 Splashdowns are iconic of the Apollo era. Pictures of astronauts being plucked out of the water or waving from recovery carriers are synonymous with the successful end of a mission. But have you ever wondered just how many men it took to pluck one astronaut out of the water? A lot. The answer is a lot. So let's go through it. Hello everyone, I'm Amy. This is The Vintage Space, my little corner of the internet where we dig into all things mid-century that fascinate me, a lot of which happens to be space-based. And this is a question I've always been fascinated by. How many people did it take to pull one astronaut out of the ocean during the Apollo era? Before we can talk about how many men were involved in Splashdown recovery efforts, we need to talk a little bit about why Splashdowns happened in the first place. We'll do the Coles Notes version because this video right up here has a longer discussion on the capsule decision. So, in short, when the space age dawned in the late 1950s, there were two vehicle types up for consideration. Aircraft inspired like the X-15 and the dinosaur, and capsule inspired like missile warheads. There was a strong argument for capsules over aircraft-inspired designs because of how little was known about spaceflight and how much, comparatively, was known about warheads. Engineers working with nuclear warheads had dealt with a unique challenge throughout the 1950s, getting the bombs to detonate on their targets and not from the friction with the atmosphere as they fell to Earth. One engineer in particular, Max Faget, who was working with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Langley Research Center, found that a blunt shape was key. This shape created a cushion of air that, coupled with an ablative heat shield, protected the warhead as it fell. Replacing the warhead with a human-carrying capsule, Faget and his team quickly realized, was a simple way to launch a man into space and bring him home safely. Aircraft-inspired vehicles, on the other hand, meant solving the problem of the same aerodynamic heating, but without the benefits of the blunt design, and also adding in the human element of pilot control. The X-15 program was doing some of this research, but it was far more complicated, and that meant it would also take longer to perfect than launching with capsules. Government and industry partners ultimately determined capsules were the best way to fast-track America getting a man into space, which was paramount since NASA's whole raison d'etre was a reaction to Sputnik, America needed to match the Soviet space. When NASA took over the individual bits and pieces of space research happening throughout the country and put them under one umbrella in October of 1958, it also inherited NACA engineers, including Max Faget and his research into capsules. Because it was a faster method for getting a man into space, NASA Space Task Group ultimately chose capsules to be the backbone of the inaugural Mercury program. In January of 1959, NASA awarded the spacecraft contract to the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, who worked with Faget to finalize the design, and what NASA got was a truncated cone with a rounded blunt bottom. The astronaut inside was positioned on his back relative to that rounded bottom in a contoured couch, a setup that offered natural protection from the G-forces associated with re-entry. The next question was landing. A deorbit burn would slow the capsule to begin its fall through the atmosphere, but from there the question was, does it land on water or on land? Landing on land had some advantages, namely recovery was much simpler. Like an airplane, the astronaut could just open the hatch and get out. He'd only need a couple of vehicles worth of people to check he was okay and to collect him and his spacecraft. The challenge was making sure that landing was soft enough to be survivable. Engineers looked at adding a wing to the capsule so it could glide to a landing, using some kind of parasail or maneuverable parachute, or just a regular chute to slow it down. But all of those solutions were complicated for the time frame and added too much mass. A simple parachute slowing the capsule's fall to the ocean was much simpler, lighter, and therefore the method of choice. It also took advantage of the natural cushioning effect of the water and provided a very large target. The large target was especially appealing when pretty much every element of space flight was new and experimental, but it meant recovery was complicated. Luckily NASA had the US Navy at its disposal since the burgeoning space race was an extension of the Cold War. The space agency could pretty much take it for granted that the US Navy would be there to help. In figuring out splashdowns, NASA settled on three splashdown recovery zones per mission. The primary zone would reflect where the spacecraft would land after re-entering the atmosphere on target on a nominal mission. As a backup there were secondary and contingency zones to account for problems during the flight. Pin pointing these zones was fairly simple. Because the spacecraft's fall through the atmosphere was ballistic, engineers were able to calculate the exact landing point based on where it would re-enter the atmosphere, and that re-entry point in turn was predetermined based on the whole mission profile. That's how, long before every mission launched, NASA knew exactly where it would land and could therefore have the required recovery forces on hand. It was the same for determining the secondary and contingency zones. Determining alternate points for re-entry to account for potential issues in flight, like a forced early re-entry or some problem meaning re-entry would happen a bit later. There were thus recovery forces on hand in these alternate zones ahead of launch, too. Like everything else at the early space age, NASA had to figure out ocean recovery from scratch. And like with the decisions to go with splashdowns, a lack of experience and a tight time frame contributed to the space agency employing what was effectively a brute force method. The thing with secondary and contingency zones is that crews in one specific point in the ocean don't cover the full swath of areas where a mission could end. A tiny change in re-entry timing could translate to a massive change in splashdown point. A fraction of a second of a delay in firing the retro rockets could translate to a landing hundreds of miles off target. Preparing for these potential problems meant having more than one ship in each recovery zone such that at least one could get to the spacecraft quickly. The spread of these zones and the number of ships meant that an astronaut splashing down wildly off target wouldn't be more than a few hours from health. So we've got multiple ships in multiple zones on every mission. And because spaceflight was so unknown, the Mercury program saw the most insane numbers. Al Shepard and Gus Grissom both flew suborbital missions in 1961. Though there was no possible chance of a missed splashdown point with these flights, they had 10 and 8 ships on hand respectively. And things got more intense when NASA started sending astronauts into orbit. When John Glenn became the first American to go into orbit on February 20th of 1962, NASA had 24 ships on hand, 23 in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific. They were 14 destroyers, two carriers, one salvage ship, two ocean minesweepers, one frigate, one anti-sub destroyer, one radar picket destroyer, and one oiler. Which maybe doesn't mean a lot to non-Navy people, so let's break it down even further. Carriers have fairly large crews. In the case of the USS Randolph that was Glenn's primary recovery ship, it had a crew of 1,615 men. Destroyers are smaller. In Glenn's case, the USS Barry and the USS Blandi had crews of 304. Salvage ships in this specific case, the USS Recovery, had a crew of 83. Submarines, in this case the USS Norfolk, brought 127 men into the mix. If we take these numbers as estimates per ship and look at how many people were in the recovery effort in total, that's about 8,000 men on hand to pull a single astronaut out of the ocean at the end of an Earth orbital mission. And this doesn't take into account the hundreds of people who were stationed throughout the world wide tracking network in support of the whole flight, or the people in mission control. Though these people were all a huge part of the recovery effort, they were also vital to the overall mission. That sounds like a lot, but the Navy is a huge branch of the American military, and the dawn of the space age coming on the heels of the Second World War meant the Navy had upwards of 6,000 active ships at the time. What makes the recovery forces seem like a lot is the fact that John Glenn once landed a plane full of bullet holes. He could definitely have landed anything returning from space onto a runway, but I digress. The remaining Mercury missions had about the same number of ships. Carpenters Aurora 7 flight had 22, Shiraz Sigma 7 had 27, and Cooper's Phase 7 had 24. In every instance it was the same mix of carriers, destroyers, oilers, and frigates spread across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Gemini mission saw similarly large numbers. Gemini 3 had 20, Gemini 4 had 18, Gemini 5 had 16, Gemini 6A and 7 had 14, Gemini 8 had 12, Gemini 9 had 15, Gemini 10 had 10, and Gemini 11 and 12 both had 11 ships. In every case the primary recovery ship was the actual recovery carrier with the exception of Gemini 8. On that mission a stuck thruster put the spacecraft into a nearly deadly spin. Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong almost lost consciousness from the centrifugal forces inside the spacecraft. They were able to correct the spin but had to use their reentry fuel to do so and mission rules stated that they then had to reenter right away. On that mission the USS Leonard F. Mason was the actual recovery ship instead of the USS Boxer which was the intended prime recovery ship. Going into Apollo, NASA was learning more about splashdowns and spaceflight. The number of ships thus went down as the program wore on. Apollo 7 had 9 ships on hand, Apollo 8 had 12, Apollo 9 had 6, Apollo 10 had 7, Apollo 11 had 8, Apollo 12 had 5, Apollo 13 had 9, Apollo 14 had 6, Apollo 15 had the lowest number with four ships, Apollo 16 had 6 and Apollo 17 also had four recovery ships on hand. The first two Skylab missions each had three ships and the last had two. The Apollo half of the Apollo Soyuz test project had just one recovery ship. The shuttle era obviously moved away from splashdowns and huge naval support for missions though some Navy forces were deployed for the launch of STS-1 in 1981. With the return of splashdowns we're going to see a return to water-based support for spaceflight so we'll have to wait and see if we get the wild mercury levels or the lower late Apollo numbers of ships on hand. When I first learned how many ships were on hand per mission my mind was a little blown so I hope you guys found this interesting as well. For me at least it definitely added some context behind the really iconic pictures of the ends of Apollo missions. That's gonna do it for me for today. I want to remind you guys that both my books Fighting for Space and Breaking the Chains of Gravity are available however you like to consume books. I've got links to both in the description. I also want to say a very special thank you to my Patreon supporters and YouTube members. Your continued support truly makes all the difference in the world and allows me to continue creating this content. So thank you so much. That is going to do it for me for today you guys. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with me and I'll see you next time.