David Frohman, President of Peachstate Historical Consulting, Inc., has discovered the original procedural drawings and blueprints for the Apollo Command and Lunar Module spacecraft
January 21, 2000
David Frohman, President of Peachstate Historical Consulting, Inc., is pleased to announce his recent discovery of a major treasure trove of profound historical importance!
Shortly after the tragic Apollo 1 fire in 1967, a major redesign was undertaken of the Apollo command and lunar module spacecraft. A newly-designed command and lunar module required new operational procedures, and the task to write those critical procedures fell to astronaut Jack Swigert. Swigert, in-turn, would later travel to the Moon himself aboard the ill-fated Apollo 13.
Swigert's historic overhaul of the command and lunar module procedures manuals involved drafting hundreds of pages of documents. They included his earliest hand-drawn sketches and manuscripts, that later evolved into the final printed manuals for the new spacecraft.
"It would not be an overstatement to say that these documents are the literal birth-certificate of the very spacecraft procedures that put man on the Moon", Frohman stated!
After the documents had fulfilled their intended purpose, Jack Swigert chose to gift this archive to fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke, Jr., who later became the 10th man to walk on the Moon during Apollo 16. The intact archive then literally remained out of sight and mind for over 30 years within Duke's holdings.
During Frohman's engagement to catalog and appraise the Duke collection recently, he uncovered the archive and sensed its importance. Interviews with Duke then confirmed Frohman's suspicions of the true nature and historical importance of the large archive of documents.
Further evaluation is now ongoing of what Frohman has since named the "Apollo 1 Archive".