Living history

Hi from Cairo - I'm still on the road and waiting to get back home to take a breather. I'm finding out all kinds of interesting stuff about what the Internet does when you're abroad. I spent half an hour this evening trying to force the Blogger sign-in screen to appear in English instead of Arabic!

I received this wonderful photo this morning from Mark Usciak, the official Spacefest photographer. I'm just blown away to see myself and my lovely bride in the presence of so much history. Half of the men who walked on the Moon are in this photo with us!

Front row: Scott Carpenter, Gene Cernan, Ed Mitchell, Jane and me, Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Duke, and an unusually glum-looking Dick Gordon. Back row: Al Bean, Hank Hartsfield, Vance Brand, Jack Lousma, Dave Scott, Jim McDivitt, Rusty Schweickart, Mike Collins, Rick Searfoss, and Charlie Walker. Too bad Bruce McCandless was running late, or he would have been in this photo with us too. This still feels too strange to be real!

This week is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission, including the first flight of the Lunar Module. Mission Commander Jim McDivitt was making his second (and last) space flight; he would go on to become the Apollo Program Manager. Command Module Pilot Dave Scott was also on his second mission, and he would later command the Apollo 15 lunar landing mission. Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart was on his first and only flight. Rusty was one of the first astronauts to get space motion sickness, which hampered his functioning for several days and caused the delay of a planned EVA.

The rumor was that Rusty was grounded after the mission because of his space sickness. At the time, we knew very little about the syndrome, though, and it was later discovered that most astronauts get it to some degree or another. The Mercury and Gemini missions did not have the problem because the astronauts remained confined in their seats for most of the mission. It was only with the ability to move about the more spacious Apollo capsules that astronauts became succeptible to this form of motion sickness.

Back from Spacefest

Holy moley, I don't know where to start. I was at Spacefest 2009 in San Diego this past weekend. I will endeavor to provide some photos and commentary over the course of the coming week(s). Suffice it to say at the moment that at this conference, I met half of the men who have walked on the Moon - Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Charlie Duke, and Gene Cernan - in addition to about a dozen other Apollo-era and Space Shuttle astronauts. I spent waaaaaaaaaay more money than I intended to on autographs, but I now have some very cool Apollo-era artifacts that are signed by participants in every lunar landing.

This photo is Jane and me with the crew of Apollo 9, together again for the first time since 1972, in front of their Command Module, "Gumdrop." This was at a reception at the San Diego Aerospace Museum.

More later, I promise... for now, I'm getting ready to go off to Cairo on Thursday...

Prepping for a mission

Among the artifacts that I have most enjoyed collecting over the years are items that were used by astronauts or mission support teams in the endless planning and practicing that preceded missions.

This training manual belonged to Dave Scott, who later commanded the Apollo 15 mission to Hadley Rille. The manual predates the Apollo 15 training, however. It was issued to Scott in February 1970, before even the Apollo 13 mission. In fact, it was for an "H mission," using the same types of LMs as Apollos 11-14. In these missions, the LM's powered descent started from a 60-mile orbit, and there was no lunar rover. The "J missions," Apollos 15-17, had an extended duration LM, used the lunar rovers, and used the Command/Service Module to take the LM down to 50,000 feet before turning the LM loose to land on its own. Moving down to the lower altitude using the CSM gave the heavier J-mission LMs more fuel for the critical last minutes of landing.

Scott annotated this manual heavily. It's fascinating to see what he chose to concentrate on in learning the techniques for lunar descent. For example, Scott has underlined a section that says, "If the LR [landing radar] altitude data-good signal has not been received by a PGCNS [guidance system] indicated altitude of 10,000 feet, the crew will abort." This is precisely the scenario that was mentioned in my recent post about Apollo 14 [a year after this manual was written], where the lack of landing radar data almost caused the crew to abort the landing, until it was corrected at the last possible moment.

Remembering Stu Roosa

Apollo 14 returned to Earth on February 9, 1971, steered by Command Module Pilot Stu Roosa.

I hesitated to call this post what I did, because I actually remember very little about Stu Roosa. He was completely overshadowed by the mission commander, Alan Shepard, and also by his crewmate Ed Mitchell, who quickly gained notoriety after the flight by announcing that he had performed ESP experiments during the mission. Roosa did his job competently, with little or no fanfare. He never flew another mission after Apollo 14, although he was backup CMP for Apollo 16 and 17. He was assigned to the Space Shuttle Program after Apollo, but he retired from NASA and the Air Force 5 years before the Shuttle's first flight.

Roosa died of complications from pancreatitis in 1994. He was the fifth of the Apollo astronauts (counting Deke Slayton) to die of natural causes.

His son is a Colonel in the Marine Corps and is currently deployed to Iraq. He wrote a touching remembrance of his father recently, which can be read here.

Antares on the Moon

Apollo 14's LM, Antares, landed at Fra Mauro on February 5, 1971. It seemed doubtful for a while that the landing would happen. A loose piece of solder in a switch kept signaling an 'abort' condition. Even though everyone knew it was a small and intermittent hardware problem, there was concern that the flight computer would get the erroneous signal during powered descent and abort the landing. MIT software engineers hastily wrote a patch to work around the condition. They radioed it up and Ed Mitchell, LM Pilot, entered the changed software by hand on the DSKY keypad.

Unfortunately, the software patch contained a bug which caused the landing radar not to lock on. Flight rules called for an abort if the radar did not lock on. Mitchell reset the circuit breaker, and that did the trick. There was a lot of speculation later on as to whether Shepard, intent on making a Moon landing, would have proceeded with the landing even without the radar. As it was, he made the closest landing to the designated landing spot of any of the Apollo commanders.

So, this was yet another nail-biter to listen to as we followed the TV coverage. Pete Conrad and Al Bean in Apollo 12 had the only trouble-free touchdown to this point.

I'm looking forward to meeting Ed Mitchell at Spacefest in San Diego in two weeks! I can't wait to hear from him what it was like to work with Al Shepard in such close quarters. I can only imagine that one would have to give Shepard plenty of leeway.

This booklet, "Science at Fra Mauro," was put out by NASA shortly after the mission ended. I picked up this copy at NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs in June 1971.

Beep Beep, My Ass!

Less than a year after the Apollo 13 near-disaster, NASA was sending another crew on its way to the Moon. Apollo 14 launched on January 31, 1971 and headed toward Fra Mauro, which was Apollo 13's intended target.

The official crew patch designates the NASA Astronaut Pin headed toward the Moon, and lists the name of its three crewmen. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, commanded the flight. He had been grounded for an inner-ear disease since the early 1960's, and following an operation that cured the problems, he demanded to be put back into the flight rotation. Some say that he stole command of Apollo 14 from Gordon Cooper, although the semi-official word was that NASA management pulled Cooper for his somewhat lackadaisical approach to training.

In any case, Shepard was at 47 the "old man" of the program, the oldest astronaut on flight status. The backup crew of Gene Cernan, Joe Engle, and Ron Evans, secretly had a patch made for themselves. They stowed the patches in every compartment of the Command Module, so that one would drift out every time someone opened a locker. The patch depicts an aged Wile E. Coyote heading toward the Moon, to which the Roadrunner 'B Team' has already beaten him.

Whenever Shepard encountered one of these patches on the flight, he is reported to have radioed to the ground, "Tell Cernan, 'Beep beep, my ass!'"

Missing Columbia

Six years ago today, Space Shuttle Columbia was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere following a 15-day research mission. It disintegrated over Texas less than 20 minutes from its scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center.

I was leaving a church choir rehearsal that Saturday morning when I turned on the car radio and heard the heartbreaking news. I raced home to turn on the TV. The video of Columbia breaking apart into multiple streaks was devastating to watch. Debris rained down across Texas and Louisiana, and people were recovering pieces of the spacecraft for weeks afterward.

I couldn't believe that we had lost a Shuttle during re-entry; that part of flight seemed almost routine at this point. However, it made me recall Columbia's maiden flight, the very first Space Shuttle mission in 1981. When the payload bay doors opened and the cameras pointed aft, we saw to our horror that several thermal tiles were missing from the left OMS pod. There was serious concern about if and how the loss of this thermal protection might impact re-entry. Fortunately, she made it home safely that mission. Unfortunately, that helped start the perception that the Shuttles were able to take punishment to their thermal protection system and still make it back home okay.

Columbia's loss grounded the Shuttle for a year and a half until safety could be improved. Although the Shuttle is flying again, next year is scheduled to mark the end of its missions.

I've lived to see three fatal accidents on US spacecraft as well as several on Soviet capsules. I know that there will be more someday...but I hope not for a long, long time.