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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.

Open the PDF at page 211 Original source ↗

“Nevers”31 pages

  • p. 15 …Alpha never came off zero throughout the launch, and I wondered if they were operating. 3…
  • p. 42 …The price you pay for that is that you never know whether it's going to…
  • p. 48 …34 S-IVB SLINGSHOT MANEUVER Now, we never saw that. It seems like the attitude they…
  • p. 51 …thought out, and we were never rushed and we were never behind. ALDRIN Well, our positioning…
  • p. 57 …This had never come up before. The ground suspected that it was due to thermal characteristics…
  • p. 71 …That never was corrected throughout the flight. We saw this condition through the rest of the…
  • p. 77 …I never absolutely caught it mal-functioning. I think those suspicions mostly had to do with…
  • p. 78 …Now, we never went into that mode that Apollo 10 discovered of pointing the plus X…
  • p. 79 # CONFIDENTIAL ## 6.24 RADIATORS COLLINS We never flowed through the secondary radiators because the primary worked…
  • p. 91 …We recognized that we had never done a new P52 to an option 1. We are…
  • p. 93 …They followed it but were never able to catch up with it. It was suggested to…
  • p. 112 …the state vector from which we could never recover. The procedure that we used was one…
  • p. 114 …I never could get into a position to check the downlock on the fourth gear. I…
  • p. 116 …I never was too concerned about what was going on inside the LM, but it did…
  • p. 122 …We had never done that in the SIM's. Later on I was a little confused…
  • p. 139 …We never powered it up and left it alone. ARMSTRONG A lot of people didn't…
  • p. 141 …It was impossible to bring it back, and I never saw the LM again throughout the
  • p. 142 …I never turned on any gimbal motors, but I did feel that I could light the…
  • p. 143 …area and all that; but again I never saw the LM, so for future flights, I…
  • p. 150 …The simulator was never able to simulate accurately what you would see through the Sun. We…
  • p. 164 …Buzz called lunar contact, but I never saw the lunar contact lights. ## ALDRIN I called contact…
  • p. 177 …We never were able to get into that area to look at those rocks in detail…
  • p. 180 …All these items took a little bit of time, a little bit of discussion, which never…
  • p. 186 …It had never been redesigned, and it was usually ascribed to the fact that all the…
  • p. 187 …It suffices to say that we never did understand what was required to enable good COMM…
  • p. 188 …The times when we actually operated the PLSS was done always in the chamber and never…
  • p. 206 …I'd never observed that problem on the ground, and I can't account for it…
  • p. 210 …I tried to choose various types of hard rocks out there so that, if we never…
  • p. 215 …Of course, there's nothing to compare it with, because I'd never seen them before…
  • p. 246 …This was a never-ending ## CONFIDENTIAL
  • p. 247 ## CONFIDENTIAL battle to obtain just a minimum level of sleeping conditions, and we never did it…
## CONFIDENTIAL

This was at the cost of probably double the amount of time that we normally would take for the bulk sample.

I want to inject a thought about spacecraft location in respect to lunar surface working location. Putting the area of the MESA in the shadow also put the cable in the shadow. The white cable, being covered with a little bit of this powdery stuff and being in the shadow, was very difficult to observe. Consideration should be given to keeping any cable or small object out in sunlight whenever possible. It leads one to think that if you're going to yaw one way or the other, it's preferable to put your working areas out into the sunlight.

We've discussed free-launch on a number of occasions and whether we wanted to yaw specifically for lighting at touchdown. There are obviously a lot of advantages, but I was very reluctant to do any fancy maneuvering on the first lunar touchdown for selected yaw for lighting considerations. I figured we'd just take what we got and we paid for that later, because we had a lot of operations in the shadow during EVA that would have been easier had we had better lighting.

## CONFIDENTIAL

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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.