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Pre-Apollo 1 Apollo 7 orbital CSM tests
I am having a hard time finding any long duration Apollo CSM flights
prior to October 1968. There were 2 short orbital tests on the Saturn V, but it appears that all Saturn IB flights were sub orbital. I am surprised that NASA did not schedule a full dress rehearsal of Apollo 7 on orbit in the summer of 1968. |
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Explorer8939 wrote:
I am having a hard time finding any long duration Apollo CSM flights prior to October 1968. There were 2 short orbital tests on the Saturn V, but it appears that all Saturn IB flights were sub orbital. I am surprised that NASA did not schedule a full dress rehearsal of Apollo 7 on orbit in the summer of 1968. I guess there was no need for an unmanned long duration flight. Maybe they got all the data needed form the 2TV-1 test in June 68. Gee, one week in the vacuum chamber in a CSM without the comfort of zero gravity... Engle, Brand and Kerwin earned an ealier flight than they finally got. Harald |
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In article ,
Explorer8939 wrote: I am having a hard time finding any long duration Apollo CSM flights prior to October 1968. There were 2 short orbital tests on the Saturn V, but it appears that all Saturn IB flights were sub orbital. Correct. I am surprised that NASA did not schedule a full dress rehearsal of Apollo 7 on orbit in the summer of 1968. My reading of the tea leaves is that there wasn't any urgent reason to. The short-duration tests established that the thing basically worked, there wasn't any reason to expect deterioration while in orbit that would make an emergency return impossible, and so long as a return was always possible, it was better to test with a crew on board. Setting an Apollo CSM up for unmanned operation required significant modifications, and there was always some nagging concern that this wasn't quite a realistic test of the manned spacecraft. The modifications would have gotten more elaborate for a long-duration test, increasing the doubts. After the fire, Apollo made a real point of concentrating major engineering effort on the final configuration of the hardware, and not putting a lot of time and work into dead-end test versions. -- "Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer -- George Herbert | |
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