Re: LM question

From: Doug... (dvandorn1_at_NOSPAM.mn.rr.com)
Date: 03/09/05 

Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 06:11:54 GMT

In article <ID2D5s.DK4@spsystems.net>, henry@spsystems.net says...
>
> <snip>
>
> For a while, there was a notion that you could widen the windows by
> training the crew for a landing at any of several sites, so a scrubbed
> launch could be accommodated by retargeting for a site farther west a few
> days later. This was never really done, because there just wasn't enough
> time for the extra training -- as it was, training ran late enough,
> because of problems like the unreliability of the simulators, that the
> 10 and 11 crews were only barely flight-ready. (There was serious
> consideration of slipping 11 to the August launch window to give more
> training time.) The one vestige of this concept that survived was the
> choice of an eastern site as the first target. And of course, the whole
> idea was dropped after the first landing was accomplished, and precision
> landing at a preselected point became the order of the day.

Um, not quite. There is one actual error in the above statement -- the
back-up landing site was retained for Apollo 12. Yes, they did a lot of
site-specific training on 12, but that flight officially retained a
back-up landing site. It was ALS-5, in fact.

According to Don Wilhelms in "To a Rocky Moon," the site selection board
preferred a landing near Surveyor I over one near Surveyor III, because
the maria seemed a *lot* younger near Flamsteed than in the Surveyor III
area. Wilhelms, in fact, thought that the Surveyor I / Flamsteed site
was indeed going to be selected, and was dumbfounded (and angered) when
he heard that NASA had selected the Surveyor III site instead. One of
the main reasons that Wilhelms states NASA gave for the change was that
the Flamsteed site was too far west to allow for a back-up site in case
of a one- or two-day launch slip.

Wilhelms goes on to discuss how a secondary argument, the possibility of
sampling a Copernican ray at the Surveyor III site, also entered into
the decision. But he does make the statement that he would have at
*least* wanted to see the Surveyor I site become the back-up site, but
instead they were planning to aim for a specific crater within ALS-5 on
Apollo 12 had they encountered a one- or two-day launch slip.

Apollo 13 was the first flight that did not include a back-up landing
site to the west of the primary site in its contingency planning. Not
Apollo 12. 

-- 
"The problem isn't that there are so   |   Doug Van Dorn
many fools; it's that lightning isn't  |   dvandorn1@NOSPAM.mn.rr.com
distributed right."  -Mark Twain

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Thinking about a new Apollo 8
    ... >> only Apollo landing to go to a Ranger/Surveyor site was Apollo 12, ... >> precision landing... ... >selection of Surveyor 3 to be revisited? ... dating the Copernicus impact, a significant science objective that seemed ...
    (sci.space.history)
  • Re: Thinking about a new Apollo 8
    ... >at selected sites (Apollo back-up sites or still deemed to too dangerous for ... lunar night, unless it is at least partly nuclear-powered. ... Ranger and Surveyor were used more for general reporting on ... lunar-surface conditions than for surveying specific landing sites. ...
    (sci.space.history)
  • Re: How much mass was saved by using a two-stage LM in Apollo?
    ... Not completely unknown, as he had the Surveyor landings to give us some indication of what the surface was like (the LM wasn't going to sink in the dread hundred-foot-deep layer of Moon dust, for instance). ... Surveyor 6 was particularly helpful in this regard as it lifted off from the lunar surface and then re-landed 2.5 meters away, letting the scientists get a look at the depressions created by the landing pads during the first landing. ... Thus Apollo 11 was, in some regards, obsolescent even ...
    (sci.space.history)
  • Re: Thinking about a new Apollo 8
    ... Ranger and Surveyor were used more for general reporting on ... > lunar-surface conditions than for surveying specific landing sites. ...
    (sci.space.history)
  • Re: Thinking about a new Apollo 8
    ... lunar-surface conditions than for surveying specific landing sites. ... only Apollo landing to go to a Ranger/Surveyor site was Apollo 12, ... crash-lander and Surveyor was to develop and test soft-landing technology. ...
    (sci.space.history)
Quantcast