The first Saturn V leaves Florida with no crew aboard; the shock rattles the control center ceiling
Apollo 4 lifted off from Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center at 7:00 am EST on November 9, 1967, the first flight of the Saturn V and the first major test since the Apollo 1 fire killed its crew in January. Nobody was aboard. It was an "all-up" test, meaning every rocket stage and the spacecraft were live on the maiden flight. The launch had slipped from November 7 over worries about leaks in the liquid oxygen tanks, and the capsule splashed down in the Pacific slightly less than nine hours later.
The Saturn V was the machine that had to carry Americans to the Moon and home again before the 1960s ended, and until this morning it had never flown. Apollo 4 gave NASA its first real flight data on the rocket, and the schedule, shaken by the Apollo 1 fire, moved forward.
QWhy did NASA aim the spacecraft's lowest point 84.6 kilometers below the surface of the Earth?
After two orbits, the S-IVB fired again and pushed the spacecraft into an elliptical path with an apogee of 17,218 kilometers (9,297 nautical miles). The perigee, the lowest point of that path, was deliberately set at 84.6 kilometers (45.7 nautical miles) below the Earth's surface. No spacecraft could complete that orbit, by design: the trajectory guaranteed the capsule would plunge into the atmosphere on the way down. The steep, fast return let engineers test the command module's heat shield at simulated lunar-return velocity and angle, the conditions a crew coming home from the Moon would face. The orbit was designed to end in a re-entry.
QHow many errors did the post-fire inspections turn up in the Apollo spacecraft?
The inspections ordered after the Apollo 1 fire turned up 1,407 errors in the spacecraft. That number goes a long way toward explaining why the schedule slid for the better part of a year. The capsule that finally flew on Apollo 4 was not the final crew design. It was a Block I command and service module, modified to test several key Block II revisions, among them the heat shield. In other words, the flight tested the new design's most important changes on top of the older airframe, while the rocket beneath it was making its own debut.
QHow close did the capsule come to its aim point in the Pacific?
Very close. The command module landed approximately 8.6 nautical miles (16 kilometers) from the target site, northwest of Midway Island in the North Pacific Ocean. That came at the end of a trip that started with the first S-IC first stage and S-II second stage ever flown on a Saturn V, and included the S-IVB's first in-flight restart. The data the flight returned covered the Saturn V and spacecraft structural integrity, subsystem operations, and the performance of the heat shield. Nearly nine hours after leaving Florida, the hardware was floating a short distance from where planners wanted it.
