I’d seen manned spacecraft enter lunar orbit twice before – Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 10 in May 1969. Even as the third time grew close, the tension, drama and suspense hadn’t lowered for 17-year-old Mike Staton on the morning of Saturday, July 19, 1969. For Apollo 11, I considered the lunar orbit insertion firing by the service modules SPS engine to be the beginning of a hectic two-day period that wouldn’t conclude until the Eagle’s ascent stage lifted off from the moon surface at 12:54 p.m. on Monday, July 21, 1969. Of course, at the back of my mind I knew that liftoff from the Sea of Tranquility might never happen. The landing might fail, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aborting the final descent, discarding the descent stage and riding the ascent stage back to the CSM Columbia and Michael Collins. Or worse … they experience a catastrophic failure and crash into a crater or rock field. But the lunar landing attempt was still a day away. I’d do my worrying then, not now when I knew the lunar orbit insertion had been successfully executed by the astronauts flying aboard Apollo 8 and Apollo 10. At lunchtime at our one-story home on Park Street in Beverly, Ohio, I watched the mission on TV as Apollo 11 slipped behind the far side of the moon, losing contact with Houston’s Mission Control. Like millions of people in America and the rest of the world, I waited to see if the engine firing was successful and Apollo 11 now orbited the moon. Behind the moon, out of contact with Houston, the astronauts retro-fired the SPS engine (service propulsion system) for six minutes. At 12:21 p.m., Houston received telemetry from the spacecraft confirming a successful burn. Apollo 11 circled the moon in an orbit of 170 by 161 miles. Later in the mission astronauts would fire the engine a second time to ease the spacecraft into an orbit of 66 by 54 nautical miles, ideal for lunar module separation and powered descent. Two burns also reduces the chance an overburn could send the spacecraft careering into the lunar surface. Just in case you think an overburn was unlikely, an unmanned Martian orbiter in 1999 crashed into Mars during its insertion burn when programmers inputted an incorrect engine-firing time. Now teenager Mike and millions of other Earthlings had to wait for just over 24 hours for the next big event – the separation of Eagle from Columbia. It was scheduled for 1:11 p.m. on Sunday, July 20. According to NASA’s timeline, the lunar landing would take place at 3:17 p.m. In the meantime, I waited for live transmissions from Apollo 11 where astronauts pointed their video camera through windows for a look at the lunar surface as the docked Columbia/Eagle passed overhead. If you want a taste of what viewers saw 45 years ago after lunar orbit insertion, listen to Collins describe the lunar surface in this short video: https://youtube/watch?v=IPIPSqrTE5Q.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 08:28:23 +0000
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