Alabama’s Hop
Apollo SL82A was a crewed Apollo Ferry spaceflight which aborted shortly after launch on 22 March 1982 due to a failure of the second stage of its Saturn I+ launch vehicle. SL82A was the thirteenth flight of an Apollo Ferry and was intended to transport its three crew to the Skylab III space station.
The first stage of SL82A would operate as planned. 5 years after the recovery of the first S-IB+ stage during SL76B, Chrysler had incorporated lessons learned from successful water landings and recoveries of 15 boosters supporting manned and unmanned flights. Reuse of a full S-IB+ stage was still several years away, but all of the H-1 engines on SL82A had flown before, as had three of the outer tanks (two RP1, one LOX) and the central LOX tank.
But by the time the first stage was descending beneath its parachutes 500 miles downrange, off the coast of the Carolinas, Alabama, the flight’s Command and Service Module (CSM) would be boosting away from an ailing S-IVB stage.
With an inexplicable and gradual reduction of thrust from the second stage, astronauts and Mission Control would try and will the vehicle into orbit before admitting defeat, 30 seconds after telemetry first indicated a problem. Four minutes after lift-off, the crew initiated an abort. The launch escape system (LES) had already been jettisoned at that stage in the flight so the spacecraft thrusted away from the vehicle using its Service Propulsion System and reaction control system (RCS). Named after the home state of Mission Commander Henry Hartsfield, the CSM separated from the S-IVB to the east of Virginia, with a further short SPS burn targeting it’s splashdown away from the cold water of the North Atlantic and into a contingency recovery area in the Celtic Sea.
Minutes later, the failed S-IVB tore itself apart, splashing down over the North Atlantic. In 1983, on Jack Grimm’s third unsuccessful expedition to find the Titanic, a remotely operated vehicle identified the powerhead of a J2S engine — strongly suspected to belong to SL82A.
The crew members: Mission Commander Hank Hartsfield; Command Module Pilot Daniel Brandenstein; and Flight Engineer Bruce McCandless, were recovered alive and in good health after splashdown by helicopters from HMS Invincible, the first recovery of American astronauts by a non-US Navy ship.
SL82A was the first ever in-flight abort of an American crewed flight. Several weeks after the flight — the shortest American crewed spaceflight since the suborbital Mercury missions — the failure was traced to a faulty electrical connection in the Instrument Unit of the booster. Brandenstein and McCandless launched together to Skylab III on Apollo SL83C eighteen months after their shortened flight, while Hartsfield’s next flight was part of the Mars Exploration Module test programme. Components of the S-IB+ would also fly again.
Alabama was stored at Cape Canaveral for several years, but is now at Battleship Memorial Park.
