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Using 70-mm. Hasselblad still cameras, 16-mm. Maurer movie cameras and roll after roll of color and black-and-white film the Apollo astronauts literally photographed everything within sight: Gumdrop, Spider, the third-stage S-4B rocket, themselves, and the curved expanse of earth below. During the somewhat more relaxed final half of their mission, they also tried out a variety of filters and specialized film to shoot infrared, green-light and other pictures that should teach scientists more about the earth and its resources...
...return to Gumdrop was the highlight of the mission, which began last week after a three-day delay to allow the astronauts to recover from troublesome colds. Launched by a Saturn 5 rocket into a near-perfect orbit, Gumdrop, in flawless sequence, separated from the third-stage S-4B rocket, pivoted in space, hooked up with Spider and plucked it out of the nose of the orbiting S-4B. On the third day, Astronauts McDivitt and Schweickart got ready to enter Spider through the 47-in.-long, 32-in.-diameter connecting tunnel...
Soon after they had left earth orbit and headed toward the moon, the astronauts pointed Apollo back toward earth and aimed a 16-mm. Maurer movie camera at the third-stage S-4B rocket, which had just been separated from the spacecraft. The resulting pictures show the receding rocket gleaming in the sunlight against a black sky as the blue, cloud-mottled earth hovers below. (Minutes earlier, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory scientists atop a mountain in the Hawaiian Islands had used a Baker-Nunn telescopic camera to shoot a spectacular picture of the S-4B, about 120 miles high, blasting Apollo...
...fired on schedule (25 minutes after LOS) or fired long enough to place the craft in orbit. Too short a burn, the controllers knew, could send Apollo smashing into the moon. But there was another problem that caused concern on the ground. Apollo's third-stage S-4B rocket, jettisoned shortly after it pushed the spacecraft out of earth orbit and toward the moon, was scheduled to pass the trailing edge of the moon about the same time that Apollo emerged from behind it. Although scientists had calculated that the spent stage would miss the spacecraft by some...
During the flight of Apollo 6, the SPS engine took over from an S-4B stage that failed to restart, and by itself propelled the unmanned spacecraft to an altitude of more than 13,000 miles. On Apollo 7, its first manned flight, it was started eight times. Thus, when Borman, Lovell and Anders embarked on their mission, they had a pretty good idea that their little engine could perform its tasks flawlessly...