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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."
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!