Fascinating guy.
It’s almost incomprehensible how much of the right stuff the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo men possessed.
p
the Right Stuff ping..
Tried reading the article but, the construct of prose got to be a bit much...
These were still adventurers’ and explorers who came from the era of the greatest generation. Thousands of engineers, scientists, and of course the flight crews involved in the incredible undertaking of putting men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. Physical evidence returned (moon rocks) and photographic evidence of events, Newton’s law of gravity demonstrated in lunar vacuum for all the world to see, laser reflectors left that still are used today for lunar orbit prediction....and yet, just wait for the conspiracy deniers to come a post’in, just because it was, in fact, a government venture.
RIP Captain
... The crew doesn’t yet know it, but the rocket has been struck by lightning twice during liftoff, once 36 seconds after liftoff and again 17 seconds later. The rocket is a mile and a half high, moving faster than 15,000 feet per second, when Conrad says, “Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here; we had everything in the world drop out.” The data stream from the service module had simply ceased. Bean thinks maybe the entire section of the spacecraft has fallen away.
“This was no failure that we’d ever practiced,” Bean tells NASA historians. “I said [to myself] ‘We’re getting ready to go into orbit without a service module.’ ” ....
After all that, Alan Bean’s first space launch has gone terribly wrong after less than a minute. He’s staring at the warning lights, but he can see the batteries are still putting out the requisite power. He keeps saying this to his crew and mission control as the team scrambles to determine what happened and what to do.
The ground suggests resetting the seemingly ailing systems, but Bean hesitates. “One of the rules of space flight is you don’t make any switch-a-roos with that electrical system unless you’ve got a good idea why you’re doing it,” he will later say. “I knew we had power, so I didn’t want to make any changes. I figured we could fly into orbit just like that.” (Gordon, in a 1969 technical debrief, agrees with Bean’s choice to wait and think it through: “I think it was a smart decision. We’ve all learned that by arbitrarily switching the electrical system around, you can get yourself into more trouble.”) ....
After some deliberation, and as it becomes more clear that lightning was the culprit, Bean begins to reset the electrical systems. He is credited with remembering the existence of a backup power switch to the signal conditioning electronics that, when used, helps cut the time of the recovery from the incident and keeps the mission from being aborted.
Interesting article, thanks for posting it!
Good post.
Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Popular Mechanics instantly crashes my browser.
It was John Aaron at Ground Control who made the call 'Try SCE to Auxiliary' and became an engineering legend.
Words to live by.
Had this been a snowflake crew we’d have heard screams of terror and sheer panic as the spacecraft fell back to earth.
Interesting story. Thanks for posting.
I’ll never forget the trouble the TV camera gave them on their moonwalk. It malfunctioned, probably because it had been pointed too long at the sun, and much time was spent in trying to get it to work. The world’s most advanced technology in history, and they’re talking with Houston about tape and whacking things with a hammer.
T04 20 15 15
LMP (Bean): The f-stop’s is still 22, but I can try something else - -
04 20 15 36
CC (Houston): Okay, Al, we see no change down here.
Why don’t you press on?
04 20 15 38
LMP Okay, let me - let me try another f-stop,
the other way. How’s that?
04 20 15 50
CC There’s no change down here, Al. That’s coming
in there, now, Al. Okay, what change did you make?
04 20 16 00
LMP I hit it on the top with my hammer. I figured
we didn’t have a thing to lose. I just pounded it
on top with this hammer I’ve got.
04 20 16 10
CC Skillful fix, Al.
04 20 16 11
LMP Yes, that’s skilled craftsmanship. *
04 20 16 15
CDR (Conrad) Hey, that’s - A1 -
04 20 16 17
LMP Yes, sir.
04 20 16 18
CDR That part has already sheared this thing.
04 20 16 23
LMP Never touched it.
04 20 16 25
CDR Okay.
04 20 16 26
LMP What should we do now with the lens, Houston?
04 20 16 36 CC Okay, why don’_ you give it one
more light rap, and also cut down the f-stop?
04 20 16 41
LMP All right, will do. Now, is the zoom right
for you?
04 20 17 02
LMP ...
04 20 17 03
CDR Oh, darn .... you really got this, Al.
04 20 17 04
LMP Okay.
04 20 17 05
CDR Down the ...
04 20 17 14
CC Al, we’re still not getting a good picture.
Why don’t you press on, and we’ll try to get
back to it later, if Ye have time.
04 20 17 19
LMP Okay, I’ll pound it a little bit. There you go.
I’ll Just leave it like it is, pointed slightly
towards the LM here, so that if you do get a picture,
you’ll see something.
04 20 17 34
CDR Ready to go now.
04 20 17 35
LMP That ought to give you some sort of a picture
that you can think about. I’ll be glad to come back
and work on it. Got to go to work again.
04 20 17 41
CDR Al?
04 20 17 42
LMP Yes, sir.
04 20 17 43
CDR What I need is a piece of tape.
04 20 17 46
LMP *** get some.
04 20 17 47
CDR Good luck.
04 20 17 49
LMP Oh, there’s all kinds of tape around here.
Of the 12 men who walked on the moon, there are now 4 still alive: Buzz Aldrin (88), David Scott (85), Harrison Schmitt (82), and Charles Duke (82). Duke is the youngest (3 months younger than Schmitt) and was the youngest person ever to walk on the moon (at 36 years, 6 months and 18 days)...at least so far. Amazing men.