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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

"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

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! |

In article ,
says...
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.

Armstrong and Aldrin (and Collins, too, for that matter) all had
acquitted themselves well during the Gemini program. Other pilots had
done well during Gemini, too. Gemini performance *alone* wasn't what got
those astronauts on that flight.

Deke put the early Apollo rotation together so that he would have some of
the best and most experienced people coming through when the first
landing flights would take place. The crews of the CSM-only missions
were made up of strong commanders with what Deke considered to be weaker
CMPs and LMPs. He made the statement a few times in his autobiography
that Cunningham, Eisele, Chaffee and White were *not* under consideration
for lunar landing crews. He put them on the early Apollo flights because
he could "use them up" before they had to deal with the complexities of
the LM and the lunar missions.

But the backup crews for those first few flights were highly experienced
and mostly seasoned astronauts, including the only all-veteran crews
assembled for Apollo -- Tom Stafford's crew, Frank Borman's original crew
and Neil Armstrong's crew. Deke was pointing these crews, plus Pete
Conrad's crew, at the last dress rehearsals and first lunar landings.

In fact, Deke's original rotation after the Fire (and after Owen Maynard
put together the A through G mission sequence that resulted in a manned
landing) had Pete Conrad's crew in line for the first landing. With the
skip-two-flights rotation, the Apollo 7 backup crew (Stafford, Young and
Cernan) would fly Apollo 10, and the Apollo 8 backup crew would fly
Apollo 11. The Apollo 9 backup crew would fly Apollo 12.

When they re-sequenced the crews to jump Borman, Lovell and Anders over
McDivitt, Scott and Schweickart for Apollo 8, that right there took Pete
Conrad off the first landing and gave it to Armstrong's crew. Pete was
backing up McDivitt; Armstrong was backing up Borman. Had the LM been
ready to fly in December, 1968, McDivitt would have gone on Apollo 8,
Borman on Apollo 9 (flying the high Earth orbit E mission), Stafford on
10, Conrad on 11 and Armstrong on 12.

So, it was all a matter of pointing a bunch of good crews to roughly the
right place in the rotation and feeling confident that whichever one of
them got the first landing, they would do a fine job.

--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for | Doug Van Dorn
thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup |