Apollo 9 Lands in San Diego
by Johnny McDonald

National treasure and a vital piece of American history, Apollo 9.

The San Diego Aeronautical Museum will be showing off something from outer space: Apollo 9’s Command Module — all 11,500 pounds of it.

The debut was July 20 with astronaut Wally Schirra, the only man to serve on all three space programs — Mercury, Gemini and Apollo — as the keynote speaker. As a board member, he was instrumental in acquiring the module.

The public got its first glimpse the next day in the free section of the museum.

As for executive vice president Bruce Bleakley, it has taken nearly a four-year paper trail to get permission from the Smithsonian Institution to fulfill all requirements.

As far as he’s concerned, it was well worth the wait. Bleakley’s sure visitors who will see this significant artifact will agree. He calls the Apollo 9 module a "national treasure and a vital piece of American space flight history."

He said the Smithsonian wanted assurances of the Aerospace Museum’s physical plans, financial base, organization and overall care. The loan ends in 2007, when the museum can reapply for an extension.

"A year ago, we got wind of the fact there would be two of them available, the Apollo 7 module in a Ottawa Museum and this one in a Michigan center, which was closing," Bleakley said.

"The first year, it will be featured as a free exhibit...one of the things that weighed heavily in our favor. Their pressing concern is how many people will see this."

Apollo 9 was the first space test of the third critical piece of Apollo hardware — the lunar module. For 10 days, astronauts put all three Apollo vehicles through their paces in Earth orbit, undocking and then redocking the lunar lander with the command module.

Astronauts Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, a civilian, and Col. Dave Scott performed a space walk, and Schweickart checked out the new Apollo space suit, the first to have its own life-support system rather than being dependent on an umbilical connection to the spacecraft.

Bleakley demonstrated with a model of the Saturn rocket assembly on his desk. With its parts, he showed the command module docking procedure. In later moon expeditions, the legged platform would reman on the moon surface and the service module would orbit the moon before crashing. The command module would return to earth.

Bleakley, a former Air Force flier with tours in Southeast Asia and Europe, has been with the museum 11 years. He first served as education director and has been in his present position eight months.

"We’ll have supporting artifacts, equipment, graphics and dramatic photographs to illustrate the purpose of the project," he said. "We want a visitor have some relation to space."