In the 1960s, astronauts trained in the mock cockpits and rigs that simulated the effects of the thrusters on a capsule’s orientation JSC/NASA
HOW did the crew of Apollo 11 know how to land on the moon? Practice. In the early days of the space race, NASA engineers spent countless hours simulating space flight before the first astronaut ever left Earth. That is why most Fridays in 1960, Harold Miller and Dick Koos took the “fruit flight” from Cape Canaveral in Florida to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
Miller and Koos had been part of a small team working on space simulations at Langley for about a year. But eventually they needed to move their operations far from their homes, to Florida, where the mission control would be based. The passenger planes that flew them home from Florida’s Patrick Air Force Base at the end of the week were always loaded with the Sunshine State’s citrus bounty. When travellers grabbed their bags at the end of the journey, they could also get a large sack of oranges for $3.
Cheap fruit was one of the few perks of working at the Mercury Control Center and launch facilities on the isolated and jungle-like Cape Canaveral all week. If a test rocket blew up (which happened about half the time in those days) and a brush fire started, you had to watch out for the alligators or wild hogs trying to escape the flames.
Project Mercury, NASA’s …
