 the Cape facilities and launch during the seventh week, there was some feeling that the schedule for the launch of Apollo 4* was extremely tight. Huntsville was still worried about the S-II stage of the launch vehicle, which had gone through, a rather tough year of testing in 1966. And Houston, as a result of fire-related changes, was fighting the age-old problem of fattening spacecraft. On top of this, the lunar module was still having ascent engine instability problems, also left over from the preceding year. (42)
The next month, in July, Mueller and an entourage visited the North American plant at Downey* to see what the contractor had done about the Thompson Board's recommendations. As they walked around the manufacturing area, Mueller seemed generally pleased with progress. (43) Within a very few months, that progress was to be demonstrated in a very satisfactory manner.
Apollo 4 and Saturn V
Birds, reptiles, and animals of higher and lower order that gathered at the Florida Wildlife Game Refuge (also known by the aliases of Merritt Island Launch Annex and Kennedy Space Center) at 7:00 in the morning of 9 November 1967 received a tremendous jolt. When the five engines in the first stage of the Saturn V ignited, there was a man-made earthquake and shockwave. As someone later remarked, the question was not whether the Saturn V had risen, but whether Florida had sunk.
Apollo-Saturn mission 501, now officially Apollo 4--the first all-up test of the three--stage Saturn V--was on its way. On its top rested spacecraft 017, a Block I model with many Block II features, such as an improved heatshield and a new hatch. The aim, of the mission, in addition to testing the structural integrity and compatibility of the spacecraft--launch vehicle combination, was to boost the command and service modules into an elliptical orbit and then power-drive the command module (in, an area over Hawaii) into the atmosphere as though it were returning from the moon to the earth. Apollo 4 also carrier a mockup of the lunar module. Weighing more than 2.7 million kilograms when fully fueled with Liquid oxygen and a kerosene mixture called RP-1, the Saturn, V first stage generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. (44)
The flight went almost exactly as planned, and the huge booster rammed its payload into a parking orbit 185 kilometers above the earth. After two revolutions, the S-IVB third stage propelled the spacecraft outward to more than 17 000 kilometers, where it cut loose from the S-IVB and started falling earthward. Then the service module fired, to send the spacecraft out to 18 000 kilometers for a four-and-a-half hour soak in the supercold and hot radiation of space. Telemetry signals noted no degradation in cabin environment. with the spacecraft nose pointed toward the earth, the service module engine fired again. When the spacecraft reached the 122,000-meter atmospheric reentry zone, it was blunt-end forward and traveling at a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour.
Seamen on the U.S.S. Bennington, the prime recovery ship in the Pacific, watched the descending spacecraft, with its parachutes in full bloom, until it landed 16 kilometers away about nine hours after its launch from Florida. Swimmers jumped from helicopters to assist in the recovery of spacecraft 017, which took about two hours. Technically, managerially, and psychologically, Apollo 4 was an important and successful mission, especially in view of the number of firsts it tackled. It was the first flight of the first and second stages of the Saturn V (the S-IVB stage had flown on the Saturn IB launch vehicles), the first launch of the complete Saturn V, the first restart of the S-IVB in orbital flight, the first liftoff from Complex 39, the first flight test of the Block II command module heatshield, the first flight of even a simulated lunar module, and so on. The fact that everything worked so well and with so little trouble gave NASA a confident feeling, as Phillips phrased it, that "Apollo (was] on the way to the moon. (45)
Even before spacecraft 017 had set out on i