<em>Holy Week</em>: Rupture
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Mission Control: … now being retracted from the Saturn V vehicle. T minus 15, 14, 13, 12 …
Vann R. Newkirk II: Odds are, you don’t know much about the Apollo 6 mission.
Mission Control: … three, two, one. We have commenced; we have liftoff. (Crowd cheering.)
Newkirk: If you’ve ever seen that one famous video from outside a rocket detaching from the first stage, just beyond the Earth, then you probably have seen Apollo 6. It’s got a bit of a mixed record, as far as space stuff goes. It was just the second test flight of the Saturn V rocket, one of the most critical components of the entire moon-landing program. On its launch date in 1968, the idea was still new, still uncertain, still dangerous.
Mission Control: Now at 10 nautical miles of altitude, heading out beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, uh, we’re on our way.
Newkirk: It had just been six years since President Kennedy announced that we would go to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. It turned out that building something like a giant bomb that would send men a quarter-million miles away through the vacuum of space was pretty hard.
The launch wasn’t as big an event as previous launches. It was uncrewed, so there was none of the majesty of astronauts walking and smiling. No names to remember. There was no nail-biting drama of wondering if the boys might not make it home. Earlier
