Apollo 19

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Apollo 19 is the name for a scheduled flight to the moon during the Apollo program of NASA . The flight was canceled in September 1970.

Schedule and landing site

Shortly after the successful moon landing of Apollo 11 , NASA announced the further program on July 29, 1969 . Accordingly, Apollo 19 was scheduled for July 1972 and should land near the Prinz Rille . After a re-planning in October 1969, Mons Hadley was given as the landing point.

Already in January 1970, before the Apollo 13 disaster , Apollo 20 was deleted from the program, so that Apollo 19 should now form the provisional end. On September 2, 1970, between the flights of Apollo 13 and Apollo 14 , the moon flights of Apollo 15 and Apollo 19 were finally canceled - Apollo 16 to 18 were renamed Apollo 15 to 17. Reasons for this were on the one hand the tight financial situation of NASA, on the other hand the near-catastrophe of Apollo 13.

Aircraft

The planned Saturn V rocket with the number SA-515 was postponed as a replacement for the launch of Skylab 1 , but was never fully assembled. The second stage had been delivered to the Kennedy Space Center on December 22, 1970 , the third stage on May 25, 1972. For a while there was still talk of launching a second Skylab with the SA-515, but this idea was never realized .

The first stage stood in the Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans until 2016 and was then transferred to the museum of the John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock County (Mississippi) . The second stage is part of an Apollo rocket on display in front of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston . The third stage served as a replacement for the Skylab space station and is now in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington .

The proposed LM-13 lunar module is now in The Cradle of Aviation Museum in New York.

CSM-115 was originally intended as the Apollo spacecraft . The spaceship, which was already under construction, was not completed. For the Skylab missions there were different requirements than for the moon flights, among other things, the spaceship had to be decommissioned for several weeks so that CSM-115 could not be used for this. Today, CSM-115 is part of the moon rocket on display in front of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.

Planned occupation

An occupation was never officially announced, so that one can only speculate about it. Usually the reserve crew of an Apollo mission was appointed the main crew three flights later. At the time of the cancellation of Apollo 19 in September 1970, the replacement crew for Apollo 16 was not yet officially assigned.

With the cancellation of Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 in September 1970, it was clear that the replacement teams for Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 would no longer come to the train according to the normal rotation scheme. Therefore, NASA only assigned experienced astronauts to the replacement team for these two remaining lunar flights.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carli Velocci: NASA's Last Apollo Saturn V Rocket Is on Its Way to Mississippi Instead of the Moon. In: Gizmodo. Retrieved June 21, 2016 (American English).