The Saturn V rocket lifts off carrying the Apollo 14 mission from Florida on January, 31, 1971. File Photo courtesy of NASA
SPACE CENTER, Houston -- The Apollo 14 astronauts probed and jiggled the docking mechanism of their lunar lander today searching for what caused its malfunction, while experts on the ground huddled to decide whether the problems were serious enough to abort the moonwalk.
As Alan Shepard. Stuart A. Roosa and Edgar D. Mitchell hurled toward the moon, space agency officials in Houston said they might wait right until the last minute -- 2:40 a.m. EST Thursday -- to decide whether to let the team explore the hilly Fra Mauro sector of the lunar surface.
The trouble developed Sunday night, when for a tense hour and 44 minutes the astronauts struggled to lock the Kitty Hawk command ship and the Antares moon lander.
On the sixth try the space pilots gave an extra hard shove with their steering rockets and linked the two craft. But the tricky latching procedure raised questions about risking Friday's scheduled moon landing. The two ships would have to link up again Sunday for the return to earth, and a recurrence of the docking problem could endanger moonwalkers Shepard and Mitchell.
The astronauts asked Mission Control if they could go to sleep 20 minutes early -- and settled down at 7:45 a.m. for a scheduled 10-hour rest period.
Before that, they exchanged information with ground control about the oxygen flow in the command module. Authorities said the oxygen flow was "higher than normal but not excessively high." An open valve in the waste management system was blamed for the flow and was fixed before the astronauts bedded down. Although the space pilots were hounded by some problems, their course was so true that an early morning correction was canceled.
Shepard, America's pioneer astronaut, and rookies Roosa and Mitchell blasted off at 4:03 p.m. EST Sunday after black storm clouds over Cape Kennedy forced a 40-minute delay in the countdown. The next difficulty was the docking, an event handled routinely on six previous Apollo missions.
Bob Gordon, a space agency spokesman, said a final decision must be made on whether to scrub the moon landing sometime before the maneuver Thursday that puts Apollo 14 into orbit around the moon. Space acency officials said they weren't rushing themselves.
Roosa clambered into the tunnel connecting the Kitty Hawk and the Antares just after 3 a.m. EST today. After 65 minutes of probing, twisting, jiggling and pushing, he told ground controllers he could not find what caused the docking problem.
"We've cycled it four or five times and it just goes in so easily," Roosa said.
Although the latches worked manually when Roosa fiddled with them, there was no guarantee the docking problem would not recur at the critical period the astronauts were trying to link up again for the return flight to earth Sunday.
Ground experts weighed the danger of a repeat malfunction several times against the importance of the mission's success.
Although Roosa could not pinpoint the problem with the lunar lander latches, he discovered six scratches on the docking mechanisms, ranging in length from 3/4 of an inch to two inches. "They are very definite scratches, very rough to the touch," he said.
The astronauts telecast their jiggling of the mechanisms back to Houston; where the ground experts tried unsuccessfully to spot the reason for the malfunction.
"We've exhausted our imagination for right now on the troubleshooting," Mission Control finally said. "We'll work on it some more over night and get back to you in the morning."
There was no immediate indication after the efforts by Roosa to pinpoint the trouble whether the moon landing would be scrubbed. Ground experts appeared to be willing to give the matter plenty of thought, since manual operation of the mechanism would be impossible after liftoff from the moon when the critical second docking between the command module and the lunar lander takes place.
"We'll give it a good ride," Shepard, 47, America's first man in space, said shortly after blastoff.
"Everybody's in great shape, having a ball!" reported Mitchell as the astronauts entered the weightlessness of space.
