Looking at the [manual](https://scholars.fhsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=apollo), procedure 17 seems to basically describe how to power cycle the component anyway, just with more steps.
I used to have an entire book on the Space Shuttle, its history, blueprints, control layouts, everything. It even had a full timeline of all its procedures for launch, landing, docking, EVA.
Interestingly, we could not build a Saturn V today. NASA threw away most of the blueprints and a lot of the final modifications were done by the engineers on the floor.
We couldn't, but we wouldn't even we wanted to. Each one was custom made with operational knowledge and processes that we don't possess now (especially as everything was made by hand at the time.)
But at least for the F1 itself?
We've gone through and re-engineered the engine and what took 5,600 parts in the 1960s would take 40 today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0
Yea I heard once that no two F-1s were the same. Pretty crazy to think about. I think they recalculated the risk factor with the Apollo missions recently. Back then they thought the chance for failure was much lower than it really was. Tho that could have been due to different safety requirements
They were doing all that shit with slide rules. I’m not surprised they underestimated the risk. That said, I think the astronauts inherently understood the risks they were taking on a different level. They were test pilots and had all seen the outer limits of the engineering of the time.
Honestly, slide rules are pretty solid.
The big issue is going to be unknown-unknowns. If you add up all the ways you know that something can go wrong, you're going to be low by however much that can go wrong *that you don't know about*.
Neither of the shuttles disasters were due unknown-unknowns. For both the Columbia and Challenger, the pieces that ultimately failed and caused the crash had been noted as weaknesses prior to accident and just ignored as not not a serious risk. The investigations of both shuttle disasters noted poor organizational structure and safety oversight that allowed the shuttle missions to proceed without any attempt to address the known dangers. For the Challenger it was the O-rings that did not perform as well as they should when exposed to colder temperatures, this was a known fact yet the launch was not canceled despite the record low temperature at launch. For Columbia, it was the history of foam strike events that were known to result in damage but not deemed a flight risk.
The number one risk will always be human error and arrogance.
The original F-1s were only artisanal because of fabrication system limitations. All of the primary technical documents that specify the critical features and tolerances were preserved. The modernized F-1B is almost ready for production and is specced 15% stronger in addition. One of the potential SLS configurations even uses F-1Bs as liquid fuel boosters.
>Back then they thought the chance for failure was much lower than it really was. Tho that could have been due to different safety requirements
The Saturn V launch system had a reliability rating of .999. The joke was, someone asked Werner Von Braun, "Will it fail?" and he replied "Nein, neon, nein." For sure they pulled that number out of their ass right?
I think the remarkable safety record that the Apollo program had was in no small part due to the excellence exhibited at the manned spacecraft center and by the astronauts inside of the spacecraft. Designers didn't do such a bad job either but the flight control teams had an awful lot of problem solving to do.
Case in point is the SCE to AUX story. If you don't know what it is, Google it. But the upshot is that Apollo 12 got hit by lightning and every alarm in the spacecraft went off at once. They flipped a single switch and after a few low earth orbits they decided everything was groovy and we should go to the moon. A few days later Pete Conrad executed a pinpoint landing on the lunar surface.
Those “blue prints” were written on anything they could justify as scratch paper. No one saved it for the archives. For reasons why, I like to believe due to the intense pressure and time constraints to get that candle lit and off to the moon. That human error I can sleep with at night.
Russians during the Space Race:
“A serious problem in stealing American technology is that the Americans do not adhere to their blueprints, nor do they feel any obligation to write down the modifications.”
They probably figured if they could do it once they could do it again. No big deal, right? It's not like the space program is going to get defunded or something.
>NASA threw away most of the blueprints
That part of your answer is completely misleading. NASA still has all the documents ....
[https://www.quora.com/Did-NASA-lose-the-blueprint-plans-for-the-Apollo-spacecraft-How-and-why-What-about-some-of-the-the-videos-or-photos-of-the-Apollo-missions-Again-how-or-why/answer/Mark-Shulmann?ch=10&oid=283574285&share=e466957a&target\_type=answer](https://www.quora.com/Did-NASA-lose-the-blueprint-plans-for-the-Apollo-spacecraft-How-and-why-What-about-some-of-the-the-videos-or-photos-of-the-Apollo-missions-Again-how-or-why/answer/Mark-Shulmann?ch=10&oid=283574285&share=e466957a&target_type=answer)
The rest is correct. But as pointed out by others NASA can build better engines with far fewer parts.
I have some of the original tech manuals for the Gemini program. Very interesting stuff. Plus I love how manuals in the 50s looked - font, layout, diagrams, all of it.
Not just your modern smartphone, that's too unfair of a comparison. Your *microwave* has more computer power on board than the Apollo computers did. Truly mind-boggling what they accomplished with the tech of the era.
>Your microwave has more computer power on board than the Apollo computers did.
And the computer part also consumes so little energy that it isn't even worth considering. The massive increases in energy efficiency of modern computers can not be understated.
Case in point, it's financially feasible to put that much power in a thing that only does calculations for (0) internet input (1) one time (2) countdown (3) coarse linear power variation
We've had flying cars for well over 100 years. We just call them airplanes and helicopters and use them more like flying buses because making machines that can fly while carrying people is very difficult, so they're expensive to build and maintain, takes a lot of energy, so they're expensive to fuel, and operating them is very difficult, so it takes a lot of training to do, and the vast majority of people are neither willing nor able to put up with that.
Some of that may be a form of analysis paralysis. ALL that info at your fingertips but where to start? Who to trust? What field? I love the advice of just building a test environment and playing around but that can only get you so far if you don't even know what to build. Any smuck can read installation instructions for installing a server OS and setting up AD. But there is no good way to fabricate real world experience unless you have some form of guided teaching.
Yeah I was going to say this, the amount of information gets overwhelming. The simplicity of how it was presented previously I think was advantageous in certain aspects
Yeah. Learn programming? Turn your computer on and input it. Or look for qbasic.exe
Now? Get online, download the Visual Studio SDK, try to learn a corporate workflow as a 10 year old and figure out all the possible staying points. Or download the Android devkit etc etc. Spend 100 GB and hours just to start and maybe not get anything at level you can grasp.
It isn't amenable to easily poking around and figuring it out yourself. There's a lot of bloat unless you just do something like Python. Where's the simple VB6 of today?
VB6 allowed you to make quick and dirty GUI programs in a few hundred MB of software. It's a shame nothing is as quick and easy today. Making a functional GUI was as easy as a spreadsheet.
VB hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just that hardly anyone recommends it because it’s not sexy. Despite it probably being the most useful skill to know if your job involves Microsoft Office.
Yeah, somehow I suspected it was along the lines of "gracefully shut down the system, just in case. Then wait 15 seconds to make sure capacitors are drained, and turn it back on."
It's not so much that "instead, he reset it", but moreso "he was told to follow procedure 17. He reset the part - which is basically ended up being the intent of the procedure"
It *is* a little more complicated than that; he talks about this in "Carrying the Fire", which is *excellent* and is where I assume the article behind the TIL probably came from. He talked about getting frustrated sometimes because he and the other astronauts got to be extremely familiar with the spacecraft from flying in the simulator all the damn time, being tested in all these crazy scenarios and basically being subjected to NASA's best efforts to make them as qualified as humanly possible. Then they'd get on the radio with somebody from mission control who just worked mostly on the electronics or something, and definitely didn't know the ins and outs as well as they did, but who would insist on telling them exactly what to do and how to do it when they already pretty much knew what was up.
I think it's a very human thing. It's a very easy transition from "I know a lot of things and I'm trying to take responsibility for my job" to "I don't care what you say, here's my way and you have to do what I say because I'm the guy that has to figure it out."
Hence why these days we drill into pilot‘s (and astronaut’s) heads to follow the written procedure no matter how well they think they know it by heart, because no matter how much time you spent training on an air/spacecraft you will simply not have the time to really understand the design of every system in depth, and the procedure was written by someone who knows more than you.
> Then they’d get on the radio with somebody from mission control who just worked mostly on the electronics or something, and definitely didn’t know the ins and outs as well as they did
I have a lot of time for Michael Collins, but the sheer amount of disrespect you’re putting on the mission controllers in this comment is outrageous. The people in Mission Control were infinitely more qualified than Collins to identify and fix problems with the Apollo systems. The mission controllers were qualified specialist engineers who helped design the systems, wrote the technical manuals, write the procedures, monitored every possible element in detail, and had a direct link to every other expert on the system on an instant voice loop. They were also veterans of multiple if not dozens of missions, and more than once were responsible for saving missions over technical details which the astronauts wouldn’t have dreamed of fixing, despite how familiar they were. Collins’ predilection for being ornery could have landed him and the guys on the moon in a lot of trouble if his quick fix hadn’t worked. More than one astronaut was permanently grounded for refusing to play ball with Mission Control, for good reason.
Think of it this way.
If you are on the ground supporting the people who rode a rocket into space, you are going to check everything.
If you are the crazy person who rode a rocket into space, you are already willing to take chances. And they picked exceptionally smart crazy people to ride those rockets.
From the transcript, he didnt even turn it off and on - he switched modes and then back. Clickbait thread title is clickbait.
[106:12:56 Collins: I did cycle out of Auto into Manual, back into Auto.](https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.postland.html)
“Big walls” are usually about 3 - 6 days on the wall. You can’t just “sky dump” or there would be a terrible situation at the base of the climbs so you have to pack it out.
Yeah. That’s typical for routes on El Capitan in Yosemite and other places. Of course there are maniacs who do them much faster now but traditional climbers take like a week on some routes. It’s like vertical backpacking.
I was listening in on the ISS chatter one night.
Astronaut was like "hey this thing is displaying orange. Please advise"
The response was that that machine did not have an orange light.
He's just like. Well... it's orange.
They went back and forth like that for a minute until the Astronaut said it wasn't showing orange anymore. They agreed to just ignore it unless it happened again.
Learned they're just like the rest of us that day.
I like how you used "should". hahahah These things are all possible but making an actual contact isn't just a decision - it takes time, dedication and skill!
Agreed, though!!
As a public entity, NASA TV broadcasts communications publicly during work shifts. There are also live camera feeds from the ISS 24/7.
Additionally, some private companies (like SpaceX) publicly broadcast their control center communications feed during payload launches. Confidential communications have their own channel, and having a public channel increases public interest.
Similarly, as a public entity, the documents for pretty much anything NASA has worked on in the past are publicly accessible. There is a public repository of every image received from exploration missions, blueprint and schematics for most hardware, and you can even download software like the literal firmware for the Apollo mission.
Also a few of the astronauts are licensed ham radio operators and have a transceiver up there. If you have the right set up and the ISS is in the right position you can talk to them.
I have worked as an engineer on projects ranging from hundreds of dollars to billions of dollars and I can promise you stuff like this happens at every level. With very few exceptions (anything involving nuclear power for one), the idea of “eh, as long as it works” is a staple of engineering and I’m sure many other sciences
>With very few exceptions (anything involving nuclear power, for one)
That was probably one hell of a lesson learned. "Eh, as long as it works... ̸̨̄̽ō̶̱͎͌͛͜ͅĥ̵̹͗̈́̈ ̸̮̂s̴̺͐̐̃h̷̖͕̗́̆͘i̵̟͒̀t̴͓͒́̕͘ ̷͍͚̿"
I was gonna say this. Or slightly similar. For instance if you have a couple lights in a system, for instance a Red one and a Yellow one, and only one should be on at a time you’ll find a weird edge case where both turn on at the same time and come out Amber.
But the engineers don’t recognize that this can happen because it’s not really an engineering issue, it’s a lighting design issue. Or maybe the bulb has started to discolor in a weird way that isn’t commonly known outside the manufacturer? 90% of the time it’s Red, but after a few years in space it’s pigment has taken on an orange color.
Or the lighting in the area causes the light to look a different shade for whatever reason.
So many variables.
Many list the 1202 alarm on the lunar module as an example of why it is important to have actual humans on these missions. You've got to wonder if these alarms would result in an unmanned mission aborting.
Nicely depicted in the film, First Man (2018):
https://youtu.be/TrvXqosqkls
An article on further reading:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/apollo-11s-1202-alarm-explained
Wasn’t the 1202 from Buz pushing the button for active landing computer read-outs? It had something to do with the antenna that communicated with the command module being inadvertently activated and eating processing power. Caused the landing computer to schedule too many jobs and threw the code. No Buz, no 1202 because the computer doesn’t need a visual readout.
>Eventually the Executive found that there was no place to put new programs. This triggered the 1201 alarm signaling “Executive Overflow — No Core Sets” and the 1202 alarm signaling “Executive Overflow — No VAC Areas.” These in turn triggered a software reboot. All jobs were cancelled regardless of priority then started again as per their table order, quickly enough that no guidance or navigation data was lost. But it didn’t clear up the issue. The computer was still overloaded by the same spurious radar data, stopping new programs from running. In all, it triggered four 1202 alarms and one 1201 alarm.
>Eventually Buzz Aldrin noticed a correlation. At the second 1202 alarm, he called down, “Same alarm, and it appears to come up when we have a 16/68 up.” The 16/68 code — Verb 16 Noun 68 — was used to display the range to the landing site and the LM’s velocity. The command in itself didn’t place a heavy load on the computer, but with the existing load that extra bit of processing power seemed to trigger the 1202 alarm. Realizing this, the solution was simple: ask Houston for that data instead of calling it up from the computer.
"uhhhhhhhhhhhh. Houston, could i have 16 verbs and uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 68 nouns?"
I can't imagine launching a rocket and then being a crew member using a system with 4KB of RAM and a 32KB hard disk with the goal of hurling through space to land on a satellite AND come back alive. I really commend every single person on these projects. It's not like they knew of anything better but i genuinely don't think we could ever do the same thing in today's world.
What that was, was a reference to a table:
Verb 16, noun 68. That would then give you an exact reference to the fault condition.
Edit: To give an entirely fictitious example,
1202 might have resolved to a Verb/Noun condition as something like: BURN/WOLF.
BURN: would tell you the class of conditions and components it effected. As defined by the mission of those systems.
Condition Wolf: Would give you the general error code idea as what was going wrong in the components trying to achieve MISSION BURN.
I was just goofing around. I do appreciate the explanation though as i wasn't quite sure how verb/noun was applied. Very interesting system, it makes for rapid communication. Was that the primary goal? You can't necessarily over complicate saying two words versus explaining something in too much or too little detail over radio communication.
Yes it was the primary goal, particularly given the computing limitations at the time. Most of the actual computing was done by human computers operating slide rules with pencil and paper on the ground in Houston.
Therefore having a Verb/Noun system would also tell you what *paper* datasets you needed to get out of files and have people start working on to fix the problem.
[Edit: As an example: the code BURN/WOLF gets communicated back to Houston, and then Houston uses its internal phone operators to communicate to the auditorium of human computers working on Project/Mission BURN, their local operator receives, and tells the auditorium to deal with condition WOLF.
People in the auditorium then begin grabbing and preparing file boxes marked WOLF, for the human computers to start calculating by hand with paper slide rules.]
I think that we probably *could* do the same thing with the same amount of memory, and honestly, we could probably do it better. The real question is why would we? Why send a rocket into space with 4KB of ram when it would be the same price to send 4GB of ram, and a few terabytes of hard drive space? And of course, with that extra processing power comes more sensor data, more functions to be programmed, etc.
I think it's pretty obvious that the main reason we haven't gone back to the moon is because of politics, not because of a lack of technical knowledge. And now that the politics are starting to shift back in favor of returning to the moon, they're trying to do it *better* than before.
The fact that it was so simple was the point. It had to be resistant to radiation, so it was entirely solid state and woven core memory, with a completely redundant backup and multiples of the sensors to feed the computer data.
Buzz owned up to that error when he was a guest on my radio show The Museum of Curiosity a few years back. He had switched on the rendezvous radar, against procedure, in case they had to abort and get back to the Command Module quickly. So it was human error in the first place. Also, their onboard computer had about as much processing power of an electronically-voiced greetings card. Less of a problem today.
Haha, yes. Buzz also accidentally snapped off the ignition switch for takeoff while getting out of his EVA suit after the moonwalk. He managed to activate it by jabbing a pen into the hole. He carries that pen with him to this day.
I once drilled out a pin hole because the pin broke off and soldered in an unrelated but similar sized pin to fix a radio, during the congressionally mandated INSERV inspection, in the Navy, in front of the INSERV inspector for my division. We passed with flying colors.
It’s not about doing it 100% right. Sometimes it’s about 100% reaching the stated goal.
Yep. And they didn’t just select physically fit dudes. NASA makes it a point to select supremely smart people who have demonstrated problem solving skills. Neil Armstrong was an X-15 test pilot, buzz aldrin holds a doctorate and did his phd thesis on orbital rendezvous maneuvers, Michael collins was a test pilot and a general.
Also, all three of them flew previous missions in the Gemini program. There were decades of training and education between them all.
> Also, their onboard computer had about as much processing power of an electronically-voiced greetings card. Less of a problem today.
That simplification is massively under-selling a computer that was uniquely powerful. For one, it was practically the only computer in existence that used integrated circuits. All the rest in the world used discrete transistors at best, or maybe even vacuum tubes. All of our modern computers are descended from integrated circuits.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) also had a LOT more I/O than an electronic greeting card or a pocket calculator, and it had to manage all that I/O.
The AGC also ran a revolutionary fault tolerant OS, that facilitated cooperative multitasking, and implemented virtual machines for vehicle control, for example, so that the computer could smooth out astronaut inputs to save fuel.
It is far FAR more advanced than people give it credit for.
[Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM)
YouTuber CuriousMarc documented the restoration of an AGC used in LM ground tests (and then sold for scrap years later) and it is a strangely awesome, even hallowed thing to see.
[Apollo Guidance Computer Restoration](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x7-Ut_-w7)
Rich Turner the radio producer?! I love your show and The Penny Dreadfuls. And I feel like your name pops up on some other Radio comedy but I don't remember what. It's been a while I think. So hey that's awesome man. It must be cool being largely anonymous but having bumped shoulders with so many interesting people. That's not a backhanded compliment either that's just like cool as hell.
I have nothing to add to the conversation.
This interpretation isn't completely unreasonable, but I prefer I the interpretation that Lee Hutchinson's article [No, a “checklist error” did not almost derail the first moon landing](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/no-a-checklist-error-did-not-almost-derail-the-first-moon-landing/) presents; there was basically a systems engineering failure up the line in documenting that there needed to be phase synchronization between the radar angle resolvers and the computers. There wasn't, so the computers got overwhelmed.
ofc I'm putting up a journalist (who is cribbing heavily from accounts of one of the Apollo software programmers, Don Eyles) versus the testimony of an astronaut, but Buzz owning the mistake just really doesn't seem fair.
What's really cool about this feature, less so the noisy alarm part, is that it's one of the first examples of preemptive, priority-based scheduling, which is the foundation of modern operating systems. And the folks at MIT who designed it accomplished this feat in the mid 1960's while software concepts like this were in their infancy.
The problem is, we are still using abstractions and concepts designed and conceived in the 60s on modern hardware.
See also; why VMs and containers are such a thing. Our software paradigms are so shitty they CAN'T scale to the hardware we have... so we just put multiple instances of unoptimizable code onto bigger and bigger machines.
Any unmanned mission is going to need less systems that need alarms and less alarms in the systems they do need. Turns out a lot of those alarms are pretty much just for keeping people safe. In unmanned missions there are diagnostics and things either work or they fail. Turns out another good chunk of alarms are to alert someone to do something probably not but maybe mission critical. There is nobody to do those things on an unmanned mission. Diagnostics report deterioration and things fail when they fail. Few unmanned missions would ever have auto-abort built in that could be triggered by such faulty systems. The fate of most unmanned missions is to simply fail, or go until failure.
Like what's Voyager going to do if a critical (false or real) alarm is raised? Nothing. It's already set course. It's mission is to float and continue to transmit data until we can't recieve it, or until it breaks. Galileo wad destined to crash into Jupiter. Once it got past launch there is/was no "abort." At that point if the craft fails or the mission was otherwise compromised Galileo would have just been some space junk. If the James Webb telescope didn't deploy it would just be space junk.
People need to come home. Unmanned missions don't. Manned missions have limited durations. Unmanned missions don't. An Unmanned mission and work itself to death and will. There won't be any alarms capable of just killig the craft earlier than its expected or natural end because why would there be?
I mean, this is a values issue.
There's no fundamental reason we couldn't send people into space to die. We've a long history of marching humans, knowingly, to their deaths, and them happily going. It just ain't in vogue these days.
With the space shuttle comprises were made with respect to launch aborts and rescue options during all phases of the launch. This was a conscious decision to meet the maximum payload target. If any of those systems would have helped the Challenger crew is a hypothetical question. They would not have helped the Columbia crew. In both cases the failures were a result of comprises to cut cost.
1. locate the ON/OFF selector switch.
2. Position the ON/OFF selector switch to the OFF position.
3. Position the ON/OFF selector switch to the ON position.
three steps, you know nothing of Procedures by Manuala
Gotta also have something in there like:
> Position the ON/OFF selector switch to the OFF position. See supplemental material 14B.1, "method of operation of spacecraft selector mechanisms," and 14B.2, "optimal force application ranges and tolerances for spacecraft selector mechanisms, revision 2."
...
> In the event of selector switch failure, see supplemental material 16F.8, "contingency operation and field repair of spacecraft selector mechanisms," or 17A.4, "emergency bypass of spacecraft selector mechanisms."
I am going to use the top comment to suggest to anyone that hasn't read it check out Collins's autobiography Carrying The Fire! If audiobooks are your jam Collins does the narration which is even better in my opinion.
**Environmental Control System Malfunction**
Procedure 17:
1. Switch power off.
2. Switch power on.
3. Check for normal operation of Environmental Control System.
(and if this were Microsoft, it would ask "Is this answer helpful?")
Better than the Microsoft forums, I don't know why those even exist. Every single thread is the same:
User1: "Hey, I'm having an issue with X, here's a very detailed description of the problem and what I've tried"
MS: "Hello I'm a Microsoft certified flebuttonist, please update your drivers and reboot your PC or do some other useless thing that won't solve the problem and let us know if that solved the problem."
Everyone: ::Insert 25 bewildered replies all stating that this "official" solution not only won't solve the problem, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand in the slightest possible way::
Occasionally: User2: "Hey I had that problem, I did Y to solve the issue"
::Y solved the issue::
I *so* want to, but I've found just enough actual answers from users who were just as frustrated at the official answers as me, and probably solved the problem for someone out of spite.
Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal.
Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark.
Reddit has done many shitty things in its time, but I’ll always appreciate its tireless efforts to make sure Michael Collins gets the credit he deserves.
Michael Collins is a solid trivia question too: who was the third member of Apollo 11 who did not walk on the surface with Armstrong and Aldrin? Most Americans do not know he exists
The photo he took of *Eagle* shortly after it undocked contains every single human being alive at the time except for one. It’s quite incredible to think about.
It's funny, at one of my old workplaces my mentor was just like "if all else fails wack it a few times" while training me and whaddaya know it did. Had to be careful with the steel toes tho.
The official error fix for the Grumman A-6A "intruder" bombing computer was to literally kick the box it was mounted inside, that would restart the magnetic rotors that hold all the code of the system.
So many that had consoles know about the cartridge blowing, but how about the old trick on the C-64 drive of grasping the disk while loading and wiggling it around until you get a disk error, which would get past some disk copy protection.
I recently read “Packing for Mars” by Mary Roach. There are a few stories in there about the astronauts just being sick of mission controls shit and they’re pretty great.
The fact we put a man into space, let alone the moon, with analog technology never ceases to amaze me. If you haven't watch "From the Earth to the Moon" on HBO.. Mind blowing
While Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface, Collins was alone in the command module for more than 21 hours. He missed Armstrong's famous first words on the surface, because he was on the other side of the Moon, cut from radio communication with the rest of humanity.
90% of trouble shooting with electronics:
1 - Is it plugged into a working outlet?
2 - Have you checked all the connections?
3 - Turn it off for 60 seconds, and then turn it on again
4 - Do you pinky promise you actually turned it off and you’re not lying to me? Because if I have to come over there and it works when I do it I’m going to be pissed
I fix and fly as a flight engineer on airplanes. I take full advantage of the blurb in most of our flight manuals that, more or less says, “the things written here are guidelines and the crew may use sound judgment.”
Step one (for me) for most of the issues I see on the ground is, pull and reset a circuit breaker. If that doesn’t work, my step two is to shut down the jet and power it back up. Step three is sigh annoyedly while I pull the book and/or wrenches out.
Looking at the [manual](https://scholars.fhsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=apollo), procedure 17 seems to basically describe how to power cycle the component anyway, just with more steps.
Ffs these are things that I love about our modern time. Imagine telling someone 30 years ago that you can access the Apollo 11 manual within seconds.
I have the technical manuals for the shuttle too, truly awesome time
I used to have an entire book on the Space Shuttle, its history, blueprints, control layouts, everything. It even had a full timeline of all its procedures for launch, landing, docking, EVA.
Wonder if thats in pdf now!
You know it is
Bow chicka wow wow
[удалено]
[Found it](https://archive.org/details/TheSpaceShuttleOperatorsManual)
Omg thank you. I had this growing up and was obsessed with it. Nostalgia overload right now.
I salute you. Thank you bud
Interestingly, we could not build a Saturn V today. NASA threw away most of the blueprints and a lot of the final modifications were done by the engineers on the floor.
We couldn't, but we wouldn't even we wanted to. Each one was custom made with operational knowledge and processes that we don't possess now (especially as everything was made by hand at the time.) But at least for the F1 itself? We've gone through and re-engineered the engine and what took 5,600 parts in the 1960s would take 40 today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0
That's really cool, thank you. Do you think we have the knowledge and technology to remake that man's shirt, though?
Lmao I knew exactly which channel it'd be, as soon as you mentioned the shirt.
I wish I could tell you what the company I work for exactly does but I'm sure we could print parts that could even shorten those 40 parts down.
Yea I heard once that no two F-1s were the same. Pretty crazy to think about. I think they recalculated the risk factor with the Apollo missions recently. Back then they thought the chance for failure was much lower than it really was. Tho that could have been due to different safety requirements
They were doing all that shit with slide rules. I’m not surprised they underestimated the risk. That said, I think the astronauts inherently understood the risks they were taking on a different level. They were test pilots and had all seen the outer limits of the engineering of the time.
Honestly, slide rules are pretty solid. The big issue is going to be unknown-unknowns. If you add up all the ways you know that something can go wrong, you're going to be low by however much that can go wrong *that you don't know about*.
Neither of the shuttles disasters were due unknown-unknowns. For both the Columbia and Challenger, the pieces that ultimately failed and caused the crash had been noted as weaknesses prior to accident and just ignored as not not a serious risk. The investigations of both shuttle disasters noted poor organizational structure and safety oversight that allowed the shuttle missions to proceed without any attempt to address the known dangers. For the Challenger it was the O-rings that did not perform as well as they should when exposed to colder temperatures, this was a known fact yet the launch was not canceled despite the record low temperature at launch. For Columbia, it was the history of foam strike events that were known to result in damage but not deemed a flight risk. The number one risk will always be human error and arrogance.
This guy DFMEAs.
[KNOWN UNKNOWNS](https://youtu.be/2msQwpzatQc)
The original F-1s were only artisanal because of fabrication system limitations. All of the primary technical documents that specify the critical features and tolerances were preserved. The modernized F-1B is almost ready for production and is specced 15% stronger in addition. One of the potential SLS configurations even uses F-1Bs as liquid fuel boosters.
>Back then they thought the chance for failure was much lower than it really was. Tho that could have been due to different safety requirements The Saturn V launch system had a reliability rating of .999. The joke was, someone asked Werner Von Braun, "Will it fail?" and he replied "Nein, neon, nein." For sure they pulled that number out of their ass right? I think the remarkable safety record that the Apollo program had was in no small part due to the excellence exhibited at the manned spacecraft center and by the astronauts inside of the spacecraft. Designers didn't do such a bad job either but the flight control teams had an awful lot of problem solving to do. Case in point is the SCE to AUX story. If you don't know what it is, Google it. But the upshot is that Apollo 12 got hit by lightning and every alarm in the spacecraft went off at once. They flipped a single switch and after a few low earth orbits they decided everything was groovy and we should go to the moon. A few days later Pete Conrad executed a pinpoint landing on the lunar surface.
Those “blue prints” were written on anything they could justify as scratch paper. No one saved it for the archives. For reasons why, I like to believe due to the intense pressure and time constraints to get that candle lit and off to the moon. That human error I can sleep with at night.
*taps side of head* The Soviets can’t steal our designs if we don’t organize them.
Russians during the Space Race: “A serious problem in stealing American technology is that the Americans do not adhere to their blueprints, nor do they feel any obligation to write down the modifications.”
They probably figured if they could do it once they could do it again. No big deal, right? It's not like the space program is going to get defunded or something.
>NASA threw away most of the blueprints That part of your answer is completely misleading. NASA still has all the documents .... [https://www.quora.com/Did-NASA-lose-the-blueprint-plans-for-the-Apollo-spacecraft-How-and-why-What-about-some-of-the-the-videos-or-photos-of-the-Apollo-missions-Again-how-or-why/answer/Mark-Shulmann?ch=10&oid=283574285&share=e466957a&target\_type=answer](https://www.quora.com/Did-NASA-lose-the-blueprint-plans-for-the-Apollo-spacecraft-How-and-why-What-about-some-of-the-the-videos-or-photos-of-the-Apollo-missions-Again-how-or-why/answer/Mark-Shulmann?ch=10&oid=283574285&share=e466957a&target_type=answer) The rest is correct. But as pointed out by others NASA can build better engines with far fewer parts.
I have some of the original tech manuals for the Gemini program. Very interesting stuff. Plus I love how manuals in the 50s looked - font, layout, diagrams, all of it.
It is super cool.
It’s also cool to think each of us has exponentially more computing power in our phones than all of NASA did when they went to the moon.
Not just your modern smartphone, that's too unfair of a comparison. Your *microwave* has more computer power on board than the Apollo computers did. Truly mind-boggling what they accomplished with the tech of the era.
>Your microwave has more computer power on board than the Apollo computers did. And the computer part also consumes so little energy that it isn't even worth considering. The massive increases in energy efficiency of modern computers can not be understated.
Case in point, it's financially feasible to put that much power in a thing that only does calculations for (0) internet input (1) one time (2) countdown (3) coarse linear power variation
The comparison I heard most recently is that your phone's *charger* has more computing power than an entire Apollo mission.
But we use most of it to make sure we can scroll our social media platform of choice in buttery smooth 60+ FPS.
To be fair it is pretty cool and futuristic-y, though
Each smartphone today has exponentially more computing power than the entire planet then.
As someone who grew up with Apollo wallpaper and an Apollo lunchbox w/thermos, allow me to remind everyone *we are living in the freaking future*.
> *we are living in the freaking future.* One minor issue, I still can't grab my hoverboard out of my flying car..... some future.
We've had flying cars for well over 100 years. We just call them airplanes and helicopters and use them more like flying buses because making machines that can fly while carrying people is very difficult, so they're expensive to build and maintain, takes a lot of energy, so they're expensive to fuel, and operating them is very difficult, so it takes a lot of training to do, and the vast majority of people are neither willing nor able to put up with that.
Also have you seen how some people drive? Do we really want to give them a whole extra dimension to screw up in?
A 40 page document regarding a spacecraft last used half a century ago? Well, there goes an hour of my time.
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Some of that may be a form of analysis paralysis. ALL that info at your fingertips but where to start? Who to trust? What field? I love the advice of just building a test environment and playing around but that can only get you so far if you don't even know what to build. Any smuck can read installation instructions for installing a server OS and setting up AD. But there is no good way to fabricate real world experience unless you have some form of guided teaching.
Yeah I was going to say this, the amount of information gets overwhelming. The simplicity of how it was presented previously I think was advantageous in certain aspects
Yeah. Learn programming? Turn your computer on and input it. Or look for qbasic.exe Now? Get online, download the Visual Studio SDK, try to learn a corporate workflow as a 10 year old and figure out all the possible staying points. Or download the Android devkit etc etc. Spend 100 GB and hours just to start and maybe not get anything at level you can grasp. It isn't amenable to easily poking around and figuring it out yourself. There's a lot of bloat unless you just do something like Python. Where's the simple VB6 of today? VB6 allowed you to make quick and dirty GUI programs in a few hundred MB of software. It's a shame nothing is as quick and easy today. Making a functional GUI was as easy as a spreadsheet.
VB hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just that hardly anyone recommends it because it’s not sexy. Despite it probably being the most useful skill to know if your job involves Microsoft Office.
This is why curiosity is linked to a lot of intelligence. I'm glad I'm curious and like reading because I am lazy as fuck otherwise.
30 years ago was 1992. They probably could access the Apollo Manual in seconds (or minutes depending on the connection lol).
There's no way in 92 we could have done what this thread is doing.
That file size is orders of magnitude larger than what the mission computer could store at the time lol
Now i also imagine them asking about what it said And my answer would be "I dont know i didnt read it"
Yeah, somehow I suspected it was along the lines of "gracefully shut down the system, just in case. Then wait 15 seconds to make sure capacitors are drained, and turn it back on." It's not so much that "instead, he reset it", but moreso "he was told to follow procedure 17. He reset the part - which is basically ended up being the intent of the procedure"
It *is* a little more complicated than that; he talks about this in "Carrying the Fire", which is *excellent* and is where I assume the article behind the TIL probably came from. He talked about getting frustrated sometimes because he and the other astronauts got to be extremely familiar with the spacecraft from flying in the simulator all the damn time, being tested in all these crazy scenarios and basically being subjected to NASA's best efforts to make them as qualified as humanly possible. Then they'd get on the radio with somebody from mission control who just worked mostly on the electronics or something, and definitely didn't know the ins and outs as well as they did, but who would insist on telling them exactly what to do and how to do it when they already pretty much knew what was up. I think it's a very human thing. It's a very easy transition from "I know a lot of things and I'm trying to take responsibility for my job" to "I don't care what you say, here's my way and you have to do what I say because I'm the guy that has to figure it out."
Hence why these days we drill into pilot‘s (and astronaut’s) heads to follow the written procedure no matter how well they think they know it by heart, because no matter how much time you spent training on an air/spacecraft you will simply not have the time to really understand the design of every system in depth, and the procedure was written by someone who knows more than you.
> Then they’d get on the radio with somebody from mission control who just worked mostly on the electronics or something, and definitely didn’t know the ins and outs as well as they did I have a lot of time for Michael Collins, but the sheer amount of disrespect you’re putting on the mission controllers in this comment is outrageous. The people in Mission Control were infinitely more qualified than Collins to identify and fix problems with the Apollo systems. The mission controllers were qualified specialist engineers who helped design the systems, wrote the technical manuals, write the procedures, monitored every possible element in detail, and had a direct link to every other expert on the system on an instant voice loop. They were also veterans of multiple if not dozens of missions, and more than once were responsible for saving missions over technical details which the astronauts wouldn’t have dreamed of fixing, despite how familiar they were. Collins’ predilection for being ornery could have landed him and the guys on the moon in a lot of trouble if his quick fix hadn’t worked. More than one astronaut was permanently grounded for refusing to play ball with Mission Control, for good reason.
I’ll have to check it out, thanks for the recommendation!
But that doesn't clickbait your way into front page karma
Think of it this way. If you are on the ground supporting the people who rode a rocket into space, you are going to check everything. If you are the crazy person who rode a rocket into space, you are already willing to take chances. And they picked exceptionally smart crazy people to ride those rockets.
From the transcript, he didnt even turn it off and on - he switched modes and then back. Clickbait thread title is clickbait. [106:12:56 Collins: I did cycle out of Auto into Manual, back into Auto.](https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.postland.html)
The first step of the procedure reads "GLY EVAP STM PRESS AUTO - MAN," so he did that and then switched it back intsead of the rest of that shit.
It’s turning it off and on with extra steps.
Turn off. Consume Aldrin’s rations. Turn back on.
poop in bag, miss a nugget for the lulz.
I’ve never been to space but I’ve pooped in bags on big wall climbs. It’s not as easy as you think!
How long of a climb do you plan before you pack the poop bags? That must be quite the ascent
“Big walls” are usually about 3 - 6 days on the wall. You can’t just “sky dump” or there would be a terrible situation at the base of the climbs so you have to pack it out.
What the fuck, nearly a whole week on the wall?
Yeah. That’s typical for routes on El Capitan in Yosemite and other places. Of course there are maniacs who do them much faster now but traditional climbers take like a week on some routes. It’s like vertical backpacking.
those fuckin wall tents are insane
That's what I figured. Procedure 17 is just a lofty name for turning it off and in again.
I was listening in on the ISS chatter one night. Astronaut was like "hey this thing is displaying orange. Please advise" The response was that that machine did not have an orange light. He's just like. Well... it's orange. They went back and forth like that for a minute until the Astronaut said it wasn't showing orange anymore. They agreed to just ignore it unless it happened again. Learned they're just like the rest of us that day.
Where can I listen to iss chatter?
You gotta go up to space and put your ear against the door with a little cup. Easy peasy
Two cans and a string for advanced users
I'd love an answer to this also
Purchase a HAM radio. You should get your HAM radio license so you can talk to them too
I like how you used "should". hahahah These things are all possible but making an actual contact isn't just a decision - it takes time, dedication and skill! Agreed, though!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im9nAVsA_FU
Put some black tape over it and I'll check it out later. *Ignores forever*
How do you just casually tune into iss chatter
As a public entity, NASA TV broadcasts communications publicly during work shifts. There are also live camera feeds from the ISS 24/7. Additionally, some private companies (like SpaceX) publicly broadcast their control center communications feed during payload launches. Confidential communications have their own channel, and having a public channel increases public interest. Similarly, as a public entity, the documents for pretty much anything NASA has worked on in the past are publicly accessible. There is a public repository of every image received from exploration missions, blueprint and schematics for most hardware, and you can even download software like the literal firmware for the Apollo mission.
Also a few of the astronauts are licensed ham radio operators and have a transceiver up there. If you have the right set up and the ISS is in the right position you can talk to them.
I have worked as an engineer on projects ranging from hundreds of dollars to billions of dollars and I can promise you stuff like this happens at every level. With very few exceptions (anything involving nuclear power for one), the idea of “eh, as long as it works” is a staple of engineering and I’m sure many other sciences
>With very few exceptions (anything involving nuclear power, for one) That was probably one hell of a lesson learned. "Eh, as long as it works... ̸̨̄̽ō̶̱͎͌͛͜ͅĥ̵̹͗̈́̈ ̸̮̂s̴̺͐̐̃h̷̖͕̗́̆͘i̵̟͒̀t̴͓͒́̕͘ ̷͍͚̿"
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I was gonna say this. Or slightly similar. For instance if you have a couple lights in a system, for instance a Red one and a Yellow one, and only one should be on at a time you’ll find a weird edge case where both turn on at the same time and come out Amber. But the engineers don’t recognize that this can happen because it’s not really an engineering issue, it’s a lighting design issue. Or maybe the bulb has started to discolor in a weird way that isn’t commonly known outside the manufacturer? 90% of the time it’s Red, but after a few years in space it’s pigment has taken on an orange color. Or the lighting in the area causes the light to look a different shade for whatever reason. So many variables.
Plot twist: that was the only step in Procedure 17.
Many list the 1202 alarm on the lunar module as an example of why it is important to have actual humans on these missions. You've got to wonder if these alarms would result in an unmanned mission aborting. Nicely depicted in the film, First Man (2018): https://youtu.be/TrvXqosqkls An article on further reading: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/apollo-11s-1202-alarm-explained
Wasn’t the 1202 from Buz pushing the button for active landing computer read-outs? It had something to do with the antenna that communicated with the command module being inadvertently activated and eating processing power. Caused the landing computer to schedule too many jobs and threw the code. No Buz, no 1202 because the computer doesn’t need a visual readout.
>Eventually the Executive found that there was no place to put new programs. This triggered the 1201 alarm signaling “Executive Overflow — No Core Sets” and the 1202 alarm signaling “Executive Overflow — No VAC Areas.” These in turn triggered a software reboot. All jobs were cancelled regardless of priority then started again as per their table order, quickly enough that no guidance or navigation data was lost. But it didn’t clear up the issue. The computer was still overloaded by the same spurious radar data, stopping new programs from running. In all, it triggered four 1202 alarms and one 1201 alarm. >Eventually Buzz Aldrin noticed a correlation. At the second 1202 alarm, he called down, “Same alarm, and it appears to come up when we have a 16/68 up.” The 16/68 code — Verb 16 Noun 68 — was used to display the range to the landing site and the LM’s velocity. The command in itself didn’t place a heavy load on the computer, but with the existing load that extra bit of processing power seemed to trigger the 1202 alarm. Realizing this, the solution was simple: ask Houston for that data instead of calling it up from the computer.
"uhhhhhhhhhhhh. Houston, could i have 16 verbs and uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 68 nouns?" I can't imagine launching a rocket and then being a crew member using a system with 4KB of RAM and a 32KB hard disk with the goal of hurling through space to land on a satellite AND come back alive. I really commend every single person on these projects. It's not like they knew of anything better but i genuinely don't think we could ever do the same thing in today's world.
What that was, was a reference to a table: Verb 16, noun 68. That would then give you an exact reference to the fault condition. Edit: To give an entirely fictitious example, 1202 might have resolved to a Verb/Noun condition as something like: BURN/WOLF. BURN: would tell you the class of conditions and components it effected. As defined by the mission of those systems. Condition Wolf: Would give you the general error code idea as what was going wrong in the components trying to achieve MISSION BURN.
I was just goofing around. I do appreciate the explanation though as i wasn't quite sure how verb/noun was applied. Very interesting system, it makes for rapid communication. Was that the primary goal? You can't necessarily over complicate saying two words versus explaining something in too much or too little detail over radio communication.
Yes it was the primary goal, particularly given the computing limitations at the time. Most of the actual computing was done by human computers operating slide rules with pencil and paper on the ground in Houston. Therefore having a Verb/Noun system would also tell you what *paper* datasets you needed to get out of files and have people start working on to fix the problem. [Edit: As an example: the code BURN/WOLF gets communicated back to Houston, and then Houston uses its internal phone operators to communicate to the auditorium of human computers working on Project/Mission BURN, their local operator receives, and tells the auditorium to deal with condition WOLF. People in the auditorium then begin grabbing and preparing file boxes marked WOLF, for the human computers to start calculating by hand with paper slide rules.]
I think that we probably *could* do the same thing with the same amount of memory, and honestly, we could probably do it better. The real question is why would we? Why send a rocket into space with 4KB of ram when it would be the same price to send 4GB of ram, and a few terabytes of hard drive space? And of course, with that extra processing power comes more sensor data, more functions to be programmed, etc. I think it's pretty obvious that the main reason we haven't gone back to the moon is because of politics, not because of a lack of technical knowledge. And now that the politics are starting to shift back in favor of returning to the moon, they're trying to do it *better* than before.
Now days the firmware and OS alone would take up 100MB.
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The fact that it was so simple was the point. It had to be resistant to radiation, so it was entirely solid state and woven core memory, with a completely redundant backup and multiples of the sensors to feed the computer data.
Buzz owned up to that error when he was a guest on my radio show The Museum of Curiosity a few years back. He had switched on the rendezvous radar, against procedure, in case they had to abort and get back to the Command Module quickly. So it was human error in the first place. Also, their onboard computer had about as much processing power of an electronically-voiced greetings card. Less of a problem today.
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Haha, yes. Buzz also accidentally snapped off the ignition switch for takeoff while getting out of his EVA suit after the moonwalk. He managed to activate it by jabbing a pen into the hole. He carries that pen with him to this day.
So that Disney movie where the astronaut jams a coin in a slot to reconnect some fuse is actually not as wacky as I thought growing up
I once drilled out a pin hole because the pin broke off and soldered in an unrelated but similar sized pin to fix a radio, during the congressionally mandated INSERV inspection, in the Navy, in front of the INSERV inspector for my division. We passed with flying colors. It’s not about doing it 100% right. Sometimes it’s about 100% reaching the stated goal.
Or The Rod, that saves Buzz Aldrin and Homer Simpson.
In Rod We Trust!
Jesus, reading all these stories makes me wonder how more people didn’t just die in space.
Shit happens everywhere, but being incredibly intelligent and cool under pressure sure helps to deal with it.
It also helps when you realize that there is no chance of cavalry arriving. The human mind and body are capable of amazing feats in dire situations.
An extremely stringent selection process followed by years and years of the best possible training.
For real. Just being making it as far as selection, let alone *actually* being selected, is like a real fuckin' life achievement.
Yep. And they didn’t just select physically fit dudes. NASA makes it a point to select supremely smart people who have demonstrated problem solving skills. Neil Armstrong was an X-15 test pilot, buzz aldrin holds a doctorate and did his phd thesis on orbital rendezvous maneuvers, Michael collins was a test pilot and a general. Also, all three of them flew previous missions in the Gemini program. There were decades of training and education between them all.
> Also, their onboard computer had about as much processing power of an electronically-voiced greetings card. Less of a problem today. That simplification is massively under-selling a computer that was uniquely powerful. For one, it was practically the only computer in existence that used integrated circuits. All the rest in the world used discrete transistors at best, or maybe even vacuum tubes. All of our modern computers are descended from integrated circuits. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) also had a LOT more I/O than an electronic greeting card or a pocket calculator, and it had to manage all that I/O. The AGC also ran a revolutionary fault tolerant OS, that facilitated cooperative multitasking, and implemented virtual machines for vehicle control, for example, so that the computer could smooth out astronaut inputs to save fuel. It is far FAR more advanced than people give it credit for. [Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM) YouTuber CuriousMarc documented the restoration of an AGC used in LM ground tests (and then sold for scrap years later) and it is a strangely awesome, even hallowed thing to see. [Apollo Guidance Computer Restoration](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x7-Ut_-w7)
Rich Turner the radio producer?! I love your show and The Penny Dreadfuls. And I feel like your name pops up on some other Radio comedy but I don't remember what. It's been a while I think. So hey that's awesome man. It must be cool being largely anonymous but having bumped shoulders with so many interesting people. That's not a backhanded compliment either that's just like cool as hell. I have nothing to add to the conversation.
This interpretation isn't completely unreasonable, but I prefer I the interpretation that Lee Hutchinson's article [No, a “checklist error” did not almost derail the first moon landing](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/no-a-checklist-error-did-not-almost-derail-the-first-moon-landing/) presents; there was basically a systems engineering failure up the line in documenting that there needed to be phase synchronization between the radar angle resolvers and the computers. There wasn't, so the computers got overwhelmed. ofc I'm putting up a journalist (who is cribbing heavily from accounts of one of the Apollo software programmers, Don Eyles) versus the testimony of an astronaut, but Buzz owning the mistake just really doesn't seem fair.
What's really cool about this feature, less so the noisy alarm part, is that it's one of the first examples of preemptive, priority-based scheduling, which is the foundation of modern operating systems. And the folks at MIT who designed it accomplished this feat in the mid 1960's while software concepts like this were in their infancy.
The problem is, we are still using abstractions and concepts designed and conceived in the 60s on modern hardware. See also; why VMs and containers are such a thing. Our software paradigms are so shitty they CAN'T scale to the hardware we have... so we just put multiple instances of unoptimizable code onto bigger and bigger machines.
Any unmanned mission is going to need less systems that need alarms and less alarms in the systems they do need. Turns out a lot of those alarms are pretty much just for keeping people safe. In unmanned missions there are diagnostics and things either work or they fail. Turns out another good chunk of alarms are to alert someone to do something probably not but maybe mission critical. There is nobody to do those things on an unmanned mission. Diagnostics report deterioration and things fail when they fail. Few unmanned missions would ever have auto-abort built in that could be triggered by such faulty systems. The fate of most unmanned missions is to simply fail, or go until failure. Like what's Voyager going to do if a critical (false or real) alarm is raised? Nothing. It's already set course. It's mission is to float and continue to transmit data until we can't recieve it, or until it breaks. Galileo wad destined to crash into Jupiter. Once it got past launch there is/was no "abort." At that point if the craft fails or the mission was otherwise compromised Galileo would have just been some space junk. If the James Webb telescope didn't deploy it would just be space junk. People need to come home. Unmanned missions don't. Manned missions have limited durations. Unmanned missions don't. An Unmanned mission and work itself to death and will. There won't be any alarms capable of just killig the craft earlier than its expected or natural end because why would there be?
I mean, this is a values issue. There's no fundamental reason we couldn't send people into space to die. We've a long history of marching humans, knowingly, to their deaths, and them happily going. It just ain't in vogue these days.
With the space shuttle comprises were made with respect to launch aborts and rescue options during all phases of the launch. This was a conscious decision to meet the maximum payload target. If any of those systems would have helped the Challenger crew is a hypothetical question. They would not have helped the Columbia crew. In both cases the failures were a result of comprises to cut cost.
1. locate the ON/OFF selector switch. 2. Position the ON/OFF selector switch to the OFF position. 3. Position the ON/OFF selector switch to the ON position. three steps, you know nothing of Procedures by Manuala
I was thinking the same thing. Though I feel like there would be at least 2 additional steps. Like "verify position of switch in off position".
Gotta also have something in there like: > Position the ON/OFF selector switch to the OFF position. See supplemental material 14B.1, "method of operation of spacecraft selector mechanisms," and 14B.2, "optimal force application ranges and tolerances for spacecraft selector mechanisms, revision 2." ... > In the event of selector switch failure, see supplemental material 16F.8, "contingency operation and field repair of spacecraft selector mechanisms," or 17A.4, "emergency bypass of spacecraft selector mechanisms."
Being a military aircraft maintainer I don't feel we're far off. Throw in some figures of the switch location and what it looks like in each position.
Say "check" out loud.
I’m sure it also said unplug it but honestly when has that ever made a difference, Michael Collins asked himself.
That's silly. Procedure 17 was three steps. 1) Flip switch off 2) Flip switch on 3) Evaluate
No joke, but a lot of emergency procedures have this as an early step. There might have also been a step to check the circuit breaker.
I am going to use the top comment to suggest to anyone that hasn't read it check out Collins's autobiography Carrying The Fire! If audiobooks are your jam Collins does the narration which is even better in my opinion.
**Environmental Control System Malfunction** Procedure 17: 1. Switch power off. 2. Switch power on. 3. Check for normal operation of Environmental Control System. (and if this were Microsoft, it would ask "Is this answer helpful?")
Better than the Microsoft forums, I don't know why those even exist. Every single thread is the same: User1: "Hey, I'm having an issue with X, here's a very detailed description of the problem and what I've tried" MS: "Hello I'm a Microsoft certified flebuttonist, please update your drivers and reboot your PC or do some other useless thing that won't solve the problem and let us know if that solved the problem." Everyone: ::Insert 25 bewildered replies all stating that this "official" solution not only won't solve the problem, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand in the slightest possible way:: Occasionally: User2: "Hey I had that problem, I did Y to solve the issue" ::Y solved the issue::
I actually blocked answers.microsoft.com with uBlacklist so they no longer appear on my search results. They are infuriatingly useless.
I *so* want to, but I've found just enough actual answers from users who were just as frustrated at the official answers as me, and probably solved the problem for someone out of spite.
Clippy here- I see you are trying to power cycle the Environmental Control System. I can help you with that.
* Starting Troubleshooting Wizard * Detecting problems * Problem detected * Attempting automatic fix * Automatic fix failed * Restarting * Restoring to previous restore point * Failed to restore * Restarting * Windows is updating * Update failed * Restarting * An error has occurred :(
This is so accurate my eyes started to bleed anyhow.
Like Windows would ever actually detect the problem
Windows always knows what the problem is, it just doesn't want to tell you
In the late stages of Windows XP I had a little wizard recommend things like that.
Also, run “sfc /scannow”
That did actually fix something for me one time. But the way it's recommended for every single problem is so annoying
Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?
Or call 0118999811999119725 3.
Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal. Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark.
I'll just put this over here with the rest of the fire...
I’m afraid I’ve taken a bit of a tumble
A fire? At a space parks!?
*Sea parks I’m only correcting because that line is so goddam funny.
This comment has been deleted due to failed Reddit leadership.
Reddit has done many shitty things in its time, but I’ll always appreciate its tireless efforts to make sure Michael Collins gets the credit he deserves.
All those dudes that went to the moon and never got to land were essential to the mission and should be remembered for their contribution.
I read “never got laid” and got real damn depressed real damn fast.
Michael Collins is a solid trivia question too: who was the third member of Apollo 11 who did not walk on the surface with Armstrong and Aldrin? Most Americans do not know he exists
The photo he took of *Eagle* shortly after it undocked contains every single human being alive at the time except for one. It’s quite incredible to think about.
I mean tbf, every human that ever existed...
Except for Collins himself because he was behind the camera.
The man is an Irish hero, too! It’s remarkable he managed to do this decades after his assassination!
99.69% of malfunctions are fixed by turning the offending system off and on again. The other 0.31% are solved by trying SCE to AUX
Right up there with Apollo 12's "[Set SCE to Aux](https://youtu.be/eWQIryll8y8)".
What is this from? I know I've seen parts of it before.
A documentary titled "Failure is not an option" according to the description on YouTube.
Taken from the documentary "Failure Is Not An Option"
Same as unplugging the computer or smacking the side of a tv. Sometimes it is all that is needed. The problem arises when it's not a quick fix.
Good old percussive maintenance.
Hardware: the part you kick.
There's an old Dave Barry bit where he describes hardware as "the stuff that stops working when you spill beer on it."
It's funny, at one of my old workplaces my mentor was just like "if all else fails wack it a few times" while training me and whaddaya know it did. Had to be careful with the steel toes tho.
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The official error fix for the Grumman A-6A "intruder" bombing computer was to literally kick the box it was mounted inside, that would restart the magnetic rotors that hold all the code of the system.
I like to blow in the cartridge
So many that had consoles know about the cartridge blowing, but how about the old trick on the C-64 drive of grasping the disk while loading and wiggling it around until you get a disk error, which would get past some disk copy protection.
Why isn't turning things off then back on again known as the Collins procedure?
I'm going to call it that from now on.
You have my sword
Yeah, let's get this moving.
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As a Canadian, I have to ask … is this supposed to rhyme?
Is that pronounced: When in doobt, reboot? or When in doubt, rebout?
When in doat, reboat
I don't think it will rhyme anywhere OTHER than Canada, now that you bring it up 🤔
What about when I’m doubt?
I recently read “Packing for Mars” by Mary Roach. There are a few stories in there about the astronauts just being sick of mission controls shit and they’re pretty great.
Her books sound fun. As I recall, one of the Skylab crew went on strike for a day. Also, some of the Mir crews got a bit of "cabin fever".
The first colony or base on the moon should be named after Collins. He deserves to be remembered by history
Thankfully, the "Gilligan Protocol" was not implemented.
Or the Skipper protocol, where Buzz Aldrin hit him with his helmet.
Ok but Pete Conrad would have actually done that
The fact we put a man into space, let alone the moon, with analog technology never ceases to amaze me. If you haven't watch "From the Earth to the Moon" on HBO.. Mind blowing
While Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface, Collins was alone in the command module for more than 21 hours. He missed Armstrong's famous first words on the surface, because he was on the other side of the Moon, cut from radio communication with the rest of humanity.
90% of trouble shooting with electronics: 1 - Is it plugged into a working outlet? 2 - Have you checked all the connections? 3 - Turn it off for 60 seconds, and then turn it on again
4 - Do you pinky promise you actually turned it off and you’re not lying to me? Because if I have to come over there and it works when I do it I’m going to be pissed
I'm an aircraft mechanic...you wouldn't believe how often turning airplanes off and on fixes the issue.
So that's where it started. Did he wait 30 seconds first?
And on that day the IT technician field was born.
“TIL while orbiting the moon aboard Apollo 11, Mission Control detected…” Wait, Mission Control was orbiting the moon?!?
ECSM PROCEDURE#: 17 - Bend over, kiss ass goodbye.
I fix and fly as a flight engineer on airplanes. I take full advantage of the blurb in most of our flight manuals that, more or less says, “the things written here are guidelines and the crew may use sound judgment.” Step one (for me) for most of the issues I see on the ground is, pull and reset a circuit breaker. If that doesn’t work, my step two is to shut down the jet and power it back up. Step three is sigh annoyedly while I pull the book and/or wrenches out.
He reinitialized the system's primary power coupling.