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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

COLLINS	I think that this is just normal. Fabric will retain an odor where metal will not.
ALDRIN	I've noticed that same odor as characteristic of some of these new materials we have. A lot of the bags, when you get them right close to you, have this same burned-insulation odor. I'm not sure if that's it, but that might explain it.
COLLINS	I don't know. My first impression was that something was burning or had been burned inside that tunnel. I went over every inch of wiring and all the connectors. I got a flashlight and looked at everything. It all looked absolutely normal. We chose not to discuss it with the ground because we hadn't popped any circuit breakers and everything looked normal. It seemed like evidence of a past problem rather than an existing one.
ALDRIN	I think it would be a good idea for subsequent crews to sniff around and smell what this probe and umbilicals smell like beforehand.
COLLINS	They don't smell anything like that. This was a sharp odor. I mean this was enough to knock you down when you opened the tunnel. It was one strong odor.
ALDRIN	This stuff had been exposed to a vacuum.

# 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.