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.

[ilbasso]

I think it was in the discussion doc about the simulators that I referenced above that I read that simulator time was a critical resource, for the reasons you mentioned, Doug. They had these at the Cape and ones at Houston running pretty much 24 hours a day during 1969 to accommodate all of the crews that were getting ready to go. The display technology was so delicate that it broke down constantly. Missions changed. Apollo 12 didn't know for sure that they were going to the Surveyor III site until late August or early September, barely 3 months before the mission. It was a crazy time, driven by that end of the decade deadline!

One piece of trivia that I read yesterday: There were only three astronauts who trained as backups for Apollo missions and who never flew an Apollo mission: Gordon Cooper (who was backup CDR on Apollo 10 and lost his Apollo 13 slot to Al Shepard [whose crew later moved to Apollo 14]), Joe Engle (backup LMP for Apollo 14, would have gone on Apollo 17 but lost his slot to Harrison Schmitt), and Don Lind (backup CMP for Skylab 3 and 4). Cooper resigned after losing his slot; Engle and Lind went on to fly years later on the Shuttle.