Finding A11 transcripts and recording

Since I'm sure this has been done by people here many times...

Soon after A11 left earth orbit for the moon, the xmitter at the
Tidbinbilla wing station failed and burned, taking out the transmitter.
This left only the main Honeysuckle Creek transmitter for the scheduled
moon walk.

Some where in the past I recall hearing that if the Tid fire had happened
before they left orbit, the A11 moon mission would have been aborted and
A12 would have been the big one.

Do recordings or transcripts exist of discussions and meetings during the
missions? Are there transcripts on Alpha or Net-1 and others?

Are there transcripts in other that the PDFs of scans of the typed ones?

Who in NASA could I ask at first about this stuff?

tnx in advance

--
Paul Repacholi 1 Crescent Rd.,
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West Australia 6076
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EPIC, The Architecture of the future, always has been, always will be.

Re Apollo 11 -- Tidbinbilla Transmitter Failure

Below is a summary of recent emails between involvees on the subject --

triggered by Paul Repacholi's email of Mar 15. The incident is
described under "Day 2" on
Col Mackellar's http://tinyurl.com/2kbr6

Mike Dinn
_______________________________________
Hi Harald

I had no direct involvement in the Tidbinbilla transmitter episode. My
priority at
the time was the realtime ops. Hamish has a description of it on page
218 of his
book. He may have more knowledge than is written.

Don Gray might have something to add. He was Tid STADIR at the time.
I thought
some hardware was obtained from DSS41 Woomera, with an all stops out
effort by the
airline Ansett to get it to Tid. But I may be confusing some other
event.

Per Hamish's account it sounds as if there was still one green
transmitter at Tid --
both Tid and HSK had dual transmitters.

As to whether this outage would have caused a mission abort -- I don't
know. I'll
info Tom Sheehan of Houston on this. Tom was responsible for Network
support --
planning and realtime ops. He might have views.

But bear in mind that HSK still had two transmitters and could support
both CSM and
LM simultaneously, and also I'm fairly sure that the 9m stations -- CRO
and GWM on
this longitude -- could have supported uplinks even at lunar distance.
I'll info
Paul Dench who was CRO USB supervisor to see if he has an opinion. And
Bill Wood ex
GDS. Uplink did not have to be supported by the same station providing
the
telemetry downlink. But two way doppler at the 9m might have been
marginal

So personally I don't think the Tid event would have been a "show
stopper", and that
would have been my recommendation had my opinion been asked.

I'm sure there will be no info at "NASA" on any of this, so we/you are
reliant on
our (fading?) memories.

Mike Dinn
_____________________________________
From Hamish:
For more detail of this incident go to the mission description of
Apollo
11 on the web site. Don has more to say on the incident there,
including the
Island Lagoon parts and airfreighting them to Canberra.

I also doubt that NASA would have aborted the whole mission on
the
failure of one transmitter, as you say, Mike, we had two at each site,
as
well as a number of sites in the area.

Hope the web site tells the story you are looking for.

Hamish
_____________________________________
Hi gang..............
Just to add a little more to my earlier response, here is a quote
from the
Canberra Times of Monday, 21 July 1969 about this incident. It might
answer
your question, as it was said by authoritive people at the time!!
"If workmen had not been able to repair it (the transmitter), special
arrangements would have had to be made for the tracking station at
Houston,
Texas, to take over the Tidbinbilla role during the moon landing of the
three Apollo 11 astronauts, a Department of Supply spokesman said
yesterday.

Although the station did have a second transmitter it could not
operate as
efficiently with only one working. The two are needed to allow
split-second
transmission frequency changes, essential during many phases of the
Apollo
mission."
The article finished with:
"Tidbinbilla tracked Apollo during the weekend with one transmitter,
but
would have been unable to undertake the more complicated parts of the
operation today and tomorrow. These would have had to done by another
station."

I leave it to you expert folk to work out what the Department of
Supply
spokesman was trying to say (I wonder who it was, could it be Bernard
Scrivener?). Maybe the space-ignorant scribe got it all mixed up.

Hamish
__________________________________________
Hi all.
I've monitored the opinions and facts with interest and have only vague
memories of that event being stranded over here on the West Coast. My
recollections that the big concern for Apollo 11 was to make sure they
could
get good TV .... hence the decision to use Parkes.
For all other purposes the 9-meter USB dishes - CRO, HAW, GWN) provided
adequate backup for tracking, telemetry and command. After all CRO
(Carnarvon)
had been proven more than adequate at lunar range for Apollo 8 and
Lunar
Orbiter. I can't see that Tidbinbilla reduced to one transmitter would
have
been so critical.
Regards
Paul
___________________________________
To all interested parties,

To my knowledge there never was any question of a mission abort in
connection with the Tid transmitter failure, only a switch of
assignments
between Tid and HSK. As for the Canberra Times article quoted by
Hamish, I
can't make head or tail of it - there never was a tracking station at
Houston. I can't believe that Scrivener or any other spokesman would
get it
so far wrong, but from bitter experience I know the Canberra Times
frequently misquoted information given to them.

Regards

Don Gray
_______________________________

wrote...
Re Apollo 11 -- Tidbinbilla Transmitter Failure

Below is a summary of recent emails between involvees on the subject --

snip

___________________________________
To all interested parties,

To my knowledge there never was any question of a mission abort in
connection with the Tid transmitter failure, only a switch of
assignments
between Tid and HSK. As for the Canberra Times article quoted by
Hamish, I
can't make head or tail of it - there never was a tracking station at
Houston. I can't believe that Scrivener or any other spokesman would
get it
so far wrong, but from bitter experience I know the Canberra Times
frequently misquoted information given to them.

Regards

Don Gray
_______________________________

Thanks for that great summary, Mike.

The Canberra times quote "the moon landing of the three Apollo 11
astronauts" isn't strictly correct either. And of course, Goldstone, which
took over the TV reception from Parkes, is in Barstow, California.

- Peter