 Some very interesting launch-related things happened in November. In 1957, history saw the world's first biological traveler, Leica, orbit the Earth. In 1963, NASA started testing its launch escape system, and in 1969, three astronauts almost had to use it when Apollo 12 Saturn V was struck twice by lightning. This month, in space history. A mutt from the streets of Moscow, Leica was trained by Soviet Air Force doctors along with nine canine companions. They were subjected to centrifuge runs, launch simulations, and kept in increasingly small cages to prepare them for flights in small spacecraft. Leica was chosen from three finalists for her even temperament. Her short hair and long neck were also deciding factors. This allowed doctors to move a portion of her carited artery close to the skin, where a special collar could then easily monitor her blood pressure and heart rate during the flight. Leica launched on November 3, 1957, after sitting on the launch pad for three days. She survived orbital insertion, but things weren't all well on the spacecraft. The environmental control unit malfunctioned, and Leica's cabin cooling system failed. She finally succumbed to heat exhaustion before doctors could administer the lethal injection already loaded into the cabin. Leica's ride to orbit on an R7 rocket was rough. It took longer than doctors anticipated for her heart rate to descend back to its resting rate. But it could have been worse. Less than 100 feet tall, the R7 was far shorter and much less scary to ride than the 363 foot Saturn V rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the moon. Even early in its construction, designers knew the Saturn V would be deadly if it exploded on the launch pad. Engineers estimated an explosion we'd yield a fireball 1408 feet in diameter that would burn for 33.9 seconds at a peak temperature of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. To give crews an escape, NASA included a launch escape system on the Apollo capsule, the same type that was used with Mercury. The launch escape system used three separate solid fuel rocket motors. The first and most important was the launch escape motor. This was the main system, delivering 155,000 pounds of thrust to pull the command module clear of an exploding Saturn V. That's a lot of power. 155,000 pounds is almost three times the 52,000 pounds of thrust the Redstone rocket had. That's the one that sent Al Shepard and Gus Grissom on their suborbital Mercury flights. The other two systems were the Tower Jettison system that separated the whole launch escape system during a nominal launch and the pitch control motor that gave the separated capsule directional momentum. The whole system was first tested on November 7, 1963. A boilerplate Apollo capsule, a test model, sat on a launch pad with an armed launch escape system. An abort signal was sent to the spacecraft, triggering ignition of the solid rockets. The solid-fueled launch escape motor fired, pulling the boilerplate Apollo off the ground for 15 seconds. Then it separated, leaving the capsule to fall on a ballistic trajectory. The parachutes deployed and the boilerplate Apollo landed at a leisurely 16 miles per hour. Aside from some soot on the capsule, the test proved the system worked like a charm. The crew of Apollo 12 almost had to use their launch escape system when they launched towards the moon on November 14, 1969. The Saturn V lifted off and launched through overcast skies. After 37 seconds of nominal flight, all hell broke loose. The crew saw a flash of light and felt the rocket shutter. The control panel lit up with warning lights like a Christmas tree and the master alarm sounded. It looked like the spacecraft had lost all power and was using its re-entry batteries. If that was the case, they would need to use that launch escape system and abort the mission. But it wasn't possible. To be using batteries, they would have had to have separated from the rocket and none of the astronauts had felt the telltale acceleration of the launch escape system, pulling the capsule free of the Saturn V. Things weren't any better in mission control, as the data on the consoles now reflected the chaos inside the spacecraft. Flight director Jerry Griffin was as confused as the crew. But one man recognized the messy data from a launch test months earlier, 24-year-old John Aaron. He knew it was an electrical problem and that somehow the signal conditioning equipment had been knocked out. The signal conditioning equipment, abbreviated SCE, was responsible for translating information from the rocket systems into the signals that fed the spacecraft's display panels and those in mission control. With the SCE switch in the normal position, low voltage would mess up the signal. But the SCE had a second auxiliary position. John Aaron knew would restore data. So he told Griffin to turn SCE to AUX. Griffin had never heard the command before. At first he'd thought he'd heard Aaron say turn SCE to OFF. Aaron corrected Griffin, who passed the command on to Jerry Carr, the launch Capcom. Carr, an astronaut, was equally confused, but continued the chain and passed the order up to Apollo 12's commander Pete Conrad. Conrad also had no idea what the command meant. He called back down to Carr for confirmation. Try FCE to AUX? What the hell is that? No one but Aaron seemed to know what or where this SCE switch was, which worried Griffin. What good was a fix if no one knew where to find it? But lunar module pilot Al Bean did, though command module pilot Dick Gordon has claimed he was the one that actually pointed the switch out. Bean flipped the SCE switch into the auxiliary position. As, one by one, the systems all came back online, Conrad suggested that they had maybe been hit by lightning. In fact, they had, twice. The rocket powering through storm clouds had acted like a lightning rod, creating two separate strikes that rode the Saturn's contrails all the way down to the launch pad. After almost aborting the mission 37 seconds after launch, the rest of Apollo 12 went off without a hitch. See you next month!