Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Apollo trivia (was Challenger tragedy)
Message-ID: <1988Aug3.151700.8678@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1001@scicom.alphacdc.com> <5827@dasys1.UUCP> <14876@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <12716@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 88 15:17:00 GMT

In article <12716@ames.arc.nasa.gov> mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Mike Smithwick) writes:
>Gotcha! There were no Apollo 2 or 3 missions. The first was Apollo 4 in 
>November 1967 I think. This was the first Saturn V flight test. I haven't
>heard any good reason as to why they jumped the mission designators.

Tsk tsk, Grasshopper, you have not been paying attention. :-)

To recap what I posted a while back, there were no official "Apollo N"
designations before the fire, and in fact there was some confusion about
what the first manned flight would be called; the crew was calling it
Apollo 1, while the booster people were calling it Apollo 4.  The only
official name it had was Apollo 204, a NASA internal mission code.

Afterward, the never-flown mission was officially designated Apollo 1
out of respect for the dead crew.  The first post-fire unmanned test was
officially called Apollo 4.  This led to a problem:  how to designate
the three pre-fire unmanned tests without infringing on the sacrosanct
Apollo 1 designation.  NASA HQ decided to resolve the problem by doing
nothing about it, so those three tests never had Apollo N designations
and there never was an Apollo 2 or 3.
-- 
MSDOS is not dead, it just     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
smells that way.               | uunet!mnetor!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
