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Apollo 12 at 35
neutron_p writes "Thirty-five years ago this week, the sedentary, fine-grained powder began to rise, billow and race off toward the horizon. Soon after - at 1:54:35 a.m. EST on Nov. 19, 1969 - the lunar module Intrepid landed, bringing two more humans to the surface of another world. Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad and lunar module pilot Alan Bean would be on the Moon for more than 31 hours, with crewmate Dick Gordon orbiting above in the command module Yankee Clipper."
...to be stuck in the command module, so close to the Moon yet to never set foot on it?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Maybe that should be:
Programmers today have trouble due to 256 megs of memory
It's good to see success commemorated. These days, when talking about the past NASA Space Program, we only hear about failures (Challenger) or near failures (Apollo 13). Incredible achievements for the time... let's hope Bush's Trip to Mars is a serious endeavor, because I can't wait to see that!
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
This was the space program with NASA in peak form. Perhaps it wasn't their finest moment (maybe either 11 or 13 was), but the breadth and ambition is utterly above NASA today. This was only the second landing, yet NASA aimed for that 31 hour stay on the surface.
They were confident that their communications around the world would keep the uplink with the astronauts as Earth rotated, confident that the first landing wasn't a lucky fluke, and willing to commit to keeping the crew there long enough to do a little real science. If the focus on 11 was largely on the medical situation of the crew, by 12 we were increasingly confident that people could survive on the Moon long enough to do something useful, and the focus began to shift to building a permanent presence there and answering some of the more interesting questions of the Planetologists.
The near disasterous shortage of fuel and over-abundance of rocky ground in the final seconds of Apollo 11's landing could have made NASA rely more on cautious approaches and more intensive micro-management, but instead it led to an increased recognition of the role of the astronauts on site in making the final decisions. That in turn gave us six successes and one gloriously redeemed failure.
Who is John Cabal?
Isn't Nov 17 the time of the year when we pass through the Leonid meteor shower? They launched on the 14th and landed on the moon on the 19th, so that means they were out there in time to fly through the debris...
Wasn't that a bit dangerous?
The episode for Apollo 12 with Dave Foley as Al Bean is easily my 2nd favorite after the Lunar Module episode. They really brought the characters to life, and I'll be damned if I didn't want to get to know all 3 of the Astronauts as friends after watching that.
I haven't watched it in years, but I just like Beano, I can remember to switch SCE to AUX.
IIRC, there were two unique things to Apollo 12. First, they landed amazingly close to an unmanned Surveyer probe that landed a couple of years before. They did this in part to test precision-guided landing techniques for later missions and to bring back samples of the old probe to see how it weathered on the moon.
They actually found viable bacteria spores on parts of the returned probe that lasted the entire flight from Earth and survived for two or so years on the Moon. They learned they had to improve the sterilization process for later probes to Mars and beyond to reduce the risk of contamination from the smallest Earthlings.
Another notable is that they accidently ruined the only TV camera they had by pointing it too long at a reflection of the sun off of a peice of equipment. It used new compact color technology and was fragile. Thus, there were no live TV pictures.
They perhaps should have brought along a lighter black-and-white one as a backup. However, weight was a premium, especially in the earlier missions. In fact, Apollo 11 (the first landing) almost skipped having a TV camera altogether because of load constraints. But mission planners were talked into carrying one.
Table-ized A.I.
You missed a few.
6. The more money invested in space exploration, the less money that goes to war.
7. Space exploration is one of the few things that many countries are working on together. This helps bring peace.
8. If all good scientists worked for NASA, or a privately funded space program, then there'd be no scientists researching weapons.
9. Australia started off as a penal colony. Perhaps this would be a good use for Mars
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
I keep reading different accounts of that Apollo 11 landing problem.
The account I read was that because the gravitational center of the moon is a bit off-center from the physical shape, there was not enough margin of extra fuel and Neil spotted a bunch of sharp boulders below that he wanted to avoid. So, he took a detour and because of that the craft was almost out of landing fuel and thus fuel warning lights were beeping like crazy.
Neil later said that he kept fairly close to the surface during the detour so that if the fuel did run out, the worse that would happen would be a slightly hard landing. The moon's gravity is low enough that a fall from 50 feet is just jarring rather than fatal.
If Neil was a bit more by-the-book, he would have aborted and launched back into orbit without landing. The control room was turning pale, witnesses said, due to the stress of that landing. If something did go wrong due to that decision, Neil probably would have a boatload of blame on him.
The lopsoded nature of the moon is part of the reason why only one side always faces Earth. I don't know if scientists didn't know it was lopsided back then, or if technicians simply forgot to include that info in their calculations. From what I gather it was a new fact whose magnitude was still under investigation, and thus they had no official numbers for calculations.
For some reason weight constraints on the first few missions were pretty tight and that is why they had so little fuel margin, but later relaxed/expanded the constraints such that moon rovers and other doodads could be included. I don't know why later missions had more payload weight. On the first mission they were so anal about weight that they almost excluded a TV camera. They used the same basic rockets as later missions. Anybody else know the reason for the difference?
Table-ized A.I.
The guy in the control room that made the "go" call to the flight director was named Steve Bales at the GUIDO position. IIRC he was about 26 years old. In his back room was Jack Garman, who was the expert on the computer (most of the "front room" guys have several "back room" support engineers).
Here's a link to the flight loop audio of the decision.
They were prepared to make the call. In the last few weeks before Apollo 11, the "evil" engineers that ran the training simulators really hammered the flight control team on these program alarms. Bales and Garman were very well prepared to respond to those alarms because of this.
The parent is right about being "gutsy". I happen to be a NASA flight controller - and when you are in Mission Control, you are "it". Sometimes, you must make a decision that is time critical, and there is no asking your boss, waiting until Monday, etc. - only you (and your backroom), your knowledge, and your training. While everyone that works there is used to the pressure, many times after a difficult shift you can almost be shaking from realizing what could happen if you made a bad call.
Worst...sig...ever!
This is depressing. It used to be we had both _technological_ AND _social_ progress. For the last ~30 years, the social progress has flattened out and we are now going backwards, turning into a paranoid fascist consumer/security state with a bunch of robber-barons at the helm.
Perhaps you could explain what you mean by "social progress". Do you believe that our society is in worse shape than it was in 1974?
Our country is now dumbed-down and medicated on a steady diet of poor public education, glorification of stupidity, media whores, and mind-numbing propaganda.
It is certainly true that the average American citizen is significantly worse educated than they were in 1904, when Latin and Greek were generally taught in high schools, and one had to take an entrance examination to be admitted to junior high. What do you think has changed over the past century that has brought us to our present situation?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I went to Johnson space center at Houston recently. One of the guided tours was to the mission control room used for the Apollo landings (which was used until 1996). There was pneumatic equipment(!) which was used for console-to-console communication. Much (most?) of the computing machinery was analog. The guide told the audience that their average PC had 300 times more computing power than the entire Mission Control at the time of Apollo. (Half the audience gave out a collective disbelieving gasp, the other half thought she was making some kind of joke.) I don't think of us kids these days has any feel what it must have been like to build high-reliability systems in that kind of impoverished computing environment.
having that little ram makes debugging somewhat simple (in contrast). imagine a full memory dump fitting on one page where you could just highlight each variable with a marker.
bite my glorious golden ass.