Two Sides of the Moon by Alexei Leonov

Author:Alexei Leonov [Leonov, Alexei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Did You See God?

1968–9

Lt. Col. David Scott

Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas

Nineteen sixty-eight was a pivotal year in the space programs of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The two most powerful countries on Earth were pressing to demonstrate to the human race that their ideology was best, by being the first to reach the Moon. Who would win? That was the burning issue at the start of the year.

It was a lousy year in a lot of respects for the United States. The Vietnam war was really taking its toll. It was going badly, and the Vietcong had scored a major victory with the Tet offensive in January. The assassinations, later that year, of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy came as a tremendous shock too. These were tragic events. Behind the Iron Curtain the situation seemed to be deteriorating, too. A crackdown on attempts to introduce liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia had led to the restoration of hard-line communism. But, bad as the news was both at home and abroad, most of us in the astronaut corps remained largely isolated from such events. We were in a tunnel. Totally focused.

Both American and Soviet space programs had suffered severe setbacks. Ours had been delayed at least a year by the Apollo 1 fire. All our energy was devoted to trying to solve the problems we were facing—and there were many. We were really going full tilt, working fourteen or fifteen hours a day. Everything had been torn apart and rebuilt. Even the names of the Apollo flights were changed because of the fire. Each flight in sequence would be assigned a mission type or purpose.

Before the fire, each flight had simply had the number of the Saturn launch vehicle or the Command Module the crew was working on. Afterward, it was decided that the lost crew had been the first Apollo flight. The next three flights were due to be unmanned tests of the new Saturn V booster rocket with unmanned Command and Service Modules and the smaller Saturn-IB booster rockets with unmanned Lunar Modules. The Saturns, the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, would be numbered Apollos 4 to 6. The first manned flight would be Apollo 7.

Furthermore, the new Apollo plan laid out a sequence of escalating “missions,” designated from A to J to mark its type or purpose. A and B were unmanned missions. C marked the first manned mission of the Command Module in Earth orbit. The D and E missions were to fly the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, while F would mark the first mission to the Moon and G would attempt the first lunar landing. The H and J missions were to extend the length of time a crew spent on the Moon’s surface and greatly expand the scientific work they carried out while there. The I missions were to have been orbital “science missions,” but were canceled.

The whole program was incremental. The objectives of each type of lettered “mission” had to

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