Apollo 10 NASA AS-505 Saturn V Mission Reports & Technical Documents PDF

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." - President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

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The Apollo 10 Command Module is on display at the Science Museum, London, England.

Apollo 10 Mission

Apollo 10 was the fourth crewed mission in the United States Apollo space program, and the second (after Apollo 8) to orbit the Moon.

Launched on May 18, 1969, it was a “dress rehearsal” for the first Moon landing, testing all of the components and procedures, just short of actually landing. The Apollo Lunar Module (LM) was flown to a descent orbit within 8.4 nautical miles (15.6 km) of the lunar surface, at the point where powered descent for landing would normally begin. Its success enabled the first landing to be attempted on the Apollo 11 mission two months later.

Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 were the only Apollo missions whose crew were all veterans of spaceflight. Thomas P. Stafford had flown on Gemini 6 and Gemini 9; John W. Young had flown on Gemini 3 and Gemini 10, and Eugene A. Cernan had flown with Stafford on Gemini 9.

The mission’s call signs were the names of the Peanuts characters Charlie Brown and Snoopy, who became Apollo 10’s semi-official mascots.

This dress rehearsal for a Moon landing brought the Apollo Lunar Module to 8.4 nautical miles (15.6 km) from the lunar surface, at the point where powered descent would begin on the actual landing. Practicing this approach orbit would refine knowledge of the lunar gravitational field needed to calibrate the powered descent guidance system to within 1 nautical mile (1.9 km) needed for a landing.

NASA took special precaution to ensure Stafford and Cernan would not attempt to make the first landing. Gene Cernan was quoted as saying “A lot of people thought about the kind of people we were: ‘Don’t give those guys an opportunity to land, ’cause they might!’ So the ascent module, the part we lifted off the lunar surface with, was short-fueled. The fuel tanks weren’t full. So had we literally tried to land on the Moon, we couldn’t have gotten off.”

Splashdown occurred in the Pacific Ocean on May 26, 1969, at 16:52:23 UTC, about 400 nautical miles (740 km) east of American Samoa and were recovered by the USS Princeton.

According to the 2002 Guinness World Records, Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a crewed vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph) on May 26, 1969, during the return from the Moon.