On the day the Apollo 8 astronauts returned from humanity’s first lunar voyage, an ebullient Johnson phoned their wives to offer his congratulations. He presided over Apollo’s lowest moment (he learned of the Apollo 1 fire at a White House reception just hours after signing the 1967 Outer Space Treaty) as well as one of its most sublime. Later in his presidency, preoccupied with civil rights and the Great Society and bedeviled by the war in Vietnam, Johnson’s role in the space program became mostly ceremonial. (He left the White House six months before Apollo 11, the only launch he ever saw in person.)Īs Senate Majority Leader in 1957, Johnson had been instrumental in the creation of NASA, and his deep knowledge of space issues and legendary political clout-particularly with the Congressional committees that controlled space funding-helped keep the moon program on track. Kennedy’s legacy, but it was Lyndon Johnson who saw it through, almost to the end. Buy Finisherīy the time of the Apollo 11 liftoff in July 1969, President Lyndon Johnson (center, watching from the VIP stands with wife Lady Bird and Vice President Spiro Agnew) had returned to being an ordinary citizen. Published in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, this 104-page volume packed with photos includes the 25 most dramatic moments of the Apollo program, the extraordinary people who made it possible, and how a new generation of explorers plans to return to the moon. But his training sessions “were like a rapier, cutting so cleanly that you did not know you were bleeding until long after the thrust.” “Dick expressed himself in incomplete sentences, and seemed unsure of what he was trying to say,” he wrote. Kranz thought Koos “a worthy adversary” in these battles and an excellent choice for training his Apollo 11 landing team. Often the team’s decision came down to a split-second call: Abort or don’t abort? Starting with Project Mercury, he and his colleagues had written the training procedures for a new enterprise where the pace of mission events outstripped even the quickest reaction times. Koos well understood that spaceflight was different from other kinds of piloting. And, as “SimSup” Dick Koos told historian Tyler Peterson, “We were the guys with the black hats.” The sims were so grueling, according to Flight Director Gene Kranz, that “when we were through, we were in a place beyond exhaustion.” In practice, though, the drills became battles between the flight teams and the Simulation Supervisors. By putting astronauts and flight controllers through hundreds of hours of joint drills-with as many surprises thrown in as the trainers could dream up-the simulations gave teams the confidence and sharpness to handle real emergencies in flight. The trainers were there to help, of course.
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His familiarity with computers gave him an appreciation for the critical role machine commands would play in spaceflight. “SimSup”īefore joining NASA in 1960, Dick Koos had worked on anti-aircraft systems for the Army. Here are some of the members of the Apollo cast. And when it was over, all of them could take a bow, the stars as well as the stagehands, and know they had played their part. But without Ellie Foraker to sew their spacesuits, or Emil Schiesser to chart their course, or Lynn Radcliffe to test their spacecraft engines, the astronauts might never have reached the moon. Most played roles so small or brief that few recall their names today. Some-the astronauts certainly, and top managers like Wernher von Braun-achieved lasting fame. In addition, the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid was the recovery ship for the Mercury MA-7 and Gemini 3 missions.As in any great drama, there were big parts and small ones. The Apollo 12 LM was named Intrepid, and three of the orbiters - Columbia, Challenger, and Endeavour - shared names with Apollo CMs or LMs. Note that Contact was written before the loss of Challenger.Īs far as I know, there was no list of names for unbuilt STS orbiters, but Intrepid is a quite plausible name for an orbiter in an alternate history. After the loss of Challenger, NASA resumed production of Endeavour in September 1987.
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Construction of OV-105, later named Endeavour, began in February 1982, but NASA decided to limit the Space Shuttle fleet to four orbiters in 1983.
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On January 29, 1979, NASA ordered two additional orbiters, OV-103 and OV-104, which were named Discovery and Atlantis. Later that month, Rockwell began converting STA-099 to OV-099, later named Challenger. On January 5, 1979, NASA commissioned a second orbiter. The original plan was for a large fleet of shuttles to support a very high mission flight rate, but according to Wikipedia, by 1983, the plan was to hold the fleet at four orbiters (not counting Enterprise, which was not spaceworthy):