Moondust by Andrew Smith Read Free Book Online

and contains the big stuff like the rocket engine and the fuel and oxygen tanks. During the early part of the flight, the CSM has been perched at the tip of the Saturn like a spearhead, while behind it, cocooned by four protective metal panels, lay the equally important Lunar Module, or LM, the ungainly craft in which two crew members will descend to the lunar surface. Now, at a distance of 6,000 miles from home, the CSM breaks free of its Saturn host, is gently guided forward by the Command Module pilot, then rotated 180 degrees on its axis to face the slumbering LM, whence the ship is nudged forward so that it might clasp,
dock with,
the LM and draw it from its berth. In this formation, nose to nose like two insects kissing, the ships drift through space for three days, before slowing dramatically to allow “capture” into lunar orbit. There, they manoeuvre into a special “descent orbit,” an ellipse with a high point of sixty-nine miles and a low of just nine, where the lucky, prechosen pair will crawlthrough a hatch from the CM to the LM and drop the short distance to history.
    The mere act of describing this outward journey is exhausting, and the return is no simpler. When the astronauts on the surface are ready to leave, the LM’s “ascent stage” – the cramped living quarters – will blast away from the spindly-legged “descent stage,” leaving that behind in the dust. Back in lunar orbit, they rendezvous with the CSM and climb aboard once more, to be reunited with the colleague they left behind, the one who
didn’t
drop sixty-nine miles into history, at which juncture they jettison the LM (an emotional moment for some who’ve lived in it) and set off for Earth. Three days later, they’re circling the home planet again; the CSM breaks into its two constituent parts, with the Service Module being ditched and the Command Module careening into the atmosphere at 24,000 miles an hour, splashing into the sea beneath a trio of gargantuan, red-and-white-striped parachutes, and the trip is over. Naturally enough, job titles derive from the participants’ relationship to this system, with the pair who reach the surface known as the Mission Commander and the Lunar Module pilot (even though the “LM pilot” is essentially a systems engineer, monitoring progress and feeding it to the LM’s real pilot – the Commander), while the Command Module pilot looks after the mother ship until such time as his crewmates return or are understood to be irretrievably lost. No one can deny the virtuosity of the technique, nor that there is an awful lot to go wrong with it.
    There were twelve crewed Apollo missions in all. The first,
Apollo 1,
ended before it had begun, when a fire in the capsule killed its crew – the Mercury 7 veteran Gus Grissom, first U.S. spacewalker Ed White and rookie Roger Chaffee – as they conducted tests in a bay on the ground, bringing despair and an eighteen-month hiatus to the programme while NASA’s management was overhauled. The next piloted mission was
Apollo 7,
which successfully launched into Earth orbit, followed by
Apollo 8,
which swung the first human beings around the Moon over Christmas 1968.
Apollo 9
then tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit,
Apollo 10
did the same in lunar orbit, and finally
Apollo 11
set down. Ten such landings were planned, but thelast three (
18, 19, 20
) were cancelled as the programme’s budget was progressively slashed. Furthermore,
Apollo 13
nearly ended in disaster when an explosion in an oxygen tank crippled the Command Module, forcing the landing to be abandoned and the LM to be used as a makeshift life raft to get the crew home. Thus, only six ships reached the surface, between July 1969 and December 1972, each with two astronauts aboard. Those astronauts were:
    APOLLO 11 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (CM pilot Michael Collins)
    APOLLO 12 Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (CM pilot Richard