With the beginning of Project Mercury, NASA initiated efforts to stress the new program was more than hardware. Rockets and spacecraft had been launching from Cape Canaveral for the better part of a decade. The new flight safety emphasis focused on missions including people. The purpose was simple, but crucial. Everyone involved in human spaceflight plays a role in flight safety and mission success.
Apollo 14 launched 50 years ago, on Jan. 31, 1971. “It’s been a long way, but we’re here,” said Alan Shepard as he stepped from the lunar module onto the Moon’s Fra Mauro highlands. It was more than a 240,000-mile trip – it was a hard-fought return to flight for NASA’s Apollo Program and America’s first person in space.
“Apollo 13” set out to chronicle NASA’s dramatic third mission to land on the lunar surface. It was based on Jim Lovell’s best-selling book, “Lost Moon.” On the big screen, what happened in 1970 is pretty much what you get.
What was to have been America’s third lunar landing in April 1970, became a struggle to safely return the crew after an oxygen tank explosion crippled the crew’s spacecraft. During a reunion of key players involved in the Apollo 13 mission, they recalled what has been termed “NASA’s finest hour.”
After the Apollo command/service module was tested successfully in Earth orbit and on a trip to the Moon, NASA prepared for the next step, the first piloted flight test of the spacecraft designed to land on the lunar surface.
The year 1967 began with the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 crew, but ended with the successful launch of the first Saturn V rocket. NASA hoped to make it two successes in a row with the first unmanned flight of the lunar module, or LM, the spacecraft designed to land Americans on the Moon before the end of the decade.
A small group of NASA engineers had an idea called, “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous.” A 1961 letter to NASA’s associate administrator proposed separate vehicles, one to land on the lunar surface while another circled the Moon.