Before the first successful manned moon landing in July 1969, Apollo 10 performed a successful dress-rehearsal mission with the lunar lander “Snoopy” descending to only 50,000ft from the lunar surface before returning to mate with the command module “Charlie Brown”.
50 years ago today, that command module “Charlie Brown” splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at the end of a successful eight day mission.
In 1976, “Charlie Brown” was loaned to the Science Museum in London, UK and has been on exhibit there ever since.
If you visit the Science Museum today, you will see that the command module is now quite some distance behind a protective handrail, and now has a perspex (sorry, plexiglass for US visitors) protective cover over its entrance hatch. This makes it difficult to have a good look at what the spacecraft is like inside.
However, that was not always the case. When I first saw the command module on exhibition in 1976, it was possible to get very close to the spacecraft and managed to get a few photos of the interior.
As I have never seen online anything similar to my photos, I am posting them here for those who may be interested.
The photos below were taken in 1976 on Kodachrome 64 slide film with a Nikon F2, and were scanned many years ago with an old Nikon Coolscan II LS-20 scanner. I apologise for all the dust spots. The original slides are still around somewhere, and if I find them, I will rescan them as long as they have not deteriorated too much over the years.
If you click on the gallery images below, you will be taken to a summary page for each image. Click again on the thumbnail on that page and you will see the original full size image. The originals are approximately 3600 x 2400 pixels, and if you zoom in on them, you will see that quite a lot of detail is visible in some areas.
Each image summary page contains comments about interesting things visible in the photo.
I hope you enjoy the images. If you copy them for use elsewhere, please do not crop out my website address which I had added discretely in the corner of each image.
