50 years ago, today, Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell became the 5th and 6th people to walk on the moon. This was the 3rd lunar landing, and coming off the Apollo 13 crisis, a failure of Apollo 14 would likely have ended the Apollo program. And sure enough, they faced a mission-ending problem on the way to the moon. They could not get the docking ring of the Command Module to mate with the ring on the Lunar module. Without docking, the LM could not be extracted from its place on the S-IVB, and no lunar landing could take place.
So, I thought I’d share some artifacts we have in the FV Space Museum, starting with the “Apollo 14 Docking Ring” from the Smithsonian (see below). I also have training documents and lunar maps used the LM simulator (seen in photo above) and perhaps the only surviving fiberglass plate, a replica of their landing site used with flyover cameras in the simulator. In the wake of Apollo 13, the crew of Apollo 14 trained together longer than any other Apollo crew to that point.
Ed Mitchell reflected on the mission: “We realized that if our mission failed—if we had to turn back—that was probably the end of the Apollo program. There was no way NASA could stand two failures in a row. We figured there was a heavy mantle on our shoulders to make sure we got it right.”
Part of the FV Space Collection.
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