Accidents happen.
As a general rule, this is considered to be a bad thing, and people work hard to prevent them.
Sometimes, some people might consider these accidents a good thing. But that doesn't stop other people from taking precautions.
Take, for example, the Apollo 10 mission. During the preceding Apollo missions, all of the pieces had come together. The Apollo capsule had been successfully tested. The lunar module had been tested in Earth orbit. The Saturn V rocket had sent astronauts around the moon. As far as anyone could tell, everything was working, and the systems were just about ready for the next mission, which would land men on the moon.
But before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land on the moon on Apollo 11, one last test flight was flown to prepare the way. On the Apollo 10 mission, the crew would fly to the moon and enter lunar orbit, where two astronauts would climb into the lunar module, separate from the Apollo command module, and descent in the lander toward the lunar surface. But, then, instead of landing on the moon, they would fire the lander's engine and fly back to the command module without landing.
One of those astronauts, Gene Cernan, has speculated that some at NASA feared that it might be incredibly tantalizing to be so close, and yet not be able to land. Especially when one small error, one small technical problem, could secure the crew's place as the first to walk on another world. Cernan said that the lander for Apollo 10 was not given enough fuel for a safe landing, possibly to prevent any such "accidents."
A similar "accident prevention" technique had been used 13 years earlier on a launch of a Jupiter-C rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. The United States was working on efforts to launch a satellite into orbit, ideally beating the Soviet Union to doing so. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency's missile development team at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., led by Wernher von Braun, had proposed using a modified version of the Redstone missile for a satellite launch. The missile, named for the arsenal, had been flying for three years -- its first test launch was in August 1953, 59 years ago this week -- and the ABMA had been developing ways to make the rocket more powerful.
The decision was made, however, that the first satellite was to be launched not by a Redstone-family rocket, but by the Vanguard. Work continued on more-powerful versions of the Redstone for potential military applications, while the Vanguard was being prepared for the satellite launching role. Visitors to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center can see the results of the former endeavor -- the Redstone family included not only the Redstone missile, but the Juno and Jupiter series of rockets and the Mercury-Redstone used to launch Alan Shepard as the first American in space.
In September 1956, the ABMA launched the first Jupiter-C version of the Redstone family of rockets. On the first flight, the rocket shattered records for previous Cape Canaveral launches, reaching an altitude of 682 miles -- two to three times higher than the space shuttle would orbit. Despite reaching an altitude higher than manned spacecraft orbit, the flight was still technically suborbital, going up and coming back down without circling Earth.
Which is where the "accident prevention" came in. For the test flight, the ABMA was ordered to weight the fuel tanks of the vehicle's fourth stage with sand instead of fuel, just to make sure it didn't accidentally put a satellite into orbit, accidentally beating the Soviet Union to a major space-race first.
Unfortunately for the United States, the only accidents that happened occurred with the Vanguard rocket, which suffered several failures before and after the Soviet Union won the satellite race with Sputnik in October 1957. Finally, the U.S. government turned back to the ABMA, which successfully lofted Explorer I in January 1958. Without accident.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
