Word: apollos
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Buoyant Bags. Successful though it was, the mission ended in tension. For several minutes after splashdown, there were fears that an accident at sea had nullified Apollo's triumph in space. After a last voice transmission by Command Pilot Schirra from only 200 feet above the surface, Apollo lapsed into unscheduled silence; recovery helicopters from the aircraft carrier Essex flapped blindly through rainsqualls and fog in a vain search for the spacecraft. Then, Ap suddenly, the helicopters reported that they had picked up Apollo's homing signals. The spacecraft was only a third of a mile from...
...Apollo's temporary silence was easily explained. As the cone-shaped spacecraft hit the ocean, it was capsized by a combination of gusty winds and choppy waves. With the capsule in a nose-down position, its submerged antennas were useless. But the astronauts, trained for such contingencies, had to inflate three flotation bags attached to Apollo's nose. As the bags became buoyant, they swung the nose toward the surface until the spacecraft flipped upright, exposing the antennas and allowing radio transmissions to be resumed...
Fogged Windows. The space doctors' worst fear-that the cold-plagued astronauts would suffer ear damage during re-entry-was not realized. As Apollo's cabin pressure was raised from the 5.3 Ibs. per sq. in. maintained during space flight to sea-level pressure of 14.7 p.s.i., the astronauts protected their ears by removing their helmets and performing the "Valsalva maneuver" (named for its inventor, the 18th century Italian anatomist Antonio Valsalva). Holding their noses, closing their mouths and trying vigorously to exhale through their nostrils, they forced air through their clogged Eustachian tubes to keep the pressure...
NASA officials reported that, like its crew, the Apollo spaceship experienced only the most minor ailments during the 260-hour eight-minute flight. Some of the spacecraft windows fogged over for still-unexplained reasons; an oxygen-flow sensor misbehaved and unnecessarily flashed a red light; batteries did not recharge as fast or as fully as expected; current overloads twice tripped circuit breakers, cutting off electrical power until the crew reset the breakers. The otherwise flawless performance was a tribute to the corrective program instituted by NASA and North American Rockwell Corp., Apollo's prime contractor, after the disastrous Cape...
...highlights of the flight were the docking maneuver and precise rendezvous with the discarded S-4B booster, and the eight successful burns of the service module's powerful propulsion engine. These operations will be essential on a lunar landing mission. While en route to the moon, the joined Apollo command and service modules must dock with the lunar module (LM), which will be carried inside the opened flaps of the S-4B. Later, should the LM become stranded in a lunar orbit on its way to or from the surface of the moon, Apollo would have to rendezvous...