THE SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
79th Year, No.13
The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
Friday, July 25, 1969
All hail return of Columbia, Gem of the Universe!!!
ABOARD USS HORNET (UPI)—Apollo 11's astronauts, their footprints stamped forever in history, splashed down in the south Pacific to make good America's commitment to walk on the moon in the 1960's.
President Nixon headed the welcoming committee aboard this aircraft carrier 1,000 miles southwest of Honolulu.
The explorer's epic voyage ended at 12:50 p.m. EDT. Ahead lay 18 days of isolation as a guarantee they brought no germs back from their walk on the moon's surface.
Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., blazed back through the atmosphere after nearly a million miles in space to complete the goal President John F. Kennedy set for the nation eight years ago.
"This is Apollo 11. Everybody take your sweet time. We're doing all right in here." Collins said as frogmen swarmed around them in the water and aircraft circled overhead.
The nation's chief space official said the Russians would duplicate the feat within 18 months, and warned his countrymen not to sacrifice their leadership in space by "turning inward."
Nixon watched, his face lighted by the first rays of dawn, and frequently grinning broadly, from the flag bridge of this prime recovery ship.
The astronauts in the command ship they named Columbia shot straight in from the moon, plowed into the earth's atmosphere in a blazing fireball, and floated down on three big parachutes into the ocean.
"Splashdown, splashdown," a helicopter pilot radioed.
The spacecraft, as Apollo craft have frequently done in the past, flipped upside down and it took several minutes for flotation bags around its top to pull it upright again.
Swimmers dropped into the water from a big SH-3D "Sea King" helicopter and deployed a sea anchor around the rolling spacecraft at 1:01 p.m. EDT.
"The crew is excellent," came the word from a hovering helicopter.
The flotation collar was attached at 1:05 p.m. and three frogmen in the water inflated it.
One helicopter reported that the spacecraft was less than 10 miles from the Hornet.
Nixon watched the operation intently, alternately peering out into the deep blue-black sky and watching through binoculars.
Sailors lined the rails of the Hornet, dressed in their whites.
Although the spacecraft was sighted in its
flaming approach by recovery aircraft and fleetingly by sailors on the Hornet itself, it was not visible on television from the carrier, and the splashdown occurred too far away from the carrier to be seen.
Nixon was joined by astronaut Frank Borman, and space and government officials including Dr. Thomas O. Paine, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Adm. John S. McCain, Jr., commander of U.S. Pacific forces.
Paine told newsmen Russia would probably be on the moon, too, within 18 months and America could not afford to turn away from the space program toward its internal problems.
"Our condition is excellent," Collins said from Columbia as the astronauts went into the most complete medical quarantine in history from the moment their hatch was opened by a frogman in the ocean.
The frogman, Lt. Clancey Hatleberg, 25, of Chippeway Falls, Wis., opened it and handed through coverall garments which filtered the astronauts breath and sealed them completely, before they went off to enter an aluminum quarantine trailer on the deck.
The 60 pounds of lunar rocks and dust they brought back from the moon were to be taken later from their spacecraft and sped to the U.S. Space Center near Houston, Tex. for analysis by the world's top scientists.
Fifteen minutes before Apollo 11 entered the atmosphere, the astronauts fired explosive bolts and kicked their service module loose to burn up in the air. Aldrin told ground controllers they saw it "going by," slowly rotating.
"You're still looking mighty fine here," ground communicator Ron Evans told the spacemen after the separation. "You're clear for landing."
"You're looking mighty fine to us," Evans radioed the crew just before blackout.
"See you shortly," came Aldrin's voice.
Columbia slammed into the first fringes of air 400,000 feet high northeast of Australia traveling 24,600 miles per hour at 12:35 p.m. EDT. Electrically charged particles, ripped from the superheated air, enveloped the spacecraft and cut off radio communication with the ground.
Engineers first encountered the problems of friction-generated heat when they built airplanes to go twice the speed of sound. The early days of the space age brought more problems with military guided missiles. They first tried streamlining.
"Half the heat generated by friction was going into the missiles." said Harry Julian Allen of that
approach to the problem. He was an aeronautics engineer at the Ames Research Center then.
"I reasoned we had to deflect the heat into the air and let it dissipate. Therefore streamlined shapes were the worse possible; they had to be blunt."
The blunt end plows into the air first and as the temperature builds rapidly to around 5,000 degrees,the special heat-shield material boils off in superheated gases. The shape of the spacecraft spews the gas out and away from the spaceship and its precious cargo.
Inside it's like sitting in an air conditioned office—if the spacecraft hits that layer of air at the right angle.
The hole in the sky—about 30 miles in diameter is the critical target. At Apollo 11's speed-24,- 000 miles per hour—a miscalculation could be fatal.
Too sharp an angle would push the temperatures higher than the craft could stand and the buffeting of the air would break it up.
At too shallow an angle, Apollo 11 would skip off like a stone on water into a long looping orbit. The astronauts jettison the bulk of their supplies before re-entry and they would run out of oxygen before they got close enough to try again.
The spacecraft, a blazing fireball in the night sky, had already been spotted by tracking aircraft from the recovery fleet, then by the Hornet itself.
Twenty-eight seconds after entering the air, the first weight returned to the astronauts. Then 54 seconds later, they felt the peak gravity load of re-entry-6.12 times their normal weight.
The spacecraft dropped to suborbital speed and about two minutes later the masking gasses whiffed away, restoring radio communication after almost $ 3 \frac{1}{2} $ minutes of silence.
After, Evans called to the spacecraft several times, the astronauts came cooly on the air and reported all was right on schedule.
Three orange-and-white striped 83.5-foot main parachutes were pulled from the compartments at 10,000 feet and slowed the spacecraft from 175 miles an hour to 22 miles an hour, the speed at which it hit the water.
Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins dropped into the Pacific Ocean about 940 miles southwest of Honolulu and 230 miles south of Johnston Island at 12:50 p.m. EDT-195 hours 17 minutes after they blasted away from launch pad 39a at Cape Kennedy.
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