Preparation For Flight
The first piece of the rocket to arrive at the Cape was the S-IB stage on August 14, 1965 by the barge Promise. It was built by Chrysler and featured eight H-1 engines built by Rocketdyne. The S-IVB second stage arrived next on September 18. The Instrument Unit that would control the launch vehicle arrived October 22, the Command Module arrived three days later and the Service Module on October 27.
The first stage was erected at the pad soon after arriving at Cape Canaveral. The second stage joined it on October 1. After fixing some problems in the Instrument Unit it was mated to the S-IVB on October 25. The CSM was mated on December 26.
The first problem encountered by NASA came on October 7. The RCA 110A computer which would test the rocket and thus automating the process was ten days behind schedule meaning that it would not be at the Cape before November 1. This meant that by the middle of October little could be done at the pad. When the computer finally did arrive it continued to have problems with the punch cards and also the capacitors that did not operate well under a protective coating. In the end however the testing of the launch vehicle was still on schedule.
Testing was running around the clock during December. Technicians were testing the CSM's fuel systems during the day and the testing was running on the rocket at night.
There was even an instance of a variant of the Y2K bug in the computer. As it ran past midnight, when the time changed from 2400 to 0001 the computer could not handle it and "turned into a pumpkin" according to an interview with Frank Bryan, a Kennedy Space Center Launch Vehicle Operations Engineering staff member.
In the end the testing regimen slowly completed and the plugs-out tests were completed proving that the rocket could function by itself.
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Famous quotes containing the words preparation for, preparation and/or flight:
“Living each day as a preparation for the next is an exciting way to live. Looking forward to something is much more fun than looking back at something—and much more constructive. If we can prepare ourselves so that we never have to think, “Oh, if I had only known, if I had only been ready,” our lives can really be the great adventure we so passionately want them to be.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)