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Tag: Apollo 11

  • SEALs Who Brought Apollo 11 Astronauts Home.

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    However, very few people nowadays remember a four-person team of courageous Navy SEALs who had made the astronauts’ safe return possible 43 years ago.

    On July 24, 1969, the Apollo 11 capsule plummeted from space and landed in the Pacific Ocean about 1,000 miles off the coast of Hawaii. Four young service members handpicked for their strength and swimming abilities arrived on the scene of the splashdown to bring the first humans to walk on the surface of the moon to safety.

    With the whole world watching, Navy SEAL John Wolfram stepped onto the steaming, partially blackened surface of the capsule, which just minutes earlier had entered the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour, according to CNN’s Light Years.

    As he stood on the vessel bobbing up and down in the ocean, Wolfram was all too aware that the well-being of the space pioneers was in his hands.

    ‘I looked in the hatch window to see if the astronauts were OK,’ recalled Wolfram. ‘They smiled and gave me a thumbs up. Being the first to look them in the eye and see that they’re OK – it’s quite a rush.’

    Wolfram and his three teammates graduated from the Navy’s elite SEAL training school, known to be among the toughest of its kind in existence. They had trained for months in anticipation of the high-profile mission and served on recovery teams for previous Apollo moonshots.

    The task at hand was not an easy one: stabilize and secure the spacecraft, decontaminate the astronauts and get them safely aboard a hovering helicopter bound for the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.

    Before Wolfram could ever step onto the spacecraft, he first had to catch it. From a helicopter hanging low over the site of the landing, he jumped into the frigid water and proceeded to lasso a high-tech bucking bronco.

    The fact that Wolfram was able to attach an underwater parachute – called a sea anchor– to stop the drifting ‘bobbing, 12,000-pound spinning behemoth,’ was an almost super-human feat, said Scott Carmichael, the author of the book about the mission called Moon Men Return. ‘If that thing hits you in the head, you’re done.’

    Wolfram had only one shot to attach the sea anchor to the capsule. It was moving so fast that if he were to miss his target, he would not have been able to catch up to the drifting vessel.

    The Navy SEAL, however, did not disappointed.

    Joined by lead frogman Wes Chesser and teammate Mike Mallory, the trio then struggled against 12-foot-high waves and 28 mph winds to attach a 200-pound inflatable floatation ring around the spacecraft.

    Home-bound: The astronauts settled into a basket-like carriage and were then hoisted into a Navy chopper for the ride to the USS Hornet

    ‘We were the muscle guys of the outfit,’ joked Mallory, 66, who now works with utility control systems in Hartland, Michigan.

    NASA officials were impressed with how quickly they wrapped the ring around the vessel.

    ‘Wolfram and I were very strong swimmers, so we muscled that ring around there,’ Mallory said. According to Carmichael, Mallory’s physical might made him a ‘horse’ when it came to swimming in the open water of the Pacific. And Chesser ‘was just unflappable,’ he added.

    ‘All hell could be breaking loose and Wes just had that capacity to calmly look at something and figure out what needed to be done.’

    The team attached inflatable rafts to the capsule and overall mission leader Clancy Hatleberg helped astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin out of the capsule – unsure if they would be able to stay on their feet after days in zero gravity.

    The Apollo crew and the frogmen put on special suits and masks – called biological isolation garments – to protect them against ‘lunar pathogens’ – possible biological threats the astronauts may have unknowingly brought back from the moon.

    Not everything, however, had gone off without a hitch. The masks made it difficult to communicate, and the goggles began to steam up. For a few minutes, they had trouble getting the capsule hatch to lock shut, which could have compromised its floating integrity.

    Chesser, 67, now a retired defense contractor, remembered how an open hatch led to the flooding and sinking of astronaut Gus Grissom‘s space capsule after splashdown in 1961.

    With the glitches resolved, the astronauts settled into a basket-like carriage called a Billy-Pugh net, and were then hoisted into a Navy chopper for the ride to the USS Hornet.

    After making Apollo 11 history and serving two tours in the Vietnam War, Wolfram’s life took a dramatic turn in 1971, when he attended a church revival. He has since become an ordained minister serving as a missionary in Southeast Asia.

    He and Chesser have visited Washington’s Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which is now home to the Apollo 11 capsule
     http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2177482/The-extraordinary-untold-story-Navy-SEAL-musclemen-brought-Apollo-11-astronauts-home.html#ixzz21SbBGVS6

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  • 10 Secrets of the First Moon landing


    No, it wasn’t a hoax. Sheesh. But some of the details of Apollo 11’s remarkable journey to the Moon are stranger than fiction. I mean, it was the first time humans set foot on another celestial body.

    * They pulled an all nighter. While the schedule for the mission called for the astronauts to follow the landing with a five-hour nap (they had been awake since early morning), they chose to forgo the sleep period and begin the preparations for their lunar excursion early, thinking that they would be unable to sleep.

    * TV coverage of the landing was recorded from another TV The first landing used slow-scan television incompatible with commercial TV, so it was displayed on a special monitor at NASA, and a conventional TV camera viewed this monitor, significantly reducing the quality of the picture. (This has helped fuel the notion that the Moon landing was a hoax.) Despite technical and weather difficulties, ghostly black and white images of the first moon walk were broadcast to at least 600 million people on Earth.

    * The tapes of the moon landing were lost Although copies of the video in broadcast format are widely available, recordings of the original slow scan source transmission from the moon were accidentally destroyed during routine magnetic tape re-use at NASA, as was a backup that existed at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in Australia. The erasure has provided yet more fodder for the myth makers. Last year, NASA issued its final report on the tapes

    * They had to squeeze through the hatch Armstrong’s Portable Life Support System (PLSS) made it hard for him to exit the lander, which included a smaller hatch than the astronauts had practiced with (the backpack was later redesigned). Some of the highest heart rates recorded from Apollo astronauts occurred when they were getting in and out of the lander.

    * The Soviets landed there a few days before The unmanned Luna 15 Soviet spacecraft began its own descent to the lunar surface just a few hours before the Apollo 11 liftoff -and crashed. This was widely seen as the climax of the Space Race, but also a moment of unusual cooperation: the USSR released Luna 15’s flight plan to ensure it would not collide with Apollo 11, though its exact mission was unknown.

    * Armstrong was moving fast As time was running out, Mission Control used a coded phrase to warn the mission commander that his metabolic rates were high and that he should slow down. But as metabolic rates remained generally lower than expected for both astronauts, Mission Control granted the astronauts a 15-minute extension.

    * Buzz broke the engine circuit breaker While moving within the cabin of the lunar module, Aldrin accidentally broke the circuit breaker that would arm the main engine for lift off from the moon, potentially leaving them stranded there. Fortunately a felt-tip pen was enough to activate the switch. If this hadn’t worked, the Lunar Module circuitry could have been reconfigured to allow firing the ascent engine.

    * They left behind a list of Congressmen Along with a plaque and a memorial bag containing a gold replica of an olive branch, the astronauts left behind a silicon message disk. It carried the goodwill statements by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon and messages from leaders of 73 countries around the world, as well as a listing of the leadership of the US Congress, a listing of members of the four committees of the House and Senate responsible for the NASA legislation, and the names of NASA’s past and present top management. They also left behind Soviet medals commemorating Cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin. Just before climbing back into the lunar module, Armstrong reminded Aldrin of a bag of memorial items in his suit pocket sleeve, and Aldrin tossed the bag down.

    * The flag fell over As the astronauts lifted off the lunar surface, film shows the flag whipping violently in the exhaust of the ascent stage engine. Buzz Aldrin saw it topple. Subsequent Apollo missions usually planted the American flags at least 100 feet from the LM to prevent its being blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine.

    * Nixon was prepared to bury them on the Moon In the event of a catastrophic failure that would leave Aldrin and Armstrong on the Moon, William Safire, President Nixon’s speechwriter, drafted a plan to be followed. Mission Control was to “close down communications” with the Lunar Module. In a public ritual likened to burial at sea, clergyman would then have commended their souls to “the deepest of the deep.” Presidential telephone calls to the astronauts’ wives were also planned. The speech (which we covered here) began, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”

    * A ten year old kept Apollo in touch After a fairly smooth docking procedure, the three astronauts began their return to Earth. But along the way, the Guam tracking station failed, which would have made communication on the last segment of the Earth return difficult. A staff member had his ten-year old son, Greg Force, do repairs that were made possible by his small hands.
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