![]() At that point, the crew would fire the lunar module's main engine - powered descent initiation, or PDI - to begin the 12-minute plunge to the targeted landing zone in the Sea of Tranquility.ĭuring that final pass behind the moon, with the lander out of contact with mission control for about a half hour, flight controllers took a final break. Making one more loop around the backside of the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin began the descent toward a target altitude of 50,000 feet above the lunar surface. The next day, Armstrong and Aldrin bid Collins farewell, entered the lunar lander Eagle and undocked during the crew's 13th lunar orbit. on Saturday, July 19, the astronauts braked into orbit around the moon. Two hours and 50 minutes later, after checking out the spacecraft's myriad systems, flight controllers at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center) in Houston cleared the crew to restart the third stage engine and head for the moon. Strapped into the Apollo command module Columbia atop their huge Saturn 5 rocket, mission commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin and command module pilot Mike Collins shot smoothly into Earth orbit. So I said OK, and off we went." Tensions high as Apollo 11 gets underwayĪpollo 11 finally got underway at 9:32 a.m. But there were a number - 1210, 1201, 1202, maybe one or two others - you had to make a choice. "Some of them, if they came up the computer was gonna stop. "There were not that many that we could do anything about," he said. He did not think it would ever be needed. Bales taped a copy to his flight console in the mission control center. "I didn't want somebody who could program it, I wanted somebody like Jack, who was one of the smartest guys I ever met, looking at what somebody else had done and tell you how it should work."Ī week later, Garman presented a list of codes and responses, written by hand on a single sheet of paper. "The MIT guys will probably tell you he couldn't program it, but who cares?" Bales said. I said Gene, I've got a gazillion things to do, I listed off two or three things, and he said I don't care what you say, get it done."īales called Garman and asked him to consult with the MIT engineers who developed the lunar module's software and come up with a "cheat sheet" defining what needed to be done in response to various alarm codes. "He said, I want you to go and add these (computer alarms) to your rules. "After the sim, we all unplugged, Gene said come up to console," Bales said in a recent interview with CBS News from his home near Philadelphia. Continuing with the descent was a much safer option than a low-altitude abort.īales, now 76 and long retired from NASA, recalls the simulation like it was yesterday. In fact, the lunar module was operating smoothly and only lower-priority items were failing to execute from time to time, triggering the alarms. Richard Koos, the simulation supervisor who added the computer alarms to the final test run, said the alarms in question were not mission critical. NASA almost didn't film the first moon landing 08:08īut as it turned out, the aborted landing was a godsend. ![]() ABORT!"Īstronaut Charlie Duke, the capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, responsible for relaying comments and instructions to the crew, turned to Kranz and asked, "We going to call an abort, Flight?" Kranz sharply replied, "Abort, CAPCOM, abort." Duke relayed the instructions and the crew executed an abort, carrying out the steps needed to jettison the descent stage and return to orbit. "Flight, Guidance," he called over his headset to Kranz. After still more alarms, Bales, seated on the right end of a string of consoles known as "The Trench," reached a decision. But something was clearly wrong, and there were no flight rules defining a procedure to correct the problem. Meanwhile, the lunar module was continuing its imaginary descent, and its systems seemed to be operating normally. ![]() The computer is busier than hell for some reason, it has run out of time to get all the work done." "Jack, what the hell is going on with those program alarms? Do you see anything wrong?" Kranz recalls Bales asking.
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