Recent Posts

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / 123:11:26 Flight dynamics assistant too tired to continue

« Last post by MadDogBV on April 12, 2024, 02:00:27 pm »

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

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Re: 116:58:07 Trench creates the Flight Dynamics re-entry checklist

« Last post by Naraht on April 05, 2024, 05:38:09 am »

What an interesting find, thank you so much for sharing! I haven't yet listened all the way through but am looking forward to it.

Dave Reed was the right man to be lead FIDO on this mission, I would say. He did an impressive job bringing things together. If he hadn't left, I imagine he would have been in line to become a flight director.

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Re: 116:58:07 Trench creates the Flight Dynamics re-entry checklist

« Last post by bfeist on April 01, 2024, 12:47:02 pm »

This is awesome!

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / 116:58:07 Trench creates the Flight Dynamics re-entry checklist

« Last post by MadDogBV on March 22, 2024, 12:20:34 pm »

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

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General Discussion / Re: Identifying speakers/ Mission Control teams

« Last post by bfeist on March 22, 2024, 11:04:50 am »

My apologies. I recently had to move this forum to a new host and misconfigured the attachment system. It should be working now.

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General Discussion / Re: Identifying speakers/ Mission Control teams

« Last post by MadDogBV 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.

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General Discussion / Re: Identifying speakers/ Mission Control teams

« Last post by ke6jjj on March 10, 2024, 07:10:03 pm »

The attachement has gone 404 again.

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / 089:30:00 Trench can't keep track of all the meetings going on

« Last post by MadDogBV on February 21, 2024, 08:53:05 am »

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.

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / 061:27:28 Burn time freakout: "Is he loaded correctly?!"

« Last post by MadDogBV on February 16, 2024, 02:44:11 pm »

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."

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General Discussion / Re: Mobile Device Website Issue

« Last post by RobatRobot on February 07, 2024, 06:09:59 pm »

No rush. History isn't going anywhere. Glad you're still engaged with it. My projects are notoriously unfinished. Thanks for the update.