Reply to post: Re: despite every audience member knowing how things will play out,

Re: despite every audience member knowing how things will play out,

awayvey,

Gene Kranz said something very interesting in the mostly excellent 13 Minutes to the Moon podcast. Well, to be fair, I think he said it in one of the NASA history project interviews that they used, but anyway.

Apollo Program rules were going to be set that no lunar landing could be attempted without full communications with the spacecraft. Because if the thing crashed, and they got no telemetry from it, they might have no idea what went wrong, and quite possibly no way to find out.

Chris Kraft and him apparently lobbied management to delegate that decision to the fligh controller.

As he said, when they started the landing communications were awful. They had to do several reorientations of Eagle, just to try and get the high-gain antenna to talk to them. He actually did the go/no-go decision on data from a minute before, because they'd got one snapshot of data, on a brief connection, and then lost it again. The go decision was actually communicated verbally via Michael Collins, because they didn't even have comms with Eagle at the time, let alone telemetry.

I think he said they had one more planned orbit, and therefore one more chance to go - so he basically had just that one wave-off and decided not to use it.

After the decision was made, they re-established communications and everything was hunky-dory after that. Which is just as well, because with the program alarms on the computer Aldrin wasn't able to check that their altitude was being maintained within the perameters of the program - and mission control had to do it for him.

Some documentaries really benefit from the cinema. I think They Shall Not Grow Old was fine on the small screen. But Senna really benefits from seeing it on a huge screen. Formula 1 in-car footage looks good on telly, but it's a whole different thing on a huge screen. It's pretty terrifying seeing Senna come through the tunnel at Monaco, then out into blinding sunlight to a chicane with a dirty great wall the other side of it. It really shows the balls you need to have to drive those things - even now when they're much safer.