Spacelog Apollo 8

Apollo 8, Houston. Confirm that battery B is a little bit lower, and this is attributed to the parasitic loads that are on there.

Okay. I just didn't see the same kind of drop for A. So if you think it's okay, it's fine.

That's affirm. You don't have the same parasitic loads on that; B is actually drawing some.

Okay. I guess that's the radiators, huh?

Apollo 8, Houston. We've seen enough of the secondary evaporator. We would like for you to wait about 2 minutes between the time you go to RESET and the time you turn the pump off.

I agree; good idea. And we plan to leave the water control in AUTO.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston. Apollo 8.

Okay. Looking over the—our redundant component check, it appears we have not yet checked the integrity of the secondary loop radiators; and if you haven't done that, sometime we would like to open up the secondary radiators but not flow through them and just measure the accumulator pressure.

Stand by.

Houston, we don't show that in our pre-LOI check, but we're willing to go ahead and do it if you want to.

Roger. We just noticed that it isn't there, and, yes, we would like to. You understand that we are not proposing that you flow, but merely we check for any pressure decay.

Roger. Wait till I get my trusty assistant here to help me.

Okay, Houston. We're going to blow the secondary, I mean, open the secondary RAD for 30 seconds now.

Roger.

Looks pretty good.

Sure does.

Okay. They're closed now.

Okay. Thank you. Looks good.

Apollo 8, Houston. You take your tape recorder to stop, and we'll reset it then and give it back to you.

Roger. It's stopped.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead.

Okay. We still need to talk about the REV 2 attitudes we're going to use here to work around the fact that you have a fogged center window. Whenever that's convenient, we'd like to go over what your thoughts are on the subject so we can make sure we can get our flight plan squared away.

My thoughts are to make—to do with the best with what we have. We are not interested in changing a lot of things right now.

Okay. The one proposal that sounds like it has some advantage to it: if we let Jim do his evaluation through the telescope, you do everything exactly the same except you turn and roll over 180 degrees so that your head's up, and let Jim do his tracking through the telescope and you'll still be a yaw right when you go to pick up your TV and that type of thing. It looks like that probably will cover everything. We can do that or we can just go as is and just have to let some of that tracking evaluation go by. Another alternate would be to have Jim look out the right-hand rendezvous window, and you may have to change your attitude in order to get the same picture there also.

I think we'll try to do that, but I don't—this is one of the things that we'll work out when we get there.

Okay. The reason we were looking into it in the flight plan is, if you do want to try rolling over and flying heads up or something of that nature, we can help Bill get a little more out of his photography by giving him some new film settings and that type of thing. We'll have something like that available; in case you do fly heads up, why, we'll have some numbers, we can call up for film settings.

Thank you.

Houston, Apollo 8.

Go ahead.

Roger. We are going to have to dump more urine here shortly. Will this bother your tracking?

Apollo 8, we're checking on that with the tracking people now.

Houston, just give us the time when we can start on it, and we'll hold off until you say so.

Okay, and you can anticipate a handover between stations here on the hour, and you might get a slight glitch as we go through. I'll give you a call when we get back.

Thank you, Ken. What station are we going to be going to, Ken?

Okay. We'll be going to Honeysuckle.

Thank you.

Send up a couple.

The only one I have is about 6 foot.

Houston, could you give us some gimbal angles to point at the moon? I never have seen it the whole trip, and I'm wondering which way it is from us now.

Houston, Apollo 8. Radio check.

Roger. Loud and clear.

Roger.

We are getting ready to give you a rundown on your systems. We're going over all the final steps, and we will tell you what we see in the way of trajectory and systems information. And once again, Dr. Joe Kerwin has brought over all the latest news, and we can read that up to you a little bit at a time if you aren't going to sleep.

What's he going to do, read out of the AMA Journal?

Roger.

Go ahead. We are all ears.

Okay. Here is one: the previously scheduled 72-hour cease fire by the Viet Cong went into effect today, 17 hours before the 24 hour allied truce was to begin.

You lost us on the numbers there. What was that again?

The gist of it was that the VC went into a cease fire earlier than the truce that we had planned on, as a Christmas holiday type.