The San Diego Aerospace Museum has opened an exibit of the Command Module from the Apollo 9 space flight mission. The command module is on loan from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C and is expected to remain on display at the Museum until March 2007 after which the loan may be extended.
The National Air and Space Museum (NASM) has in its collection all spacecraft flown in America's space program. “This is the culmination of a four year effort,” said Aerospace Museum Executive Vice President Bruce Bleakley. The exhibit was moved on May 18, 2004 from its former home at the Michigan Space and Science Center, where it had been on exhibit for over two decades, and carefully transported to the San Diego Aerospace Museum. Museum staff and volunteers worked extra-hard to preserve and properly showcase this new exhibit.
Apollo 9 is the only Apollo Command Module flown in space on display west of the Rocky Mountains. The exhibit opened to the public on June 21st, 2004 – the day after the 35th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing. Built by the North American Rockwell Space Division plant in Downey, CA, the spacecraft, named “Gumdrop” by its crew, will initially take up residence in the free venue of the Museum's Rotunda, enabling visitors a close look at what Bleakley describes as “a vital piece of American space flight history.”
The Apollo 9 crew consisted of Gemini program veterans James McDivitt as Mission Commander, Dave Scott as Command Module Pilot, and rookie Russell L. Schweickart as the Lunar Module Pilot. During a 10-day mission launched March 3, 1969, the crew accomplished the first tests of the Lunar Module, or LM, that would take a crew to the surface of the Moon.
For the first time in space flight history, crewmembers flew in a spacecraft—the LM—designed to operate only in the vacuum of space. McDivitt and Schweickart separated the LM from the Command Module and maneuvered as far as 113 miles away before a successful rendezvous and docking. In addition to putting the LM through its paces, LM Pilot “Rusty” Schweickart successfully tested the Portable Life Support System that astronauts would wear on the Moon's surface.
The success of Apollo 9 paved the way for the Apollo 10 crew to take their Lunar Module within nine miles of the Moon's surface as a “dress rehearsal” for the subsequent landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.
