One of the more remarkable still-frames from all the Apollo launches.
Posted on 05/26/2018 11:20:27 AM PDT by DFG
We know how to leave.
We know how to live for extended periods out there.
We even know how to get back.
Trouble is, we aren’t doing it, except to near orbit, and we don’t have our own assets for that much.
Apollo 12 almost didn’t make it to space. How they regainsed control is an awesome story:
Bean was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing. In November 1969, Bean and Pete Conrad landed on the moon’s Ocean of Storms—after a flight of 250,000 miles and a launch that included a harrowing lightning strike. He was the astronaut who executed John Aaron’s “Flight, try SCE to ‘Aux’” instruction to restore telemetry after the spacecraft was struck by lightning 36 seconds after launch, thus salvaging the mission.
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More:
Apollo 12 launched on schedule from Kennedy Space Center, during a rainstorm. It was the first rocket launch attended by an incumbent US president, Richard Nixon. Thirty-six-and-a-half seconds after lift-off, the vehicle triggered a lightning discharge through itself and down to the Earth through the Saturn’s ionized plume. Protective circuits on the fuel cells in the Service Module (SM) falsely detected overloads and took all three fuel cells offline, along with much of the Command/Service Module (CSM) instrumentation. A second strike at 52 seconds after launch knocked out the “8-ball” attitude indicator. The telemetry stream at Mission Control was garbled. However, the vehicle continued to fly correctly; the strikes had not affected the Saturn V Instrument Unit.
The loss of all three fuel cells put the CSM entirely on batteries, which were unable to maintain normal 75-ampere launch loads on the 28-volt DC bus. One of the AC inverters dropped offline. These power supply problems lit nearly every warning light on the control panel and caused much of the instrumentation to malfunction.
Electrical, Environmental and Consumables Manager (EECOM) John Aaron remembered the telemetry failure pattern from an earlier test when a power supply malfunctioned in the CSM Signal Conditioning Electronics (SCE), which converted raw signals from instrumentation to standard voltages for the spacecraft instrument displays and telemetry encoders.
Aaron made a call, “Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to Auxiliary. Over,” which switched the SCE to a backup power supply. The switch was fairly obscure, and neither Flight Director Gerald Griffin, CAPCOM Gerald Carr, nor Mission Commander Pete Conrad immediately recognized it. Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean, flying in the right seat as the spacecraft systems engineer, remembered the SCE switch from a training incident a year earlier when the same failure had been simulated. Aaron’s quick thinking and Bean’s memory saved what could have been an aborted mission, and earned Aaron the reputation of a “steely-eyed missile man”. Bean put the fuel cells back on line, and with telemetry restored, the launch continued successfully. Once in Earth parking orbit, the crew carefully checked out their spacecraft before re-igniting the S-IVB third stage for trans-lunar injection. The lightning strikes had caused no serious permanent damage.
Initially, it was feared that the lightning strike could have caused the Command Module’s (CM) parachute mechanism to prematurely fire, disabling the explosive bolts that open the parachute compartment to deploy them. If they were indeed disabled, the Command Module would have crashed uncontrollably into the Pacific Ocean and killed the crew instantly. Since there was no way to figure out whether or not this was the case, ground controllers decided not to tell the astronauts about the possibility. The parachutes deployed and functioned normally at the end of the mission.
I am a fan of space exploration.
My beef is that 50 years into the space age, we should have men looking at those rocks, picking them up, taking them back to labs for chemical and other analyses, and bringing back the more interesting ones.
One of the more remarkable still-frames from all the Apollo launches.
Heck, most millenials can't drive a stick shift.
RIP
RIP.
There are no ticker-tape parades for unmanned spacecraft, but they nonetheless provide and invaluable service returning tons of data/discoveries etc. They will pave the way for men someday.
And I agree, we should have had an exploratory lunar base decades ago, and should have already landed a man on Mars. But as far as going out into the solar system, the outer planets and beyond into interstellar space, it's not going to happen for man any time soon and might possibly never happen in regards to interstellar space.
Of course Voyager I is already well on it's way. In fact, in about 38,000 years Voyager will be approaching another star at about 18 light years from earth. Man would have never survived this trek and it would have never been considered in the first place.
Some time when ya get a chance, look up the discoveries made by Voyager I and II. They're unprecedented and historic!
That is an attitude that would not have settled our Nation. Human adventure is the most important single thing that raises the human spirit and creates achievements. The risk IS the excitement and the source of honor.
I'd settle for having a moon-walk veteran under 45 years old. Maybe even a regularly staffed lunar base, and periodic visits to Mars.
I feel old.
IIRC, the F-1A was an uprated version of the original, but never flown. The newer engine is a further refinement. Hope it gets to fly.
Q.E.D.
When Apollo 12 was launched along with Bean non-stop to Ocean of Storms, it was a huge achievement for the entire Apollo mission and Bean. Very gutsy and even more so for the people like Bean in the early days.
Another love of Alan Bean, at home in his artist studio. I understand on occasion he would sprinkle a little moon dust into his paintings!
It’s worse than that. We don’t have an operational, man-rated launch vehicle that could duplicate Alan Shepard’s suborbital hop in 1961. Now we have to pay the Russkies millions to use their vehicles as taxis to orbit.
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