Apollo spacecraft program office

Without more details, it is still not possible to know. That was primarily George Low, whose records point to the Apollo schedule being the primary influence.

American intelligence assets focused on the Soviet Union were getting increasingly capable. CIA and NSA listening posts around the world were gathering up signals from Soviet spacecraft as well as monitoring the movements of ships used to track spacecraft and recover them from the water.

Much of the information on this intelligence remains classified, although it is slowly coming out. The rocket lacks a spacecraft on its nose. The date of the photo is unknown, and it has been degraded by multiple reproductions, but the image provides a stark indication of just how good the intelligence information on Soviet space capabilities had become by the late s.

Photos like that, shown to a select group of NASA officials, would have provided useful intelligence data on Soviet capabilities, although not necessarily their intentions.

The preponderance of evidence still supports the conclusion that it was the Apollo schedule that drove the decision, not specific Soviet actions. And an intriguing set of questions remain unanswered: just what did the CIA know about the Soviet Zond flight plans, when did they know it, what did they tell NASA, and when?

Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1 cox. Note: we are temporarily moderating all comments subcommitted to deal with a surge in spam.

Time Magazine cover from early December and the unused printing plate for the early January edition of Newsweek in the event that the Apollo 8 mission failed and the astronauts died. NASA managers became increasingly cautious right at the time they needed to take big risks to meet the end of decade lunar landing goal.

The fire also forced Apollo management to reconsider whether it was worth rescheduling the Apollo 1 Block I shakedown flight at all.

While the Apollo 1 investigation wore on, the structure of the whole lunar program was called into question. By the end of April, the charred spacecraft had been disassembled to find the root of the accident and the pieces of Apollo were slowly coming back together. The decision was made to cancel all manned Block I flights. It was at this time that the agency also made a decision about how to name its Apollo missions.

The widows of the Apollo 1 crew asked that NASA retire the mission designation in honour of their husbands so they might keep the flight they never got to fly. NASA, of course, agreed.

Continuing this naming scheme, there were two options, both of which Mueller outlined in a letter to Deputy Director of the Manned Spaceflight Centre George Low. The agency could proceed in sequence and name the first mission after the fire Apollo 2, or it could count the unmanned Saturn IB test flights as part of the Apollo series and retroactively rename them to have Apollo designations.

What happened, and how did the agency recover? On January 27, , spacecraft was mated to its service module and Saturn IB rocket, and the whole stack was on the launch pad. The hatch was closed, the cabin was pressurized, and the crew and launch teams and flight controllers took their stations at the Cape and in Mission Control in Houston. At , the crew reported a fire in the spacecraft. Flames could be seen through the small porthole window on TV monitors in Mission Control.