Spacelog Apollo 8

Houston, Apollo 8. Returning to the PTC mode.

Apollo 8, Houston. Understand; returning to PTC. Thank you.

Roger.

You can tell Jim he is getting pretty ham-handed with that P21; he got a perilune altitude three-tenths of a mile off what we are predicting down here.

Is that right?

Roger. Apparently, he got 69.7 and the RTC says 70.

Are we going to leave it at that, or are we going to correct it to make it lower?

We are talking about it, Frank.

We have got a lumen reading of about between 1 and 1.25 thousand—1.25 K.

Roger. Understand; between 1 and 1.25 K. Thank you.

Houston, Apollo 8.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Roger. If you put your CM TLM to ACCEPT, we will send you our state vector.

Houston, Apollo 8.

Apollo 8, Houston.

How does everything look, Mike, all our systems and everything? See any switches out of place?

Negative. I'll take a check around here, but it is looking good. Just a second.

We are all over the cabin, Mike, like monkeys, and I wanted to make sure we didn't hit anything.

Apollo 8, Houston. Everything is looking good down here. All switches and systems are GO.

Houston, Apollo 8. How are you reading on OMNI D?

We are reading you loud and clear, Frank.

Okay. We are reading you like that, also. Thank you.

We are having a playback of your TV shows and are all enjoying it down here. It was better than yesterday because it didn't preempt the football game.

Thank you. Don't tell me they cut off a football game; didn't they learn from Heidi?

Houston, Apollo 8.

Go ahead, Apollo 8.

Hey, Jerry, how much water does this—the water dispenser in the lower equipment bay, the one that puts out hot and cold water—how much comes out of that with each shot?

Stand by. I'll take a check on that. And, by the way, welcome to the moon's sphere.

The moon's fair?

The moon's sphere—you're in the influence.

That's better than being under the influence.

Hey, Jerry?

Go ahead, 8.

My handy LMP had his schematics out at the drop of a hat and informs me that it's 1 ounce per cycle.

Apollo 8, looks like the flying EECOM the ground EECOM came to a dead heat on that one.

They did?

Roger. We got the same answer at the same time.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston. Apollo 8.

Okay, 8. We want to run a little exercise on the ground here to make are that we're able to dump the tape and bring the voice portion back to Houston in a timely manner. So we plan to dump your tape, and we're going to exercise the procedure on the ground to get it back here and take a listen to it. We believe that we have something on the tape already unless you have recorded over it after the last dump. Just to make sure, we'd like to have you just say a few words, give us a short count or something on the tape and anything else that you might want to put on there. And we're going to do this in the next 5 minutes before we get away from Madrid. That's the site we want to exercise, so we'll go ahead and do that, and we'll tell you before we make the dump.

Houston, Houston, this is Apollo 8. Over.

Go ahead, Apollo 8.

Okay. Ken, we put a few comments on the last of the tape after we heard from you, and it's being rewound now, and you can have it as soon as we get it back to the beginning.

Okay. We'll have to wait. It looks like you are going out of the attitude to use high gain. We'll catch it next time around and then dump it.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Roger. Do you think you're in a position where you could use the high gain?

I'll give it a try.

Apollo 8, Houston. We're dumping at this time.

Roger. Tape voice is probable.

We ought to also get a check on it at low bit rate for DSE voice, Ken.

Apollo 8, are you saying that everything that's on there now is in high bit?

That's where my switch was.

Okay. We'll take a look at it then. If there wasn't anything that was previously recorded in low bit, then we'll come back and maybe take a look at that, too.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Okay. We've completed the dump, and the tape recorder's back to you. You can use it any way you want. We may want to dump that thing again, and if we do we'll go ahead and use the same information unless you have something else that you specifically wanted to put on there later. Listening to the voice quality—it sounds real good. We're coming up on a midcourse 4 and right now it's—talking about doing it on time, and you can anticipate the burn in the neighborhood of 3 foot per second. We're considering and would like for you to think about the possibility of doing this burn using the onboard vector and just have us update the vector in the LM slot, so that you will have the MSFN vector on board. But it looks like it won't have any big effect on the burn results, and it might prove interesting. So if you think about that one for a bit and let us know if you have any suggestions or thoughts on the subject.

Roger. You say it uses the onboard vectors and leaves the MSFN vectors on the LM slot.

That's affirmed, if that's what you would like to do, right. We considered it, and it looks like that would be a reasonable thing.

Roger. Frank and Jim are asleep now, and I'll bring this up to them when they wake up.

Okay. Real fine.

Apollo 8, Houston. How about stirring up the oxygen?

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Okay, Bill. I guess I want to belay my last about using the onboard state vector for MCC 4. After looking at it some more on the ground, they've got to get going on making the PAD's and doing all their computations, and rather than put it off or do it twice, we're going to go ahead and go with the procedures we've been using all along. On the lunar orbit stuff, we've been looking it over and we got several guys—Jack Schmitt and company in the back room—looking at what effect your windows have. And, basically, it looks like there's two options that will make an impact on that REV 2. One of the options, of course, will be just to have you and Jim change seats and let Jim look out and get his SAM that way, and another option will be to roll the bird over and let Jim point the optics as far forward as he can get them and take his SAM through the telescope. And I guess we'd like to have any thoughts that you folks have on what you think you can do with the windows; if you have anything, we'd like to factor it into our thinking and go ahead and firm up our plans as early as we can. We'd like not to put it off so that we have none of these things to do after midcourse. You folks can probably tell us more about what you can do with those windows. So if you have any thoughts, go ahead and sing out with them, and we'll see what we can do about factoring that in.

Okay. With reference to the midcourse, I think that's generally agreed upon, that we do it like we've always been doing it. Now, with respect to the windows, center windows, essentially, are unusable. The two side windows are—may be all right for observation, and the problem with the rendezvous windows is that they're pretty small. And I just thought we'd have to play the window game by ear almost. Not really sure what capability we're going to have. And we'll give you some more thoughts on this later.

Okay. How about exercising the idea of rolling over and having Jim do his polarization through the telescope because if we have to change attitudes we'd like to go ahead and start thinking about what effects that'll have on such things as antenna orientation and all that.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Okay. Apollo 8, we'd like to update your CMC clock. This is not to correct errors which we have now but just to make up for some effects that we're going to have in lunar orbit. And what we'd like to have you do is go to P00 and ACCEPT and let us update the clock time.

Stand by.

Okay. You got P00 and ACCEPT.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Okay. We're completed with the clock update, and the computer is yours.

Roger. Going to BLOCK.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

How about an O₂ purge?

Okay.

Thank you.

There's number 1.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Houston. Apollo 8. Go ahead.

Okay. We'd like to update CMC. The order that we'll update will be the LM state vector, the CSM state vector, and then the external DELTA-V and the REFSMMAT. So any time you're free with it, we can have P00 in ACCEPT; we'll go ahead with it.

I understand you're going to update LM state vector, CSM state vector, and external DELTA-V and the REFSMMAT.