posted 09-04-2022 08:43 AM               

Space Cover #666: The First Launch of Our First Moon Rocket

With the launch of the Artemis I mission using our newest moon rocket just around the corner I thought I would highlight the first launch of the Saturn V, our first moon rocket. When President Kennedy challenged NASA and the United States to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960's we had no idea how it would be accomplished. The list of items needing to be developed was huge. We needed engines, boosters, spacecrafts, lunar landers and ground support equipment just to name a few.

The Saturn booster was developed in incremental steps starting with the S-1 booster and the H-1 engine. This led to the Saturn-1B booster and finally the Saturn V booster with the mighty F-1 engines on the first stage to lift the 363 ft tall rocket. NASA also built the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to assemble the various stages and other components of the Saturn V as well as the crawler transport to take the rocket out to the launch pad. Finally Launch Complex 39 was constructed with two launch pads to launch the Saturn V on its way to the moon.

Following the incremental development of the Saturn booster comprising of 10 test flights and then the first 3 Apollo launches using the Saturn 1B to test the S-IVB upper stage and the Apollo spacecraft, all of the work finally came together for the launch of Apollo 4 which is also known as AS-501. Apollo 4 was the first all up test of the Saturn V booster as well as all of the launch support equipment at Launch Complex-39.

The cover pictured commemorates the launch of Apollo 4/AS-501 as the first rocket able to take men to the moon. Postmarked at Cape Canaveral, the cover has the popular Space Craft Covers/Carl Swanson cachet. It is interesting to note that the cachet includes many of the support pieces for Launch Complex-39 including both launch pads, the VAB, the LCC and even the crawlerway path that would lead to the never-built Pad-39C.

Many covers were produced for the Apollo 4 launch. Show us some of your favorites!

posted 09-04-2022 01:21 PM               

The events leading up to Nov. 9, 1967, had been in the making for six years since 1961. Apollo, the fourth Apollo spacecraft, went to the pad (rollout) in late August of that year. While at Pad 39A, four actuators were replaced for most of the first stage F-1 rocket engines in early September.

With this week's disappointment in trying to launch NASA's new Artemis 1 / Orion vehicle to the moon, let us not forgot that it was also a difficult and frustrating period in trying to launch NASA's new Apollo/Saturn V moon rocket. It took lots of hard work and long hours by NASA engineers working together from MSFC and KSC. Some of the media while covering the pre-launch activities questioned rather 501 would ever fly.

During AS-501's CDDT just over a month away from launch, the countdown was halted three times of annoying problems, although problems had been anticipated with a new vehicle, new launch pad and support facilities, GSE, and a different kind of launch team. It took three weeks to complete the CDDT instead of an estimated one week(+).

Issues, procedures, and operations that functioned normally in one countdown rehearsal suddenly became problems during the next. They included cables, fuel cells, a compressor, computers, stage batteries, a helium regulator, a LOX fill-rate measuring probe, and broken sump baffles in the S-II stage.

There were even concerns for potential leaks in the Teflon seal rings and drain valves of the LOX tanks onboard the giant vehicle due to the long time it had been sitting on the pad in the Florida sun. Fortunately, all of those issues and problems were fixed and/or by components that needed to be replaced at the pad within a month's time leading up to a successful liftoff and flight of the world's most powerful rocket at the time. Another first often forgotten about AS-501 was that it had been the first time a NASA space vehicle had been assembled away from its launch site.

posted 09-04-2022 01:27 PM               

Above is a cover postmarked at Cape Canaveral for the launch with a cachet printed by AC Electronics, a Division of General Motors. General Motors AC Electronics provided portions of the Apollo command module’s guidance and control computer.

And below is the Bendix Cachet for this mission, postmarked at KSC. Bendix provided launch support services at KSC for the Apollo Program. Bendix provided a different cover for each Apollo mission from Apollo 4 through Apollo 17 and these are among my most favorite covers. This one features the crawler-transporter for the Saturn V, still in use for Artemis today...

posted 09-04-2022 04:56 PM               

9,685 Apollo 4 ONCs were provided by the KSC post office, as indicated in Ralph Yorio's KSC Philatelic History handbook.