Showtime at the Apollo! NASA’s Moon Missions Photographed

Apollo 2 & 3 (Unmanned Test Flights)

Before the Apollo 1 disaster, three unmanned test flights of Apollo to Saturn rockets took place. Missions AS-201, AS-202 and AS-203 took place in 1966, testing the Saturn 1B launch vehicle. They set the stage for AS-204 which was planned to be the first manned mission but ended up killing three astronauts.

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Source: Flickr

That mission was renamed later as Apollo 1. Apollo 4 was to be next, but the plan was to continue the unmanned test flights as NASA redesigned the command module. The missions were made so that Apollo 2 would debut the Lunar Module while Apollo 3, the high Earth orbit mission with both the CSM and LM, would then be the first manned Saturn V launch.

The next three unmanned Apollo flights aren’t well known…

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