Rousing End to a Relaxed Flight

A PAIR of loud sonic booms shook the sky over the Atlantic Ocean last week, heralding the approach of Apollo 9 as it hurtled through the thickening atmosphere on its way home. Then, to the cheers of sailors on the deck of the helicopter carrier Guadalcanal, the heat-charred spacecraft floated down through the cloud cover and splashed into the water only three miles away. The triumphant ending to the ten-day, near-perfect mission of Apollo 9 cleared the way for the final U.S. thrust toward a manned landing on the moon.

A worldwide TV audience had a close-up view of the astronauts when they splashed down and as they emerged from the bobbing spaceship they call Gumdrop. As the Guadalcanal moved to within 100 yards of the spacecraft, TV cameras on the deck zoomed in to show Astronauts David Scott, Russell Schweickart and James McDivitt tumbling into inflated rubber rafts--a surprisingly awkward operation after the precise maneuvers and sophisticated procedure of the space flight.

When a recovery helicopter descended to lower the cagelike sling used to lift the astronauts aboard, the draft from its rotor whipped the ocean swells and pushed the floating spacecraft and attached rafts away. Again and again, as NASA the helicopter made passes, frogmen reached for and missed the dangling cage.

When Astronaut Scott was finally able to hitch a ride after ten misses, the cage swung widely back and forth in stomach-churning arcs as it was lifted to the helicopter. Astronaut Schweickart, the next passenger, was splashed through the water on the first swing of the sling. Astronaut McDivitt was forced to take refuge on the flotation collar when the wind flipped over his raft. McDivitt got a thorough soaking and dizzying spin before he was lifted safely aboard the helicopter. Although the astronauts were probably never in real danger, the recovery provided exciting counterpoint to Apollo 9's final days of routine space flight.

Bright Planet. After completing their crucial rendezvous (TIME, March 14) and sending the Lunar Module they call Spider off into a looping 4,300-by-l 47-mile orbit, the astronauts were left alone in space with fully 97% of their mission objectives completed. The primary reason for remaining in orbit for another five days was to test the reliability of the Apollo systems. So the astronauts settled back for one of the most relaxed periods of any manned space flight to date, taking rest periods of ten hours or more. "The big events of today," cracked a NASA official on Sunday, "are the sleep cycle and the wake-up period." On Monday, when the crew failed to call Houston at the scheduled hour, flight controllers simply allowed them to sleep on for two more hours.

While they were awake, however, the astronauts made good use of their time to gain experience in navigation and tracking--skills that will be vital for landing Spider on the moon and returning to a lunar-orbit rendezvous with Gumdrop. In addition to plotting their position by star sightings, they became the first spacemen to use the planet Jupiter for a navigational reference. The astronauts also twice sighted and tracked Pegasus, a giant satellite orbited in 1965 to record meteor hits. Pointing their scanning telescope toward earth, they obtained fixes on islands, capes and other landmarks to establish Apollo's precise position in space.

In addition to the spectacular rendezvous and spacewalk shots they took early in the flight (see color pictures), the astronauts conducted photographic experiments designed for the study of earth resources. With four electrically synchronized cameras, they shot pictures of selected areas in the Southwest U.S., Puerto Rico, Mexico and Brazil. Using different filters and film sensitive to a variety of wave lengths of light, the cameras actually saw more of the earth than meets the eye.

From Apollo's infra-red pictures, for example, scientists will be able to distinguish the location of diseased vegetation in areas of healthy growth. On film recording only green light, which best penetrates water, they will be able to see the bottom contours of rivers, lakes and shallow coastal waters.

Conclusions obtained from these and other pictures will be compared to actual conditions on the ground and will help scientists plan an unmanned earth-resources satellite that the Interior Department hopes to launch in 1971 or 1972. With such satellites, officials plan to make a worldwide inventory of natural resources, track ocean currents, measure soil moisture, detect new mineral deposits and derive other benefits that should help pay back the enormous costs of the space program.

Calm Waters. While taking their pictures from a 281-by-113-mile elliptical orbit, the astronauts could see whitecaps in the ocean site southwest of Bermuda that had been chosen for their landing. The weather in the recovery area was so bad, in fact, that controllers avoided mentioning it to the astronauts until McDivitt asked.

"Jim, I hate to bring that up," the controller replied, "but there are fairly heavy winds around 30 knots (34.5 m.p.h.), or so, and waves around 6 to 8 feet."

By midweek, NASA officials decided that recovery would be too dangerous in the tossing waters off Bermuda and ordered the astronauts to stay in orbit for one additional revolution. Thus, as the earth revolved beneath Apollo's orbit, the next pass over the Atlantic enabled the astronauts to splash down far from the storm, in the calm waters off Grand Turk Island, in the Bahamas. There, the only whitecaps were those churned up by recovery helicopters.

After debriefing the astronauts and studying telemetry from Apollo 9, NASA will announce on March 24 whether it will maintain the current schedule (Apollo 10 in mid-May, the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission in mid-July) or move directly to a landing mission in June. Whatever the decision, there is now more confidence than ever that U.S. astronauts will be walking on the surface of the moon this summer.

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