Posted on April 23, 2015
The Apollo contract specified a shirt-sleeve environment. For this reason, North American was told not to include in its design a hatch that opened by explosives, like Mercury’s. An accidentally blown hatch in space would cause an instant vacuum and ...
The impact facility at North American was used to drop-test the CM
Selection of Little Joe II completed the Apollo family of launch vehicles.
Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, and Walter Schirra in 1963 inspect a full-scale mock up of the Apollo CM
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Interior of a partial full-scale mockup of the Apollo command module
major parts of the command module structure
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Posted on April 30, 2015
During 1962, NASA faced three major tasks: first the mode selection and its defense (covered in episodes 106-109), second keeping North American moving on the command and service modules (covered in episode 110) and third finding a contractor to deve...
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Posted on May 7, 2015
“The contractor role in Houston was not very firm. Frankly, they didn’t want us. There were two things against us down there. Number one, it was a Headquarters contract, and it was decreed that the Space Centers shall use GE for certain things; and n...
General Electric employees monitor activities of a spacecraft test in the automatic-checkout-equipment spacecraft control room in 1965
comparison of spacecraft and launch vehicle configuration
Apollo tracking network in 1966. Radar stations with large antennas for continuous tracking and communications were at Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia
Tagged:Ames, Apollo, Apollo Spacecraft Project Office, Bellcomm, Block I, Block Ii, Brainerd Holmes, Charles Frick, Edward S Miller, Ellington Air Force Base, Exploration, F 1, Frederick R Kappel, Gemini, General Electric, George Low, Gilruth, Grumman, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, H 1, Highwater, History, Holmes, Houston, Hugh Dryden, Huntsville, J 2, James Webb, John P Mayer, Joseph Shea, Kurt Debus, Langley, Lewis Research Center, Lunar, Lunar Module, Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, Manned Space Flight, Manned Spacecraft Center, Marshall, Marshall Space Flight Center, Mcdonnell, Mercury, Mode, Moon, Msc, Msfc, Nasa, North American Aviation, Office Of Manned Space Flight, Project Apollo, Robert Seamans, Rocket, Rocketdyne, Saturn, Seamans, Service Module, Space, William Rector
Posted on January 23, 2014
This brings us to Project Gemini. Gemini started after Apollo had begun, in part to answer a crucial question for Apollo. Was rendezvous and docking in orbit a feasible basis for a manned lunar landing mission?
fig6 (1)McDonnell-proposed two-man Mercury spacecraft. Shown is the interior arrangement of spacecraft equipment
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Tagged:Ames, Apollo, Demarquis D Wyatt, Exploration, Gemini, Goddard, History, Houbolt, Jpl, Kehlet, Kondratyuk, Langley, Lewis, Luna, Lunar, Mark Ii, Marshall, Mercury, Moon, Nasa, National Space Vehicle Program, Noordung, Nova, Oberth, Pirquet, Post Mercury, Rca, Rendezvous, Rocket, Seamans, Soviet, Space, Space Task Group, Station, Stg, Strass, Tsander, Tsiolkovskii, Von Braun, Werner, William Michael
Posted on January 29, 2015
President Kennedy proposed the manned lunar landing as the focus of the US space program but, at the time of his address, only one American, Alan B. Shepard, Jr. had been into space, on a suborbital lob shot lasting 15 minutes. No rocket launch vehic...
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