Dress Rehearsal

Though barely two months have elapsed since the successful flight of Apollo 9, the U.S. is poised for yet another space epic. At Cape Kennedy last week, a giant Saturn 5 stood on Pad 39B, and an astronaut crew and NASA technicians methodically ran through a mock countdown in preparation for the launch of Apollo 10 on May 18.

The forthcoming eight-day mission is a dress rehearsal for July's lunar landing attempt. It is easily the most complex and ambitious flight yet scheduled for the U.S. manned space program. Astronauts Thomas Stafford, Eugene Cernan and John Young will spend 61 hours and 35 minutes in lunar orbit, three times longer than the Apollo 8 astronauts. Stafford and Cernan will separate the lunar module from the command module and fly it for the first time in the lunar environment, some 240,000 miles from home. During the LM's solo flight, it will descend from the command module's orbiting altitude of 69 miles to a height of only 50,000 ft. above the moon, the closest that man has been to the lunar surface.

Spotlight on Snoopy. Then why not go all the way with Apollo 10? George Low, manager of the Apollo spacecraft program, explains that all Apollo systems have not been tested together in the vicinity of the moon. There has been no rendezvous in lunar orbit, no testing of the LM's landing radar or of the entire communications system at lunar distances. In addition, NASA scientists are recalculating trajectories and orbital paths to take into account irregularities in the lunar gravitational field that caused Apollo 8 to stray from its course. "We looked at all these things," says Low, "and we decided that we had to fly once more before we take the big step of landing on the moon."

Even without a landing, the flight of Apollo 10 promises to have spectator appeal. Command Pilot Stafford openly lobbied for the installation of a color TV camera aboard the spacecraft and finally won approval. "A color shot of the spidery LM patched gold and black against a background of the gray, cratered moon would be fantastic," he says. Eleven 15-minute telecasts have already been scheduled for the flight.

There will be other innovations. In line with NASA's new policy of allowing frivolous radio call names for spacecraft, the Apollo 10 crew has decided to call the command module "Charlie Brown" and the lunar module "Snoopy," after the characters in the Charles Schulz comic strip.

All three astronauts seem voluble and anxious to describe their forthcoming adventure as it unfolds. "We can't show you television from 50,000 ft. above the moon because we don't have it on the LM," says Cernan. "But we certainly hope to share the view through words and tell you what it really looks like." It may be only a dress rehearsal, but Apollo 10 promises to monopolize the attention of a worldwide audience from its liftoff in Florida to its splashdown off Samoa in the Pacific.

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