Astronauts on way home

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32528, 11 February 1971, Page 11

Astronauts on way home

f N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) HOUSTON, Feb. 10. The American astronauts, Captain Alan Shepard, Commander Edgar Mitchell and > Major Stuart Roosa, are being taken to American Samoa aboard the aircraft carrier New Orleans with their cargo of rocks and photographs from the lunar hills of Fra Mauro.

The men of Apollo 14, whose moon mission has been the most successful so far. returned safely to the earth today, but are still almost as isolated as they were during their nine-day space voyage. They had only a brief, halfhour meeting with some of their fellow-men in a liferaft and in a recovery helicopter from the time they crawled through the hatch of their scorched space capsule in mid-Pacific until they strode rapidly across the han-gar-deck of the carrier, and into a steel quarantine trailer. There they will remain until the carrier is near Samoa on Friday. And even then they will remain isolated, except for contact with a flight surgeon and a technician, for 17 days. They will be flown off the carrier as it approaches Samoa and transferred to another quarantine trailer for the long flight back to Houston, there to make yet another transfer to the sealed-off lunar receiving laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Centre.

The complex quarantine precautions were ordered, as after earlier moon-landing flights, by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, to preclude any possiblity that Captain Shepard and his crew may have brought back to earth disease-carrying bacteria from the moon. Flight controllers, scientists and technical experts at the mission headquarters in Houston are jubilant about the flight, which has been described by Captain Shepard as “a smashing success” and ‘‘a great show.” The final success was the

isplash-down—within seven-i (tenths of a mile of the tarIget in the Pacific. j The Apollo 14 achievement jappears to have ensured the (green light for the three reraining Apollo moon missions planned in the next 18 months. Certainly it has erased the many doubts that future manned space flights, already reduced because of budget cuts, would become victims of the economy axe. The N.A.S.A.’s acting administrator (Mr George Lon) declared after the splashdown: “The Apollo 14 mission has demonstrated that man

belongs in space, that he functions better than any machine yet devised.” Mr Lon emphasised that the Apollo 15 mission in July, using a powered lunar transporter for the first time, and the Apollo 16 and 17 missions would be proceeded with. “The success of Apollo 14 should help the N.A.S.A. to obtain its SUS2BS7m budget from Congress,” he added. Apollo 14 has thus given renewed hope to thousands <if space technicians and workers who have been threatened with redundancy, particuarly at Cape Kennedy. ’

And it strongly points to the fulfilment of America’s next space leap the launch- j ing and operation of a re-< usable space shuttle in the . latter part of this decade to j ferry men and supplies from , the earth to orbiting space, laboratories. ]