The Space Program In The Post Apollo Period

Reviews current status of manned lunar exploration and the Apollo Program, and explores future programs, such as space transportation systems, planetary travel, and plans for a large manned space station.

I have had the privilege of being an engineer who worked on both the Apollo and Space Shuttle Orbiter Programs for more than forty-five years. It has been a fascinating and rewarding experience, along with its share of pressures and disappointments. Come take this exciting journey with me. In this book, I present the contributions of thirty key scientists who, over a period of 2,500 years, made the Moon visit possible in my lifetime. I review the birth of the Space Age, early Russian dominance in the sixties, and the successful landing on the Moon. The details of the failure analyses of the Apollo Fire, which cost the lives of three Apollo astronauts, are presented, along with the corrective actions taken. I cover the contribution of the Mercury and Gemini programs, the details of the design of the Apollo and the greatest material challenges we faced. The book also describes the Lunar Module; without its concept, we may have never made the Moon landings. The book details how we beat the Russians to the Moon, covers all Apollo missions, and how we saved the Apollo 13 astronauts. Finally, I present what I consider to be the Apollo legacy.

The aim of the present book will be to summarize the results of the space exploration of the Moon in the past fifteen years -culminating in the manned Apollo missions of 1969-1972 -on the background of our previous acquaintance with our satellite made in the past by astronomical observations at a distance. Astronomy is one of the oldest branches of science conceived by the inquisitive human mind; though until quite recently it had been debarred from the status of a genuine experimental science by the remoteness of the objects of its study. With the sole exception of meteoritic matter which occasionally finds its way into our labora tories, all celestial bodies could be investigated only at a distance: namely, from the effects of attraction exerted by their mass, or from the ciphered messages of their light carried by nimble-footed photons across the intervening gaps of space. A dramatic emergence oflong-range spacecraft -capable of carrying men with their instruments not only outside the confines of our atmosphere, but to the actual surface of our nearest celestial neighbour - has since 1957 thoroughly changed this time honoured picture. In particular (as we shall detail in Chapter 1 of this book) space astronomy ofthe Moon is barely 15 years old. But relative infant as it is by age, it has already provided us with such a tremendous amount of new and previously inacces sible scientific data as to virtually revolutionalize our subject.