The march to the first Moon landing took a giant leap forward in May 1969 with the successful completion of Apollo 10, essentially a dress rehearsal for the
landing mission. During their eight-day flight, the all-veteran Apollo 10 crew ofrehearsed nearly every aspect of the Moon landing with the exception of the landing itself, flying to within nine miles of the lunar surface. Their mission sorted many of the unknowns for the lunar landing. While Apollo 10 traveled to the Moon, workers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida rolled Apollo 11 to its launch pad.
Engineers began the countdown for Apollo 10 on May 13, as Stafford, Young, and Cernan finished their final simulator runs. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew joined them for dinner the night before launch. On launch day, they donned their spacesuits and boarded the van for the ride to Launch Pad 39B, where they climbed aboard their spacecraft.
Thirty minutes after the TLI burn, the crew separated Charlie Brown from the S-IVB, with Snoopy still snuggled atop the third stage. Young guided Charlie Brown about 150 feet away, turned the spacecraft around, then flew it back to dock with Snoopy, completing the Transposition and Docking maneuver. Viewers received the first color TV images from space, the first of 17 transmission during the mission, showing Snoopy atop the S-IVB as Young brought Charlie Brown in for the docking.
Mission Control gave Snoopy the go for the Descent Orbit Insertion burn of the LM’s Descent Propulsion System engine to lower its orbital low point to about 50,000 feet. The 27-second burn began with the engine at 11.3% thrust for the first 15 seconds, then Stafford throttled it up to 40% thrust for the remainder of the maneuver. Stafford and Cernan began taking photographs and film of the surface as they started their descent to the low point, later calculated as about 47,000 feet.
While Apollo 10 headed for the Moon, on May 20 workers at KSC rolled the Apollo 11 Saturn V from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A. Two days later, they rolled the Mobile Service Structure around the rocket and began integrated tests on the launch vehicle. Left: Apollo 11 astronauts Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, left, Neil A. Armstrong, and Michael Collins aboard the MV Retriever prepare for the water egress test using the Biological Isolation Garment . Middle: Engineerdemonstrates the BIG. Right: Armstrong emerges from the boilerplate Command Module to join Aldrin and Collins, as recovery team’s decontamination office Clancy Hatleberg monitors the activity.
Left: Apollo 12 astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad during the geology field trip to Big Bend, Texas. Middle and right: At the Manned Spacecraft Center, now NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Apollo 12 astronauts Conrad and Alan L. Bean conduct vacuum runs in Chamber B of the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory.and several geologists, took part in a geology field trip to Big Bend, Texas, on May 1-2.
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