Apollo Part - 9
After all the excitement of Apollo-11 it seemed like almost a letdown for Apollo-12. The Apollo 12 mission commander was Gus Grissom, the command module pilot was Roger Chaffee and the Lunar Module Pilot was Neil Armstrong. The Apollo-12 mission was aiming to land close enough to surveyor-3 in the Ocean Storms that it could be visited and parts removed for analysis back on Earth. The surveyor 3 had soft landed on the moon on April 20, 1967. It was time for humans to visit a unmanned probe that had been sent ahead to another world. In order to successful explore the Lunar surface the Apollo astronauts and hardware had to demonstrate the ability to have pin-point landings. Gus had to put down the LM within walking distance of Surveyor-3 for the mission to be successful. Landing miles away from the chosen landing site like Apollo 11 was not acceptable.
The Apollo-12 mission would also have a longer surface stay time of over 30 hours with 2 EVA’s of almost 4-hours of duration. The mission would start demonstrating the ability to actually perform science on the moon, beyond just planting the flag and collecting a few rocks. The key science addition to the Apollo-12 mission would be the nuclear powered ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package). On Apollo 11 the surface experiment package was solar powered and didn’t last the long lunar night. The Apollo 12 ALSEP would be powered by a (RTG) (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator). The RTG used heat from decaying Plutonium-238 to generate about 70 watts of power for years. The primary part of the ALSEP was the central station which would receive commands from Earth, transmit data and also distribute power to each experiment. Using the central station different experiments could then be flown on each Apollo flight. On Apollo 12 there was a Lunar Surface Magnetometer, Solar Wind Spectrometer Experiment, Passive Seismic Experiment, Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment and Cold Cathode Ion Gauge.
However first Deke Slayton had to plug the hole for Apollo 14. The original scheduled commander was Jim Lovell. For temporary purposes he had asked Tom Stafford to be the backup Commander for Apollo 11 until the launch of the 11 flight, god forbid he would lose another Commander. However for the Apollo 14 mission he needed a new commander. He certainly wasn’t going to move Aldrin from the Lunar Module Pilot position to Commander he even though Aldrin had spoken to him about being assigned the Commander spot. Aldrin really got on his nerves and the guy just didn’t seem to understand how much he irritated him or anybody else for that matter. He was a skilled astronaut but a Commander of a mission needed to be more than just skilled. Well for Deke their really wasn’t any better choice but Gene Cernan for the Commander spot. He had been already the backup Command Module pilot on Apollo-11 and he was a veteran of two spaceflights already. Cernan handled the difficult, orbital issues of the Wally cold fiasco during Apollo-7 very well. He was well qualified for the commander spot for Apollo 14. He knew that after Apollo-7, Gene was hoping for a Commander spot on a later missions and he was disappointed at being assigned the Command Module Pilot backup for Apollo-11, but he kept his mouth shut about it and did his job. If anyone at NASA had a issue with his choice, then they could have a frank and open discussion in his office. That left the command module pilot position open. Slayton decided to assign a rookie, Stuart Roosa to the Command Module Pilot job.
After the success of Apollo-11 landing on the moon. The Soviet Moon program was in turmoil. Successes were few and far between and the failure of the N1 launch in July didn’t help the situation. However with the continued US push into flights beyond Earth Orbit the Soviet Union had to respond. Unlike the Soviet Union, the US didn’t keep their space program secret and it was well known that the US was building on the Apollo program and would keep exploring beyond Earth Orbit. The Soviets had no choice but to continue the moon program and development with the N1 rocket. The next Soyuz flights would attempt docking and crew transfer again. This time 3 Soyuz craft would be launched within days of each other and a total of 7 astronauts would be in space together which would set a new record. During the mission Soyuz-7 and 8 would dock and exchange crew and Soyuz-6 would film the procedure. This would help to further develop successful docking techniques for the Soviet Lunar program. All 3 spacecraft launched successfully which was a huge feat in itself. However the Soviet Program continued to have docking issues, Soyuz-7 and 8 were not able to successfully dock. The Soviet’s claimed publicly that docking was never intended. The biggest success for the mission was in Soyuz-6 when the crew carried demonstrated that welding in a zero-G environment was possible.
The last astronaut group hired, group 6 in 1967 and was a group of 8 scientists. However the Scientist group overall was lacking in Earth Science specialists. As Deke said, they were a group of scientists but in the wrong specialities for serious lunar geological work. NASA management decided to put out a call for more scientists in 1969 and decided to specifically encourage Earth Science specialists to apply. This time the requirement of flight experience would be waived for this group. These science astronauts would only be flying as mission specialists so flight training and experience would no longer be required. Something that Deke and NASA hadn’t thought about was the removal of flight experience resulted in the first female applicants. While NASA was in the middle of conducting this search a group of astronauts from the canceled USAF MOL program was also dropped in NASA’s lap. These were pilots that were part of the USAF manned spaceflight program. Really Deke didn’t need more pilots right now but NASA decided to offer any of the USAF astronauts that were 35 or younger astronauts jobs with NASA, however he didn’t promise them any flight assignments anytime soon. He had more than enough astronaut pilots in Houston already. The MOL astronauts would become astronaut group 7 which included the first African American astronaut, Robert lawrence. The next astronaut group 8 would broke even more new ground when the first female astronaut was selected, Dr. Angela Green a Geologist. When Angela Green was selected as part of Group 8 this created a major sensation in the press. All sorts of questions where being asked of NASA about a woman in space with endless speculation. As far as Deke was concerned she was expected to perform just as well as the male astronauts. If Dr. Green couldn’t hack it she would be bounced from the program.
On November 14, 1969 SA-507 lifted off from Cape Canaveral with the Apollo 12 crew. During launch day on and off again rainstorms had been hovering around Cape. However Launch Control did see a window in the cloud cover and decided it was a go for launch, which might not of been the best decision. The launch of the vehicle into the clouds would trigger two discharges of lightning through the Saturn-V and back down the rocket plume to the launch pad. These lightning strikes took all 3 fuel cells in the CSM offline and much of the instrumentation in the CSM with it. The failures in the power lit up nearly every warning light on the panel. Despite all this the launch vehicle continued to fly correctly, the strikes had not affected the Instrument Unit on the Saturn-V. The telemetry stream going back to the Mission Control was completely garbled by the lightning strikes. On duty in Mission Control at EECOM (Electrical Environmental and Consumables Manager) was John Aaron, the original NASA “Steely-eyed missile man”. He remembered seeing this pattern before during a test when a power supply had malfunctioned in the CSM signal conditioning equipment (SCE). Aaron called out to have the astronauts try SCE to Aux. This was a really obscure switch and neither the Flight Director, CAPCOM (Gerald Carr) and Commander Gus Grissom recognized the switch. However Lunar Module Pilot Neil Armstrong remembered where this switch was and set SCE to Aux. This moved the SCE to a auxiliary power supply and telemetry was restored to Mission Control. After 1st stage separation occurred, Neil was able to get the fuel cells back online as the launch vehicle continued into orbit. While the crew was in the temporary parking orbit, the CSM was checked out and no permanent damage was caused by the lightning strikes. This cleared the way for S-IVB to be re-ignited for trans-lunar injection. As Dr. Von Braun would later gloat in Launch Control, it would take more than a little lightning to cause one of his Saturn’s to abort. He would come to regret that statement.
For Apollo-12 this mission would make the first use of what was being called a hybrid trajectory. The previous missions had used a free-return trajectory during the lunar coast. This meant that if the SPS failed during Lunar Orbit insertion the spacecraft would just fly around the moon and would be able to use the lunar gravity to place it back on a trajectory to land on Earth. In the event of complete failure of the CSM SPS engine the spacecraft could still get back to Earth. The requirement of free-return trajectory constrained the possible lunar landing sites to a fairly narrow band near the equator. The flight planners at NASA came up with what was called a hybrid trajectory. The S-IVB firing would inject the spacecraft into a highly eccentric elliptical Earth orbit that had a free return characteristic. In the event of complete failure of the CSM SPS the spacecraft would still return to Earth without any course changes. After transposition, docking and extraction of the LM a short burn would be performed by the CMS SPS to put the spacecraft into a lunar approach trajectory. This trajectory would not be free return. However this would allow a wide range of landing sites on the lunar surface since. They hybrid flight plan not only allowed a wider choice in landing sites it also improved the performance to allow high payloads to the moon. The hybrid flight plan would still retain most of the safety features of the free-return trajectory. The lunar approach trajectory wouldn’t be initiated until the CSM SPS had been checked out and the Lunar Module was also attached. The LM being attached provided a second propulsion system for returning to Earth in the event of a CMS SPS failure.
On November 19, 1969 the Apollo 12 mission touched down in the Ocean of Storms on the Lunar Surface. Unlike Jim Lovell in 11, Gus and Neil were able to make a pinpoint landing within walking distance of Surveyor-3. To be fair, Jim Lovell only landed so far off target because the LM guidance had been thrown off because of the lunar Mascons. Mascons were discovered on the Moon from previous missions and were becoming more well understood, and how they affected lunar orbits and landing trajectories. Mascons where areas of concentrated mass on the moon that caused high gravity. This would affect the orbit of objects in lunar orbit and also affected the trajectory of Apollo-11 as it was landing, which threw off the computer from the planned landing zone. This meant the computer had started flying Apollo-11 towards a boulder field instead of the intended landing zone. It was only through Lovell’s flying skills that he was able to correct and get the LM down range into a clear area and successfully land on the Moon with only seconds of fuel to spare. For Apollo-12 a fix was applied for the gravity changes caused by Mascons and the automatic control was able to successfully guide the Apollo-12 LM to the proper landing location. Gus only had to take over from the Computer within a couple of hundred feet of the surface.
A couple of hours after the landing, Gus stepped off the Lunar Module and onto the surface of the Ocean of Storms followed shortly by Neil Armstrong. During the first EVA that lasted almost 4-hours Gus and Neil deployed the ALSEP, collected samples near the Lunar Module and also collected a core-tube of lunar material below the surface. The crew then re-entered the LM and repressurized it for their sleep period. Unlike with Apollo-11 who had to sleep on the floor, NASA had added simple hammocks that could be rigged inside the Lunar Module. However both Gus and Neil found it difficult to sleep. Because of the short time on the surface, NASA didn’t want the astronauts getting out of their spacesuits. They had to try to sleep with the spacesuits on and it wasn’t very comfortable in the moons ⅙ gravity, trying to sleep in a spacesuit. After the sleep period the second EVA was conducted and most of this EVA was decaded to geology. The crew sampled material from several craters and then made their way over to Surveyor 3 where they removed some parts and documented the probe with photographs. During the 2nd EVA they spent almost 4-hours on the surface and during both EVA’s had gathered 75 lbs of lunar surface material. Gus and Neil then re-entered the lunar module, discarded any equipment no longer needed and then re-pressurized the LM. A short time later the Lunar Module lifted off and re-docked with the Command Module waiting in Lunar Orbit. The biggest surprise that Gus and Neil had on the lunar surface was when the backup crew had inserted into their EVA checklist reduced sized pictures of playboy playmates. Gus and Neil were surprised during the first EVA as they flipped through their checklist to come across B/W pictures of naked woman. The Command Module Pilot was not left out. He found stowed in a locker on the Command Module a full color picture of a playmate.
On November 24, 1969 the Apollo 12 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The Apollo-12 flight despite it’s issues during lift-off was extremely successful and achieved all of it’s objectives. The science community was happy that they know had a active monitoring station on the moon for next several years. The US public after the excitement of Apollo-11 the 12 mission was kind of anti-climatic. There was an overall loss of excitement in the space race after this. Through the decade the excitement for the US public was if they we were going to beat the Soviet’s to the moon. Now that we had won the race to the moon. What was next? Some people were questioning all the expenditures on the NASA moon program. Was all the money spent worth it for a few rocks?