August 18, 2023 - Apollo 2 and 3

This week's Musing is a real head scratcher for me. We are working on an online version of our recent exhibit South Windsor’s Contributions to Space, and I came across primary source material for an Apollo mission that technically never occurred.

Apollo 2 & 3 - The Missing Missions

According to Amy Shira Teitel writing for Popular Science, "when NASA received the spacecraft for AS-204, spacecraft 012, at the Kennedy Space Center on August 26, 1966, it was protected by a cover emblazoned with 'Apollo One' in capital letters." The mission was soon dubbed Apollo 1 with NASA approving a mission patch designed for the crew by Allen Stevens, using the moniker.

Before this first manned mission into space ever occurred, other Apollo missions were already in the advanced planning stages. The Apollo 2 mission was initially a planned duplicate of Apollo 1 and Apollo 3 would be the first to use the Block II Command Service Module (CSM) which had the capability to dock with the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM).  Teitel writes that by November that plan had changed and "The missions were reorganized so Apollo 2 would debut the LEM, while Apollo 3 would be a high Earth orbit mission with both the CSM and LEM, as well as the first manned Saturn V launch.

All of this planning for the 2nd and 3rd Apollo missions would be for naught, when on January 27, 1967, a fire took the lives of astronauts Edward H. White, Virgil (Gus) Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee during a test aboard their Apollo I spacecraft.

Following the tragedy, the widows of the Apollo 1 crew asked that NASA retire the mission designation in honor of their husbands and NASA, agreed.

Teitel states that two options were put forward; "the agency could proceed in sequence and name the first mission after the fire Apollo 2, or it could count the unmanned Saturn IB test flights as part of the Apollo series and retroactively rename them to have Apollo designations. AS-201 would become Apollo 1-A, AS-202 would become Apollo 2, and Apollo 203 would become Apollo 3. This meant subsequent flights following the fire would begin with Apollo 4."

NASA’s picked neither option. According to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum website the preflight test originally known as the Apollo-Saturn 204 (AS-204) mission, would be known as Apollo 1, and that the first Saturn V launch, scheduled for November 1967, would be known as Apollo 4."

This meant the AS-201, AS-202, and AS-203 wouldn’t be renumbered in the Apollo series, essentially erasing the Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 missions.

Apollo 2 Lives On.. in Our Archives!

Somehow the information failed to trickle down to some of the promotional people at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft though and they kept the designation Apollo 2 alive in these primary source documents safely tucked away in our archives. Look closely at the far left entry on the bar graphs.

Feel free to reply to this email if you have any comments, or suggestions on how to accurately refer to something, that technically does not exist. Preferably in fewer words that this Musing, took to explain it. Learn more about South Windsor's contributions to space by exploring the many documents and artifacts, including the Joseph A. Bost Collection of UTC Fuel Cell Papers, located in our archives.

According to NASA's website the Apollo emblem is a disc circumscribed by a band displaying the words Apollo and NASA. The center disc bears a large letter "A" with the constellation Orion positioned so its three central stars form the bar of the letter. To the right is a sphere of the Earth, with a sphere of the Moon in the upper left portion of the center disc. The face on the Moon represents the mythical god, Apollo. A double trajectory passes behind both spheres and the central stars.

Look for our online exhibit focusing on South Windsor's Contributions to Space debuting this fall on our website.

Sources used for this Musing are listed below.

 - National Aeronautics and Space Administration website, accessed August 18, 2023.

 - Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum website, accessed August 18, 2023.

 - Teitel, Amy Shira,  What Happened to Apollos 2 and 3?, Popular Science website, October 29, 2013, accessed August 18, 2023.