50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'? It is half a century since NASA's second crack at landing a crew on the Moon had a shocking encounter on the way to orbit. It was almost as if NASA bigwigs were looking for some way to inject a bit of drama into Apollo as the US taxpayer tired of the agency's costly jaunts off-planet. A jolly trio (when compared the Apollo 11 …
Many of my friends wonder why I always have a Plan B for anything that requires implementation or coordination. They call me "so negative" and a "pessimist".
After nearly 60 years in electronics and IT it has become second nature to ask myself "what can go wrong - what if?" - and to have more than one Plan B at least in outline. I suspect most competent engineers do that too.
I call myself a "realist" - with the old adage "Fear the worst - and hope for the best".
I was talking to a med student in the week who was using the GP surgery automated blood pressure device on me. They are still taught how to take BP manually using a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer (vertical column of mercury). This for the same reason why bags of transfusion blood are still hand labelled. In a disaster situation there may be no power for automated BP meters or barcode readers.
You might be practicing medicine in a tent in the hospital grounds under lamp or candle light.
As records become computerised* and electronic and computerised medical devices proliferate 'what are we going to do in the disaster situation?' should still be asked and med students still need to learn the old manual methods.
BTW the stethoscope is dispensible, you can do it by carefully watching the mercury column for when it starts and stops pulsing.
*The GP was a bit nonplused as my records apparently say I have a hearing aid when I don't. I did have a hearing test about 15 years ago but no action was necessary. Someone coded it wrong. The data are sometimes not reliable.
Since carbon fibre is graphite and at least partially conductive, balls of diamond might be preferable. Or, perhaps even more appropriately, balls made of buckminsterfullerene, C60 (don't know how to get subscript here) which is, of course, the "football" molecule. But it hadn't been discovered fifty years ago.
In my humble opinion he was a *man* (at his age today many are still called "boys") who took the time to fully understand the systems he was working on and responsible for, and with the required memory and quick thinking to analyze the situation and recall the right information at the right time. Without a search engine, tags or AI (just the I).
Hope they could find enough of them for the next Moon landing attempts... I can imagine the next launch/landing:
"Huston, the display shows only an emoji of a Pokemon throwing lightnings! Everything else is blank!"
At Huston:
"Stand-by Artemis 8!"
"Quick! What StackOverflow says about that???!!!!"
Technically it's Apollo/Saturn since both were needed.
The key point.
They knew the limits to their knowledge.
They knew they didn't know everything (and couldn't in the time allowed) so they planned around it.*
*They also had about 5% of the whole federal budget (itself considerably swelled by Vietnam) rather than the 0.9% NASA has today (less that the DoD spends on the aircon for its overseas bases).
Yes. I just attended a great talk by a space policy advisor, a Washington "swamp creature" she called herself, who was asked about what to tell anyone dubious about the US space program over thanksgiving dinner. Regarding the NASA 2019 budget, the number for space exploration she mentioned was $8 billion. She said to compare that with the US Government's budget for pizza: $9 billion.
Good news - your memory is still working.
The explosion was caused by a fan used to stir the oxygen tanks. The tank that exploded was originally meant to fly on Apollo 10, but substituted late in the build and eventually ended up on Apollo 13.
The cables driving the fans were insulated with Teflon, but this had been damaged after completing a countdown test. At the end of the test, the tank couldn't be drained entirely through a drain line, so the decision was made to turn on heaters in the tank and let the residue boil off. A switch designed to prevent the tank heating beyond 27C failed and the temperature gauge could not go higher than 27C, so no one noticed when the tank became much hotter, melting part of the insulation.
When the switch was thrown to stir the tanks, a spark leapt across the exposed wiring and - well they didn't go to the Moon.
Apollo 13 almost had a fatal failure during the second stage burn, the centre engine suffered a pogo vibration that caused the engine mounts to move nearly 6 inches at the peak of the cycle. Had this continued another cycle or two the stage would have come apart but luckily the sensors detected problems with fuel pressure and shut the engine down.
Jim Lovell thought that this was the mission's glitch and that they wouldn't have any more problems, but he was wrong on that count.
When the previous gig for a lot of at least the early guys (test pilot) had a 1 in 4 fatality rate at the time might as well go all out and get to see space or even better the moon if going to pull the Gs and play russian roulette every time you go up.
(edit: yep all 3 were Navy test pilots lol).
One reason why the Soviets decided not to go for manned moon landings (they used robotic landers for sample and return missions and got their moon rocks and regolith*) was because they decided the risk to their cosmonauts was too great. Their guys had balls of steel too but it wasn't their decision.
Yuri was first in space, Valentina first woman, Leika the first dog and they had the first space station. They also put the first probes on Venus.
*The moonlanding was faked conspiracy nuts ignore the Soviet landers and their moon rocks. At the height of the Cold War if the Soviet moon rocks had contradicted the Yank moon rocks it would have been exploited to the max and the Soviets accusing the Yanks of fakery. Didn't happen so the conspiracy nuts are doubly wrong. As well the Soviets monitored the Apollo flights, they knew where they went. If they had faked it Moscow would have told the world.
" they decided the risk to their cosmonauts was too great."
Ater the Wall came down and the russian space guys were able to get a look at the LEMs they made some pretty damning comments about the extreme recklessness of the USA in trying to get there first.
They had a point: The pressure hull of the LEMS was so thin (aluminium foil) that was fairly easy to put a finger through it and it would have torn easily in the event of any mishap.
Lots of things on Apollo 12 didn't go as planned. Alan Bean pointed a handheld video camera at the sun which destroyed the pickup tube. No more TV. It is still amazing that it was done at all. It makes me feel horribly spoiled to have highly accurate GPS module smaller than a pack of fags and an Inertia Measurement Unit even smaller along with tiny computers and cameras to navigate a rocket built from catalog parts.
Youtube has a video of Apollo 12 landing on the moon. Well worth your 15 minutes. It is very interesting how NASA landed on the moon with a computer much less powerful than the phone I hold in my hand.
1) It wasn't taking selfies and posting them
2) It wasn't playing Pokemon
3) It wasn't messaging the astronauts families and friends
4) It wasn't streaming "Blue Moon" and playing it
5) It wasn't downloading and displaying Moon maps while descending
6) It wasn't profiling astronauts to sell them Moon underpants
7) The software wasn't written by Google and didn't use Java
Well, there are a few times when you want to be tracked...
Anyway it was the mode left on to track the CM while landing Eagle that led to issue in the Apollo 11 mission.... good that the software was designed to "kill" less important tasks and give priority to the critical ones.
Compare it to phones that could interrupt a navigation app to show the photo of who's calling you...
For the seriously nerdy there is a replica of the DSKY (display/keyboard) available via a Kickstarter project. (Instructions here). One neat additional feature is that you can replay the mission with the mission audio synched to the AGC. So as a code comes up on the display, you hear the astronaut reporting it to Houston about half a second behind, i.e. as he's had time to react.
The other thing that gets lost in the Apollo reporting sometimes is that the lunar module was entirely fly by wire. When you see Armstrong moving the joystick to the left - well that's just a recommendation to the AGC to go left. :-)
The excellent A Cheesemonger's History of The British Isles relates how British cheese was down to single figures in the 1970s. Now, it seems, there are about 700 varieties.
as the US taxpayer tired of the agency's costly jaunts
Really? We seem to never tire of paying for the military's costly jaunts, even back then. And that was orders of magnitude more. (And still is.)
i wasn't paying taxes back then, but now I'm more than fed up with the size of the military budget and not at all worried about NASA's budget.
I kinda remember that launches and moon walks had become commonplace and maybe a little boring. It was also apparent that we had beat the 'Ruskies' so the thrill of the race was gone.
If you ever get to Florida, science nerds, don't faff around with Disney or Universal, go to Cape Canaveral, where the magic and adventure were REAL. They have the whole mission control center, and a show that demonstrates a bit of what it took to put people on the moon. They also have a Saturn V you can walk along side, which is quite a hike, and a "ride" experience of a Space Shuttle liftoff - don't know how that was done, but highly convincing. And more info and exhibits than one can absorb in a day.
I'm old enough to (faintly) remember John Glenn launched into space. Several years later, while at a campground in Canada we tweaked and re-tweaked the rabbit ears on the TV to watch as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. The space program was riveting, as were so many other technological events. My mom, an RN, was in tears when the first heart transplant was announced. Great times.
Great story about this at the link below. Watch one of the short videos that has the actual folks involved in the solution that saved the mission. I always liked the part about Bean laughing about the event while cruising into orbit.
I grew up in the 1960s, lived in FL and the space culture was all around us. It was an incredible time to be around all that activity. On the downside, when my 6th grade class went to Kennedy Space Center there were only a few rockets & capsules to see--that's all they had at the time. It's much more fun to visit now!
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xyw4kz/john-aaron-apollo-12-curiosity-luck-and-sce-to-aux
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