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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 224 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

I do think we need a better way of identifying the various packages that have this packing material wrapped around them, so that at a glance you'd know what is inside a certain roll. In many cases, there is nothing in it. In other cases, it's got an environmental container in it, or it's got the caps to the core tubes. In putting the extension handle on the core tube, the first one went on fairly cleanly and locked into position with a fairly high degree of confidence that it was not going to come out. I won't say that there was complete certainty that they were not going to come apart. I then picked up the hammer, went out into the vicinity of where the solar wind experiment was, and drove the first core tube into the ground. I pushed it in about 3 or 4 inches and then started tapping it with the hammer. I found that wasn't doing much at all in the way of making it penetrate further. I started beating on it harder and harder and I managed to get it into the ground maybe 2 inches more. I found that when I would hit it as hard as I could and let my hand that was steadying the tube release it, the tube appeared as though it were going to fall over. It didn't stay where it had been pounded in. This made it even harder because you couldn't back off and really let it have it. I don't know if we have any way of measuring the exact force or impact that

## 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.