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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 62 Original source ↗

“Roll”17 pages

  • p. 15 …LIGHTS ARMSTRONG Launch vehicle lights, roll program, pitch program, roll complete were on time, as were…
  • p. 41 …Then, just as in the simulator, the DAP rolled itself out. It ceased its pitch rate…
  • p. 43 …I did have a slight roll misalignment. I knew I had a slight roll misalignment, but…
  • p. 48 …It definitely had a good roll to it moving away. ## CONFIDENTIAL
  • p. 63 …roll angle is unconstrained in that with large trunnion angles, the computer may pick a roll…
  • p. 64 …being furnished to me in regard to roll angles. However, I didn't. That's one…
  • p. 65 …What they meant was that the spacecraft did not have to be rolled in such a…
  • p. 66 …very large, and you have an obvious roll on its alignment in the reticle, then it…
  • p. 79 …We always used 0.3 deg/sec roll and we never tried the 0.1. It…
  • p. 111 …There is a constraint on 2-jet roll, 4-jet roll, and no-jet roll, depending…
  • p. 150 …While flying AOT, you depend on the other crewmember to assure you that the roll gimbal…
  • p. 158 …It was then that I clearly realized that we weren't rolling as fast as was…
  • p. 216 …The part that had been melted, separated, and rolled back or peeled back on the secondary…
  • p. 224 …d know what is inside a certain roll. In many cases, there is nothing in it…
  • p. 227 …When it rolled up, it had a tendency to sneak off to the side and crinkle…
  • p. 247 …Also, I could roll over on one side or on the other. I had the two…
  • p. 248 …more horizontal position or the capability to roll from one side to the other. That's…
6-11

## CONFIDENTIAL

But I would just say in general that that checklist should be reworked. There are many little pitfalls. For example, if you find yourself in an inertial attitude, and all you want to do is spin up around that attitude, the checklist implies that you can just go into it at that intermediate point, but that is not the case either. You must pretend that you are in the wrong attitude, ask the computer to maneuver you to the right attitude and then go through the entire checklist from that viewpoint, or it won't work properly. These are just two pitfalls that I happen to know about right now.

## ARMSTRONG

It seems to me that the point is that this is a very good procedure that worked extremely well, and we're going to find that it's extremely easy to use but has not stood the test of time yet. It needs a lot more experience in use before we could use it reliably and repeatedly every time without causing a later problem that we couldn't predict.

That's right. Another little facet of it is that after the PTC is initiated, then there are certain no-no's in regard to the use of the DSKY's having to do with collapsing deadband and other problems internal to the computer.

## 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.