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During the launch of an Apollo spacecraft by the Saturn IB or Saturn V rocket, the flight could be aborted to rescue the crew if the rocket failed catastrophically. Depending on how far the flight had progressed, they would use different procedures or modes. None of these launch abort modes was ever used on any of the fifteen manned Apollo spacecraft flights. Houston's announcements of the current abort mode and the spacecraft commander's acknowledgements were among the few things said on the radio link during the first minutes of flight. If the rocket failed during the first phases of the flight, the Emergency Detection System (EDS) would automatically give the command to abort. The reason is that life-threatening situations can develop too fast for humans to discuss and react to. In the later, less violent phases of the ascent, the EDS was turned off and an abort would have to be initiated manually. ==Overview== Of the five abort modes, the modes up to two (II) are variations of jettisoning the entire rocket followed by an immediate landing in the sea (splashdown). Mode three (III) and up are variations of jettisoning only the failing rocket stage, using the other stages to continue into Earth orbit. Once there, a backup Earth-orbit mission could be performed so that the flight was not entirely in vain. In all cases, the Command Module (CM) with the astronauts performs a splashdown by: * Dumping the hypergolic fuel overboard since the toxic substance would be an unnecessary risk to recovery personnel. * If high enough, deploying high-speed parachutes (drogue parachute). * Jettisoning the drogues and deploying the main parachutes. * Splashing down in the sea and waiting for recovery team to arrive. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Apollo abort modes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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