Visited the USS Yorktown yesterday. That was the ship that picked up Apollo 8. Anywho, we saw the Command module/re-entry vehicle. It had 3 seats and no way for the astronauts to get up move/float around. My BIL said that that’s all the ‘room’ they had. Is that so?
I thought that they could maybe get up and get the service module or something. Certainly they didn’t have to remain seated for what, 6 days?
Googlefoo is not helping, and I’m away from a good internet connection. The wiki link I found is not very clear.
Wait a minute. 210 cu ft. roughly an 8 foot tall room, 5 feet square. That’s MUCH bigger than it looked (it was not a model). I’m guessing from your link, Johnny, that by habital space, they mean the pressurised space much of which was taken up by equipment.
Once they were in space, and weightless, they had a great deal more freedom to move. The only way they stayed seated was to strap themselves in. Once weightless they could move easily into positions and places that would be essentially impossible otherwise. With no up or down, everywhere is equally available.
As noted above, once the Apollo spacecraft was on the way to the moon they docked with the lunar module, which in principle added some further space, albeit for only a small part of the journey. It was discarded before the return trip.
If you want to contemplate a cramped spacecraft for a long mission, consider the Gemini spacecraft, and the Gemini 7 mission. Borman and Lovell spent just under 14 days in a craft not much bigger than a garbage can. This pic has always been a favourite of mine, and shows the conditions the astronauts endured.
ETA, of course for Apollo 8 there was no lunar module.
As Francis Vaughan notes, weightlessness adds another dimension. Also, the leg pans of the couches could be repositioned, and the hip pan on the center couch could be removed and stowed.
I bet that was some pretty ripe air that drifted out of the modules when the hatch opened. Bringing all that ripe air up to sauna temperatures during reentry must have added a level of intensity. Those guys went through a lot of discomfort.
Right - once in freefall the seats could be partly folded out of the way. When one looks in through the hatch of one of the display modules at museums, one does not easily see the space of the lower equipment bay below and behind the seats and instrument cluster. Still pretty tight, but manageable under the circumstances.
One of the astronauts (I think it was Mike Collins in Carrying the Fire - which would mean this was Apollo 8 - it couldn’t happen for 11) relates that after they were picked up, he had a shower and changed, by which time the capsule had been recovered and was sitting on the carrier’s deck. He stuck his head back inside and was stunned at how bad it smelt. Three guys couped up in a tin can for a week is going to be pretty ripe. Things could get pretty gross, especially if anyone got sick.
Carrying the Fire is a great, great book, unjustly neglected. I love the part where Collins jokes about having become an astronaut “for all the money and ass .”
If it was Collins, he must have been talking about Gemini 10. He was backup for Apollo 8.
On Apollo 8, Frank Borman got space sick, or a stomach bug, soon after trans-lunar injection, and he puked and crapped all over the equipment bay. Blobs of puke and explosive diarrhea had to be collected from their various floating trajectories. It is thought that the extra room to move in the CM, as opposed to in Gemini, might have contributed to space sickness. Must have been like spending a week in a full porta-potty.
Bah, rotten memory. (Actually we are both wrong about Apollo 8 - Armstrong and Aldrin were part of the backup, but Collins wasn’t.) I’ll have to dig the book out again. It is indeed a great read, really the best of all the autobiographies written by the astronauts. And yes, I was being polite about the “pretty gross” bit
Out of curiosity, I looked up John Houbolt, who promoted the idea of lunar orbit rendezvous as the only viable way to land on the Moon. Apparently he’s still alive, having turned 92 last month.
