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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. 30 …It was impossible to read an effect on any indicator in the cockpit. COLLINS This is…
  • p. 38 …the expected altitude was 174 and we read 176. The EMS was 3.3 plus. ARMSTRONG…
  • p. 39 …There's no way that the EMS could read 99.1 at docking. As I recall…
  • p. 40 ## CONFIDENTIAL Then I thrusted minus X until the DELTA-V counter read minus 100.5. I…
  • p. 46 …Neil and I both read a memo put out by MPAD, saying that for some failure…
  • p. 50 …We gave daily dosimeter readings, which as far as I'm concerned fall in a sort…
  • p. 51 …COLLINS And the dosimeter we just gave them a once-a-day reading on that dosimeter…
  • p. 68 …When you read me the numbers, you didn't note that I read star number 2…
  • p. 79 …The cabin temperature (translunar) was slightly warmer than we would like it, although the gage readings…
  • p. 130 …We had good helium pressure and read that out to MSFN. We went through the RCS…
  • p. 132 …the AGS, and give you an erroneous reading so you wouldn't pass. In any case…
  • p. 134 …There is a bad amount of data that the ground reads up to you in that…
  • p. 151 …They did approach the maximum numbers with a reading of approximately 94. Anyway, they weren't…
  • p. 169 …with time as evidenced by successive LPD readings. FCOD REP. Do you recall when you proceeded…
  • p. 170 …again, although at the time we were reading relatively low tank pressures. I think the OX…
  • p. 172 …We read the sine and cosine out of AGS (and I'm sure they copied that…
  • p. 175 …we were going to launch, so we read through the remainder of the simulated countdown and…
  • p. 235 …same exercises such as pressure-integrity check, reading the cabin down, and configuring the ECS. I…
  • p. 236 …We used a sequence of marking that involved an onboard averaging of five successive cursive readings…
# CONFIDENTIAL

COLLINS to the horizon. They kept telling me that it was all (CONT'D) right to go ahead and mark anyway.

ALDRIN They didn't really mean that. We're sure they didn't.

Now, I'm not sure what they meant. Maybe you hit the nail on the head. What they meant was that the spacecraft did not have to be rolled in such a manner that the spacecraft roll was parallel to the substellar point. In other words, what they were saying is that the computer program could accommodate a change in spacecraft roll simply by torquing the optics around to go off at a peculiar angle. Nonetheless, when you look through the sextant to get accurate marks, you must have the reticle pattern parallel to the horizon or you are not measuring the true angle between the star and horizon. Here's the star and the horizon, and instead of measuring this angle, you're measuring this angle or that angle or some other oblique angle that is larger than the true angle, which is the angle from the star normal to the horizon. So this initial run on P23 got very confused. The following day, the problem went away because we were far enough away from the Earth, and the fact that their angles were not at the substellar point became immaterial because the Earth was small enough that a very small maneuver on my part could locate the

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.