50 years ago today (Apollo 11)

[Nymrod121]

Probably the ultimate 'Success Story' of all time ... and with live pictures, too.
That has to be 'vintage television', by anyone's standards
Guy


[Mods, my apologies if this seems OT - I hope for your forbearance/forgiveness ]

[Richard_FM]

I remember hearing a good talk about the Apollo 11 mission at the Washington Air & Space museum a few years ago.

The astronauts had a few problems that wouldn't sound out of place here.

One being the lunar module's navigation computer crashing during the final decent & a power breaker that needed a pen barrel sticking into it to get it to work.

[merlinmaxwell]

My dad woke me up to see the moon walk at 3:00 AM, it is still vivid in my memory. Armstrong left the LEM at 3:45 (ish), fantastic. Dad, a keen photographer took loads of shots of the TV and as he had access to an RAF darkroom a couple of days later I had 8x10" prints to show off at school.

One being the lunar module's navigation computer crashing during the final decent

It didn't crash but merrily shed off less important tasks hence the 1202 alarm, boy they could write proper software then!

[Bazz4CQJ]

If anyone wants to know the detail about why the computer kept overloading (the 1202 alarms) the cause is explained brilliantly well here https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...-moon-landing/.

It was due to "a crazy confluence of events", but primarily, the signals from the landing radar and the rendezvous radar systems had been specified as needing to be at the same voltage and the same frequency, but the need for them to be phase-sync'd was overlooked. That detail nearly cost the mission. Of course, when Apollo 12 flew just a few months later, everything had been fixed and with no great drama, they landed within feet of their target point, and were able to stroll across to an old "Surveyor" soft landing craft and cut bits off for return to Earth.

B

[rambo1152]

This is an incredible resource
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/
All the console positions have their own audio tracks on a common timeline so you can hear the chatter between them, and really see how they worked through the various anomalies.
Continuous voice recordings from the spacecrafts, not just the space - ground comms.
Lots of trivial stuff too, as you can imagine in 11,000 hours of audio.

[MurphyNut]

I was about ten years old at the time and watched it on the TV with my parents, I remember thinking "whats the big deal!" The importance of the occasion went completely over my head, I guess I was expecting it to look like Star Trek!

[Bazz4CQJ]

Originally Posted by MurphyNut

I was about ten years old at the time and watched it on the TV with my parents

What's your best guess as to how old you will be when another human walks on the Moon? The new crew-vehicle, which NASA has been working on, has been described as "Apollo on steroids"; looks very much like Apollo, but I think it can take 6 crew(?). It will no doubt be packed with state-of-the-art electronics (state of the art in ~2010), but the propulsion system is barely changed since Apollo.

B

[AC/HL]

Originally Posted by merlinmaxwell

It didn't crash but merrily shed off less important tasks

Much like the male brain!

[Slammer]

There are some fascinating videos on youtube where one of the original Apollo computers has been restored to working condition along with a guidance computer from the lunar lander.

[Nymrod121]

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...lisi_x7-Ut_-w7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7Lfh5SKUQ

Enjoy