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Very little of the thousands of hours of Mission Control audio on the website has been heard or documented. As you find moments of interest, post them here for discussion.

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Messages - MadDogBV

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16
A flight dynamics assistant during the Gold team shift just prior to re-entry at 123:11 GET calls up FIDO Bill Stoval essentially to ask if he can go home early due to fatigue. He had been off his game all night, including a really serious blunder earlier in the evening that resulted in GUIDO Bales and RETRO Spencer arguing over whether a REFSMMAT stored in the RTCC was the same one as earlier in the morning. It had been stored incorrectly.

Amidst all of the technical jargon on the FIDO loop, clips like these really show the human impact that the Apollo 13 incident had on the flight controllers who were trying to manage the situation on the ground, many of them not getting enough sleep or just outright pulling all-nighters.

Link: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=123:11:26&ch=20

17
Apollo geeks and flight dynamics nerds brace yourselves - this is going to be your lucky day.

This is by far the highlight of the FIDO loop. During the Black Team shift starting at around 110-112 GET, FIDO Dave Reed, RETRO Chuck Deiterich and GUIDO Ken Russell are manning the trench along with YAW Will Pressley. This will also be the same group of personnel that works the White Team's shift during re-entry.

Dave, a stickler for organization and "doing the right thing", sets aside time with Chuck and Ken to draft a re-entry checklist for the flight dynamics team during the hours leading up to entry interface. This is required due to the massive amount of work needing to be done in a very short timespan, getting both the CSM reactivated and aligned, the service module and LM jettisoned, and the midcourse correction required to stay in the corridor.

What follows from this point on is truly remarkable: an unbroken three-way discussion that goes on for over an hour, essentially a planning meeting taking place on a live MOCR loop. During this time, Dave has backup personnel respond to inquiries from other flight controllers so that his team can focus on drafting the checklist. Presumably, he got permission from Lunney to do this since even FLIGHT avoids bugging him with questions. (AFD is not so lucky when he tries later on.)

RETRO: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=116:58:07&ch=19
FIDO: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=116:58:07&ch=20

18
General Discussion / Re: Identifying speakers/ Mission Control teams
« on: March 20, 2024, 08:37:54 am »
It's a webhost issue; the files are still technically there, just inaccessible and locked off until the webhost makes them available again. I did save a local copy. Here it is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y9mjRT6vvmsq9Gy7xcAoAdRP8NM0d2Ko/view?usp=sharing

As others have mentioned, the MOCR manning situation is a mess post-accident and it's not out of the realm of possibility to hear two or more distinct voices on a loop during any given shift (Greene, Boone, Stoval, and Reed can all be heard on the FIDO loop throughout the GET 90+00 White team shift.

19
It is now 8:43AM local time. FAO Bob Lindsey is reaching out to RETRO (but instead getting FIDO Bill Boone) to ask whether there's going to be an 8am re-entry meeting. Boone doesn't know about that - but he does know about Bill Tyndall's data priority meeting, and he wonders if perhaps that's what FAO means?

Link: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=089:30:00&ch=20

Apollo 13 was on its way back to Earth. Although the PC+2 abort burn was executed as correctly as could be under the circumstances (with subsequent tracking indicating that a MCC5 would still be necessary), flight control still had one major problem to contend with: re-entry - all the activities that would be needed in the last six hours of flight.

One of the most key aspects of Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank disaster is the total, industry-wide mobilization that occurred in order to solve rapidly-developing problems that urgently needed an answer by a certain timeframe. From one end of the Manned Spacecraft Center to the other, there was one practice that was a near-constant throughout the mission: Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. Sometimes planned, but more often improvised, all to tackle different problems, all vacuuming up different flight controllers with all of their varying levels of expertise.

This is why when listening to the FD loops after the abort burn, you sometimes can hear up to 3 or 4 different officers manning one station during a single shift. They frequently had to be swapped out as managers such as Gene Kranz, Bill Tyndall, Neil Hutchinson and Jerry Bostick yoinked controllers and brought them from one meeting to the next.

20
Within three minutes of the free return burn, FLIGHT Glynn Lunney suddenly notices that the wall clock in the MOCR is off by a large amount. Once RETRO Tom Weichel provides a countdown from his retro clock indicating the time left before the burn, Glynn suddenly becomes a lot more animated over the loop.

It was shortly thereafter determined that the wall clock had been improperly set by the comm staff, and that both the spacecraft and the retro clock were properly synchronized to the burn time.

Link: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=061:27:28&ch=19

As an addendum, later before the PC+2 burn, FIDO Bill Stoval (also in the MOCR at the time of the free return burn, sitting next to Bill Boone) reminds Bobby Spencer to check the wall and retro clock to make sure both are aligned - "I'd hate to get zapped on that one again."

21
This is prompted by a question from Jim Lovell, who wanted to know how the command module will be aligned for re-entry, particularly with the LM still hanging onto it. As far as I know, these are the absolute first ever words spoken over the Flight Director loop regarding the actual techniques involved. It comes across as a somewhat informal conversation, with GUIDO Gary Renick essentially walking through the process and CAPCOM Jack Lousma repeating his own interpretation of the words back to him (off the loop), to make sure that his understanding is correct for when he passes it up to the crew.

There's a lot of background noise on the GUIDO and CAPCOM loops, so for the sake of ease on the ears, this is just the isolated flight director loop.

LINK: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=110:32:39&ch=50

22
General Discussion / Re: Accurate edition of Apollo 11 (2019) movie?
« on: November 27, 2023, 09:30:18 am »
Documentary authors have to weave a difficult line between being making a film that is appealing and compelling in the narrative sense, which does involve taking creative liberties, versus being as historically accurate as possible. Once upon a time, I thought it was more important to adhere to the latter principle, but I've come to realize that when most film reviewers - be they a professional like Roger Ebert or just the word of a friend whom you trust - scrutineer documentaries about topics such as the space program, they're not so concerned about whether or not the biomed readings were accurate. They are more focused on ensuring that the drama, ambition, wonderment, and scientific innovation of that time period was successfully captured on film so that the viewer can relive an enthralling and engaging if not believable simulation of those pivotal moments in human history.

Frankly, compared to other frequently-espoused historical myths, the implications of that rather pales in comparison to something like the infamous "the two stood eye to eye and the other fellow blinked" in reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a myth that persists in popular AND historical media to this day. 😁 I'd say "Apollo 11" gets a pass.

For strictly reliable secondary sources of the events that took place during the Apollo program, the best place to go would probably be the Apollo Flight Journal - and as for primary sources, I would say those would be the MOCR tapes themselves. It's wonderful that NASA had such a keen eye towards posterity particularly in those days.

23
https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=033:56:11&ch=33

Recovery Houston (id unknown) offers Recovery Pacific (id unknown, but likely on a ship in the Pacific) a trade of a six pack of "Cold Pearl" for two pineapples on return. Haggling ensues.

To further emphasize the human quality of what these ironclad-willed flight controllers do on a daily basis, you want to know what EECOM John Aaron was doing at the exact same time that RECOVERY was making a trade for pineapples?

Looking for a trash can.

Link: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=033:57:52&ch=17

24
I found this particular gem because it's just one minute past a much more important historical artifact: confirmation that the IRIG-B time signal encoded on the MOCR tapes is lock-step with the clocks used by the human controllers and support crew. Just a minute before this barter there is an exchange between Houston Recover and Pacific Recovery where Houston clearly counts down the GMT and GET clocks so that Pacific Recovery can adjust their ship clocks to match.

In the attached annotated spectrogram, the speaker speaks the phrase "eight, nine, MARK, 50 seconds". Below each utterance are the time code markers output by the IRIG-B decoder software that we wrote for Apollo In Real Time. The "MARK" phrase lines up perfectly with the GET timestamp "33:53:50" / GMT timestamp "1970-04-14T05:06:50".

https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=033:53:36&ch=33

This is an absolute gem of a find. Thanks for locating this. It really truly drives home how history was made 53 years ago, and how we sometimes take for granted that what we're listening to is just the digital facsimile of the media of that era.

25
General Discussion / Frank Borman
« on: November 09, 2023, 05:03:00 pm »
And now Frank Borman. One of the most accomplished astronauts, including CDR of Apollo 8, has passed away at the age of 95.

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/frank-borman-who-led-historic-flight-around-the-moon-in-1968-dies-at-age-95-489afa09

Ad Astra. *

26
What I plan to do at some point, as I have time, is just a few compilation YouTube videos (or well, audios) of some of the Trench officers - Reed, Deiterich, Bales, possibly even Boone - just as a highlight reel of stuff they say on the loops. Each compilation video would probably be themed in some way. Perhaps Bales would be a mix of him being overly enthusiastic versus quiet and somnolent; Reed would be all the times he lost his temper, etc..  ;D

27
Oh yes, I've listened to him in some of the prelaunch dialogue; he does have a little bit of a temper, yes.  ;D

Listen carefully in this one, when he speaks to Gary again (he slams the desk!): https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=134:14:44&ch=20

I've regarded him as probably one of the most senior FIDOs in the Trench, particularly after Bostick and Shaffer became leaders of the Flight Dynamics branch. Jay Greene was brilliant, of course, but Reed had all the confidence in the world - a must when dealing with other members of his cohort.

28
A small addendum to this one: Compare and contrast FIDO Dave Reed at 134 hours with FIDO Dave Reed almost exactly 20 hours prior. He sounds more like a pilot on a commercial airliner flying to Honolulu. ;D Everybody must have felt pretty confident about how the last day of the flight would play out, until of course the actual reality of the situation hit everyone in the face.

Link: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=114:57:57&ch=20

29
FLIGHT Milt Windler had surprised the flight dynamics crew by calling for the PGNS to be activated early, partly due to generous power margins, but mostly to help warm up the freezing crew. As a result, the trench suddenly became very active, but the backrooms and computers are still operating on a skeleton staff due to not anticipating a power-up until the planned midcourse at 137 hours. It's currently 134.

GUIDO Gary Renick has been trying to get the dynamics officer in the RTCC, Ken Leach, to run a starsearch. However, Ken is the only dynamics officer on duty* and he has been prioritizing the FIDO's requests. After Gary complains about his slowness in computing the search, Ken fires back a blunt rejoinder about the trench's lack of organization. Then FIDO Dave Reed, who is about as stressed out as any flight dynamics officer can be, decides it's time to have a word with his guidance officer.

https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=133:58:34&ch=21

The two have argued with each other before; when Dave had pressured him to tell Windler that it was not practical to run a P52 in the current compressed entry timeline, Gary buckled: "He is the FLIGHT, Dave."

Edit: Ray Reynolds is actually working in the backroom with Ken Leach, but he isn't heard on the loops at all. Based on how he struggled through the Gold Team shift, he might still be very tired by this time.

30
General Discussion / Re: Other Apollo Missions
« on: October 06, 2023, 10:18:05 pm »
Oh my goodness. Apollo 8. That one is going to be a blast.

And evidently Apollo 9. On the EECOM loops in Apollo 13, when the question is asked by an ECS man "how can I tell it's night on Apollo 9?", John Aaron tells him jokingly to look for when "Liebergot woke the crew up." Which makes me wonder what he did.

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