The crew poses with their command module, named Charlie Brown; left to right, Cernan, Young, Stafford.
In two months, we’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. But before we landed, we did a low-altitude fly-by. Today marks the anniversary of Apollo 10, the dress-rehearsal before the main event.
Tom Stafford was the mission commander and a close friend to my father, Bill Kelly. Their long friendship began when they were roommates at Annapolis and later went into the Air Force (this was before the Air Force Academy was established). They earned their pilot wings at Greenville Air Force Base. During the early 70s, LtGen Stafford and I exchanged letters at a time when I needed emotional support during my dark years. He inspired me to study science, and more importantly, to stay focused on getting into College.
The Apollo 10 crew were all seasoned astronauts from the Project Gemini, the precursor to Apollo. Their mission was simple: Set the stage for a successful landing on the moon and make sure it would be a round trip.
After they descended to within just 47,000 feet of the moon, Stafford announced: “Houston, this is Apollo 10. You can tell the world we have arrived.”
What a cosmic joke it must have been for them, to embark on a risky voyage of a quarter-million miles and then pull back, not landing, remaining just a foreshadow of the most famous space mission in history. Yet that was the burden borne by this unheralded crew. I wonder what went through Tom’s mind when they fired the ascent engine and headed back up?
The lunar module pilot, Gene Cernan, speculated that the lander had been short-fueled on purpose: “A lot of people thought about the kind of people we were: ‘Don’t give those guys an opportunity to land, ‘cause they might!’”
Although Stafford never again returned to the moon, he was the American commander of the Apollo-Soyuz Mission in 1975, docking with Soviet cosmonauts in Earth orbit to support of the detente between the superpowers. He later participated in the design and evaluation the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.