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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. 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…
## 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.