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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
I know that the selection of Armstrong and Aldrin for the mission that
ultimately made the first moon landing was supposedly because they were in line. But could there have been the following factors in their favor (for getting that assignment): Armstrong: 1. Handling the Gemini 8 tumbling spacecraft 2. good judgement when the flying bedpost (is that what it was called) went out of control Aldrin: 1. very successful EVA after some less successful ones 2. expert at critical rendezvous (although I don't know how much his expertise would be useful in the mission) Just wondering. |
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
In article , Jan Philips wrote:
I know that the selection of Armstrong and Aldrin for the mission that ultimately made the first moon landing was supposedly because they were in line. But could there have been the following factors in their favor (for getting that assignment): Primarially, neither was out of favour with The Powers That Be... g (It'd be very interesting to see the results of a "peer poll", similar to that of the Original 7, on who should get the flight; none was done, though... and, interestingly, there doesn't seem to have been *that* much political manouevering to get it. You'd almost have expected more.) Armstrong: 1. Handling the Gemini 8 tumbling spacecraft 2. good judgement when the flying bedpost (is that what it was called) went out of control Of course, one could argue he didn't use that good judgement on A11, but chose to gamble. All in your interpretation :-) But, yes, he did seem to have a reputation as unshakeable. Aldrin: 1. very successful EVA after some less successful ones True, although NASA seemed confident they had the EVA problem solved, regardless of who performed it; this was reasonably corroborated by A9. Remember, the only man on A11 not to have performed an EVA was Armstrong... 2. expert at critical rendezvous (although I don't know how much his expertise would be useful in the mission) LEM rendevous had only been done twice before, and on A9 (AIUI) the rendevous profile was fairly dissimilar to that needed for lunar ascent; it made sense to have someone who had a Reputation for orbital rendevous (remember, Aldrin was seen as having run Gemini 12 by hand, preventing dangeous delays). Admittedly, this could be seen as giving him better preparation for the CSM slot - Mike Collins had rendevous experience, from G10, but wasn't (AIUI) famed for it as Aldrin was. It's worth noting that *all* the A11 crew had experience of successful rendevous, which is the major thing they had in common. -- -Andrew Gray |
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
Armstrong: 1. Handling the Gemini 8 tumbling spacecraft 2. good judgement when the flying bedpost (is that what it was called) APPEARED UNINTERESTED IN MEDIA OR BECOMING A CELEBRITY. |
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
On 23 Aug 2003 12:56:14 GMT, Andrew Gray
wrote: Of course, one could argue he didn't use that good judgement on A11, but chose to gamble. All in your interpretation :-) Do you mean going ahead with the landing with less than 30 seconds of fuel? |
#5
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
In article , Jan Philips wrote:
On 23 Aug 2003 12:56:14 GMT, Andrew Gray wrote: Of course, one could argue he didn't use that good judgement on A11, but chose to gamble. All in your interpretation :-) Do you mean going ahead with the landing with less than 30 seconds of fuel? That, and not aborting when the computer started doing things they'd never heard of :-) In retrospect, neither of these were terrible; the program alarm was just a buffer overflow, and the fuel level never quite got to the "emergency reserve" (where you had twenty seconds to get down or get away) - it was a good fifteen or twenty seconds away at contact, and the post-flight estimation was almost a minute of hover left - other landings had double this, which is a notable but not remarkable margin. From the ALSJ: 102:55:16 Armstrong: Hey, Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase. The Auto targeting was taking us right into a football-field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around it, and it required us going in P66 and flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area. That last stage was inherently a gamble; when it became apparent how bad the terrain was it wasn't guaranteed they'd be able to get down safely, adn at that stage there wasn't great flexibility. The apparent prospect of packing it all in and going home must have loomed larger then than it does in retrospect :-) -- -Andrew Gray |
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
Andrew Gray wrote:
That last stage was inherently a gamble; when it became apparent how bad the terrain was it wasn't guaranteed they'd be able to get down safely, adn at that stage there wasn't great flexibility. The apparent prospect of packing it all in and going home must have loomed larger then than it does in retrospect :-) It wasn't irresponsible. If they had continued on past the mandatory abort point, that would have been irresponsible. If they had given up before the "fuel bingo", that would have been irresponsible. But in the event, they landed before they hit the abort fuel level, which is exactly what they were supposed to do. Brett |
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
In article , Brett Buck wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote: That last stage was inherently a gamble; when it became apparent how bad the terrain was it wasn't guaranteed they'd be able to get down safely, adn at that stage there wasn't great flexibility. The apparent prospect of packing it all in and going home must have loomed larger then than it does in retrospect :-) It wasn't irresponsible. If they had continued on past the mandatory abort point, that would have been irresponsible. If they had given up before the "fuel bingo", that would have been irresponsible. But in the event, they landed before they hit the abort fuel level, which is exactly what they were supposed to do. Yeah, I shouldn't have implied it was; I'd originally remembered the "ninety seconds to bingo" call as the "land now" call, which explains my misconception. It wasn't irresponsible, but it was close - and, at that stage, I wouldn't have said it was guaranteed they could find a site. -- -Andrew Gray |
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
"Andrew Gray" wrote in message . .. | | That, and not aborting when the computer started doing things they'd | never heard of :-) No. The 120x program alarms were variants of "executive overflow" errors, meaning that the computer's list of real-time tasks had grown too long to perform in real time. The computer's response to that situation is to truncate the list and only perform those tasks which can be completed in real time. The list is kept in priority order so the critical tasks were not being omitted, nor was the computer in danger of crashing. 120x program alarms are noteworthy only when they persist. The computer was simply *notifying* the crew that an exceptional condition had arisen; it was not throwing up its hands in confusion. The ground crew had been drilled only days before about what to do with 120x program alarms. And it was fresh in their minds because they'd gotten it wrong: the responsible controller had ordered an abort during the simulation and this had turned out to be the wrong decision. And so when the 120x program alarms occurred, everyone knew what to do. -- | The universe is not required to conform | Jay Windley to the expectations of the ignorant. | webmaster @ clavius.org |
#9
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Selection of Armstrong and Aldrin
In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote: Of course, one could argue he didn't use that good judgement on A11, but chose to gamble. All in your interpretation :-) Do you mean going ahead with the landing with less than 30 seconds of fuel? That, and not aborting when the computer started doing things they'd never heard of :-) Actually, there was a more serious and more subtle lapse there, which arguably was seriously bad judgement by Armstrong. The reason why a fair bit of last-minute maneuvering was needed, and also why nobody knew where exactly where the LM had landed, was that during the critical approach phase -- when Armstrong was supposed to be picking a landing spot and pointing the LM at it -- *both* astronauts had their eyes and attentions inside the cockpit looking at the computer alarms. There are some famous cases of the same mistake being made in aircraft, often with fatal results. Armstrong should have let Aldrin look after the balky hardware -- the LMP was really the LM flight engineer, it was his job -- and kept his own eyes on the terrain and his attention on the flying. In hindsight, I wonder just how much confidence Armstrong had in Aldrin. The Apollo 11 crew were noted for being co-workers but not really friends; unlike most of the other crews, they didn't party together or hang out together. And their training was undeniably rushed -- the flight was almost postponed a month to give more training time. If Armstrong had private doubts about Aldrin's ability to handle a crisis, that could explain why he didn't just delegate the computer problems. ...and the fuel level never quite got to the "emergency reserve" (where you had twenty seconds to get down or get away)... That wasn't clear at the time, though. The fuel-level report was *wrong*: the sensor was uncovered prematurely due to sloshing in the tanks. After Apollo 11, the LM tanks got anti-slosh baffles. -- MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! | |
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