The prime crew of Apollo 10 (from left to right): Gene Cernan, John Young and Thomas Stafford.
REHEARSAL FOR A MOON LANDING
Apollo 10 was the fourth manned mission in the Apollo program and a dress rehearsal for a landing on the Moon. Initially, it was thought that Apollo 10 would be the first mission to attempt the landing, but difficulties in the production of the Lunar Module meant that it would be left to Apollo 11 to undertake the task.
On May 18, 1969, the Apollo 10 crew of Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan set off on their mission, the primary aim of which was to test a Lunar Module that would be capable of landing on the Moon. They were also to survey the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 10 added another first by broadcasting live color television from space.
Stafford: We were told that because of the trajectory we would fly, we would not see the Moon until we got there. And that’s kind of weird, looking around. You see the Earth go by every 20 minutes, see the Sun go by. Where in the hell is the Moon? And the way the trajectory was and everything, the Moon was eclipsed. Finally, we got—well, a few hours out from the Moon, you could maybe see one little rim of it, hardly a rim. But most of the way to the Moon, we never saw it. Now, we saw it all the way back. Then the Earth started to be eclipsed, and just before we came back to see the Earth, all you could see was a little thin blue line of the Earth. So it was kind of unique. and right within a second—BOOM—the Earth goes down. The Earth disappears. There’s this big black void. Down below the Earth, when it goes night time, you always see lights and cities and gas fires. There’s just all kinds of lights around, and lightning all over. Just a big black void. So we left the Earth. It disappeared. It was quiet. Got turned around, and suddenly—couldn’t see anything, and suddenly, about 60 seconds, we were all set, just counting down. Right below us, here comes the Moon, right out in daylight. So it was a real funny feeling there. It really looked weird. And to me, the color of the Moon in early morning and late at night always looked a little reddish tinge on the top of the mountains. Some people say it’s always white and black. I thought it was reddish, with maybe some charcoal grays and tans. So we went through the procedures, got a little bit of rest, and then got squared away.
We got all squared away and started our maneuver to go down to about nine miles above the mountains and do two low passes, check out the landing radar, because if the landing radar doesn’t work to update your state vector, you couldn’t land. And it turned out the radar locked on to the lunar surface way in excess of spec, which was good. So as to what we did, we undocked and went way up high above him and came down low to get phasing behind him in case we had to abort to come up. So we did that, went down. What always amazed me was the size of the boulders. They were awesome, these big ones, you know, huge things. Some of them are pure white with black striations up on the side of these gigantic craters. I said, oh, they’d have to be as big as a two- or three-story building. It’s hard to judge distance. Here on the Earth, even from space, you can still see some roads and you can see cities. You can kind of judge some distance. No roads up there.
They fired Snoopy’s (the Lunar Module) rocket to drop down to within 15,240 meters (50,000 ft.) of the Sea of Tranquility. As they made their first pass over the southwestern corner of the Sea of Tranquility, an excited Cernan called out: “I’m telling you, we are low. We’re close baby! We is down among ’em, Charlie.” Capcom Charlie Duke responded: “I hear you weaving your way up the freeway.”
Stafford: We were all set to stage off, and I noticed the thrusters started to fire. I looked down and I could see I had a yaw rate, but I could tell by the eight ball I wasn’t yawing. So I talked to Cernan, and started firing again. We were all buttoned up, and I started troubleshooting, went to the AGS [phonetic] position and all that, but the first thing you know—BOOM—the whole damned spacecraft started to tumble and tried to rotate like that. And real fast, I just reached over and just blew off the descent stage, because all the thrusters were on the ascent stage, get better torque-to-inertia ratio, because we’re heading over toward gimbal lock on the main platform.
The Soviets were unable to perform such space missions. None of their lunar spacecraft was near flightworthy, and the Soyuz spacecraft was more dangerous that it should have been. But despite dampening enthusiasm, a group of cosmonauts continued to prepare for lunar landings at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and the Gromov Flight-research Institute. It was the cosmonauts, rather than the politicians or the engineers, that kept the Soviet lunar dreams alive. Aleksei Leonov said in the spring of 1969:
The Soviet Union is also making preparations for a manned flight to the Moon like the Apollo program of the United States. The Soviet Union will be able to send men to the Moon this year or in 1970.
But Kamanin wrote in his diary during the Apollo 10 mission of the “unrestrained lying” by Soviet officials about their intentions with respect to the Moon. He added bitterly:
We have come to the end to drink the bitter chalice of our failure and be witnesses to the distinguished triumph of the USA in the conquest of the Moon.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1969, as the world waited for the first manned landing on the Moon, there was speculation that the USSR was planning something spectacular to upstage it. In reality the Soviets could do little. Even so, Wernher von Braun said that it was still possible for the USSR to reach the Moon before the United States if Apollo 11 was delayed, and he strongly believed that the Soviets would undertake piloted lunar flight in the latter part of the year using a giant rocket. But von Braun was “out of the loop,” and in fact the US intelligence community knew the Soviets had no chance. A top secret CIA “National Intelligence Estimate” of June stated that it would probably be 1972, and late 1970 at the earliest, before they could attempt a manned lunar flight. Von Braun also warned that a Soviet robotic spacecraft could bring back lunar soil before Apollo 11 came back with its samples. In fact, the Soviet unmanned lunar sampler mission did indeed have two launch windows to reach the Moon in June and July of that year.
On June 4 a spacecraft was launched from Baikonur in a desperate move to obtain some lunar soil without putting human life at risk. If the gamble paid off, it would at least be some sort of achievement. But as the third stage of the Proton rocket burned out and the Block-D was due to take over, a control system failure prevented it from firing. The mission was lost. Instead of going to the Moon, the lunar sampler ended up in the Pacific. The Soviets had four remaining lunar scoop spacecraft left and only one chance to beat Apollo 11. Things looked bleak; the Proton rocket had failed on all of its last five missions.
The mighty N1, which the Soviets hoped would eventually put a cosmonaut on the Moon, was moved to the launch pad with liftoff set for July 3—under two weeks before Apollo 11 attempted the first Moon landing. Before midnight the N1’s 30 first-stage rockets burst into life. Lieutenant Menshikov recalls:
We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the 100-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition. The flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame. And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. There was a terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake and all of the soldiers and officers froze.
There was a deathly silence as the onlookers awaited the arrival of the blast wave. Menshikov recalls:
Something quite improbable was being created all around—the steppe was trembling, thundering, rumbling, whistling, gnashing, together in some terrible, seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare. The thick wave from the explosion passed over us, sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above.
Pieces of the rocket were hurled up to 6 miles (10 km) away, and large windows were shattered 25 miles (40 km) away. The 400-kilogram (880-lb.) spherical tank landed on the roof of a building 4.4 miles (7 km) from the launch pad. Kamanin wrote in his diary:
Yesterday the second attempt to launch the N1 rocket into space was undertaken. I was convinced that the rocket would not fly, but somewhere in the depth of my soul there glimmered some hope for success. We are desperate for a success, especially now when the Americans intend in a few days to land people on the Moon.
There was only one card left to play—the final chance to launch an unmanned sample-retrieving return mission. After five straight failures of the Proton rocket it finally performed well, lifting their last hope off the pad three days before the scheduled launch of Apollo 11. They called it Luna 15. The Soviet media said its mission was merely to study circumlunar space.