Doug... wrote:
In article , 7lv43nn0c5
@stinkers.org says...

snip

Iirc, by Apollo 12 it had progressed to where the techs were
actually
packing "ceremonial" sandwiches into the knee pockets at suit-up
(?).
There's a really good foto of Conrad having a sandwich packed at
the JSC
archive, I think.

They weren't exactly ceremonial, there was operational logic behind
it.
Apollo crews always adjusted their sleep schedules so that, on launch

day, they would get up, have breakfast, suit up and go launch. By
the
time they got into orbit, it was well past time for lunch -- but you
didn't want to try and get out of the suits until after TLI. It was
awkward to move around the CM in suits, and preparing a full meal
under
those conditions would have taken a lot more time than they wanted to

spend on it.

So, they started packing a snack into the suit pockets, so the crews
could have a light lunch "on the go" as they finished up their
pre-TLI
checkouts. IIRC, on Apollo 16 the on-orbit snack was hamburgers --
one
feature story at the time made a big deal about how they would be
room-
temperature hamburgers, but that the crew didn't seem to care...

It was good human factors engineering, actually. Just like the drink

bags and food sticks in the Apollo EVA suits. You want your crew at
their best, mentally and physically, and so you try to keep them
well-
fed, well-watered and well-rested. You see a lot of emphasis on that
in
the later Apollo flights.

--

"The problem isn't that there are so | Doug Van Dorn
many fools; it's that lightning isn't |
distributed right." -Mark Twain

things haaven't changed. someone needs to feed that porker mosley,
so that he's at his best.