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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.

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

# CONFIDENTIAL

COLLINS	I think that this is just normal. Fabric will retain an odor where metal will not.
ALDRIN	I've noticed that same odor as characteristic of some of these new materials we have. A lot of the bags, when you get them right close to you, have this same burned-insulation odor. I'm not sure if that's it, but that might explain it.
COLLINS	I don't know. My first impression was that something was burning or had been burned inside that tunnel. I went over every inch of wiring and all the connectors. I got a flashlight and looked at everything. It all looked absolutely normal. We chose not to discuss it with the ground because we hadn't popped any circuit breakers and everything looked normal. It seemed like evidence of a past problem rather than an existing one.
ALDRIN	I think it would be a good idea for subsequent crews to sniff around and smell what this probe and umbilicals smell like beforehand.
COLLINS	They don't smell anything like that. This was a sharp odor. I mean this was enough to knock you down when you opened the tunnel. It was one strong odor.
ALDRIN	This stuff had been exposed to a vacuum.

# CONFIDENTIAL

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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.