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Apollo 13 Engineers to be Honored
sconeu writes "Yahoo! News is carrying a story that the engineers who helped save the crew of Apollo 13 will be honored by GlobalSpec.
The article mentions the jury rigged air scrubbers, and gives duct tape its due." Here is our coverage of the 35th anniversary.
The command module was build by North American Aviation and the Lunar Module was built by Grumman Aerospace.
So it could well be the case that since 2 different companies built the 2 different air systems, they used 2 different shapes of CO2 filters because no-one bothered to make them the same (after all, it didnt matter much at the time)
Because the command module was made by a different company than the lunar module and nobody thought about coordinating / unifying components between the two since nobody ever envisioned that there would actually be any need to use parts from one as spare parts for the other.
Contrary to popular belief, NASA does very little itself. Pretty much everything is done by subcontractors.
No. It's "jury rigged" and "jerry built".
"Jury rigged" implies a kludge that allows you to survive (say, if your ship got dismasted, or something). "Jerry built" applies mostly to extremely poorly built houses (the kind that has mortar made of flour paste).
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Actually,
"GlobalSpec is a rapidly growing B-to-B, Internet-based, 'media-model' business linking buyers and sellers in the $500 billion electrical, mechanical and optical products markets."
You must have mistaken their front page search links to mean they actually had something to do with those things?
They do seem to be good at generating hot air and pageviews with press releases, anyway.
02 07 53 12 CMP Okay. Stand by.
02 07 55 19 LMP Okay, Houston - -
02 07 55 20 CDR I believe we've had a problem here.
02 07 55 28 CC This is Houston. Say again, please.
02 07 55 35 CDR Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.
02 07 55 42 CC Roger. MAIN B UNDERVOLT.
Actually, if you read the original article in Spectrum, you'll see that a lot of it was simulated: in particular critical lifeboat procedures (including the important power-the-CSM-from-the-LM-through-the-umbilicals bit) were developed after an Apollo 10 sim where three fuel cells were failed at almost the same point that they did on 13.
And they did have a bunch of mainframes on the ground for the heavy lifting with the trajectory calculations.
While there was some brilliant improvisation (the LM controllers hack to power up the LM for example), the controllers were by no mean 'winging it': thanks to leadership, teamwork, dedication and skill, when it came to crunch time, they'd already had a lot of the work done.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article!
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who