Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Kraft explained their three options. They could, if they chose, bring the crew back in less than thirty-six hours after P.C.+2 with a long burn at full throttle if they were willing to bring Odyssey down in the Atlantic where NASA had no recovery ships. Kraft didn’t spend much time on this option, for it was only a few hours faster than the second one, thereafter called the “fast burn,” which would put the spacecraft in the southwest Pacific, the prime recovery area, in less than thirty-nine hours. The third option was a shorter, lower-power burn (the “slow burn”) that would return the spacecraft to the prime recovery area in sixty-three hours, or twenty-four hours later than the fast burn. They had no intermediate choices if they wanted to land in the prime recovery area. A spacecraft returning from the moon had limited maneuvering range. If one wanted to put the space in a particular spot along the potential landing track, it was available only once per earth rotation.