It was no accident that Nasa crashed one of its Apollo 16 rocket boosters onto the moon, but the researchers never intended to lose it. In April of 1972, the booster drifted off and was never seen again, unable to transmit tracking data and reveal its whereabouts because of a malfunction.
Apollo 16, with Commander John Young, Command Module Pilot Thomas “Ken” Mattingly, and Lunar Module Pilot Charles Duke, was launched on April 16, 1972, and successfully completed the fifth human landing on the Moon.
Because of problems with the Apollo CSM main engine, the crew were forced to release the subsatellite in a low lunar orbit of 62 x 62 miles (100 × 100 kilometers) at 10° inclination. The probe eventually crashed onto the lunar surface after 34 days in orbit rather than the planned one year mission.
The Apollo 13 mission was to be the third lunar landing in the program before an on board explosion forced the mission to circle the Moon without landing.
Following the April 16, 1972 launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Apollo 16's translunar coast lasted 74 hours. During the astronauts' fourth day in space, their spacecraft's trajectory took them past the leading edge of the Moon, and as they disappeared behind it.
Apollo 16 lifted off at 12:54 p.m. EST April 16, 1972, from Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Two significant command and service module problems – one en route to the moon and one in lunar orbit – contributed to a delay in landing and a subsequent early termination of the mission by one day.
the fire that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee.
The Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by an explosion and rupture of oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module. The explosion ruptured a line or damaged a valve in the no. 1 oxygen tank, causing it to lose oxygen rapidly.
Two Apollo missions were failures: a 1967 cabin fire killed the entire Apollo 1 crew during a ground test in preparation for what was to be the first crewed flight; and the third landing attempt on Apollo 13 was aborted by an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon, which disabled the CSM Odyssey's electrical power ...
With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth on April 17, 1970.
The spacecraft and parachute system descended in this configuration to water landing. The three parachutes were disconnected and one of the good main parachutes was recovered. The failure occurred abruptly.
The command module of Apollo 13 entered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down on target on April 17 at 1:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. The mission has been referred to as a successful failure, in that all the crew members survived a catastrophic accident.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. On July 20, 1969, humans walked on another world for the first time in history, achieving the goal that President John F. Kennedy had set in 1961, before Americans had even orbited the Earth.
Alongside him were two rookies: Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell and Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa. Though Apollo 14 was a success, it wasn't without some intense troubleshooting of its own.
Shortly after being launched on a rainy day at Kennedy Space Center, Apollo 12 was twice struck by lightning, causing instrumentation problems but little damage. Switching to the auxiliary power supply resolved the data relay problem, saving the mission.
It's the story of the engine that brought those astronauts home, and the chemist who invented it. On April 13, 1970, Gerard Elverum's pintle injector rocket engine fired for 34 seconds to put the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft on a safe path back to Earth.
Apollo 1 was expected to fly to Earth orbit later in 1967 with astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White on board. During a test on the launch pad, however, a fire erupted and rapidly asphyxiated all three astronauts.
For the Apollo 13 mission, the blackout was much longer than normal because the flight path of the spacecraft was unexpectedly at a much shallower angle than normal.
According to the 200-page report, Grissom, Chaffee, and White had died of cardiac arrest from inhaling too much carbon monoxide and falling asleep. All three astronauts were gone long before they sustained burns. It was a horrific way to go nonetheless, and the waves of grief affected everyone in the program.
Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful crewed space mission in NASA's Apollo program, died Tuesday in Houston.
The Apollo 16 landing site was selected to obtain samples of two highland geologic units, the Descartes Formation and the Cayley Formation, which are widespread on the lunar nearside.