Apollo Saturn 501

 NASA’s unsuccessful attempts to launch the new moon rocket this past week-end have put me in mind of AS-501, the first flight of the original moon rocket.

AS-501, a.k.a. Apollo 4, was the first flight of the Saturn V.  In one sense it was months late; in another it launched exactly on time.

The first stage arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in September, 1966, more than a year before the flight.  Over the next nine months, the upper stages and the Apollo spacecraft arrived and were checked out.  The stacking was completed in June, 1967, inside the giant Vehicle Assembly Building.  There followed another two months of checkouts before the stack was rolled to Pad 39A in late August.

It was a new vehicle and there were lots of surprises and lots of things went wrong and had to be fixed.  Everything took longer than it should.  Rocco Petrone, the Director of Launch Operations, started planning his schedules in terms of “Saturn V minutes,” which he figured was about five regular minutes.

Finally, on 27 Sep 1967, they were ready to start a practice countdown, known as the Countdown Demonstration Test (CDDT).  The countdown for an Apollo-Saturn V lasted four days: sixty hours of tests and 36 hours of planned holds.  Since this was the first vehicle, Petrone figured it would actually take six days.  It took seventeen.  “It wasn’t any one thing,” write Charles Murray and Katherine Bly Cox  in their book, Apollo: The Race to the Moon, “but an unending series of delays in almost everything they tried to do.”

On October 9^th, a Monday, Petrone realized he was losing track of time.  “He hadn’t noticed that by now he and many of the launch people were in the twentieth hour of one long shift.”  He sent the launch team home for a two-day recess.  Finally, on October 13^th, they got to T-14 seconds and the end of the test.  “’We got through it,’ Petrone said, describing the CDDT as one might recall a battle which one had unexpectedly survived.”

On November 5, they started the 4-day countdown for real.  Four days later at 0700:00:00 9 November 1967, exactly on time, AS-501 lifted off.  The 8 ½ hour test flight was near-perfect.

The flight made headlines the next day.  “But there was no way the paper could convey what a von Braun or Petrone or Mueller—or, for that matter, a Rigell or Fannin or Corn—knew.  Only a few years earlier, many of them had been hesitantly trying, often failing, to launch rockets with a single, small engine in each stage.  Today, in its first trial, they had launched a rocket the size and weight of a Navy destroyer, carrying eleven new engines, new fuels, new pumps, new technology of all kinds, and had done it perfectly.  There was simply no way to explain it…. ‘We fought that thing for seventeen days,’ Ike Rigell said, remembering the tortuous CDDT. ‘And then on launch day it worked.  It worked beautiful.’”

The details and quotes above are from Murray and Bly Cox.  Their 1989 book is one of the best I have read about the early space program.  I can’t recommend it enough.  They are great story tellers who, through the stories of managers and engineers – some well-known, most obscure – convey a sense of wonder and awe of what they achieved.