Documents / Document

Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, Volume 1 (scan)

NASA via ibiblio · 1969-07-31 · 251 pages · text by OCR

This is Volume 1 of NASA's Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, dated July 31, 1969. The Mission Operations Branch of the Flight Crew Support Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston prepared it, and it was originally classified Confidential. In it Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins go phase by phase through suiting, launch, powered flight, Earth orbit and lunar surface activities. They comment on suit fit, vibration, checklists, lunar dust, footing and poor sleeping conditions in the lunar module. A section titled Visual Sightings appears in the table of contents.

  • p. 22 …COLLINS The only interference I noted was that Neil's suit pocket interfered with the abort…
  • p. 31 …You hand them up and you get the bracket from Neil. It's really sort of…
  • p. 46 …DAP control 5 seconds after spring actuations. Neil and I both read a memo put out…
  • p. 121 …I think that Neil came in just about on schedule. I was able to accomplish three…
  • p. 148 …The way that we found to work out best was for Neil to tell me when…
  • p. 149 ## CONFIDENTIAL soon as Neil would say "MARK", I'd hit ENTER, record NOUN 20. Now the…
  • p. 176 ## CONFIDENTIAL with the EVA and it was sometime in here that Neil called to ground and…
  • p. 185 …The problem was not with mine, but in hooking up Neil's. I can't say…
  • p. 187 …So we unstowed Neil's, and that didn't help immediately. A little later, it seemed…
  • p. 191 …my feet and posterior out the hatch, Neil was in good position, as good as I…
  • p. 196 …In confirmation of Neil's findings, I didn't experience any hot or even warm spots…
  • p. 209 …amount of traverse of this kind. ## ALDRIN Neil initially pulled out about 20 feet of cable…
  • p. 222 …BB was still sitting on the edge. Neil came by with the camera to photograph it…
  • p. 223 …While I proceeded to that — because that's essentially a one-man operation — Neil went around…
  • p. 229 …doubt is a pretty good step, though Neil tells me he got up to the third…
  • p. 231 ## CONFIDENTIAL I had very little difficulty, again using the same technique that Neil used. About half…
  • p. 236 …and then five successive spiral readings that Neil would log down as I would read them…
  • p. 241 …I guess it slipped my mind, perhaps Neil's too, that the Apollo 10 crew had…
  • p. 251 …It was a question of my looking at the LEC, talking to Neil, and hoping we…
## CONFIDENTIAL

you very good indications as you are approaching that range. So we were a little misled and I thought we were still well out of range when we finally got the lockon.

You call up the program before the command module gets to 400 miles. It sits and waits; and, when it gets less than 400, it locks on automatically, and you see the signal strength grow and it starts to track. But it's in mode 2 so you don't see the needles doing anything; the cross-pointers move, indicating it's got rate drive going as it's trying to keep up with it. Because we didn't want to run the tape meter into the stops, we left it in ALTITUDE/ ALTITUDE RATE.

We really didn't have much of an indication that any good information was coming in, other than signal strength.

I guess the ground got the data on the downlink. When it broke lock, I thought the command module was overhead and it had broken lock because of a maximum rate drive. The radar representative from RCA had indicated that the SPEC said it might break lock, but he didn't think it would as it went over the zenith. But, because of the AGS indications, I thought that was what had caused the break-lock. Evidently, it had gone out the front field of view. It broke lock just a short time after the time given us by

## CONFIDENTIAL

About this file

Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 251 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.