posted 08-04-2019 08:24 AM               

Space Cover #526: Was That Ever a Sim They Gave Us?

Earlier, it appeared that NASA officials would postpone the launch of Apollo 12, NASA's second attempt to land astronauts on the Moon. It was now fifteen minutes before launch, but a U.S. Air Force weather plane confirmed that the flight ceiling was acceptable, winds were within requirements, and there was no lightning within the immediate launch area.

Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad, Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean, and Command Module Pilot Richard Gordon in Yankee Clipper were go for launch. The accomplishments of Apollo 11 had been spectacular, but the crew of Apollo 12 would prove that the feats of Apollo 11 could be duplicated and even surpassed.

"Liftoff!" radios Conrad, the clock is running, as Apollo 12's Saturn V slowly lifts away from its launch pad. Conrad intones, "That's a lovely liftoff!" The massive Saturn V responds amazing well and completes its roll over to its track heading as it thunders into the stormy skies over Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Suddenly, Conrad looks out of the corner of his eye and sees a bright flash of lightning followed by loud static noise on his headset and a trembling of the crew's mighty Apollo 12 Saturn booster.

Only Conrad had observed the lightning flash, but all of the crew then heard the repetitive and urgent warning of their instrument panel as the master alarm reverberating in their headsets. The instrument panel was a blur of warning lights indicating the spacecraft's electrical system had been knocked out.

Conrad calls out to his crew mates, "Wait for staging!" The crew sees the first stage of the Saturn V rocket fall away. The crew is slammed into their harnesses as the Saturn's second stage rocket engines thunder to life, cut-in, and accelerate them forward as expected. After staging, Alan Bean is able to reset the spacecraft's electrical bus, and the command module's electrical system suddenly comes back on line.

Slowly but surely, the instrument panel's warning lights blink off one by one. As Apollo 12 speeds into Earth orbit, spacecraft operations appear to return to normal. Conrad excitedly looks at his crew mates, and suddenly laughs, shouting to them, "Was that ever a sim (simulation) they gave us?! There were so many lights up there I couldn't read them all!"

At 10,000 miles from Earth, three primary tracking stations spaced at equidistant intervals around the Earth will take over communications and tracking responsibilities for the Apollo 12 mission. The primary tracking stations are Madrid, Spain; Canberra, Australia; and Goldstone, California. The primary tracking stations each have a dual system that can track the command module in lunar orbit and can also track the lunar module on its separate flight trajectory, or descent to, or ascent from the Moon's surface.

This astronaut cover is signed by the Apollo 12 crew of Charles (Pete) Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. The cover is similar to the normal crew patch cover above except it also has the Navy astronaut wings at the bottom of the cover with the added names of the Command Module Yankee Clipper and the Lunar Module Intrepid. The Apollo 12 crew is an all Navy crew and the ship symbolism builds upon an earlier speech by President John F. Kennedy that the American people will embark upon a new ocean.

Once Apollo 12 reaches Earth orbit, Conrad directs his crew to check out everything in the spacecraft. Dick Gordon checks out the lower equipment bay and realigns Yankee Clipper's navigation system against star sightings. Conrad and Bean check out the other spacecraft systems. Everything in the command module and lunar module checks out surprisingly well.

Houston CapCom Jerry Carr confirms this, after Houston engineers complete their diagnostic tests, saying, "Apollo 12, the good word is you are go for TLI [trans-lunar insertion]." Conrad is ecstatic and says, "Whoopde-do! We are ready! We didn't expect anything else!"

As Conrad and Bean move to their LM lander, they think about this. The Apollo 11 LM crew had missed their lunar landing point by four miles. NASA mathematician Emil Schiesser makes a key breakthrough on this mission and used Doppler shift in frequency, to predict if the lunar module was on course or not, and how much correction was required. It is an elegant solution to a complicated problem.

As requested by Mission Control, Conrad and Bean in Intrepid think they have landed fairly close to the Surveyor 3 lunar lander at the Sea of Storms. Conrad had landed on target, he was sure of that.

On the Moon, as teammate Conrad descends the ladder from the Intrepid lander porch, he holds onto the ladder with both hands and then gently jumps down onto the lunar lander foot pad. Conrad pauses, then steps from the foot pad onto the lunar surface. Conrad exclaims, "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small step for Neil, but it is a long one for me!"

He says, "Well, I can walk pretty well, ah Al, but I have got to watch where I am going." Conrad views a shallow bowl twice the size of a football stadium, but is visually surprised at what he then sees. On the far side of the crater wall, standing in the shadows is the white diminutive shape of the Surveyor 3 lander. Pete Conrad exuberantly states, Does that look neat! It can't be any further than six hundred feet from here. How about that?! The Intrepid LM has landed within sight of Surveyor 3.

On their second moonwalk, Conrad and Bean head directly towards Surveyor 3 and its crater in a slightly uphill run. They take photos of nearby soil and rock samples so NASA can compare the photos with those taken by Surveyor 3 thirty-one months previously. The astronauts also wrestle with the TV camera on Surveyor 3 and clip it free of its lander. Conrad exclaims, It is ours! and puts it into their tool carrier.

Conrad looks at Bean and sees he is worried. He asks, "Beano, are you worried about the ascent engine?" Alan Bean answers, "Yep." Conrad quietly continues, "Well, there is no sense worrying about it, Al, because if it doesn't work, we're just gonna become the first permanent monument to the space program." An hour later, when they fire the ascent engine on their command. The Ocean of Storms quickly recedes and Intrepid successfully docks rejoining CM Pilot Dick Gordon and Yankee Clipper in lunar orbit.

On their homeward trip back to Earth, Bean comments this. "As Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and I were speeding toward Earth in our command module, we were treated to a marvelous sight never before seen by any humans. We were seeing our home planet Earth eclipse our own star, the Sun. As we were about 27,000 nautical miles out, the Earth had moved to completely obscure the disk of the Sun. I reported to mission control, '...the atmosphere is illuminated completely around the Earth...'" Pete added, "It has blues and pinks in it, but instead of being banded, it's segmented."

The crew sees pulses and flashes of light moving in a gentle arc from an 8 to 2 o'clock position on the eclipsing Earth, but they were puzzled. What were they seeing? Dick Gordon observed, "It looks sort of the same as lightning flashes down inside thunderstorms when we flew over them in our T-38 airplanes." Bean continues, "As we studied the Earth carefully, we saw that the most active locations were along the equator. Violent thunderstorms that had built up during the daylight hours were now dissipating as this side of our planet Earth rotated into darkness."

Bean later describes this experience in a meeting with French explorer Jacques Cousteau, and the explorer exclaims, "It was as if the Earth was wearing a necklace of diamonds."

As Apollo 12 rockets back to Earth, Yankee Clipper's speed increases as it is increasingly pulled forward by Earth's gravity. Seven minutes from entering the Earth's atmosphere and 3,476 nautical miles from splashdown in the western Pacific, Apollo Control confirms Yankee Clipper's velocity at 22,630 miles per hour as it begins reentry back to Earth. Apollo 12 enters the Earth's atmosphere at 400,000 feet altitude and enters a communications blackout period for four and one half minutes, but has communications with USAF Apollo Range Instrumentation Aircraft (ARIA) just prior to their blackout period.

USS Hornet's Air Boss confirms visual sighting of the spacecraft by ship's lookouts as the spacecraft's drogues and then three main parachutes deploy. Conrad confirms parachute deployment, reporting, "Hello, Houston, Apollo 12, three gorgeous beautiful chutes. And we're at 8,000 feet, on our way down in great shape." An earlier concern had been that the lightning strikes after the launch of Apollo 12 may have seriously damaged the pyrotechnic system deploying Yankee Clipper's main parachutes for reentry.

After deliberating, NASA officials had not called off the mission after checking the spacecraft systems and reviewing the spacecraft's status. Their logic was very clear. The crew of Apollo 12 would be just as dead if the main parachutes did not work for an aborted mission as they would upon returning from the Moon after their mission.

Conrad matter of factly confirms the crew's status with USS Hornet's Air Boss saying, "We are all are all okay." Later, the crew rejoiced in the Apollo 12 mission and its success. It was quite a sim they were given, indeed!