Left photo, the first American spacewalk using an umbilicus. Middle photo, the inner layer of a moon rated suit. Right photo, same suit with outer layer, visor, and backpack.

If you have not been following these Apollo posts, here is a quick summary: when three astronauts died on the launch pad, their scheduled flight was renamed Apollo 1. The flight which completed their mission, after much delay, was called Apollo 7 following the original sequence. Apollo’s “2 through 6” never existed.

The next flight, originally Apollo 8, was to be a repeat of 7, but was changed to be the first launch of the complete Apollo package, Control Module, Support Module, and Lunar Module. However, delays in building the LM (or LEM as it was called in the early days) meant that flight could not happen by the scheduled date. The Apollo 8 which actually flew was a different Saturn, different CSM without an LM and different crew. They <flew around the moon>.

The first flight with all parts of the Apollo was pushed back, renumbered to Apollo 9, and flew fifty years ago yesterday, March 3, 1969. A full picture of the shuffling of missions and crews would take more words that even the geekiest reader could tolerate.

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Apollo 9 was the second manned flight atop a Saturn V, and the first to have both CSM and LM on board. Jim McDivitt was in command. David Scott was the CM pilot and Rusty Schweickart was the LM pilot. Don’t confuse him with Jack Swigert of Apollo 13.

There were two main objectives for the ten day mission. First was to test the ability of the astronauts to dock the CSM to the LM, to undock and fly the LM separately, both as a complete unit and the ascent stage alone, and to dock the ascent stage to the CSM once again. The second objective was to test out the first American space suit which was not tethered to its mother vehicle.

We will concentrate on the space suit today and look at the testing of the LM on Friday. That will be posted at 3 PM, PDT, fifty years to the minute from the first separation of the LM from its CSM.

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The space suits worn by both Americans and Russians had not allowed true freedom. Cooling, power, and life support gasses were never contained in the suits, but were sent to the suits by umbilical connections. As long as the crew was inside the vehicle, this posed no problem. The suits were deflated and for long periods of each mission, helmets and gloves were removed. During launch and return, the suits were again made air tight but were not inflated. There was no need. If the cabin had been breached during those maneuvers, the suits would have continued to provide life support.

I never seen it admitted, but clearly both NASA and the Russians were flirting with disaster through all those early flights. Let me explain.

When the first spacewalks (EVAs, extra vehicular activities) were made by Alexey Leonov and then Ed White, the space suits proved to massively restrict mobility. Leonov could barely get back into his vehicle because his suit had puffed up so much. Ed White only got back into Gemini IV with great difficulty and with the help of fellow astronaut Jim McDivitt.

You can imagine what would have happened on any early fight if there had been a hull breach during a reentry, and the pilot’s spacesuit had suddenly become stiff and unmanageable when every second was critical.

Small glitches kill pilots, as everyone in aeronautics knows.

Five missions after White’s EVA, Eugene Cernan nearly died during a spacewalk because his suit was so unmanageable. See  posts 295 and 296. It took three more EVAs on three missions by three additional astronauts until before spacewalks were brought under control.

All of these EVA’s, Russian and American, used umbilicals to provide life support and to tether astronauts to their vehicles. That was not going to work on the moon.

The development of a suit suitable for moonwalks took seven years. Pressurization, oxygen, and cooling were taken care of by an inner layer that rarely made it into photos. See the middle picture above. The outer layer was a laminate designed to resist abrasion, radiant heat, and micrometeorites. The backpack took the place of the umbilicus and provided power and oxygen.

Backpacks were first tested on Apollo 9 by McDivitt and Schweickart. David Scott performed a standup EVA — that is, he stood up in the open hatch of the CM — but he received life support through an umbilicus. This was the pattern for Apollos 9 through 17. The moon bound astronauts used backpacks, the CM pilot did not.

If the LM tested on Apollo 9 had worked, but the backpack hadn’t, Apollo 11 could still have landed on the moon, but Armstrong could not have left the Eagle to make “once small step . . .”

But it did work. The EVA was cut short by Schweickart’s space sickness, but the backpack worked fine.

more on Apollo 9 Friday

Joe Engle missed his chance to go to the moon when he was bumped from Apollo 17 by Harrison Schmitt. It made sense. Schmitt was a geologist turned astronaut, and became the only one of the scientist-astronauts to get to the moon. He was, in fact, the only scientist to fly in space before the space shuttle program.

Joe Engle never became a household name like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, but fighter jet crazy and space crazy kids of my generation were already aware of him before Apollo began. Not through the internet, which was decades away, nor from books in the library which were always two generations out of date, but from Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. That was where my generation went to read about what was newer, faster, shinier, and cooler.

Iven Kincheloe, Mel Apt, Chuck Yaeger, Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker — if those names don’t stir your blood, you missed out. They were test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base who flew the newest and the best, especially the X-1, X-2, and most especially the X-15.

Joe Engle was one of them. By the way, so was that other guy, Neil Armstrong.

Engle decided to be a test pilot while in college, where he was in Air Force ROTC. Chuck Yeager recommended him for USAF test pilot school, and he subsequently attended Aerospace Research Pilot School. This was pre-NASA when the Air Force planned to put a man in space in a project called MISS (Man in Space Soonest). MISS morphed into Mercury after NASA took over the space program from the Air Force.

Engle served as a jet test pilot at Edwards and applied to NASA to be an astronaut. Instead, the Air Force chose him for the X-15 program. There he made sixteen flights; the fastest speed he recorded was 3887 mph. His highest altitude was 53.1 miles.

FAI (Fédération aéronautique internationale) in Switzerland maintains world records for human space flight. They set the limit of space at 100 kilometers. That’s 62.1 miles in the measurements Americans still use. In the days of the X-15, the Air Force set 50 miles as the edge of space and awarded an astronaut’s wings to any pilot exceeding that altitude. Engle exceeded fifty miles three times in the X-15.

(Fellow test pilot Joe Walker flew the X-15 above 100 kilometers twice, becoming the eighth American in space by the FAI’s more difficult criterion.)

Joe Engle applied to NASA again and was accepted. He was backup Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 14, and would have landed on the moon in Apollo 17. Engle then elected to transfer to the Space Shuttle program. He commanded one of the crews which flew multiple flight on the unpowered Enterprise. This near-shuttle was carried aloft on a Boeing 747 and dropped for a dead stick landing to evaluate its aerodynamic characteristics. NASA had to determine if the shuttle could land before it would launch it into space.

Engle was backup for the first Space Shuttle flight, and commander of the second flight. He later commanded STS-51-1.

Joe Engle is the only man to have flown two different types of winged vehicle into space. He is also the only remaining pilot of the twelve who flew the X-15, which he still calls his favorite aircraft.

These poor guys got left behind when Apollo 17 went to the moon, and then I left them behind as well. This and the following post were originally planned for January but life got in the way.

When Apollo missions 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled, ten astronauts lost their chance at the moon. They were:

joe Engle who was scheduled for Apollo 17, but was replaced on that mission by Harrison Schmitt. (see 444. Last Men on the Moon) He will get his own post on Wednesday.

Richard Gordon and Vance Brand, who were scheduled for Apollo 18 along with Schmitt.

Fred Haise, William Pogue, and Gerald Carr who were scheduled for Apollo 19.

Stuart Roosa, Paul Weitz, Jack Lousma, and Don Lind who were on the short list for Apollo 20, although the final choice of three had not been made at the time of cancellation.

Here are their individual stories:

Stuart Roosa had been the Command Module Pilot of Apollo 14, the third moon landing. It was his only mission in space. He did not fly in space after Apollo 18 was cancelled.

Richard Gordon flew first on Gemini 11 where he and Pete Conrad set a record for the highest apogee earth orbit, while Gordon performed two space walks. He was Command Module Pilot of Apollo 12, the second moon landing. He did not fly in space after Apollo 18 was cancelled.

Vance Brand was on the backup crew of Apollo 15 and scheduled for the cancelled Apollo 18. He was then backup on Skylabs 3 and 4, and was on the rescue team held in reserve for a possible Skylab disaster. He finally flew on space on the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and later commanded the first fully operational Space Shuttle mission on the Columbia. He commanded Challenger on the tenth Space Shuttle flight and Columbia again on the thirty-eighth shuttle flight.

Fred Haise had gone around the moon on the ill-fated Apollo 13. On Apollo 19 he would have landed on the moon. He subsequently was a pilot on the ALT program (full title, Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests), where he piloted the unpowered Enterprise to three successful landings, after being dropped from a 747. He was scheduled to fly the second Space Shuttle mission to boost Skylab to a higher orbit, but that was cancelled when delays in the shuttle program allowed Skylab to fall.

Skylab plays a role in the stories of several of these astronauts. For details, go to posts 297   298  and  299.

William Pogue and Gerald Carr both shifted from Apollo to Skylab after the cancellation of Apollo 19. They were part of the Skylab 4 crew which spent 84 days in space.

Paul Weitz also shifted to the Skylab project, where he was on the crew of Skylab 2, the first manned mission. Skylab was badly damaged during its unmanned launch, a mission that was called Skylab 1. Weitz along with Pete Conrad and Joseph Kerwin spent much of their mission doing repairs.  Weitz retired from NASA, then returned to fly the maiden voyage of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Jack Lousma was on the crew of Skylab 3, where he spent 60 days in space. He subsequently was commander of STS-3, the third orbital test flight of Space Shuttle Columbia.

Don Lind once said he was “in the right place at the wrong time.” He was one of the scientist-astronauts brought into Apollo and would most likely have followed Schmitt in rotation had Apollo 20 not been cancelled. He moved to Skylab, where he was backup for Skylabs 3 and 4, on standby for a rescue mission that didn’t happen, and was scheduled for Skylab 5 mission, which also didn’t happen. He was under consideration for Skylab B, a second Skylab space station that was cancelled. He was under consideration for the Apollo-Soyuz mission, but was not chosen. He finally flew on STS-51-B in 1985 aboard Spacelab-3. Spacelab was a space lab, in module form, carried in the payload bay of a space shuttle. Lind had served nineteen years as an astronaut before his first and only spaceflight.