Today is a red-letter day in space history, with a failed flight that still featured some success, and a big success that followed on the heels of a tragic failure.
Fifty years ago, October 11, 1958, NASA launched Pioneer-1 — the first launch by NASA, which was less than two weeks old. Its target was the moon, but a launch vehicle malfunction sent the spacecraft into a ballistic trajectory instead. It reached an apogee of 70,700 miles altitude and returned some scientific observations of our planet’s magnetic field before it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere on the 13th.
Ten years later, on October 11, 1968, NASA launched Apollo-7. Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham checked out the newly redesigned Command Module — redesigned, that is, after the fatal fire that destroyed Apollo-1 — in the first manned flight of the Apollo program. This mission achieved a string of spaceflight firsts:
- First flight test of the Apollo Command/Service Module, with the first rendezvous & station-keeping maneuvers
- First launch of a three member crew
- First launch from Launch Complex 34
- First crew-assisted flight of the Saturn-IB rocket
- First live network TV broadcast from space during a crewed space flight
- First time astronauts experienced head colds during a mission
- First flight of the Apollo space suits
- First crew to drink coffee in space
Wally Schirra was one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, and Apollo-7 was his third and final space flight. Here’s a brief and amusing tribute to Schirra and particularly to the flight of Apollo-7 and Schirra’s key role in redesigning the Command Module.
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