To come: Apollo 11

Apollo 11. The flight that made NASA famous.
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The Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal. Geek heaven, containing the entire annotated transcript of the moon landing. Main page.

The public rightly celebrated reaching the goal Kennedy set a decade before:

Apollo 12 — "Yankee Clipper", Virginia Air and Space Center, Hampton, VA

Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Al Bean went back to the moon. It was the second manned touchdown mission. And the first boring one.

The number of interesting blunders and mishaps on this mission is pretty remarkable. It's a fun one to research, which I highly recommend. The treatment of this mission in Tom Hanks' excellent miniseries From the Earth to the Moon is a story not to be missed.

We visited the Virginia Science Center in Summer, 2010. We also visited the National Air & Space Museum in D.C., which has far more recognizable relics, but not nearly the access to them as you can get here. I recommend a visit highly.

Click here to see my Flickr album of our visit.

To come: Apollo 13

Apollo 13, the "successful failure".
I have actually been to see the Apollo 13 Command Module Odyssey - currently on display at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Hutchinson, Kansas, but it was many years ago. I'll visit it again for the purpose of this blog.

To come: Apollo 14

Apollo 14, the replacement mission for Apollo 13, traveling to the Fra Mauro highlands with Al Shepherd in command. Golf on the moon.

Details:
Command module name
Location today
Exciting details about this mission
Men who flew it
Names of the other modules
Distance traveled, launch date, landing date, landing location
Photo of me next to it
Link to site that houses it (place for that above)

Apollo 15 - Endeavour

Welcome to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the home of the Apollo 15 Command Module Endeavour - Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio.

The boy, me, and Endeavour. Click here to go to Flicker photoset of our visit.

Apollo 16 - Casper

Apollo 16, CASPER, located at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama.
Much, much, much, much more to come later, but this photo was taken during "You have the place to yourselves" time at the museum at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center while Dustin and I were at SPACE CAMP. Yes, that Space Camp. I had to wait until I was 38 years old, but I finally got to go to Space Camp. And I loved it. So much that it inspired me to go visit all of the Apollo space capsules. Yep, this photo was the inspiration for this quest, and the web page you're reading now. I'd say this photo represents one of the happiest weeks of my life.

To come: Apollo 17

Harrison Schmidt and Gene Cernan, the last men to stand on the moon in the 20th century.

Apollo 6

Apollo 6 was an UNMANNED test flight. It was launched in the morning on April 4, 1968. Later that evening, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis.

Wikipedia has this to say about the flight. Plus, I found the following book excerpt:

The second Saturn V launch unfortunately did not meet with the success
of the first. As the Apollo 6 vehicle lifted off its pad on April 4,
1968 ("Early morning, April 4/shot rings out in the Memphis sky/Free at last, They took your life/They could not take your pride"), the ground
controllers had visions of a repeat performance of the Apollo 4 mission.
Their expectations, however, were not realized, since after only six
minutes into the flight, the Saturn V suffered the first of a number of
setbacks. Two of the five J-2 engines of the S-II stage prematurely shut
down. The crisis was not fatal, however, as the remaining three engines
continued to burn longer than programmed owing to the extra propellant
which the two shutdown engines had not consumed.

But there were still more problems ahead for the Apollo 6 mission. Since
the premature shutdown caused the S-II stage to be slower at burnout
than programmed, the guidance computer commanded the S-IVB stage to burn
about 30 seconds longer to make up the difference. This additional
burn-time depleted ten tons of additional S-IVB propellant, fuel that
was to have been used when the S-IVB was restarted after a two-orbit
coast. Aimed at a 115-mile circular orbit, the Apollo 6 payload was
finally placed into a 110- by 225-miles elliptical orbit. If the Apollo
6 had been carrying men for the lunar trip, the mission would probably
have been aborted. Since the purpose of this flight was to have the
Saturn V place a payload into orbit, the mission was in effect a success
even though it was in the wrong orbit.

One more difficulty, however, was to lie ahead in this hard-luck
mission. Following a two-orbit coast, the S-IVB stage failed to reignite
when commanded from the ground to do so. The purpose of this second
S-IVB burn was to propel the payload to a distance of 322,000 miles into
space. This maneuver would be quite similar to that which S-IVB would be
required to perform in the actual lunar mission.

To salvage what they could from the Apollo 6 mission, the NASA ground
controllers commanded the 21,500-pound-thrust service module engine to
drive the spacecraft to a 13,821-mile altitude, which was far short of
the planned 322,000-mile apogee. Later analysis of the flight revealed
that the early shutdown of the two J-2 engines was due to the improper
installation of two wires (newer information in Wikipedia indicates that "pogo" shaking of the craft on liftoff likely broke a propellant line, leading to an automatic shutdown, but the wire carrying the shutdown command was cross-wired from engine 2 to 3. When 3 shut down, further failsafe sensors caused the cross-wired engine 2 to shut down as well. The fact that these wires were cross-wired rather than simply miswired may have prevented a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft). A leak in one of the propellant lines probably was responsible for the failure of
the S-IVB to reignite in orbit. It was not the Saturn V that failed, but
the men who served her. -- Saturn V, The Moon Rocket (1970) by William G. Holder and Glenn Holder. Julian Messner, New York.

In the Summer of 2008, my son and I traveled with the family to visit Huntsville, Alabama, and spend a weekend together at Space Camp. On a side trip afterwards, we discovered that the Apollo 6 capsule was only a few miles away from our hotel in downtown Atlanta, Georgia at the Fernbank Science Center. This Apollo capsule was the first one that I saw after I began my quest, but it's approximately the fifth in my life. In any event, because of its relative historical INsignificance, it is stored right out in the open, with nothing but a 4-foot-high wall of plexiglas to prevent you from reaching out and touching Apollo history.

Geek bonus: The Apollo 6 Press Kit in PDF.