Jan 31 2009
Apollo 14 Heads to the Moon
On this day in 1971, Apollo 14, piloted by astronauts Alan B. Shepard, Edgard D. Mitchell, and Stuart Roosa, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. In 1961, Shepard was the first American in space. He became the fifth man to walk on the moon and celebrated by hitting golf balls from the lunar surface.
Apollo 14 had a few technical issues in its flight, the first being the command module not being able to dock with the lunar module after separation from the third stage. Another technical issue was on the decent to the moon, following separation from the command module, the lunar module computer kept getting an erroneous ABORT message from a faulty switch; if this error continued after the descent engine was fired, then the computer would override and would separate the lunar module from the descent stage and would fire the ascent engine, sending the lunar module back to orbit. NASA and the MIT programming team came up with the solution and that was to reprogram the computer. The new instructions were sent by voice and keyed into the computer by hand.
Apollo 14 landed in the area on the moon that was supposed to be the area for Apollo 13. The crew took two moon walks, rounded up 100 pounds of lunar samples, tried out the Mobile Equipment Transporter. The crew also spent the longest time on the moon - 33 hours with 9 hours and 17 minutes of the time being spent outside on the surface of the moon.
