Apollo 4 and Apollo 5 Missions (1967)

Video from the channel AIRBOYD about Apollo 4, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 32:52. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

NASA film combining two uncrewed test flights of the Apollo program. The first part follows the Apollo 4 mission, the first flight of the Saturn V with its spacecraft. It shows the rocket's transfer from the assembly building on the crawler-transporter, the countdown, the launch and the stage separations filmed by onboard cameras. It also includes photographs of Earth taken through a window and the splashdown. The second part shows Apollo 5, the first flight test of the LM-1 lunar module, launched on a Saturn IB, with scenes from mission control in Houston and the tracking stations.

This is period footage. Apollo 4 launched from the Kennedy Space Center on November 9, 1967, at 7:00:01. The countdown had begun on November 7 at 6:00, about 49 hours earlier. The command module splashed down in the Pacific, a few hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, in sight of the recovery ship USS Bennington, about eight and a half hours after launch. The Apollo 5 scenes were filmed in the blockhouse at Cape Kennedy and in mission control in Houston, where astronauts Jim McDivitt, Rusty Schweickart, Frank Borman and Bill Anders were following the flight.

The Saturn V was tested complete from its first flight, rather than stage by stage as in earlier programs. The first stage produced about 7.5 million pounds of thrust and separated at 2 min 32 s. The third stage put the spacecraft into circular orbit in just over 11 minutes and later reignited in space, despite suspicion that a valve had not closed. A 16-second burn of the spacecraft's engine took it to 11,232 miles (about 18,000 km) in altitude over the Indian Ocean. Another, four and a half minutes long, sent it into reentry at 25,000 mph (about 40,000 km/h): the heat shield, less than 3 inches thick, reached 5,000°F while the interior stayed below 70°F. On Apollo 5, the onboard computer cut off the first burn of the descent engine after 4 s of the planned 38. Flight director Gene Kranz switched to a backup plan, and from the ground the variable-thrust descent engine burn and the abort test with stage separation were completed. The final ascent engine burn was commanded during the pass over Hawaii, despite the shortage of attitude control propellant.