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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. 6 …completing the countdown procedures, the number 2 rotation hand controller was raised to the launch position…
  • p. 9 …They had rotated this handle on the X strut on the left of my seat so…
  • p. 73 …You do have to think about whether the vehicle is rotating or not, in what area…
  • p. 114 …Then it rotated around, and I never really could check the fourth downlock. I was relatively…
  • p. 213 …the LM that the weight of the flag had rotated the entire unit about the ## CONFIDENTIAL
  • p. 220 …The handle deployed upward and rotated around, even though I wasn't able to see it…
  • p. 221 …I would try to push it down to get it to rotate around and it would…
  • p. 225 …On rotating it up to the inverted position to keep anything from coming out, I didn…
  • p. 232 …I ran into a minor problem in getting it to rotate fully so that I could…
  • p. 233 …seem to rotate it as much as I thought it should have been rotated. However, the…
  • p. 237 …it would have amounted to a considerable rotating of the spiral and cursive reticle field back…
## CONFIDENTIAL

tangled up in wires. There were wires all over the place, and we were running around from one strut to the other. We found out that it was set to have the monitor attached right to the camera itself, so from that point on, we taped the monitor beside the camera.

Well, we have a couple of comments we'll get into sometime later with respect to television, but with respect to its operation, it's unquestionably a magnificent little piece of equipment. However, you cannot operate it without any planning at all. You do have to think about whether the vehicle is rotating or not, in what area you're going to take pictures, where the lighting is going to be from, and through what windows, and all that sort of thing. This takes some planning to enable you to assure yourself that you are going to get a good TV picture of whatever you decided you are going to take a picture of.

That's right, and the monkey is on the back of the crew, functioning as script writer, producer, and actor, for the daily television shows. We had no time nor inclination preflight to plan these things out so they were all sort of spur-of-the-moment shows. And maybe that's a good way to do business and maybe that's not. I don't know. Maybe other flights with perhaps more time to devote

## CONFIDENTIAL

About this file

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.