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To: Vince Ferrer

I wish the audio feed were inside the control rooms or recorded in such a way that the party-goers were a low, dull roar in the background. All that woopin’ and hollerin’ made it sound like the whole launch was a lucky fluke.


150 posted on 02/06/2018 5:16:24 PM PST by BradyLS (DO NOT FEED THE BEARS!)
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To: BradyLS
I wish the audio feed were inside the control rooms or recorded in such a way that the party-goers were a low, dull roar in the background. All that woopin’ and hollerin’ made it sound like the whole launch was a lucky fluke.

There might be video of it like that, you'll have to look around. But if there is video like that, it would probably seem underwhelming. There is a communication loop that all the stations have at the control center, and you can hear the communication on the loop in the video that I saw. But the actual dialog is very limited on that loop, and it is culturally frowned upon to say anything not necessary on the loop. So its just a short occasional comment amongst the shouting.

If you want to enjoy a really cool bit of ground control history, here is a video of the Apollo 12 launch. At Mission Control, there was a main communication loop connecting each person at a workstation, plus each person at a workstation was connected to another loop focusing on their area of expertise, which connected them to a team of people off in another room. In those rooms they had teams of engineers and racks of documents and engineering drawings that could help them solve any problem.

What happened at Apollo 12 is that right after the rocket cleared the tower, it was struck by lightning twice. All communication between astronauts and ground control was cut for a few seconds, all the workstation displays show nonsensical data, and the electric bus in the command module went down.

Nobody knew what to do, nobody knew if the rocket had exploded or was even in the air. The flight director was about to send the command to abort the launch and destroy the rocket. After a few seconds they were able to get data from the Saturn first stage, and realized that the rocket was still flying. Later they got in communication with the astronauts.

But back in one of the engineering rooms, a twenty eight year old engineer realized that he had seen this situation before a few years back, when a power surge overloaded a test PCE panel. The contractor he was working with flipped a switch on the panel to AUX, then reset the panel, and went on testing.

Instead of giving the command to blow up the rocket, the engineer relayed to his mission control loop to reset the PCE panel to AUX. He then relayed instructions to reboot the electrical bus, and the astronauts brought the command module back on line. They went into orbit, and then onto the moon successfully.

Here's the video. Watching it, because of the terse communications on the loops, you would never know just how bad the situation was. Even the network news anchors listening in didn't catch on fully to the drama.

Launch of Apollo 12 Saturn V and lightning strike on rocket, original NBC TV

152 posted on 02/06/2018 6:33:10 PM PST by Vince Ferrer
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