initially due to the system switching to a low range scale and if it did not find the target by 3,048 metres altitude, mission rules specified an abort. Houston were working on the problem and Capcom Fred Haise radioed up, “We’d like you to cycle the Landing Radar breaker.”

Shepard pulled the circuit breaker out and pushed it back. “OK, it’s cycled.”