Keeping Apollo on Schedule

Despite technical setbacks, and an increasingly tight budget, NASA seems determined to meet the goal set by President Kennedy seven years ago: a manned U.S. landing on the moon during this decade. Last week Apollo's program director, Lieut. General Samuel C. Phillips, announced a revised schedule that will postpone the manned flight of the glitch-ridden lunar module (LM), and may add a manned flight around the moon to the prelanding missions, yet still place astronauts on the moon before the end of 1969.

NASA is forging ahead with its plans for the first manned test flight of the Apollo spacecraft on Oct. 11. But a De cember mission, in which astronauts were to have rendezvoused and docked their Apollo command ship with an LM, has been pushed back until February by problems in the Grumman-built module. In place of the LM flight, a manned Apollo flight has now been scheduled for December, the first to be powered by the mighty Saturn 5 rocket.

Mascon Troubles. NASA is confident that it can speedily solve the troubles of the LM, which is designed to carry two astronauts to the surface of the moon while the third remains in lunar orbit in the Apollo command module. Tests have shown that most of the LM's troubles are electrical, and technicians at Cape Kennedy are busily rewiring the spacecraft, shielding circuits and replacing switches.

The Apollo program has also received a boost from scientists at the Jet Pro pulsion Laboratory, who recently discovered the cause of unexpected variations in the altitude and speed of earlier unmanned lunar orbiters. Such flight deviations, which could drop a module several miles off target, were caused by local increases in lunar gravity brought about by areas of dense material beneath the five circular maria, or "seas." The concentrations of mass, called "mascons," may have been caused by the impact of large meteors, which generated enough heat to melt material below the surface of the moon and form regions of high density.

Now that NASA is aware of the mas cons, said General Phillips, it can alter orbital paths and navigational equations, thus eliminating another gnawing worry for the Apollo planners.

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