On May 18, 1969, the dress rehearsal of the Apollo 11 flight began, the American spacecraft making its first soft landing on the moon. Apollo 10 was equipped with everything needed to do it earlier. And there were such plans. Optimism was inspired by the previous - highly successful rehearsals - flights of Apollo 8 and Apollo 9. But NASA decided not to risk it. And postpone the landing.
The Apollo 10 crew consisted of Commander Thomas Stafford, Command Module Pilot John Young, Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan. If NASA had done without a rehearsal, then the first to set foot on the moon would not be Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, but Thomas Stafford. Eugene Cernan would have accompanied him, and John Young would have remained in orbit.
View of the Earth and the Moon from Apollo 10.
Apollo 10 astronauts flew to the Moon and entered its orbit. Cernan and Stafford even switched to the lunar landing module, separated from the command module, flew independently, and descended to an altitude of about 15 kilometers. Only they did not land on the surface. Docked back and went home together. They returned to Earth on May 26.
Flight of the Apollo 10 command module - filmed from the lunar module.
Flight of the lunar module: filmed from the command module.
Young and Cernan will land on the moon after all. One as the commander of the Apollo 16 spacecraft, the other as the Apollo 17 spacecraft.
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SOMETHING ANOMALOUS
Toilet bowl in Earth orbit
The Apollo 10 crew also distinguished themselves by the fact that they photographed something strange near the Earth. The image with the anomaly was found in the NASA archives by the famous virtual archaeologist Scott C. Waring - he found it in the NASA archive among others that were taken during the flight of the Apollo 10 crew to the Moon.
Scott saw that the part of the UFO in the frame was in the shape of a disc. The disc is light. Something flat adjoins it, and a dark dome rises in the middle. Such a complex structure, according to the archaeologist, undoubtedly represents a ship of aliens in orbit of our planet. Scott believes they were following the flight of the Americans. From afar. Without getting close. And they got into the frame by accident.
However, not everyone interpreted so clearly what the suspicious researcher saw. Some felt that most of all the UFO looks like a toilet - only without a cistern. The toilet faces the observers with its thicket, which Scott mistook for a dome. It’s hard to believe that there might be aliens in the toilet.
UFO toilet bowl pictured from Apollo 10.
The toilet is larger: the original photo is stored in the NASA archive.
There are three sound versions. The UFO could be the detached stage of the rocket on which the astronauts were launched. Or is it some kind of microscopic object - perhaps a speck of dust that has stuck to the already developed film. UFOs can also be a shooting defect - a distorted image of a star or the same moon to which the Americans were heading. The stars in the original archival photograph also look strange - in the form of some kind of loops, spirals and blots.
Or was the entire Earth then surrounded by alien ships?
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY