First Manned Apollo Flight Soon

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31726, 9 July 1968, Page 17

First Manned Apollo Flight Soon

The American Apollo man-on-the-moon programme has now completely recovered from the setback last year when three astronauts perished in a capsule fire. The first manned Apollo flight will take place shortly. The spacecraft, designated Apollo 7, is undergoing its final check at Cape Kennedy and the crew has been named. The commander is a space veteran, Walter Schirra, who will become the first astronaut to have flown three times in space in each of America’s three manned space programmes: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. He flew his Sigma 7 Mercury spacecraft on a near-perfect six-orbit flight in 1962, and in 1965 he participated in the first successful rendezvous between two orbiting spacecraft. In Apollo 7 he will be accompanied by Donn

Eisele and Walter Cunningham, who will be on their first spaceflight. The Apollo 7 flight is set to last for eleven days. A Saturn IB rocket almost 200 feet tall will boost the spacecraft into an orbit ranging from 140 to 170 miles above the Earth. It should be a mid-morning lift-off, which means that it will occur during the evening in our time-zone. On the second orbit the astronauts will separate their capsule from the upper stage of the Saturn booster and later carry out a simulated docking manoeuvre with it. This will be very similar to the one to be performed on a flight to the Moon. They will allow the Saturn stage to drift out of sight and a day later, after about 17 independent orbital revolutions, they will fire their service propulsion system twice. The two bursts of rocket power will match their orbit with that of the drifting Saturn stage and lead to a rendezvous about 30 hours after lift-off. For half an hour they will keep station with the rocket stage and then drift clear a second time.

During the mission the various spacecraft systems will be thoroughly tested. The Apollo service propulsion system will be fired five more times to produce small changes in orbit. Each time a different method of control will be employed in order to test alternative systems. The final burn will be on the morning of the eleventh day and the resultant orbital changes should head Apollo 7 for re-entry and splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.