Apollo 9

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollo 9 launched on the 3rd of March 1969, carrying three men into low Earth orbit aboard the first complete Apollo spacecraft ever flown. Commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart had a deceptively modest-sounding job: test a lander that had never been flown by people. But the stakes were enormous. If they could not prove that the Lunar Module worked, if they could not fly it free of the mothership and then find their way back, no one would walk on the Moon. The mission they were running was known inside NASA as the "D mission," and it was the pivot point on which the entire lunar program turned.

  What does it take to rehearse a Moon landing without leaving Earth orbit? How do you train three men to fly a vehicle that cannot bring them home if something goes wrong? And why did the astronaut who vomited twice in space ultimately pay a price that none of his colleagues had to bear? Those questions run through the ten days of Apollo 9.

• 2. Years in the Making

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  In April 1966, Deke Slayton, the Director of Flight Crew Operations, chose McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart as the second Apollo crew. Their first assignment was as backup to Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee for the first crewed Earth-orbital test. That mission, designated AS-204 and later named Apollo 1, never flew: on the 27th of January 1967, a fire broke out in the cabin during a launch-pad test, killing all three men.

  In the aftermath of that disaster, everything was reconsidered and rescheduled. The McDivitt crew found themselves waiting for a new slot while a series of uncrewed tests proceeded. When the schedule was restructured, their assignment became the D mission: a long test of both the command module and the lunar module together in Earth orbit. Author Colin Burgess and Francis French judged the Apollo 9 crew among the best trained in history. The three men had worked together since January 1966 and had always been slated to fly the LM first. They logged 1,800 hours of mission-specific training, roughly seven hours in preparation for every hour they would spend in space.

  Their training ranged from zero-G simulations in the "Vomit Comet" to navigation studies at the Morehead Planetarium and the Griffith Planetarium, where they focused on the 37 stars used by the Apollo Guidance Computer. They traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for computer training at MIT and spent more than 300 hours each in command module and lunar module simulators at Kennedy Space Center and in Houston. Gene Kranz, who would serve as lead flight director, later called the Apollo 9 crew the best prepared for their particular mission he had ever seen.

• 3. A Reshuffled Deck

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  In August 1968, Apollo Program Manager George M. Low proposed something audacious: if Apollo 7 in October went well, send Apollo 8 to lunar orbit with no lunar module at all. Until that point, Apollo 8 had been the D mission. Accepting that plan meant bumping the D mission to Apollo 9 and making Apollo 9's original slot an "E mission" testing in medium Earth orbit.

  Slayton offered McDivitt a tempting alternative: stay with the redesigned Apollo 8 and go to lunar orbit. McDivitt declined on behalf of his crew. He wanted to fly the LM. The switch had a consequence far beyond Apollo 9 itself. When the crews of Apollo 8 and 9 were swapped, their backup crews were also exchanged. The standard rule at NASA was that backup crews flew as prime crews three missions later. Swapping the backups placed Neil Armstrong's crew, who had been backing up Frank Borman, in position for Apollo 11 rather than Pete Conrad's crew, who ended up landing second on Apollo 12 in November 1969. McDivitt's decision to stay with the D mission quietly shaped who would take humanity's first steps on the Moon.

• 4. The Hardware Itself

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  The Saturn V designated AS-504 was the fourth of the rocket's type to fly, but the first ever to carry a lunar module in its nose. Several refinements distinguished it from the Saturn V used on Apollo 8. Engineers removed the inner core of the F-1 engine chamber in the first stage to save weight and gain a small increase in efficiency. Lighter tank skins on the liquid oxygen tanks and upgraded J-2 engines in the second stage contributed to a total weight reduction of about 3,250 lb in that stage alone, roughly half of which came from a 16 percent thinning of the tank wall.

  The lunar module itself had a complicated history before it even reached the pad. The crew had found numerous flaws in LM-2, the machine originally intended for the mission, many of them traceable to its being the first flight-ready lunar module off Grumman's production line. The delay caused by the Apollo 8 crew swap turned out to be fortunate: it allowed LM-3 to become available, and the crew considered LM-3 far superior. Even so, small cracks in its aluminum alloy structure required Grumman engineers to keep working right up until December 1968, when the lander had to be mounted on the rocket. Neither LM-2 nor LM-3 could have gone to the Moon; both were too heavy. Grumman's weight reduction program only became fully effective with LM-5, assigned to Apollo 11. LM-2 never flew in space and today sits in the National Air and Space Museum.

  One more piece of hardware made its debut on Apollo 9: the Extravehicular Mobility Unit backpack worn by Schweickart during his spacewalk. It carried the Portable Life Support System, which supplied oxygen and water for cooling, and an Oxygen Purge System capable of providing emergency oxygen for up to roughly an hour if the primary system failed. A more advanced version of this backpack would be worn by every astronaut who walked on the Moon.

• 5. Gumdrop and Spider

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  NASA had banned spacecraft nicknames after Gus Grissom named his Gemini 3 capsule Molly Brown. Apollo 9 forced a rethink. During the mission, the command module and the lunar module would separate and fly independently, and they needed distinct call signs so that Mission Control could reach each crew. In simulations, the crew had already taken to calling the command module "Gumdrop," inspired by the blue protective wrapping in which the cone-shaped CM arrived from the manufacturer, and the lunar module "Spider," inspired by the insect-like look of the lander with its legs deployed. NASA's public relations staff thought the names were too casual, but the call signs eventually got official approval. NASA then required more formal names from Apollo 11 onward.

  The crew also became the first astronauts permitted to bring personal music mixtapes. McDivitt and Scott brought easy listening and country music. Schweickart's cassette of classical music vanished and did not surface until the ninth day of the ten-day mission, when Scott presented it to him.

• 6. Ten Days in Orbit

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  The launch, originally set for the 28th of February 1969, was postponed when all three astronauts developed colds. Around-the-clock shifts were needed to keep the spacecraft ready during the delay, which cost $500,000. The rocket finally lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 11:00:00 EST on March 3, with Vice President Spiro Agnew present in the firing control room representing the Nixon administration. By 11 minutes and roughly 4 seconds into the flight, Apollo 9 had settled into a parking orbit of 102.3 by 103.9 miles.

  The first major test came quickly: Scott flew the CSM away from the S-IVB third stage, turned it around, and docked with the lunar module still housed in the rocket's nose. This transposition and docking maneuver was essential to every lunar landing mission. After the combined spacecraft separated from the rocket, McDivitt and Schweickart entered the LM for the first time in space. Schweickart had been suffering from space adaptation sickness and vomited during the LM checkout. He vomited a second time inside Spider. McDivitt quietly requested a private channel to doctors in Houston; the first episode had not been reported to the ground, and when the media later learned of the illness, a wave of critical coverage followed. Schweickart feared the episode might jeopardize President Kennedy's goal of a lunar landing by decade's end. The crew pressed on, completing the LM systems checkout including a 367-second firing of the descent engine that simulated the throttle pattern planned for the actual Moon landing.

  On March 6, the fourth day, Schweickart exited through the LM hatch and moved around the exterior of the spacecraft using handholds. Scott stood in the CM's open hatch. Both men photographed each other and retrieved experiments from the exterior of their vehicles. Schweickart used the call sign "Red Rover" during the EVA, a nod to the color of his hair. He found moving around easier than he had in simulations.

  March 7 brought what one account called "the key event of the entire mission." McDivitt and Schweickart flew Spider away from Gumdrop, making the first crewed flight of the Apollo Lunar Module. For the hours they were separated, they were flying a vehicle with no ability to return them to Earth on its own. At a separation of 185 km, Spider fired its engine to lower its orbit and begin catching up with Gumdrop. After more than two hours, McDivitt brought Spider alongside. Glare from the Sun made docking difficult, and Scott had to guide him in. Once the crews were reunited, Spider was jettisoned and its engine was fired remotely by Mission Control until its fuel ran out, pushing the ascent stage to an orbit with an apogee of more than 3,700 nautical miles.

  The remaining days were more relaxed. Four identical Hasselblad cameras were coupled together to photograph Earth using film sensitive to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, a prototype system that would lead directly to the Earth Resources Technology Satellite and eventually the Landsat series. Scott tracked landmarks with a sextant and turned it toward Jupiter to practice navigation techniques for later missions. The crew also tracked the Pegasus 3 satellite, launched in 1965.

  On March 13, less than an hour after the ten-day mark, the eighth and final burn of the Service Propulsion System brought the spacecraft home. Unfavorable weather pushed the landing zone from the primary site some 220 nautical miles east-southeast of Bermuda to a point 160 nautical miles east of the Bahamas. Apollo 9 splashed down about 3 miles from the recovery carrier USS Guadalcanal after a mission of 10 days, 1 hour, and 54 seconds. It would be the last crewed Atlantic splashdown for more than five decades, until Inspiration4 in 2021.

• 7. After the Mission

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  NASA Associate Administrator George Mueller described Apollo 9 as "as successful a flight as any of us could ever wish for." Gene Kranz called it "sheer exhilaration." Apollo Program Director Samuel C. Phillips said it exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. Standing in Mission Control as Spider and Gumdrop docked, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin knew in that moment, according to writer Andrew Chaikin, that Apollo 10 would also succeed and that he and Armstrong would attempt the landing. On the 24th of March, NASA made it official.

  The three men took very different paths after the mission. McDivitt chose not to seek a lunar landing command and left the Astronaut Corps, becoming manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program later in 1969. Scott was assigned as backup commander of Apollo 12 and then commanded Apollo 15, landing on the Moon in 1971. Schweickart volunteered for medical investigation into spacesickness, but the stigma of his illness proved lasting. He was never assigned to another prime crew. He took a leave of absence from NASA in 1977 that became permanent. Commander of Apollo 17 Eugene Cernan later said that when it came to understanding spacesickness, Schweickart "paid the price for them all."

  The command module Gumdrop is now on display at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, having previously been exhibited at the Michigan Space and Science Center in Jackson, Michigan, until that facility closed in April 2004. The S-IVB third stage, fired into solar orbit after staging, remains there today, circling the Sun with an orbital period of 245 days.