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Two tragedies block the race in space

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The Race to the Moon Chronicled in Stamps, Postcards, and Postmarks

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Abstract

With the last mission of the Gemini program successfully completed, NASA could now concentrate all of its efforts towards President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. George Mueller, brought in to facilitate concurrent development of the many needed systems, had begun to introduce radical management changes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mueller’s approach would turn out to be a winning one. After the first two unmanned tests of Apollo 4 (SA-501) on November 9, 1967 and Apollo 6 (SA-502) on April 4, 1968, the third Saturn V would launch Apollo 8 on its lunar orbital mission at Christmas 1968, and the sixth would send Apollo 11 on its way to the first Moon landing. Von Braun would later acknowledge that without Mueller’s approach, NASA would not have landed astronauts on the Moon before Kennedy’s deadline.

  2. 2.

    Having not really wanted the scientist-astronauts in the corps in the first place, Deke Slayton was quick to take advantage of the fact that Graveline was filing a divorce case at the time of his selection. “Worried that the divorce procedure could distract him from his new commitments,” Slayton did not hesitate to remove Graveline from the corps, acting so quickly that he did not even have time to appear in the first group photo. The scientist-astronauts, in “John Wayne’s space frontier” would have bigger handicaps to overcome than just the usual new-guy-on-the-block syndrome (Cunningham [2003], p. 298). The first of the remaining five to fly in space would be Jack Schmitt, on the last Apollo mission, Apollo 17.

  3. 3.

    Officially, ‘Apollo 1’ was used retrospectively to designate the unfortunate mission of Grissom , White and Chaffee , at the request of Grissom’s widow Betty in 1967.

  4. 4.

    Officially, no Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 missions exist.

  5. 5.

    No Saturn rocket ever failed at launch: a record still unparalleled in space history.

  6. 6.

    In his book, Alexei Leonov commented: “We discussed the Apollo 1 fire among ourselves a great deal. From a professional point of view, I viewed the deaths of the three American astronauts as a sacrifice which would later save the lives of others. But I was also very angry at how stubborn the American engineers were in continuing to use a pure oxygen atmosphere in their spacecraft. I couldn’t understand why they had not switched to the system we adopted after the death of Valentin Bondarenko : regenerating oxygen during a flight.

    “The Americans must have known of the tragedy that had befallen Bondarenko in a pure oxygen environment. He had been given a big funeral, and the American intelligence services would not have been doing their job properly if they had not informed NASA about what had happened.” (Scott-Leonov [2004], p. 192.) Also see the footnote on page 73 in Chapter 2. It is hard to find evidence that Bondarenko was given a big funeral. What is known is that his tombstone merely mentions that he was a pilot, not a cosmonaut.

  7. 7.

    National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) are United States classified documents prepared for policymakers on particular national security issues. They are reviewed and approved for dissemination by the National Intelligence Board (NIB), which comprises the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and other senior leaders within the intelligence community, and present what intelligence analysts estimate may be the course of future events. They are read by the President, his advisors, and national security staffers, as well as heads and assistant-heads of national agencies including the FBI and the Atomic Energy Commission.

  8. 8.

    A very accurate analysis of the flight of Soyuz 1 is provided by Sven Grahn in “Sven’s space place” (Grahn svengrahn.pp.se]) under “An analysis of the Soyuz-1 flight” (accessed in February 2018.)

  9. 9.

    In Deputy Chief Designer Chertok’s investigation into the matter in the early 1990s, he could not find anyone still living who could remember why the covers had been left off.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Italian Astrophilately Society, Villarbasse, Italy

    Umberto Cavallaro

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  1. Umberto Cavallaro
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Cavallaro, U. (2018). Two tragedies block the race in space. In: The Race to the Moon Chronicled in Stamps, Postcards, and Postmarks. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92153-2_5

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