The Apollo 9 mission was launched 50 years ago, on March 3, 1969, carrying Commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart into Earth Orbit 200 km high. It was the first mission that carried the Command and Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM) for a flight test in space. It was an engineering mission to test several aspects critical to landing on the Moon, including the LM engines, backpack life support systems, navigation systems, LM docking maneuvers and paved the way for future Apollo missions.
Mission Highlights
The highlight of the mission included the LM undocking, separation and docking and a two-person EVA (spacewalk).
On Flight Day 5, McDivitt and Schweickart entered the LM and separated it away from Scott's CSM. The LM was maneuvered to a distance of 179 km away from the CSM. Six hours later, the LM approached and docked with the CSM. This was no cakewalk — it was a very complex and difficult set of maneuvers, done in an era with relatively primitive equipment and computing resources and required a great deal of skill on the part of the astronauts.
Schweickart and Scott performed a two-person EVA — Schweickart checked out the new Apollo spacesuit, the first to have its own life support system rather than being dependent on an umbilical connection to the spacecraft, while Scott filmed him from the Command Module hatch.
On the 10th day, Apollo 9 splashed down in the Atlantic ocean.
A few important parameters of the mission -
Item |
Description |
Launch Date |
March 3, 1969; 11:00 a.m. EST |
Launch rocket |
Saturn-V AS-504 |
Launch facility |
Launch Pad 39A, Kennedy Space Center, FL |
Altitude |
188 km |
Orbits |
151 |
Duration |
10 days, one hour, 54 seconds, 10 seconds longer than planned |
Distance traveled |
6.743 million km |
Landing date |
March 13, 1969; 12:01 p.m. EST |
Landing location |
Atlantic Ocean, 341 miles north of Puerto Rico |
Recovery Ship |
USS Guadalcanal |
LM name |
Spider |
CSM name |
Gumdrop |
A Few Images and Articles
Check out the twitter site for Apollo 50th for a minute-by-minute reenactment of Apollo 9 and other Apollo missions.
Views from Apollo 9
The Views of the Astronauts
Rusty Schweickart — It seems to me the real significance of Apollo was that view of the Earth and recognizing that, you know, all of life is here on Earth.
"Looking at it from the perspective of the moon, you become very, very aware of the uniqueness of life and that very, very thin boundary called the atmosphere that separates all the life we know from infinite universe. To me, the significance of Apollo is, in essence, we went to the moon and found the Earth." More at www.space.com/...
Splashdown
Videos
The video below is an animation and may not be 100% realistic.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)
The AGC used a simple 16-bit processor, running at 1 MHz, with 4 kwords of RAM (magnetic core memory) and 32 kwords of read-only memory (core rope memory). The instruction set contained 11 instructions. The computer was built using 2,800 chips, each with dual three-input NOR gates, mounted on wire-wrap boards.
The core rope (read-only) memory was used because its density of 72 KB per cubic foot was 18x that of magnetic core memory at that time. Software written by MIT programmers was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories.
Today, we cannot fathom using or programming a computer with such little processing power and memory.
Rusty Schweickart
- Schweickart served in the U.S. Air Force and Massachusetts Air National Guard (101st Tactical Fighter Squadron) from 1956 to 1963, with over 4,000 hours of flight time, including 3,500 hours in high performance jet aircraft.
- Prior to joining NASA, Schweickart was a research scientist at the Experimental Astronomy Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his work there involved research upper atmospheric physics, star tracking and stabilization of stellar images.
- Backup Commander of the first manned Skylab mission in 1973.
- Served at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. as Director of User Affairs in the Office of Applications
- Schweickart left NASA in 1977 to serve for two years as California Governor Jerry Brown's assistant for science and technology, then was appointed by Brown to California's Energy Commission for five and a half years, serving as chairman for three.
- Many other activities in telecom and satellite technology
Epilogue
Apollo 9 paved the way for the lunar landing that took place just a few months later in 1969. 50 years later, we (the U.S.) do not have spacecraft to carry humans to space. But this is changing this year, with commercial spacecraft from SpaceX and Boeing now paving the way for human flight to near-earth orbit, the moon and to Mars.
Come let’s celebrate the astronauts, engineers and personnel of the Apollo era. What are your memories of the Apollo 9 mission? How did the Apollo missions affect your lives? What are your thoughts on the future if the space program? The crewed space program, the planned missions to the moon and to Mars and the future of humankind.
Further Reading
- Rusty Schweickart remembers Apollo 9 — www.astronomy.com/…
- Apollo 9 in Photos: NASA Tests the Spidery Lunar Module — www.space.com/…
- Apollo 9 Press Kit — history.nasa.gov/…
- Apollo 9 image atlas — www.lpi.usra.edu/...
- Remembering Apollo 8, the Daring Moonshot Mission, on its 50th Anniversary — www.dailykos.com/...