Apollo 13 reentry - pressure suits?

I haven't seen Apollo 13 for a while, but AFAIR, they may be wearing
pressure suits during reentry, but did they wear helmets? What was the
standard procedure for Apollo reentry? Was the Apollo 13 reentry different
with regards to suits/helmets than the other Apollo reentries?

/steen

Steen wrote:
I haven't seen Apollo 13 for a while, but AFAIR, they may be wearing
pressure suits during reentry, but did they wear helmets? What was
the
standard procedure for Apollo reentry? Was the Apollo 13 reentry
different
with regards to suits/helmets than the other Apollo reentries?

/steen

I believe the Apollo 13 re-entry was done shirt-sleve, same as every
other Apollo re-entry. The film depicts it that way as well.

I'm pretty sure the only Apollo re-entry that was planned to be suited
was Apollo 7, but Schirra vetoed that idea when the crew came down with
headcolds, worried they might burst their ear-drums if they wore
helmets. I recall reading they wore pressure suits for re-entry but
with the helmets stowed. However, I've never seen any photots to
support this (actually, the one photo I have seen speaks against this,
has Schirra exiting the CSM in the shirt-sleve outfit).

Mike Collins was pretty thankful Apollo re-entries were not suited
according to his book. The CSM had a tendency to tip over and he didn't
want to even imagine hanging on his straps and in an upside down CSM
after over a week in zero-g in a bulky pressure suit. Of course what
happened on ASTP might indicate wearing pressure suits would have been
a good call.

-A.L.

Skylon wrote:

Mike Collins was pretty thankful Apollo re-entries were not suited
according to his book. The CSM had a tendency to tip over and he
didn't want to even imagine hanging on his straps and in an upside
down CSM after over a week in zero-g in a bulky pressure suit.

:-) I can imagine...

Of
course what happened on ASTP might indicate wearing pressure suits
would have been a good call.

Oookay - what happened on ASTP?

/steen

Steen wrote:

Of
course what happened on ASTP might indicate wearing pressure suits
would have been a good call.


Oookay - what happened on ASTP?

they popped the cabin vent valves a bit too early IIRC, and some of the
toxic fuel from the attitude control system got sucked into the cabin.
Brand and Slayton passed out, leaving Stafford to fumble around in IIRC
a Stable-2 capsule getting gas masks on everybody.

Could have been *real* nasty, luckily just a near miss.

--
Terrell Miller


"Every gardener knows nature's random cruelty"
-Paul Simon George Harrison

Terrell Miller schrieb:
Steen wrote:

Of
course what happened on ASTP might indicate wearing pressure suits
would have been a good call.



Oookay - what happened on ASTP?


they popped the cabin vent valves a bit too early IIRC, and some of the
toxic fuel from the attitude control system got sucked into the cabin.
Brand and Slayton passed out, leaving Stafford to fumble around in IIRC
a Stable-2 capsule getting gas masks on everybody.

Could have been *real* nasty, luckily just a near miss.

Nope. The valves opened automatically at a specific pressure level. They
had forgotten to activate the Earth Landing System, a sequencer that
among other things throws the chutes and deactivates the RCS. So they
had to do the stuff manually, but forgot the RCS deactivation.

Harald

Terrell Miller wrote:
Steen wrote:

Of
course what happened on ASTP might indicate wearing pressure suits
would have been a good call.


Oookay - what happened on ASTP?

they popped the cabin vent valves a bit too early IIRC, and some of
the
toxic fuel from the attitude control system got sucked into the
cabin.
Brand and Slayton passed out, leaving Stafford to fumble around in
IIRC
a Stable-2 capsule getting gas masks on everybody.

Could have been *real* nasty, luckily just a near miss.


It was real nasty. According to Slayton, they inhaled 300 pmm nitrogen
tetroxide. 400 ppm is fatal.


-----


"Stafford's account continues:

'We had breathed rocket fuel from twenty-four thousand feet down
and it had burned our noses, throat, and lungs. Our postflight medical
examination in the sick bay of New Orleans showed that we had come very
close to serious injury. [Traditional post-splashdown ceremonial
activities were cancelled.] Flying us to Hawaii was out of the
question. ...

The next morning, X rays showed that our lungs were filled with
edema, as though we were suffering from chemical-induced pneumonia.
When I started up the ladder toward the admiral's quarters and
breakfast, I found I could only take a few steps at a time before I had
to stop and rest. Deke passed out briefly.

In Honolulu, we were taken in ambulances to Trippler [sic] Army
Hospital for more extensive examinations. ... With cortisone treatment
therapy, we started to improve, and by the thirtieth our chest X rays
had returned to normal. [They had splashed down on July 24.] We then
moved to a resort at the Marine Corps Air Station, Kenoe Bay, on the
east end of Oahu.' [Stafford, p. 196]

Slayton adds:

'The small drag chute deployed with a big whap, and suddenly we had
a cockpit full of yellow gas. ...

It wasn't until the press conference on deck [of New Orleans], when
we were talking to President Ford, that we even bothered to mention the
problem. It came up when we summed up the flight as very smooth, a
piece of cake "except for the last four minutes." ... They stopped the
conference and hauled us downstairs. ...

The doctors started pumping cortisone into us. A good thing, too.
We hadn't felt too bad once we got out of the command module and onto
the ship ... but about three-quarters of an hour later, suddenly we all
felt like we had pneumonia. A lethal dose of the gas was four hundred
parts per million. They estimated we had inhaled it at three hundred
parts per million. Pretty close. For the next ten days we steamed
toward Honolulu, with the doctors giving us chest X-rays every few
hours. I wasn't feeling too hot there for awhile.' [Slayton, pp.
304-305].

http://www.doctorzebra.com/drz/s_medhx.html

-----

"The joint U.S./Soviet mission, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), was
flown in 1975, as the last Apollo mission. The Apollo craft and the
Soyuz remained docked together for two days in Earth orbit. The crews
visited with each other and conducted five joint experiments before the
two crafts separated. During their return to earth, at an altitude of
24,000 feet, the Apollo crewmembers were exposed to toxic gases,
primarily nitrogen tetroxide, from an inadvertent firing of the
reaction control system. All three crew members developed a chemical
pneumonitis despite rapid donning of their oxygen masks. One crew
member was rendered unconscious for a short time, and all three
required intensive therapy and hospitalization for treatment of their
subsequent development of pulmonary edema.(20) No permanent damage
resulted."

http://wwwsam.brooks.af.mil/af/files...hapter_25.html





Rusty

In article ,
Terrell Miller wrote:
Oookay - what happened on ASTP?

they popped the cabin vent valves a bit too early IIRC, and some of the
toxic fuel from the attitude control system got sucked into the cabin.

It wasn't quite that simple.

First, early in descent the headset system developed a feedback problem,
which made it impossible for the crew to hear the ground and difficult for
them to hear each other.

Then, Brand missed a checklist call to arm some functions of the automatic
descent sequencing -- either Stafford didn't make the call or Brand didn't
hear it, and neither noticed the omission.

Then Slayton noticed that apex-cover jettison and drogue-chute deployment
were late, and told Brand to use the manual overrides. He did... but
neither of them thought to disable the thrusters, as the automatic
sequencing would have done.

The drogues deployed, and the thrusters started fighting the resulting
swaying. Stafford then cut the thrusters, but all this was happening
quite late, and the thrusters were still venting residual propellant when
the cabin vent opened automatically.

Stafford saw fumes coming in through the vent, and took the precaution of
firing the main parachutes manually, a few seconds ahead of schedule, in
case the crew was incapacitated.

There has been some speculation that maybe this crew wasn't as well
trained as it could have been, with too much time spent on diplomatic
socializing and not enough in the simulators.

Brand and Slayton passed out, leaving Stafford to fumble around in IIRC
a Stable-2 capsule getting gas masks on everybody.

Slayton was still conscious, but pretty much incapacitated by nausea.

Could have been *real* nasty, luckily just a near miss.

As is not unusual for N2O4 inhalation, the crew felt fine after getting
some fresh air, but came down with symptoms resembling pneumonia some
hours later, and were several days recovering.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 15:19:47 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article ,
Terrell Miller wrote:
Oookay - what happened on ASTP?

they popped the cabin vent valves a bit too early IIRC, and some of the
toxic fuel from the attitude control system got sucked into the cabin.

It wasn't quite that simple.

....Henry beat me to this one because I felt like sleeping late today,
but his explanation is dead-on with one minor exception: the bit about
the training lapses, based on the research I did for my
soon-to-be-updated ASTP page, were listed as only a *distant*
possibility, and were apparently made by one NASA manager who wasn't
too enamored with the "stunt" mission to begin with. The crew received
more than sufficient training for the mission, and given the
circumstances blaming them 100% for what happened is like blaming the
crew of A13 for deliberately stirring the cryo tanks.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 07:55:02 -0500, Terrell Miller
wrote:

they popped the cabin vent valves a bit too early IIRC, and some of the
toxic fuel from the attitude control system got sucked into the cabin.
Brand and Slayton passed out, leaving Stafford to fumble around in IIRC
a Stable-2 capsule getting gas masks on everybody.

....Actually, only Brand passed out, as he was closest to the inrush
and got the brunt of it. Stafford was the more coherent of the three
as Slayton was about half incapacitated from the nausea. Note that
I've heard differing stories as to whether or not they threw up/down
while in Stable 2.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On 2005-03-07, Skylon wrote:

I believe the Apollo 13 re-entry was done shirt-sleve, same as every
other Apollo re-entry. The film depicts it that way as well.

Wasn't one (Apollo 15, I'd guess) done suited (although still
pressurised normally) because of paranoia immediately after the Soyuz 11
accident? I can't seem to find a reference to this, though.

--
-Andrew Gray