Americans gathered around their televisions 50 years ago today, Oct. 11, 1968 as NASA engineers worried about winds of more than 20 knots hampering the launch of the first-ever manned Saturn 5 rocket.
The Saturn V rocket, taller than a 38-story building, weighing 6.5 million pounds, sat ready for launch at Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 34. According to reports filed at the time, technicians were nervous too as this was the first-time astronauts would be aboard this massive, 361-foot rocket.
NASA engineers determined that the Saturn V rocket would eventually have to carry a payload of more than 90,000 pounds into space to land a man on the moon, requiring massive thrust from two giant rocket stages. A company in Seal Beach had landed the contract to build the second stage of the rocket, and many people were now focused on this mission.
According to family members of workers involved in the Seal Beach program, the excitement was especially high in Seal Beach as hundreds of employees of North American Aviation, now a division of Boeing, watched and waited to see their work lift America into space, the final frontier.
The father of a Los Alamitos High School history teacher, Rex Moses, was an engineer who helped design the rocket engines that went into the Saturn V stage two built in Seal Beach.
The teams in Seal Beach, which included North American Aviation, their vendors and sub-contractors, were tasked with the mission to engineer and build the massive second stage of the rocket. The United States was then at war. Not a hot war with hostilities, but a cold war struggling for world dominance with the Soviet Union.
The Soviets had grabbed an early lead in space with Sputnik and President John F. Kennedy had rallied the nation with his famous challenge on May 25, 1961.
“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving this goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to this earth.”
Citizens around the nation were especially nervous as an accident had placed the future of the growing NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in doubt. Just 10 months earlier, a tragic fire had taken the lives of three astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee and severely set the Apollo program back on its heels.
Without a flawless performance of Apollo 7, Americans inherently seem to have known that the country could have easily lost their space race momentum.
Since the fatal fire, the command module and escape hatch had been completely redesigned, yet it had never been tested in flight.
The giant stage was ready on time, was shipped in April by truck down Bay Boulevard, (now Seal Beach Boulevard), taken very carefully to what is now the Naval Weapons Station, loaded onto barges and shipped through the Panama Canal to Alabama for testing.
Once testing was complete, the Seal Beach made Stage two was eventually delivered to Kennedy Space Center where the stage II rocket was laid in place, ready for launch. Despite the 20-knot winds, the order for liftoff was given. At 11:02:45 a.m., the Saturn V rocket roared, and buildings shook within a three-mile radius. The spacecraft crew consisted of commander Walter M. Schirra, Jr., command module pilot Donn F. Eisele, and Walter Cunningham as lunar module pilot.
Apollo 7 carried a lunar module pilot, but no lunar module.
Within seconds, the giant J-2 engines on stage one began to lift the six-million-pound rocket off the ground as people around America held their breath and watched the giant fireball shoot straight into the sky.
The Saturn V Second Stage, constructed in Seal Beach, contained five Rocketdyne J-2 engines. After the first stage was discarded, the second stage was designed to burn for 6.111 minutes, with its five engines sending the astronauts and the craft to a height of 115 statute miles, 936 miles downrange and reaching its critical speed 15,500 miles per hour.
There were concerns about the massive heat and the insulation, but the engines burned effortlessly to exponentially push Saturn V, and the astronauts, into deep space.
After Stage II had done its job, it jettisoned from the remaining stages, as the payload would then be powered by another local stage, built by workmen in Huntington Beach; a single J-2 engine that would eventually power men to the moon and back.
According to NASA, the primary objectives of Apollo 7, were to thoroughly test the spacecraft systems in a mission lasting up to 11 days.
During the mission, the crew practiced rendezvous operations with the spent S-IVB stage of the launch vehicle (built in Huntington Beach) and conducted eight burns of the Service Module’s propulsion system, including the final de-orbit burn to bring spacecraft and crew back to Earth.
Much of the data and information gathered from Apollo 7, which lifted off fifty years ago, helped the entire NASA space program succeed.
In the end, the Apollo 7 mission was a complete success, as most systems performed flawlessly. NASA, of course, would go on to launch 13 giant Apollo rockets into space that eventually achieved President Kennedy’s goal of planting the American flag on the moon.
In fact, exactly 2,969 days after President Kennedy’s famous speech, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous phrase, “one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind” as he planted the American flag in the Sea of Tranquility on July 11, 1969. The men and women of North American aviation, their vendors, contractors, etc. had done their job and secured their place in American history.
Sadly, the famous building on Seal Beach Boulevard where the stage II rockets were built will soon disappear, as officials have announced that it will come down in early 2019.
Next week, we will profile how the contract for Stage II landed in Seal Beach, we will provide a detailed description of the project and speak to some of the locals involved in it.
Some parts of the article are in error. You incorrectly state that the Apollo 7 mission was launched with a Saturn V ticket. The mission was launched atop a Saturn 1B as shown in the photograph. The first launch of a manned mission by a Saturn V was Apollo 8.
You also state that the US was not involved in a hot war with hostilities but a cod war. We were involved in a hot war, the one in Vietnam.