Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lunar Module Development Operations

Inclusion and take that on as a special badge of honor that our staff has had special training to work with people with any type of learning disabilities, challenges or anything like that. If you see theres a need were not meeting, please let us know, because we always want to improve. Welcome today for our first panel discussion. [ cheers and applause ] i spent over 20 years of my life with nasa and industry, and ill tell you, ive been around a lot of folks, been around Flight Controllers, directors over the last four years that ive been here. Have just been a fantastic experience for me. Many of these gentlemen, weve been involved with either planning discussions like this, or have been a part of the Mission Control that has been restored as a National Historic landmark where they actually had the missions up through shuttle but also included the Lunar Landing for apollo landing and other great space flights. If you have not gotten your ticket for that, hopefully you will today. They will go quick i apologize if youre not able to go today. We run that on a quick circuit. Well be open for quite a long time today. Hopefully youll be able to get that and see if you can be back tomorrow so maybe you can do that, too. It was a great opportunity for us to partner with nasa Johnson Space center. We worked with them in the city of webster, gave a large contribution for that 3. 5 million or 5 million for that restoration. [ cheers and applause ] so today with our first panel, we thought it would be best to have a discussion, as were talking about the Lunar Landing, talk about lunar Module Development and operational issues to start out with. These are quick presentations and discussions. We really wanted to have some commentary from the audience as well. We would ask that you have a quick question so others can also ask questions and the gentlemen are able to answer those. First, ill allow them to ill introduce by name and ill allow them to give a quick synopsis of what they did when they were in Mission Control. First is, to my right here, richard cucco. Richard . [ cheers and applause ] bill reeves in the middle and jack knight on the far end. [ applause ] richard, why dont you start us off . Okay. See, i graduated college in 1966 and went to work for groman Aircraft Company at the time. I started testing the Environmental Control systems on the lunar module which involved getting co2 out of the atmosphere. In a closed environment like that, have you to scrub it. Otherwise, youre in trouble. It was cabin pressure management and life support type things was my focus during the testing and development phases. Bill . Good morning. Im bill reeves and grew up in arkansas and got here as fast as i could. [ applause ] so i joined here in 1967 and went straight to the Flight Control division and was a Flight Controller on the lunar module in the electrical power system group. We were responsible for all of the power systems, which on the limb was just batteries. And the Distribution System in keeping track of power profiles. We also were in charge of the pyrotech knick devices that separated the stages and open e valves and all that kind of stuff i was in the back room, Vehicle System Staff Support room. We were the people that made the people in the front room look good. [ cheers and applause ] i was 2 years old when the landing happened. I wasnt actually on duty but we stuck around shift to shift and watched it. Turn it over to jack. Jack knight, member of an air force family that bounced around the world a number of times, number of places. Went to georgia tech, graduated 1965 and came straight here at the manned space flight center. Again also in operations. And was assigned to the lunar module. But the lunar module wasnt quite ready at the time so i participated in the Gemini Program a little bit. Once they were over, the apollo moved on, moved out. The first lunar module was unmanned. And i was involved in that. That was launched on a saturn1b. It automatically executed some of the critical events. Since it didnt have people on board, it was just to keep the atmospheric integrity. After that, we started to really pick up and i was involved in all the limb manned flights, apollo 9 through apollo 17. I started out in the ecs back room and was out for the apollo 9 and subsequent. On apollo 11, my shift was right after the landing shift. So i waited in the ssr for that to happen and then came out immediately thereafter for the eva. So got to see armstrong step on the moon and the rest of the e. V. A. The subject of this was issues and there were quite a number of them, i think, on all the vehicles, Commanding Service module. Should i sure. As well as the lunar module. Everyone is, of course, probably aware we had the apollo 1 fire. That set things back a little bit, but we kept progressing and managed to get past that, rebuild the interior of the command surface module. Lunar module was running parallel with all that. Source of a number of interesting things to me, later on, in areas that were not my specialty, but in particular the limb engine. Nasa had a process by which if they had uncertainty in particular areas, they would often put two contractors to work. So, the first one that came up with a good solution, youre in. Youll do the rest of it. And the other guy that was paid moved on to other things. This particular case of the engine, the problem was the injector. They did manage to make it work. As it turns out, you could only fire the engine once. So, no engine was ever tested other than the Development Period by firing its complete session complete parts until it launched from the moon. To me, thats a kind of interesting thing. [ laughter ] but it was simple and you knew it only had to work once, and it did. Did you want to comment on that . Yes. Being in the ssrs, i was in what they call the mer, Mission Evaluation room, and we helped them look good. [ applause ] seems theres a lot of healthy discussion here. Theyve only had about 50 years to workup to this. Its working very well. That is a fact. That was the beauty of the flight ops, it was a competitive environment. Those who trained all of us and put together through the simulations and all the failures and all that, those people were behind the scenes and really did a great job, but talking about issues, how many of you all have heard, have seen the lunar module described as the lem . A lot of old documentation in fact, when i first got here a lot of documentation called it the lem, which stood for lunar excursion module. The original design of the vehicle was for it to land and be able to move around. That was dropped way early on for cost and weight reasons and so they reduced the name to the lunar module, the lm. Theres your trivia question for the day. But the power system in the lunar module i was working on was strictly battery, silver zinc batteries and our main focus is we would take the checklist that was being developed as to what we had to do and we would resolve it into power draw so that we knew at any point in time how much power was being drawn out of the batteries and how much time we had left. And there were four major batteries during landing and then there were two batteries that powered the stage when they left the moon to go back to the command module. One of the bigstein issues we ran into was the batteries were all in parallel on the power buses with the decent batteries during the landing in case you had to abort. And you had to abort the landing and stage the vehicle and go back to the command module. What we found out was that the assent batteries, which had not been used quite a while time wise were sitting on cold plates and were getting very, very cold. And silver zinc batteries had a characteristic where the voltage was very unstable for the first 10 or 12 amp hours out of the battery before the voltage got stable and we found out that if you stage the vehicle without getting that first 10 or 12 amp hours out of the batteries, the voltage on the bus would drop during the staging to the point it would dump the computer and affect a lot of equipment. So, we had to come up with a power scheme to put the batteries on at a certain point in time to get them to pick up the load and get that preconditioning out of the way. So, that was quite a challenge to do that. And during the mission, we found out that they werent drawing as much as they were supposed to. And so we wound up having to play some games with it. But all is well that ends well. Go ahead, richard. Yeah. I just wanted to point out that if you go up, theres a lunar module hanging from the sky. That was the test article number eight and that eye accompanied down here from bethpage where grumman was located and put it through a full series of tests to validate that the environment control system as well as the thermal control system could manage and keep the vehicle from getting too hot, too cold and it helps the equipment, make sure that the equipment didnt get too hot. As i said before, in space theres no atmosphere. Heat gets carried away only by direct contact with cold plates and that was what bill was talking to. That vehicle was brought down here and put in the space environment out on the back part of the center and its a great its a huge vacuum chamber. And they would pull a vacuum, run liquid nitrogen through the walls and they also had a number of lights that simulated sunlight. So the lunar unlike the command module, which is always in space and was rotating, so it would barbecue and so the sun would see different sides or sun on different sides of the vehicle constantly, the lunar module, once it sat on the surface, sat there. And it did not barbecue. Wherever the sun was, it was going to impinge on that part of the lunar module all the time that it was there. Its thermal design was different, and validating that thermal design was done out there in that chamber, among other things. Another i dont know what you call it an issue or not but one of the things that came up, particularly during there was a number of changes made to the lunar module, fairly minor once it arrived at kennedy, one of which was that during testing down there, they would put it in a chamber down there and the crewmen would get in it. One of the things that happened very kind of late in armstrongs flight, apollo 11, is that he indicated he was too warm being in the lunar module, in the chamber. And at that time, there was only air cooled, air blowing through the suit and out. And our plans always had been when were landing that the crew was completely suited. So the only cooling was air flow. And he got too warm. So because they were also going to be on the lunar surface, they were wearing a liquid cooling garment, a fabric that had water tubes running through it. And when you run a suit with a portablized sports system, it ran water through that for cooling. Just didnt have enough capacity just for air cooling and the crew would be working too hard. So after that, grumman very quickly built a little pump and tubing system and put a heat exchanger in that lunar module and all the subsequent ones while it was at the cape and that was made available so that when we got to the moon, the crew could plug in those little water tubes and use those while they were still in the lunar module. And there were other i think there were other changes made late in the game when certain subjects came up. That capability was there. For our operations, on a slightly different tact, one of the agreements we had with each of the contractors, grumman for the lunar module and north american was those companies provide technical representatives that had contacts back to the factory to flight operations, because we were making drawings and procedures and malfunction procedures, normal procedures, and those contacts were very valuable, because they knew the people back at the plant and they could call and get information somewhat easier than a voice nobody had ever heard. That was one of the, i think, fairly key decisions that was made in the program was willing to pay for. Another big problem with the lunar module is when it was first built it turned out to be too heavy. It was way overweight. He heard a lot of stories about apollo 10, a complete dress rehearsal for apollo 11. The limb had gone through a massive Weight Reduction program to get the weight down to where it could land and take back off. And apollo 11 was the first lunar module that had gone through that Weight Reduction program. The lunar module on apollo 10 was too heavy anyway, and even youve seen articles about fuel was offloaded out of the stage so that they wouldnt land. And thats really not true. It was offloaded to reduce the weight of the vehicle. From my perspective, the Weight Reduction program, first of all, affected the thickness of the skin on the lunar module itself. It was more like an oil can than anything else. When we were testing, it would go pop, pop, pop. The pressure would go up. And also in that Weight Reduction program, and when people working on the vehicle touched those things, they broke the connections, the wires. A massive amount of time spent troubleshooting where the break was. Another little trivia question or statement was the lunar module was a unique vehicle. It only flew in the vacuum and only had to land on the moon and get back off and not reenter the earths atmosphere. So there was always a motto that heat shields were for sissies. I guess turnabout is fair play. Jack . That one is a hard one to follo follow. They had a comeback which escapes me at the moment. I was trying to remember that. I dont remember it, unfortunately. It was 50 years ago and some things have something to the effect youre not getting home without i it. Grumman, at the time, made aircraft for the navy. So those things had to land on carriers and they had a lot of experience and reputation for structures and structures was, again, part of the lunar module was it had to land on the moon. You cant just assume youre going to land on nice flat surface. Had you to account for you might be also falling straight down. You might be going so much forward, so much to the left or the right. So all of that had to be built into the design of the struts. Struts were honeycomb ed. There was no spring or anything like that. They would just crush. He had a reputation but he also had a reputation for assuming certain farout things and one of the things he mentioned was there was a possibility that the lunar dust and the moon would be very loose and very deep and it could be 40 feet deep. So the lunar module could just disappear. Now nobody knew that for certain. But other people thought differently and designed it differently. We did find out if you have ever looked back in history, our first satellite not satellite but moon shots were called ranger. Ranger shot straight from the earth to the moon, went straight in but while it was going in, it snapped pictures, snapped pictures. You would get close, close, closer and get a feel that might be a landing spot. It had pads that would give you information about whether you were going to sink or not and how much pounds per square inch the lunar surface could support. We found out what the reality was with those missions. When the lunar module was designed the foot pads took that kind of thing into account. The area of those pads, we had a pretty good idea, there was not going to be a problem provided the surface you landed on was within the angles that were designed, too, so you wouldnt tilt over. In fact, you can look at maybe apollo 15, if you see one of those videos, one of those landed with a fairly obvious tilt. And it just it just stayed there until you took off. To jab jacks point about the honeycomb structure in the struts, mr. Armstrong put that thing down so gently, i dont think it crushed more than two inche inches. Also on the pads, there was a probe sticking down on each pad that was about five feet long and had a little switch on the end of it. And the original design, whenever those probes would touch the lunar surface, it would mean you were five feet off the surface and they were wired so that diagonally, if any two of the four probes diagonally tripped that switch, it would shut the decent engine off so that it would drop the last five feet and crush those struts. The crusade nobody is turning my engine off but me. During the landing youll hear them say contact light. When they say contact light, that meant that that lunar that light, the lunar contact light had come on, which meant that the probes had touched the surface. And then they shut the engine off. On that, those probes, there was a concern with the one that was right by the ladder, and i think they ended up taking that off because if it was sticking up, it would be a surprise when they jumped down. Armstrong pointed that out in one of his visits to grumman and they took that one off. You only had three, two sides and the back. The engineer iing was a little worried. Again, it wasnt my area so i didnt hear much about it. But if you look at the lunar module, the decent engine bell extends almost down to the bottom of the pads. So if you land with the edge still rung or on a rock with some raised area, you have enclosed area. Thats why they had that original design he was talking about. Crew talked him out of it, and they would shut the engine off, hopefully, before anything like that happened. Of course, nothing ever did. If you hear it hit the ground, contact light, engine off, engine arm off and things like that. If you count the time that they actually were on the moon, the first words essentially were engine off. Then there was that moment of silence, the eagle has landed. Grumman had a pretty good reputation for thermal analysis which again was quite turned out to be very good. When you get into the Weight Reduction and you have to take off various and sundry things, whats remaining, those gold foil sheets just reflected the suns energy and did a really good job. Theres another change that was late, and that was the down firing thrusters, you could damage. So late in the game they added these little deflectors on the stage right under each of the four downfiring rcs thrusters and that turned out because it was pretty late in the game to maybe cause a bit of a problem on apollo 11 because those deflectors did not get modeled in the communications analysis. When they came around to