Documents / Document

Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, Volume 1 (scan)

NASA via ibiblio · 1969-07-31 · 251 pages · text by GLM-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. 130 …it should go barberpole, it would go gray. Then, as you released, it would go to…
  • p. 178 …fade, and it began to be more gray. As we looked back as far as we…
  • p. 179 …ALDRIN When illuminated, it did have a gray appearance, very light gray. ARMSTRONG Wouldn't you…

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## CONFIDENTIAL

the LM through the sextant. The LM would appear to be just a tiny little dot of light which was easily confused with many other little dots of light on the optics. One trick that you can use is switch from AUTO to manual and slew the optics up and down and left and right. All the other little dots that are associated with the background of the surface will remain fixed, and the LM will then move across them; and you can pick out which little dot is the LM by the fact that the LM has motion relative to the background.

This technique works for another few miles, but I don't know how long I could have kept the LM in sight. I lost it prior to PDI when I switched from P20 to P00. My procedures called for me to do this, and in the simulator it worked quite well; however, in the real world at the instant I called P00, I went VERB 37, ENTER 00 ENTER. That stopped the P20 rate drive, and despite the fact that I was prepared for it and was looking through the sextant, the instant the computer went to P00 and the rate drive stopped, the LM just disappeared from view. It took off for parts unknown at a great rate of speed and disappeared to the 6 o'clock position in the sextant and at an extremely rapid rate. It was impossible to bring it back, and I never saw the LM again throughout the

About this file

Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 251 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.