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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. 34 …ARMSTRONG Yes, I didn't feel that it was as marked as I had remembered. COLLINS…
  • p. 53 COLLINS (CONT'D) On a couple of marks, when I got 5 balls, I know that…
  • p. 65 …They kept telling me that it was all (CONT'D) right to go ahead and mark…
  • p. 66 …And they kept saying go ahead and mark, that it was all right, and so I…
  • p. 68 ## CONFIDENTIAL I think it's all unfortunate that the first mark, the first star set that…
  • p. 69 …We marked on that star without any further verification. I suppose this could rise up and…
  • p. 107 …I have on my map the location of the crater on which I marked. I'll…
  • p. 117 …I updated the state vector by using both VHF ranging marks and sextant marks. This is…
  • p. 118 …I did get some accepted updates from the sextant marks. They were: 6.1 ft/sec…
  • p. 138 …ARMSTRONG Yes, we took five marks on each star, and it did take us quite a…
  • p. 140 …It gives you an opportunity to make some sextant marks, make VHF marks, and then to…
  • p. 142 …a phasing burn. ## 9.1.9 Sextant marks COLLINS I've covered those. ## 9.1.10…
  • p. 149 ## CONFIDENTIAL soon as Neil would say "MARK", I'd hit ENTER, record NOUN 20. Now the…
  • p. 150 …our margin just in variation between our marks. That's not really a good enough procedure…
  • p. 154 …only about two or three range-rate marks. They appeared to give us a perilune altitude…
  • p. 156 …However, the downrange position marks after ignition indicated that we were long. Each one that was…
  • p. 165 …landing spot prior to the 100-foot mark and then pick out an area just beyond…
  • p. 173 …than I had hoped to get the marks on that. I can't comment particularly on…
  • p. 209 …where I saw the black and white marks on it. The cable, being wound around the…
  • p. 220 …get it orientated at the 45-degree mark. The big problem arose in trying to get…
  • p. 227 …Perhaps by the use of some marks you just make a judgment whether the distance between…
  • p. 236 …We used a sequence of marking that involved an onboard averaging of five successive cursive readings…
## CONFIDENTIAL

training had been built toward using AUTO optics for these maneuvers. I asked them to go back and find stars whose trunnion angles were small enough that this would not then be a problem (the LM structure occulting it). Flight planning talked to the MPAD people and said that they could not find such stars with the proper in plane/out of plane geometry. But the ground-computed angles would locate satisfactory substellar points and all subsequent maneuvers would be very small. Now, I should have called a halt right there and sat down with the flight planning people and with the MPAD people, and I should have gone through each star, each maneuver, each gimbal angle, each subsequent substellar point, and ironed out just exactly step by step how many maneuvers would be required; the size of them and exactly what was being furnished to me in regard to roll angles. However, I didn't. That's one of the things that fell through the crack. So, in flight when I maneuvered to the ground-supplied angles, I found that I was nowhere near the substellar point as determined by the fact that the sextant reticle was not parallel to the horizon at that point. And here I think we had some kind of a communications breakdown with the ground, because I kept telling them that this was not at a satisfactory substellar point, that the reticle was not parallel

## 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.