介绍： As Commander Thomas Stafford stated during a preflight press conference, Apollo 10 was planned to “sort out all the unknowns” to make the Moon landing possible. Stafford, Command Module Pilot  John Young, and Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan, were strapped into their Command Module perched atop a Saturn V r...

介绍： As Commander Thomas Stafford stated during a preflight press conference, Apollo 10 was planned to “sort out all the unknowns” to make the Moon landing possible. Stafford, Command Module Pilot  John Young, and Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan, were strapped into their Command Module perched atop a Saturn V rocket and lifted off precisely on time at 12:49 PM on May 18, 1969. Their launch was the first from Pad B at Kennedy Space Center’s  Launch Complex 39. Their mission was a dress rehearsal for the lunar landing mission, a goal President John F. Kennedy set for the nation eight years earlier. Among the spectators on hand to observe the historic launch were Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, and King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of Belgium.

Three and a half miles away, in the Launch Control Center’s Firing Room 3, controllers had monitored the countdown and the first few seconds of the liftoff. As the rocket cleared the launch tower, Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center ，now the Johnson Space Center in Houston, took over monitoring the flight. There, three teams of controllers working in eight-hour shifts watched over all aspects of the mission until splashdown.

The three stages of the Saturn V placed the Apollo 10 spacecraft, at 98,273 pounds the heaviest ever launched, into a temporary parking orbit around the Earth, still attached to its S-IVB third stage. Two and a half hours later, after the ground and crew verified that all systems aboard the spacecraft were functioning normally, Duke called up, “10, you’re go for TLI,” the Trans-Lunar Injection. The S-IVB fired for 5 minutes and 43 seconds, adding more than 7,000 miles per hour to the spacecraft’s velocity, enough to send Apollo 10 toward the Moon. The engine burn was so precise that it exceeded the expected velocity increase by a mere 0.4 mile per hour! With such a precise flight path, only one of the planned four midcourse corrections were needed.

To facilitate communications when the two spacecraft were flying independently, the crew designated their CM Charlie Brown and the Lunar Module Snoopy, Thirty minutes after the TLI burn, the crew separated Charlie Brown from the S-IVB, with Snoopy still snuggled atop the third stage. Young guided Charlie Brown about 150 feet away, turned the spacecraft around, then flew it to dock with Snoopy, completing the transposition and docking maneuver. Viewers received the first color TV images from space, of the S-IVB and Snoopy as Young brought Charlie Brown in for the docking. Duke exclaimed, “It’s looking great!  The resolution is fantastic!” This first color TV transmission lasted 22 minutes, and resumed about 30 minutes later as springs ejected Snoopy, firmly docked with Charlie Brown, from the S-IVB, with Stafford exclaiming, “Snoopy’s coming out of the doghouse.” By this time, Apollo 10 was more than 13,000 miles away from Earth, but its velocity was decreasing as the home planet’s gravity inexorably tugged at the spacecraft.