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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

substellar point. But when you are close to the Earth, and the Earth is very large, and you have an obvious roll on its alignment in the reticle, then it requires a very large maneuver to maneuver the spacecraft over to the substellar point. I'd be happy to draw it on a blackboard some other time for the proper people. I was reluctant to make these large maneuvers, because I thought something was wrong. And they kept saying go ahead and mark, that it was all right, and so I did take some marks and the DELTA-R's and the DELTA-V's were excessive. I don't know what else to say now. I'd sort of like to get a blackboard and talk this over with flight planning and with the people from MPAD, if necessary, and see where we went wrong. It's my fault in that I didn't get all the interested parties and sit down and go through step by step and maneuver by maneuver exactly where we were going to go and what we were going to do.

I think it's one of these areas that it would have been nice maybe, for you anyway, to have had an abbreviated simulation with Houston as part of our training. One big problem there is that you just can't always count on the simulator giving enough fidelity.

## 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.