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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

area. For some reason that I am not sure of, we started to pick up left translational velocity and a backward velocity. That's the thing that I certainly didn't want to do, because you don't like to be going backwards, unable to see where you're going. So I arrested the backward rate with some possibly spastic control motions, but I was unable to stop the left translational rate. As we approached the ground, I still had a left translational rate which made me reluctant to shut the engine off while I still had that rate. I was also reluctant to slow down my descent rate anymore than it was or stop because we were close to running out of fuel. We were hitting our abort limit.

## 9.2.28 Touchdown

## ARMSTRONG

We continued to touchdown with a slight left translation. I couldn't precisely determine touchdown. Buzz called lunar contact, but I never saw the lunar contact lights.

## ALDRIN

I called contact light.

## ARMSTRONG

I'm sure you did, but I didn't hear it, nor did I see it. I heard you say something about contact, and I was spring loaded to the stop engine position, but I really don't know whether we had actually touched prior to

## 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.