Space Ships

Patrick Boniface describes the ocean ships that recovered the space ships involved in the Apollo and Skylab missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Between 1967 and 1974 the Apollo and Skylab space missions were watched by millions as the impressive power of the Saturn 5 rocket took man to the moon. Despite the massive media coverage of Neil Armstrong’s famous ‘small step for man’ in 1969, little attention was paid by the newspapers or television outlets to how each Apollo or Skylab mission spaceship was recovered from the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans.

NASA and the United States Navy had worked well together during the earlier Mercury and Gemini space programmes and had perfected many of the techniques needed to recover spacecraft landing at sea. For each of the moon shot missions, the US Navy provided a vast armada of vessels. Not only were ships positioned in the Primary Recovery Area (usually the Pacific Ocean), but a Secondary Atlantic Recovery Ship and support ships were deployed should some unforeseen incident lead to a landing in that area instead. During the Apollo missions launch, the US Navy also had, on standby off Cape Canaveral, a launch abort ship, as well as numerous maritime search and rescue aircraft.

For each recovery there were no fewer than five Sea King helicopters in the air. These were called: ‘Recovery’, the Primary helicopter for crew recovery; ‘Swim’, backup for the primary helicopter; ‘ELS’, for recovery of the main parachutes; ‘Apex’ for recovery of the drogue chute and apex cover; and finally ‘Photo’ to take photographs of the event.

Each recovery involved US Navy swimmers attaching a sea anchor, followed by a floating collar, to the Command Module. Then a recovery raft would be attached, and only then would the process of helping the astronauts out of the spacecraft begin. The astronauts were lifted into the ‘Recovery’ helicopter one at a time until all three were safely out of the Command Module, and they were then ferried to the waiting Primary Recovery Ship.