[MID]

Waspie_Dwarf, on 04 November 2009 - 02:37 PM, said:

MID, I'm shocked at your lack of basic astronomy. What do you think the Milky Way is doing up there?

...Aw shoot.

I'm a complete fraud now...
I fergot about the Milky Way. Damn.

Leave it to a chemist to make me look like a dope (they always do (scary smart folks)...and them electrical engineers...God, they're too smart too!!!!)

[Waspie_Dwarf]

MID, on 05 November 2009 - 12:18 AM, said:

Leave it to a chemist

I'm an ex-chemist now (although maybe a once and future chemist). My job may change but I'll always be an amateur astronomer and a wannabe astronaut.

[MID]

Waspie_Dwarf, on 04 November 2009 - 07:48 PM, said:

I'm an ex-chemist now (although maybe a once and future chemist).

I think it's probably alot like being a pilot.
Once a pilot, ALWAYS a pilot.
You're still a formidable intellect!

Quote

My job may change but I'll always be an amateur astronomer and a wannabe astronaut.

Yea...me too!

[DONTEATUS]

Arent we all! LoL Its still good company!

[MID]

14 November 1969.





Two days and 40 years ago, the Giant Step tour finally came to an end, with the Apollo 11 astronauts and their families arriving back in Washington D.C. after a mind-numbing world tour that had taken them all over the planet in the past 6 weeks, and had placed them before over 150 million people.

For the three men of Apollo 11, and their families, another world had been created around them, and the triumphant events of a warm summer week four months ago had marked the beginning of a completely different path for each of their lives. Despite that fact, Apollo was still going at full steam ahead.

On this day, the Apollo 11 crew were back home in Houston, and at least one of them, Neil Armstrong, was in familiar surroundings again, in the Manned Spacecraft Center, at the MOCR, watching as his successor, Pete Conrad, and his Apollo 12 crew, prepared to launch on their mission to the Moon.

But it was no sunny, warm summer day at the Cape. In fact, all along the east coast, the weather was pretty crappy…a dismal autumn day, overcast and rainy. Down at the Cape…it was unstable. Rain fell, and then stopped, thunderstorms passed by, then the sky would break open and we’d see some sunlight.

Here, the press site down at the Cape was, at the time of this launch day photo, bathed in some of that spurious sunlight:




But you could see the way the sky generally looked in this view of President and Mrs. Nixon arriving to view the launch that morning:







There was technically GO weather at this time, but frankly, the possibility of a scrub for weather was looming in everyone’s mind. By the time the crew would arrive at 39A for ingress, rain would be falling, and during the countdown, sometimes pelting rain would fall on-and-off, actually leaking beneath the Boost Protective Cover and streaking the CM windows. There were continual discussions going on between the Launch Director at the Cape and Houston regarding opinions about the weather, and they’d go on throughout the countdown.

As the countdown progressed toward T-0, an Air Force weather plane finally tipped the scales when it reported acceptable ceilings, no wind constraints, and no lightning within 19 miles of the pad. Up until that point, it was hit or miss with the weather. At some point, you either had to have a GO or NO GO decision, and the Air Force data gave it a GO, and we proceeded toward the launch Apollo 12.

Nonetheless, the skies continued to be unpredictable…

But…otherwise, all launch vehicle systems were looking good, and the ritual of launch day was underway.


The classic steak and eggs breakfast, that ritual of launch day, which followed final pre-flight physicals, was well underway in the crew quarters dining room. Here you see Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon (reading the newspaper), and Al Bean’s face in the right side of the picture, and a special guest behind Pete, looking somewhat disinterested in the proceedings.




The gorilla was sent to Pete Conrad by a friend. He was “officially” known as “the fourth crewmember”, and as “Irving” by the crew, and for breakfast was seated with a flight smock and crash helmet on.

Irving was perfectly in character with the funny, oftimes irreverent all-Navy crew of Apollo 12.



This shot shows everyone at breakfast that morning:

In the back row was Tom Stafford (Apollo 10 CDR and present head of the Astronaut Office), Pete Conrad, Irving, Dick Gordon, and Chuck Tringali, Flight Crew Support Team Leader. Left to right with their backs facing the camera were Jim McDivitt (Apollo 9 CDR and present Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program), Al Bean, and astronaut Paul Weitz (who was the LMP Support Astronaut for Apollo 12).

The atmosphere was light, lots of laughter in the room, as in Mission Control in Houston and in Firing Room 2 at the Cape, lots of activity was in full swing as the second lunar landing mission prepared to launch:



It took lots of people at the Cape to launch one of these birds!

[MID]

Prep Continues.


After breakfast, the crew reported to the suit room, where as in all flights, suit technicians and support personnel assisted the crew into their suits, made sure their watches were wound and set to Houston time, verified that all of their gear was stowed properly, and checked the suits for pressure seal and complete operational functionality…






Yo ! Ya think we could get this show on the road?


And once again the parade out the door into the transfer van…





As they arrived at 39A, you can see the weather pattern that had been occurring on and off, and which would continue throughout the count.





Once again, Gunter Wendt and his team went through the detailed procedures of ingress up on the 320 foot level of the launch tower in the White Room:






The crew was sealed into the spacecraft and underway with the large checklist of pre-launch procedures by around 09:20 EST. As I’d mentioned before, weather was a potential scrub concern, and it was dynamic, and even the crew saw the evidence of the rain pelting their vehicle as it seeped beneath the Boost Protective Cover (BPC) and streaked their CM windows.

But a GO for launch was finally given as things wound down, due to reports from that Air Force weather aircraft I’d mentioned earlier, and at around 11:15, Launch Test Conductor Skip Chauvin called Apollo 12:

“Pete, you guys have a good trip.”

CONRAD: “Yes Sir! Sure appreciate everything.”
GORDON: “Hold off the weather for five more, will you?”


Well, they tried...

[DONTEATUS]

Not in any way to take any of our recent missions in lesser grattitude But The Apollo Program has to go down in Mankinds Histroy as the Crowning Glory of our Ability ot Explore to our extreem Limits! Just think people we Did something Impossible! And Quite well I may Add!You Rock Mid! Just speachless!

[MID]

DONTEATUS, on 12 November 2009 - 08:31 PM, said:

Not in any way to take any of our recent missions in lesser grattitude But The Apollo Program has to go down in Mankinds Histroy as the Crowning Glory of our Ability ot Explore to our extreem Limits! Just think people we Did something Impossible! And Quite well I may Add!You Rock Mid! Just speachless!

Thanks D...

We get off the ground tomorrow!

Prepare for the ride of a lifetime!

[MID]

11:22 EST, 14 November 1969

The count proceeded smoothly. We were ready to fly to the Moon…


Somehow, the litany of a launch has never been boring. That tightening up in the gut still happens, as it did that overcast November morning in 1969:

“10, 9, 8, we have ignition sequence start…6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0…all engines running, commit: liftoff!”[/font]


Inside the spacecraft, the crew talked to each other, their hearts pounding with excitement as the vehicle roared to life and shook, and the push of a strong elevator was suddenly felt on their backs:

(Only the bolded parts could actually be heard by Houston, and of course, the audience watching on their TVs. The rest was intercom inside the CM).

CONRAD: Liftoff, the clock’s running.
BEAN: 3 seconds.
CONRAD: I got a yaw program.

[font="Courier New"]PAO: Pete Conrad reports the yaw program is in!

BEAN: Six seconds,….there’s ten seconds.
GORDON: Cleared the tower.
CONRAD: Roger, clear the tower…I got a pitch and a roll program, and this baby is really going!
BEAN: Man, is it ever!
CAPCOM: Roger Pete.

GORDON: Twenty seconds.
CONRAD: That’s a lovely liftoff ! That’s not bad at all!



They’re all lovely…but this one didn’t last too long in the visual department:















By around twenty seconds, all you could see was a glow disappearing into the low overcast at KSC…

The litany on board continued:

GORDON: Everything’s looking great. The sky’s getting lighter.
CONRAD: Okay.
BEAN: Thirty seconds.
CONRAD: Looks good….Roll’s complete.
BEAN: This thing moves, doesn’t it?
CAPCOM: Roger, Pete.

36 seconds into the flight. Roll program completed, and Apollo 12 was now moving into it’s proper flight path to orbit.


___________________________________________________________________________________


What the hell was that?!


Out of the small opening in the BPC, Pete Conrad saw out of the corner of his eye a flash of light.
Concurrent with that was a long burst of static in his (and everyone else’s) ears, and they felt the whole spacecraft shudder, the lights went out on board, the cockpit went dark, then came back up, and things happened very rapidly as a series of panel caution and warning lights illuminated in a Las Vegas like display of yellows and reds.

CONRAD: What the hell was that?

The Master Alarm claxon started banging away in the CM…this was serious stuff.

CONRAD: Huh?
GORDON: I lost a whole bunch of stuff…I don’t know…
CONRAD: Turn off the busses.
CAPCOM: Mark, one bravo.

On the ground, the folks watching trajectory and Saturn data were reporting the nominal abort mode calls to the spacecraft through the CAPCOM. They weren’t seeing what the spacecraft people were seeing on their screens. Mode 1 B was a call indicating that LES use for an abort would not require firing of the pitch control motors, and that the canards on the rocket would deploy to turn the spacecraft around to a blunt-end-forward position to allow proper parachute deployment. The call was normally made at around 40-45 seconds into the flight when the vehicle had passed through about 10,000 feet and its attitude no longer required any pitch adjustment by the LES motors.

CONRAD: Roger. We had a whole bunch of busses drop out.
BEAN: There’s nothing, it’s…nothing…
GORDON: A circuit…

Confusion reigns and heart rates start spiking rapidly. Very suddenly, these guys, on their way into orbit see their cabin lights go off and on, warning lights are illuminating on their instrument panel telling them everything’s basically screwed, they can’t see a thing out their windows as they’re covered by the BPC, and another flash happens at 52 seconds and the attitude indicator in front of Pete Conrad started spinning around, no longer indicating attitude control…

CONRAD: Where are we going?
BEAN: AC BUS 1 light, all the fuel cells..
CONRAD: I just lost the platform.
GORDON: All we’ve got is the GDC.


The GDC was the Gyro Display Coupler, a device which gave the crew attitude information in relation to an attitude they wanted to maintain, rather than attitude data relative to a fixed inertial reference (the “platform”).

CONRAD: OK, we’ve just lost the platform gang. I don’t know what happened here. Everything in the world dropped out.
CAPCOM: Roger.
BEAN: I can’t…there’s nothing I can tell is wrong Pete.

It was mighty weird aboard that spacecraft. It looked to Conrad, Gordon and Bean as if their spacecraft had shut off. Yet, Al Bean was looking at the spacecraft drawing power still, although at a lower voltage. Nothing was making sense and there wasn’t anything he could definitively say based on what he was seeing.

CONRAD: I got three fuel cell lights, and AC bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, AC BUS OVERLOAD 1 and 2, main bus A and B out!


BEAN: I got AC.
CONRAD: We got AC?
BEAN: Yes.
CONRAD: Maybe it’s just the indicator. What do you got on the main bus?
BEAN: Main bus is—the volt indicated is 24 volts.
CONRAD: Huh?
BEAN: 24 volts, which is low.
CONRAD: We’ve got a short on it of some kind…but I can’t believe the volts..


We were now at 1:30 into Apollo 12. This problem had been going on for an interminable minute. Pete Conrad had just described the largest set of caution and warning lights ever seen …even in the worst simulation! Basically, what Pete was describing was a Command Module that appeared to have just shut off, as best he could determine. Fuel cells had shut down, the electrical system was giving indication of overload, and the guidance platform indication had just been lost, and the 8-ball in front of his face (his attitude indicator) was now just spinning around wildly.



In Mission Control, Gerry Griffin, on his first shift as a new Flight Director, began thinking about aborting the mission (not exactly what a first time FD wants to contemplate). He called his EECOM (the controller responsible for electrical systems), 24 year old John Aaron, and asked him what he was seeing.

There was no immediate response.

The problem was, Aaron wasn’t seeing anything on his screen. It was filled with a jumble of nonsensical numbers…and the rest of his panel was illuminated with warning lights. Anyone looking at spacecraft data was seeing the same nonsensical mumbo-jumbo. The funny thing was, the booster itself was still returning valid data that indicated that the launch vehicle was right on it’s predicted flight path and was performing well.

We had serious problems. The crew was aboard what appeared to be an essentially dead spacecraft which was being powered by re-entry batteries, and was flying along without any attitude reference being given to the crew…basically, flying blind.

But Aaron had seen this nonsense pattern before in a simulation long ago, and had noted it. He remembered what he discovered over a year earlier. His call to Griffin became legend in Mission Control”

“Flight, try S.C.E. to Aux.”


SCE was signal conditioning equipment…a small redundant power supply that would feed alternate power to critical instrumentation. But only John Aaron knew about it, and that it had worked before in a simulation with similar data return.

What followed was somewhat comical in retrospect…and went something like this:


FLIGHT: Say again? SCE to Aux?
…meaning, “What the hell is that?”

EECOM (slowly): S.C.E. to Auxiliary.
FLIGHT: Capcom, have them take SCE TO AUX.
CAPCOM: SCE to AUX?
FLIGHT: Have them take SCE to Auxiliary.

No one except Aaron knew what the heck this was, seriously. SCE was an obscure switch that few people were familiar with.

CAPCOM: Apollo 12, Houston, Try SCE to Auxiliary.

CONRAD: NCE to Auxiliary. What the hell is that?
CAPCOM: SCE, S-C-E to auxiliary.

Al Bean, as LMP, had trained for launch in the right seat. The instrumentation and controls on the right side of the instrument panel contained controls for the power management of the spacecraft—the fuel cells, electrical power, cryogenics, and communications. Al Bean intimately knew just about everything about those systems, and in simulations, he’d become adept at recognizing just about every possible malfunction one could see during ascent. He had no idea about this one (“I’d never seen so many lights in my life!”). But he knew where the SCE switch was, up over his head. Within the next 4 seconds, Al flipped it to Auxiliary.

CONRAD: Try the busses. Get the busses back on line.
BEAN: It looks….everything looks good.
CONRAD: SCE to AUX.
GORDON: The GDC is good.


And in mission control, the data suddenly came back on the screens, and Aaron and crew could see what was happening, and hopefully assess what was wrong.

EECOM: I’ve got valid data flight. It’s looking good.



The guidance data from the Instrument Unit aboard the Saturn was still coming in, and Apollo 12 was still flying right down the track of the predicted flight path. In Mission Control, the priority was getting the fuel cells re-started, if possible. There was little time to get them back on line, because the spacecraft was now running on the re-entry battery supply. We were at about 2 minutes into the flight at this point, and we had about two minutes to get those fuel cells on line or abort the mission.

We had a Saturn that was flying perfectly, a CM that was at least reporting data in critical areas now, but without power of its own. The back and forth between flight controllers and conversation inside a semi-disabled spacecraft continued…

CONRAD: Stand by for the …I’ve lost the event timer; I’ve lost the …
CAPCOM: One Charlie.
CONRAD: One…one Charlie.

1 C was another abort mode milestone, this one indicating that the CM RCS would have to be used to orient the spacecraft for proper parachute deployment, because the canards on the LES would no longer work in the thin air at their present altitude.

At 2 minutes six seconds CAPCOM called, “12 Houston, Go for staging.”

CONRAD: Roger, GO for staging. We had some real big glitch gang!
GORDON: What do the busses read, Al?
BEAN: Stand by.
CONRAD: Center engine.
GORDON: OK.

CAPCOM: 12, Houston, try to reset your fuel cells now.
BEAN: Reset the fuel cells.
GORDON: Wait for staging.
CONRAD: Wait for staging , yes.

You didn’t want to be flipping switches during the train wreck that was about to occur…

GORDON: Hang on.
CONRAD: Hang on.
GORDON: 25…27……32…
CONRAD: You got a clock running over here?
BEAN: Yes…hang on.
GORDON: There’s 41, Hang on…there it is.
BEAN: That’s it.
CONRAD: That’s it…that’s it.
BEAN: Staging.
GORDON: Hang on!
CONRAD: OK, CDG is good. Got a good S-II gang!
CAPCOM: We copy Pete…you’re looking good.

BEAN: Cabin pressure’s OK.
GORDON: We’re OK.
CONRAD: OK, now we’ll straighten out our problems here. I don’t know what happened. I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.


Pete was right. Back on the ground at the cape, the following was observed, an event concurrent with the appearance of the glitch at 36 seconds…




The Saturn, trailing a column of flame and ionized gasses, tore through the rain clouds and had become the largest lightning rod in the world. The bolt discharged right through the Saturn V and trailed all the way down to the launch tower, over a mile below.


We would have to re-think this all weather flying thing in the future!

[thefinalfrontier]

In such a short period of time and all the chaos that ensued that flight crew and missin control handled this just as it was normal procedure, Simply amazing how it all went from liftoff to righting it all,

Thanks MID that was interesting as well as intense,

Regards;

TFF

[MID]

3 minutes in…

Rapid fire re-setting started taking place aboard the spacecraft right after staging. By around 3:10 into the flight we heard:

CONRAD: OK, I have a good GDC, and Al has got the fuel cells back on, and we’ll be working our AC buses.

CAPCOM: Pete, your fuel cells look good down here.

CONRAD…I suggest we do a little more all-weather testing…

CAPCOM: Amen!

At 3:18, the LES tower jettisoned on time…


CONRAD: There goes the tower, gang. That’s away clean. It looked good.
CAPCOM: Go Pete, you’re Mode 2.
CONRAD: Roger, in mode 2…no sweat.

Yea...no sweat at all...

The very busy trio of Apollo 12 was still working through the problems, and just before 4 minutes, riding a good S-II stage, it looked like we had things back on line:

CONRAD: OK, we’ve got –an ISS light on, and we’ve got a cycling CO2 partial pressure high which I don’t…bother me particularly, and we have reset all the fuel cells, have all the busses back on line, and we’ll just…clear up the platform when we get into orbit.

CAPCOM: Pete…real good!

As things continued aboard, Pete came back with:

Hey! That’s one of the better sims, believe me! Man Alive, I’ll tell you what happened!

CAPCOM: We had a couple cardiac arrests down here too Pete!

CONRAD: There wasn’t any time for that up here! OK, we’ve got a good clock running here, and correct me, I’m gonna give you a mark at 4:30. I’ve lost my event timer, and …MARK, 4 plus 30.

CAPCOM: Good Pete.

Things were coming together. They still had no guidance platform, and the folks on the ground were doing some pretty intense thinking on how to get that back up, but Apollo 12 was back to life with power, and everything looking good. The warning lights were out, things were moving right along the timeline, and critical events of course would still be happening as they moved toward staging and eventual orbit insertion…


But the relief started filtering through the voices of the guys heading to the Moon…both on the intercom and on the loop to Mission Control, the comments were flying, and laughter started…


GORDON: God darn almighty wasn’t that something Babe!?
CONRAD: (Laughter)…

GORDON: Man…oh…man…
BEAN: Isn’t that a…
CONRAD: Wasn’t that a SIM they gave us!?
GORDON: Jesus!
CONRAD: (Laughter)
GORDON: There was no sense reading them because there was…I was…I was looking at this…Al was looking over there…
CONRAD: Everything looked great (laughter erupting in all three men), except we had all the lights on!

CAPCOM: 12, Houston, you’re right smack dab on the trajectory, your IU’s doing a beautiful job.
CONRAD: OK…we’re all chuckling up here over the lights; we all said there was so many on, we couldn’t read them!

It was actually comical…

BEAN: Son of a gun!
CONRAD: (Laughing again…)
GORDON: Oops, oops…center engine. Wake Up!

The S-II center engine had shut down on time.

CONRAD: (…laughing like a little kid)….it’s something…(laughing while talking).
BEAN: That’s known as the LMP’s nightmare (and he’s laughing…)…sure it is!


They more or less laughed their way into orbit…

But still, there was some concern about the platform…

7:55

GORDON: Well, I’m, I’m starting to worry about this platform gang.
CONRAD: Yes.

And on cue..

CAPCOM: Apollo 12, Houston, we can start getting that platform squared away. Go IMU, POWER, STANDBY, then back to ON. We’ll get her caged up.

GORDON: IMU, POWER.
CONRAD: POWER, OK.
GORDON: STANBY..PROCEED.
CONRAD: OK, we’ll wait until we get through staging here I think, Houston.

CAPCOM: OK. Soon as you can reach it, that’s the way to go.


They made it into orbit, with SIV-B cutoff occurring at 11:35…they pretty much laughed nervously the whole way up there…but they made it!

CONRAD: Well, I’ll tell you one thing. This is a first class ride, Houston.
CAPCOM: Kind of a rough start.
CONRAD: Yea…I always like to start out behind the eight-ball and get ahead…


Well…he did, and they got ahead.
After that launch, the atmosphere was a bit giddy. Pete Conrad was infectious. His crazy laughter was contagious. These guys had just faced what looked like an abort. But things happened too fast that day for the CDR of Apollo 12 to even give the abort handle a single thought.

It was a real concern there for a couple minutes that felt like a couple hours on the morning of 14 November 1969, but they’d fixed everything, and had made it to orbit.

Perhaps the most helpless feeling was in the firing room at the Cape, as everyone could only watch as Mission Control worked the problems…




But work them they did, and the reward was out the windows of the Apollo 12 spacecraft on orbit around the Earth:




Beautiful!

But now, it was time to check out their spacecraft, and considering what had just occurred, really, really check it out. In a couple hours time, they were scheduled to slide their way out on a trajectory to the Moon. There was some concern that they might not get a GO...

[MID]

thefinalfrontier, on 14 November 2009 - 02:46 PM, said:

In such a short period of time and all the chaos that ensued that flight crew and missin control handled this just as it was normal procedure, Simply amazing how it all went from liftoff to righting it all,

Thanks MID that was interesting as well as intense,

Regards;

TFF

Thanks TFF...aprreciate it!

Oh, that was a hellish couple minutes...especially on board that spacecraft. If it wasn't for John Aaron making that call to take SCE to AUX...that may well have been an abort. That allowed them to actually see what was going on with the spacecraft and thus effect fixes. If they had no data, they couldn't make any calls!

We've often heard HBs talk about how perfectly all of these Apollo missions went.

We saw that Apollo 11 certainly had its heart stoppers, and Apollo 12 continued the pattern right after liftoff! There was nothing easy about Apollo...

[DONTEATUS]

We get to relive History thanks to Mid and Nasa`s TV ch,I feel oh so Luckie!
WHat a Histroy we mankind can build! Lets not stop !
Thank you again Mid!
P.S I gotta get me a pair of those Speed-Britiches! It may help with the Blood flow to my Grey matter when reading some of the outrageous post about How we didnt Go to the Moon!

[MID]

Off To The Moon???

After initial Earth orbit insertion, a very thorough check of everything was performed...with additional tests due to the anomaly during launch.

The platform was realigned by Dick Gordon, and was re-done twice to check gyro drift. These were done quickly after insertion, and proved to be difficult due to lack of time for Gordon's eyes to dark adapt so as to be able to see the stars used in the alignment.

Also performed were computer self tests, an E-memory dump, and an thrust vector test on the SIV-B.

The LM was also being highly scrutinized via telemetry by the responsible group in Mission Control.

The timeline for the pre-TLI checkouts had built in time for these contingencies, so there was little strain involved in the additional workload. There wre some breaks in the activities on orbit, and Conrad and Gordon took those opportunities to guide their rookie LMP, Al Bean to the sights of space, pointing out to him when to look for sunrise and such things as that...

And still, as the time passed, the launch crisis was being discussed. From the onboard recorders came this exchange.

CONRAD: That'll give them something to write about tonight. I'll bet your wife, my wife, and Al's wife fainted dead away!
GORDON: I'll bet they did when you started calling out about 18 lights!
CONRAD: Every time I close my eyes, all I see are those lights!


Things were looking OK on the ground, both with the CSM and the LM. But there was a concern voiced in Mission Control, one which got Chris Craft involved.

What if the lightning strikes had damaged the pyrotechnic charges that were used to deploy the parachutes?
They could see the electrical system looked OK, but you couldn't tell if the charges themselves had been damaged. If they didn't work, the result was somewhat obvious.

Chris Kraft had a conference with NASA mangers at the Cape, and came to the decision that we would be go for TLI so long as everything else checked out nominally.

Thinking about this situation, it was really the only call.

We couldn't actually know if the pyros were damaged or not. So, what are we gonna do? Abort the mission because we don't know if the parachutes will deploy?

Here's the scenarios.

1. We abort and come back.

RESULTS:
A. The parachutes don't work, and three men are killed. No lunar mission. Nothing, just three dead men.
B. The parachutes work, and we dump 365 million dollars of going to the Moon vehicle in the ocean. The men are safe, they've done nothing. We have no lunar mission, and we look like a bunch of utter fools.

2. We go to the Moon.

RESULTS:

A. We come back from a lunar mission, the parachutes work, and we have a success.
B. We come back from a lunar mission, the parachutes don't work, and we have three dead men...

But--we also had a lunar mission, instruments returning data from the surface, the scientific descriptions by the crew, and a collection of samples and film magazines that we might be able to recover from the spacecraft intact...maybe not.

It was actually a non-issue. If all was well, we'd go.
This was never discussed with the crew, because there was no point in doing so. If it was, and they proposed to Pete Conrad aborting the mission because of a possible issue that couldn't be proven to exist and which nothing could be done about anyway, he'd have said: "Are you freaking kidding me?"

No...you're not going to mention anything like this to the crew.


And, everything did check out, and at 13:50 E that day, the following call came up to Apollo 12:

CAPCOM: Apollo 12, the good word is you're GO for TLI."

CONRAD: Whoop-de-doo! We're ready! We didn't expect anything else!

This was going to be fun.

[MID]

Headed for the Moon

At 14:15:13 EST on 14 November, Apollo 12's SIV-B stage ignited, and burned nominally. At shutdown, Conrad Gordon, and Bean were on their way to the Moon, traveling at a speed of about 6.7 statute miles per second (24,130 MPH).

The burn went perfectly, and at 14:40, Transposition and Docking maneuvers began, where the CSM is turned around and docked to the LM, stowed inside the top of the SIV-B stage.

This picture was taken during that time...You'll note that one of the SLA panels which housed the Apollo 12 LM is floating off against the backdrop of a beautiful Earth.



And here's the top of Intrepid, the docking target in view as Yankee Clipper had her in tow. Docking occurred at 14:49 EST.