Page 40 - Apollo Moonships

38 On bOard apOllO mOOnships
THE APOLLO
MOTHER SHIP
The Apollo Program involved approximately 400,000 engineers, scientists, and workers over a decade. As a result of their job, the world saw some of the most amazing machines ever built. One
of them was the formidable Apollo mother ship, designed to be operated by three astronauts and perform Earth orbit missions, translunar coasts, and lunar orbit flights. The 11 manned missions of the Apollo Program used this orbiter, which traveled to the moon nine times and always brought its crew safely to Earth—on one occasion, even seriously damaged.
APOLLO MOTHER SHIP CHARACTERISTICS
The Apollo mother ship consisted of two sections: the Command Module (CM) and the Service Module (SM). The first of them was a pressurized conic capsule, which housed the crew and much of the hardware and software necessary to navigate the vessel in space, reenter it in the Earth’s atmosphere, and complete a secure splashdown. The CM measured only 11.4 feet tall
and 12.8 feet in diameter across the base, but was a complex structure with more than fifteen miles of wires and 2 million functional parts (by comparison, a car has only 3 000 components). However, it operated with only 2 000 watts of electricity, the same energy required by an ordinary oven. On the other hand, the SM was a very simple 24.6-to 12.8-foot-wide unpressurized cylinder. Inside, it was divided into six pie-shaped sections used to shelter
the propellant tanks, the electrical power generators, the reaction control thrusters, the main engine, and other critical systems. The CM and SM remained attached together during most of the flight, forming a single entity known by the acronym CSM.
APOLLO 17 CSM
The Apollo 17 CSM America was photographed on December 19, 1972, from the LEM Challenger during a rendezvous maneuver in lunar orbit. Note the reflection of the lunar surface on the CSM outer structure (heat shield).
APOLLO MOTHER SHIP CONFIGURATION
1 Docking probe
2 Main parachute (1 of 3)
3 Drogue parachute mortar (1 of 2)
4 Forward pitch engines
5 Crew access hatch
6 Extravehicular Activity (EVA) handle
7 Roll engines (1 of 2)
8 Aft pitch engines (1 of 2)
9 Aft Electrical power subsystem radiators engines
10 SM sector 1 (empty)
11 Reaction Control System (RCS)
assembly (4 locations)
12 RCS Helium tank
13 RCS Fuel tank (1 of 2)
14 RCS oxidizer tank (1 of 2)
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