Space: Perfection Plus 1 %

Although it rose no higher than 266 miles above the earth during its eleven-day mission in space, Apollo 7 and its three-man crew last week lifted U.S. space officials to new heights of optimism. “Apollo 7 goes down in my book as the perfect mission,” said Lieut.

General Samuel Phillips, Apollo program director. “We achieved 101% of our objectives in this flight. This is a very major step toward the manned lunar landing, and I have every confidence that it will be accomplished by the end of next year.”

Before they splashed down in the Atlantic 230 miles south of Bermuda, Apollo 7 Astronauts Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele had completed 163 revolutions of the earth, com piled more man-hours in space than all of the manned Russian flights combined.

They conducted scores of experiments, produced the first U.S. live TV shows from space and rendezvoused with their discarded Saturn 4B booster (see color pictures). More important, by checking out Apollo’s control, navigation, communications and life-support systems, they confirmed that the craft was completely spaceworthy. If no unexpected difficulties are uncovered as technicians decipher the mountain of data that ac cumulated during the flight, an Apollo 8 crew composed of Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders may be sent into orbit around the moon with in as little as six weeks.

Buoyant Bags. Successful though it was, the mission ended in tension. For several minutes after splashdown, there were fears that an accident at sea had nullified Apollo’s triumph in space. After a last voice transmission by Command Pilot Schirra from only 200 feet above the surface, Apollo lapsed into unscheduled silence; recovery helicopters from the aircraft carrier Essex flapped blindly through rainsqualls and fog in a vain search for the spacecraft. Then, Ap suddenly, the helicopters reported that they had picked up Apollo’s homing signals. The spacecraft was only a third of a mile from its selected landing spot.

Apollo’s temporary silence was easily explained. As the cone-shaped spacecraft hit the ocean, it was capsized by a combination of gusty winds and choppy waves. With the capsule in a nose-down position, its submerged antennas were useless. But the astronauts, trained for such contingencies, had to inflate three flotation bags attached to Apollo’s nose. As the bags became buoyant, they swung the nose toward the surface until the spacecraft flipped upright, exposing the antennas and allowing radio transmissions to be resumed.

Ferried to the Essex by helicopter, the three heavily bearded astronauts walked unsteadily, obviously weary after their long confinement. But NASA doctors reported that despite colds, loss of weight (Schirra 41 Ibs., Cunningham 8, Eisele 10), and muscles weakened by inactivity, the three space travelers were in good health —and in better humor than they had been for most of the week. The irritability that they had displayed during exchanges with ground controllers, said the doctors, was a natural consequence of long confinement, a rather humdrum flight and troublesome head colds. NASA’s Paul Haney had another explanation: “Something happens to a man when he grows a beard,” he quipped. “Right away he wants to protest.”

Fogged Windows. The space doctors’ worst fear—that the cold-plagued astronauts would suffer ear damage during re-entry—was not realized. As Apollo’s cabin pressure was raised from the 5.3 Ibs. per sq. in. maintained during space flight to sea-level pressure of 14.7 p.s.i., the astronauts protected their ears by removing their helmets and performing the “Valsalva maneuver” (named for its inventor, the 18th century Italian anatomist Antonio Valsalva). Holding their noses, closing their mouths and trying vigorously to exhale through their nostrils, they forced air through their clogged Eustachian tubes to keep the pressure in their middle ears equal to the increasing cabin pressure. The tactic worked perfectly, preventing pain and possible rupture of their eardrums.

NASA officials reported that, like its crew, the Apollo spaceship experienced only the most minor ailments during the 260-hour eight-minute flight. Some of the spacecraft windows fogged over for still-unexplained reasons; an oxygen-flow sensor misbehaved and unnecessarily flashed a red light; batteries did not recharge as fast or as fully as expected; current overloads twice tripped circuit breakers, cutting off electrical power until the crew reset the breakers. The otherwise flawless performance was a tribute to the corrective program instituted by NASA and North American Rockwell Corp., Apollo’s prime contractor, after the disastrous Cape Kennedy fire that killed three astronauts in January 1967.

The highlights of the flight were the docking maneuver and precise rendezvous with the discarded S-4B booster, and the eight successful burns of the service module’s powerful propulsion engine. These operations will be essential on a lunar landing mission. While en route to the moon, the joined Apollo command and service modules must dock with the lunar module (LM), which will be carried inside the opened flaps of the S-4B. Later, should the LM become stranded in a lunar orbit on its way to or from the surface of the moon, Apollo would have to rendezvous and dock with it in order to rescue the two astronauts aboard. Even more important, the propulsion engine will have to fire without fail to place Apollo in lunar orbit, and fire again to kick the spacecraft back toward the safety of the earth.