Documents / Document

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. 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…
## CONFIDENTIAL

consequently we were in a slightly lower altitude at the completion of the yaw around than we had expected to be, so we were probably down to about 39,000 or 40,000 feet at the time when we had radar lockup, as opposed to about 41,500 that we expected to be.

There are no discrepancies noted in any of the systems that were checked throughout the first 4 minutes. The RCS was surprisingly high in its quantity indications. The supercritical did tend to rise a little bit after ignition and then it started back down again. I don't recall the maximum value that it reached. I guess the first indications that we had of anything going wrong was probably around 5 minutes, when we first started getting program alarm activities.

We probably ought to say that we did have one program alarm prior to this; sometime prior to ignition, that had the radar in the wrong spot. In any case, as I remember, we had a 500 series alarm that said that the radar was out of position, which I don't have any way of accounting for. Certainly the switches were in the right positions. They hadn't been changed since prelaunch. But we did, in fact, go to the descent position on the antenna and leave it there for a half a minute or so,

## 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.