Fiery Beginning of a Final Journey

IT was like a scene from Dante's Inferno. An incredible belch of flames against the night, ominous clouds of steam and smoke, and finally a thunderous, earth-shaking roar that assaulted the senses and numbed the minds of the 500,000 spectators gathered on nearby Florida beaches and highways. As the Apollo 17 Saturn rocket began to lift ponderously from Cape Kennedy's launch pad 39A, the entire sky was filled with an orange-pink glow, a false dawn against which gulls and pelicans wheeled and fluttered in aimless confusion. The awesome spectacle marked a fitting beginning to the mission of Apollo 17, which at week's end was approaching the moon, carrying Astronauts Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt and Ron Evans on what may well be man's last visit to the lunar surface for decades to come.

Even before the launch, there seemed to be a mystical, almost religious quality to preparations for the last Apollo mission. As the astronauts were driven through the early-evening darkness from their crew quarters to the launch pad, their path was illuminated by a spotlight shining like a guiding star from a helicopter hovering overhead. At the site, the 36-story rocket gleamed starkly white, lit by searchlight beams that radiated from the pad, forming a crown of light. Nature added to the display: flashes of lightning glowed within distant clouds, and an occasional meteor streaked through the stars in the clear skies above the cape.

Shortly before Apollo 17 was to have been launched, many spectators were startled by a burst of flame that seemed to come prematurely from the base of the rocket. The countdown clocks suddenly stopped only 30 seconds before the scheduled liftoff. To the disappointment of the throng at the cape and the millions more watching over television, Launch Control announced curtly: "We have had a cut-off." Never before during the Apollo program had a countdown been halted so close to blast-off time.

As NASA technicians frantically traced the source of the trouble, rumors swept the cape that there had been an explosion in the first stage of the rocket. Actually, NASA explained later, the early burst of flame had been a burn-off of excess fuel: the pumps had continued to run briefly after the shutdown. The real problem, it turned out, was a defect in the Terminal Countdown Sequencer, which supervises the complex operations in the last minutes before a launch.

At precisely T-minus-2 min. 47 sec., the computer should have ordered pressurization of the liquid oxygen tanks in the Saturn 5's third-stage booster. But because two tiny electrical contacts in the computer's miniaturized circuitry did not touch, the signal was not given. That failure was noticed by an alert launch controller, who immediately threw a manual switch that started the necessary procedure. The computer, programmed only to check its own automatic signals, assumed that pressurization had not begun and stopped the countdown at T30 sec.

It took the launch controllers at Cape Kennedy only a short time to discover the failing and to work out a simple solution: on the subsequent countdown, they would feed a false signal into the computer, duping it into "thinking" that it had given the pressurization order and thus avoiding another automatic shutdown. Yet it was not until 2 hr. 40 min. after the scheduled launch time that the fiery lift-off took place. As Apollo rose above a pillar of hot white gas, even Gene Cernan, a veteran of Gemini 9 and Apollo 10, was impressed. "Let me tell you," he radioed, "this night launch is something to behold!"

"You're Go." Heading toward orbit round the earth, Apollo was visible to the naked eye for some six minutes. Spectators witnessed the first stage's orange jet turning blue-green just before shutdown, the ignition of the second stage and finally, like a bright star going out, the disappearance of the rocket. After two loops of the earth, the astronauts got the word they were waiting for: "Guys, you're go for TLI [translunar injection]." After firing their third-stage Saturn 4-B rocket and gaining additional velocity to make up time lost in the launch delay, the astronauts pulled out of orbit and began their three-day voyage to the moon.

From that point on, the mission seemed routine, marred only by the minor glitches that provide almost a relief from the boredom of space flight. For no apparent reason, the spacecraft's master alarm went off periodically, flashing a red warning light and giving off a high-pitched whine. Each time, after checking their instruments, the astronauts shut off the alarm.

With only minor worries to distract them, the astronauts were soon so relaxed that Houston had difficulties wakening them on Saturday morning. After playing the University of Kansas fight song three times to arouse Alumnus Evans (who was assigned to receive the wake-up), Mission Control made seven verbal calls, used a buzzer once and finally sent a screeching signal through the spacecraft. That did it. "We're asleep," groused Cernan. "That's the understatement of the year," replied Capcom in Houston.

Thoroughly refreshed, Apollo 17's crew made final preparations for heading into lunar orbit on Sunday and descending to the Taurus-Littrow site on Monday to begin man's most ambitious and potentially most rewarding expedition to the moon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.