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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.

Open the PDF at page 56 Original source ↗

“Works”60+ pages

  • p. 6 …It released after a good bit of work and coordination between Mike and Fred, the BCMP…
  • p. 7 …Our procedure worked very well. I don't know who thought it up to use the…
  • p. 16 # CONFIDENTIAL 3.11 CABIN PRESSURE (DECREASE) COLLINS The valves worked as advertised and started decreasing as…
  • p. 17 …ALDRIN This would give you a clue if the lights were not working, if something had…
  • p. 25 …L-2 and L-9 need some work to get them in the proper sequence. ALDRIN…
  • p. 28 …ARMSTRONG That worked well for us, I think. COLLINS Worked fine. ALDRIN Optics Cover Check. COLLINS…
  • p. 40 …and docking, in general, worked in flight just as it worked a couple of times in…
  • p. 41 …In the simulator, sometimes it worked like magic and other times it wouldn't. In flight…
  • p. 42 …ALIGNMENT AT 50 FEET My procedure was worked out so I'd be 66 feet away…
  • p. 46 …All that hardware worked well. We followed the checklist. We extracted in CMC, FREE, and then…
  • p. 51 …were quite reasonable and had been well worked out by previous crews and I'd recommend…
  • p. 53 …That worked fine. All three suits did go in the L-shaped bag satisfactorily and could…
  • p. 54 …That worked as planned, and we think that's a reasonable procedure. Folding them, taking a…
  • p. 55 …3 OPTICS CALIBRATION COLLINS Optics calibration worked all right. 6. 4 PHOTOGRAPHY; EARTH AND MOON COLLINS…
  • p. 62 …from that viewpoint, or it won't work properly. These are just two pitfalls that I…
  • p. 68 …A little bit of work could have cleaned that up before the flight, and I just…
  • p. 69 …safe and comfortable with it, and it worked throughout the flight. 6. 15 ADEQUACY OF PROCEDURES…
  • p. 70 …all the P30's and P40's worked out very smoothly. ## 6.16 MIDCOURSE CORRECTION ## ARMSTRONG…
  • p. 74 …It hasn't been well worked out. I feel uncomfortable about this. ARMSTRONG It's just…
  • p. 75 …just trying to see how it was working. All of a sudden we found that we…
  • p. 77 …I suspected at times that it was not working properly. I never absolutely caught it mal…
  • p. 78 …6.21 S-BAND SQUELCH ## ARMSTRONG It worked very well, I thought. ## ARMSTRONG ## 6.22 DAYLIGHT…
  • p. 79 # CONFIDENTIAL ## 6.24 RADIATORS COLLINS We never flowed through the secondary radiators because the primary worked…
  • p. 80 …ALDRIN When it worked, it worked like a charm. There were a couple of times when…
  • p. 82 …The repetition just took the pressure off the next day's IVT. ## ALDRIN Working in the…
  • p. 83 …ARMSTRONG So, all in all, I guess it worked out well. We recommend it as a…
  • p. 84 …We got a lot of rest and got into lunar orbit eager to go to work…
  • p. 93 …That always worked for us. We were always able to see the star in the sextant…
  • p. 103 …It seemed to work well. ARMSTRONG I was thinking ahead about our overall LM stowage which…
  • p. 110 …The probe, drogue, and hatch worked flawlessly. At this time, I was on this solo book…
  • p. 115 …This solo book concept, where I had all the information I needed in one book, worked…
  • p. 116 …I'm not sure it turned out to be any less work. I never was too…
  • p. 117 …me to see that the system was working. We had no scheduled checks on it to…
  • p. 120 …I think that things worked out quite well. We were gradually, comfortably getting 15 to 20…
  • p. 122 # CONFIDENTIAL ALDRIN (CONT'D) E-memory dump, and you did some work with the DSKY and…
  • p. 123 …But, that worked out all right. ## CONFIDENTIAL
  • p. 124 …If in other flights it could be worked into the earth-side pass, I think it…
  • p. 127 …ALDRIN The S-band antenna seemed to work very well at this stage. It didn't…
  • p. 129 …If it didn't work that way, when you moved it, it didn't go to…
  • p. 132 …Cards worked quite well. We'd lose maybe a little bit of time by having to…
  • p. 133 …The little piece of Velcro on the feet port worked quite well, just slapping it down…
  • p. 140 …AUTO optics worked well, and the optics drive was extremely smooth. When using resolve and in…
  • p. 141 …This technique works for another few miles, but I don't know how long I could…
  • p. 143 …I did that as a VERB 49 maneuver, and it worked fine in that I had…
  • p. 148 …This procedure seemed to work as we had planned; however, the variation in the data was…
  • p. 149 …We had it worked out with the ground how we arranged the signs on the differences…
  • p. 151 # CONFIDENTIAL for the PDI needs additional work prior to the next flight. There are some alternative…
  • p. 154 …something that the two of us could work on at the same time and to give…
  • p. 165 …That worked pretty well, but I was surprised that I had as much trouble as I…
  • p. 174 …noticed that the mission timer wasn't working. It was frozen; it just stopped. ARMSTRONG No…
  • p. 175 …We turned it off for a while and turned it back on again and it worked…
  • p. 176 …might have that we'd want to work on, and the second was our adaptation to…
  • p. 177 …from the window prior to lunar surface work. We were in a relatively smooth area covered…
  • p. 180 …We would have at least one working watch to back up the mission timer or to…
  • p. 187 …It seemed to work well. ## 10.20 DEPRESSURIZATION This was one area of flight preparation that…
  • p. 188 …Well, in retrospect, it all seemed to work okay, it was just that we weren't…
  • p. 190 …and the work on the ladder and the platform is that our simulation work in both…
  • p. 191 …The work and effort required to go up and down the ladder and in through the…
  • p. 193 …operation of lowering the camera seemed to work fairly well. It appeared as though you might…
  • p. 196 …10.25 ENVIRONMENTAL FAMILIARIZATION With respect to work on the surface, the 1/6 gravity was…
## CONFIDENTIAL

ALDRIN Right.

We spent a lot of time with EECOM before the flight discussing what items to check and what items not to check. I suppose as long as we have space flights, we're going to have philosophical disagreements on how exhaustively we want to check all the equipment. My personal philosophy is that if you don't have some reason to believe that it's broken, leave it alone. Don't fool around with it.

FOD, of course, has a number of mission rules that require verification of each and every component of each and every system to make sure that they're not going to violate one of the mission rules. I can understand their viewpoint. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. We ended up after many, many discussions including the operation to make sure that the glycol was flowing satisfactorily through the secondary radiators without any leaks and to make sure that the secondary water boiler was functioning properly. We did that pre-TLI. Then pre-LOI, we checked only for gross radiator leaks and did not check secondary water boiler operation.

LDRIN It wasn't really a difficult time-consuming task. It went very smoothly.

## CONFIDENTIAL

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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.