Apollo 12 pre-launch, Some shots from a VIP tour of KSC, August 1969 Options

[ilbasso]

This thread had me going back through some of my dad's slides from when he toured KSC in August 1969. I thought you'd enjoy these - which have never been seen publicly before!!!!!


The ascent stage of Intrepid, the Apollo 12 lunar module


The base of the first stage of the Saturn V. S-IC-7 at the top of the picture identifies this as the Apollo 12 Saturn V. Note that the fairings just above the fins have been removed. These fairings covered retro rockets that were fired when the first stage separated from the second stage.


The Apollo 12 Saturn V stack, viewed from above.

[dvandorn]

If you're counting Skylab, both backup crews included a few other people who didn't fly until Shuttle. The Skylab 2 backup crew was Rusty Schweickart (CDR), Bruce McCandless (PLT, or Pilot) and Story Musgrave (SPT, or Science Pilot). The backup crew for Skylabs 3 and 4 was Vance Brand (CDR), Don Lind (PLT) and Bill Lenoir (SPT). Yes, there were only two backup crews for the three Skylab flights.

Of those backup crewmen, Schweickart had already flown in Apollo, on Apollo 9. Brand flew in an Apollo on the Apollo-Soyuz flight. The other four did eventually fly in the Shuttle, McCandless waiting an eternity for his first flight (selected along with moonwalkers Mitchell, Irwin and Duke in 1966, Bruce didn't fly until 1984). Then again, he was the astronaut involved in the AMU jet backpack project, so he waited to fly until the AMU was ready, and became the first person to fly it. But McCandless does have his own place in history, as the CapCom during the Apollo 11 EVA.

-the other Doug