[Apollo 14]

From the Personal Collection of Apollo 14 CMP Stuart Roosa.

APOLLO 14 MANUALS AND POSTFLIGHT DOCUMENTS USED BY COMMAND MODULE PILOT STUART ROOSA

Altogether, the manuals and assorted documents with notes and annotations in the present lot speak to the staggering technical expertise required for an Apollo mission to the Moon. 

Postponed due to the near-disaster that was Apollo 13, Apollo 14 was humanity’s third trip to the lunar surface. Commander Alan Shepard, Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa, and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell were originally assigned Apollo 13, before Dr. George Mueller swapped the Apollo 13 and Apollo 14 crews in order to give Alan Shepard more time to train once he was returned to flight status. The resultant delay in their mission, especially after the events of Apollo 13, meant that the Apollo 14 crew trained for a total of nineteen months and logged more time than any Apollo crew before them.  The Command and Service Module (CSM) had to undergo changes after the Apollo 13 investigation. These were supervised by Roosa. The thorough care with which they approached their training and these changes is apparent in the handwritten notes in several margins of documents in this lot, particularly in Command Module schematics.

Apollo 14 almost ended in a mission failure as well. Early in the mission, there was a technical failure that prevented the Lunar Module Antares and the Command Module Kitty Hawk from connecting. On the ground prior to the mission, Roosa had gone through mission simulations of the required maneuvers so many times that he was on track to break the record for using less fuel than any Command Module Pilot before him. He would have broken the record if not for a faulty docking latch that kept the two spacecraft from engaging. After five attempts and troubleshooting in collaboration with mission control and the astronaut support crew led by Gene Cernan, Roosa successfully docked on the sixth attempt and continued their mission. 

Apollo 13’s aborted Moon landing mission also meant that the scientific objectives assigned to that mission were then inherited by Apollo 14. Shepherd and Mitchell, in the Lunar Module Antares, landed in the Fra Mauro region of the highlands originally assigned to Apollo 13’s Aquarius. In the Command Module Kitty Hawk, one of Roosa’s roles was to survey the lunar surface from orbit for future missions by taking hi-res photos with a Hycon camera, a handheld topographic camera based on models used in reconnaissance satellites at the time. To be best equipped for this responsibility, Roosa also spent time training with geologist Farouk El-Baz. He trained by running simulations in his Northrop T-38 jet and observing at a similar speed and altitude. The Hycon malfunctioned after approximately 140 frames, which led Roosa to have to take detailed photographs of the Descartes highlands (the proposed landing site for the upcoming Apollo 16 mission) with a Hasselblad camera while ensuring that the Kitty Hawk was angled precisely to take each shot as it sped past (Chaikin, p 365). The Apollo 14 lunar maps and landmarks documents in this lot have annotations speaking to this experience.

Each of the documents in this lot speak to the massive scope of technical details that required total mastery to ensure mission success. After the “successful failure” of Apollo 13, NASA could not afford another failure of any kind. The astronauts and support personnel trained extensively through the use of these documents to ensure mission success and the continuation of the Apollo program. 

REFERENCES

Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. 2019 Penguin Random House, London.