I’ve been joking about NASAs new Orion spacecraft being Apollo 2.0 since last year. But now I’ve got the proof.
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NASA engineers had been trying in vain to find details of the umbilical connection between the Command and Service modules. After searching blueprints at the National Archives in Ft. Worth Texas, one of the researchers found a families vacation photos on the internet that showed Apollo CSM 119 in the Saturn V Center at Kennedy with an intact umbilical connection. The spacecraft was backup for the Apollo Soyuz mission and had never been flown. The umbilical housing is the ugly duct like thing underneath the CSM in the picture above.
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Dan Catalano and Chris Lamoreaux remove the housing. I’ll bet the engineers that installed that thing would never have worn blue jeans and New Balance tennies to work.
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Images from NASA, and the full story with more pix here:
