Spacelog Apollo 8

Okay, Apollo 8. I'd like to run one more null bias and looks like we will have exercised everything we can get to.

Okay. DELTA-V AUTO, all zeros.

Minus 2.

Roger. Understand minus 2. Alright. Is that minus 2 or minus two-tenths?

Two-tenths, three-tenths now.

Okay. Real good. That looks like we —

It looks like we had a lot of noise on the circuit for a while there, Ken.

Yes, we did, too; all those electronic glitches I guess.

Okay. One hundred seconds, it's plus—minus four-tenths.

Okay. Real fine. That looks like that's about all of the functions that we can check, and looks like everything is just down the line.

Roger.

Okay. We still owe you confirmation that you can expect your high speed scroll to be the first pattern you come to, and I'll let you know as soon as they come in with an answer on it.

Okay.

I'd like to go ahead and finish going through the entry book if you're ready.

Roger.

Okay. We've reviewed most of the book up here, and we will have to come back and suggest a way that we can check out the water boiler prior to getting reentry area. We've reviewed all of the last minutes changes that were put in—pen and ink type things—and they're all looking good. On page E-7, like to add a couple of items.

What's that?

Okay. On step 34 under final stowage, which is a sort of catch-all area, there's a step that says secondary glycol to radiator, and it says bypass, verify. While we are down in this area, we would like to go to panel 382, the water control panel, and set up the evaporator water control valve both primary and secondary to AUTO. Now this is something we would have done had we done the cold soak at minus 12 hours, but since we weren't doing it there, we would like to go ahead and make sure we have these in AUTO, and this will enable automatic controls from the panel.

Can we just make this part of the procedure when we test out the water boilers beforehand?

Yes, sir. If we get that checked out earlier, we can just leave them in AUTO.

I'd rather do that.

Okay. I'm just going to make a note here, and we can do it the other way, too. The other item that was pen-and-inked in —

…

You may already have this down as step 35. It says UP TELEMETRY to BLOCK, VERIFY, and there's a step right after that that says RCS command module heaters to circuit breakers CLOSED.

Roger.

Okay.

I have that.

Okay. I guess that one was sent up to you this afternoon. And when you turn the page over to E-8, it shows the EMS entry check being run at minus an hour, and you know that it's a short test. There is really no reason to wait for an hour; we might as well go ahead and do that as soon as you get through with step 35 on page E-7 because we're coming up on a pretty busy period.

I say that's fine; we'll do that.

Houston, are you still there?

Roger. We got a discussion going; be right back.

Okay, Apollo 8. On page E-9 —

Okay.

— at the top of the page, you have step 38, and right underneath that, prior to step 39, we want to have a primary glycol loop activation. What we are doing is to get the glycol evaporator water switch to AUTO and the glycol evaporator steam pressure switched to AUTO. This will get your primary water boiler on the line prior to entry, or at least it'll enable it.

Okay. Tell me what to write in, Ken.

Okay. It's glycol evaporator water to AUTO.

Apollo 8, Houston. Are you there?

Glycol evaporator water switch to AUTO.

Okay. And the second switch is the glycol evaporator steam pressure to AUTO.

Okay.

Okay. That takes care of getting the primary water boiler enabled, and it's my understanding that we were going to make the actual entry with both the primary and the secondary water boilers on the line.

I'm not reading you now, Houston.

Roger. How now?

Loud and clear.

Okay. There's some question from reading the checklist. It is my understanding that both the primary and the secondary water boilers will be ON for the actual entry, and don't find a place in the checklist where it's actually turned on. So we'd like to get confirmation on that, and we'll make sure that we have all the proper switching to put in the checklist.

Okay.

Alright. Still on page E-9 and under step 39 at the bottom of the pyro circuit check, there's a step that says panel 8, all circuit breakers CLOSED except and then it lists five that are printed, one that was pen-and-inked before launch. It says EDS power circuit breakers 3 OPEN, and to be complete, we ought to add the RCS heater circuit breakers. There's two of those, and they should also be OPEN.

Okay.

Alright. The rest of these pages look good; I'm coming over through the graphs. And on page E-11 —

What do you think I am, Rip van Winkle?

Just trying to find out how soundly you really slept. I guess you are not that sleepy.

. . . but not that.

Okay. It's really about 4 hours, Bill.

Okay. Good.

Apollo 8, Houston. Have you got somebody under the left couch, or could you get down to the water control panel?

I can get down there. Frank hasn't quite gone to sleep yet.

Well, what we were thinking about doing was boiling a little out of the secondary evaporator to check it out, just as a component check, something we need to do; but if there's somebody down there in the way, why, we can do that some other time.

Well, if it boils, we are going to know it before—it won't take long to find out it won't boil. There's not a heck of a lot we can do about it, so why don't we wait until someone else wakes up here, Frank wakes up again. How will that be?

Yes. That would be fine. There is something you can do; you can reservice it. And it is kind of a tedious process, and that's the reason why we just want to kind of keep our eyes on it so we will have some idea prior to entry if we can count on having two loops or one. Which kind of leads us into another question we are trying to pin down, two questions, in fact. Number one, we would like to verify that you do plan to use both primary and secondary boilers during the actual entry, and we are also looking for a way of checking the primary boiler to make sure it isn't dried out prior to entry. And that is turning into a little more of a challenge than you might suspect. If you have any thoughts on that subject, we can go over that.

The answer to the question is yes, we do plan to use both. Before we get into the water boiler pump though, CDR would like to take a Seconal also; make sure he can get off to sleep here.

Okay. That's a GO.

Okay. On the water boiler: it's interesting that I get my own—I was going to say anytime you have our mike keyed, I can hear myself talk with about a 2-second time delay. With respect to the primary and secondary boiler checks, I think that is a good idea to make sure we got them both prior to entry and have the reservicing procedures handy.

Roger, Bill. You know the secondary—well, in fact, both reservicing procedures are available in a malfunction book, and sort of the problem with checking out the primary boiler is finding a way to make it boil on the way in.

Yes. Just a second, I got another little chore going here.

Roger. It looks like the only way we'll be able to do it would be to shut off the radiators.

We were looking for a little more docile way to do that.

Roger. That way would be agreeable to me too, a little more docile way, but they shouldn't freeze up if we did it quickly.

Roger. We are talking over several things, you know, like putting the ten-pin valve to MANUAL or partially closing it or some of these different ideas, and something you can think about while you are laying there with nothing else to do.

Yes. We noticed that it had gotten warmer in the cockpit coming back than it was going out. And I remember going out when we manually positioned the ten-pin valve, but we had pretty good control over the glycol evap outlet temperature. So possibly that would be the thing to attack first rather than the radiators.

Okay. We've got the back room boys looking at it.

I guess if we do pick a time, though, we ought to pick a time that if something did go haywire, we could afford to boil . . . the rest of the way in, but still leave us enough time to fix—rig up the evap service if it didn't work.

That's affirm, and we're factoring in things like trajectory considerations and all that sort of thing, too.

Right. I think that the second derivative of the water boiler versus time plot will give us the optimum time to do it.

EECOM's copying that.

There's also speculation you have a chart on board that gives that information.

Well, if I don't, I'm sure those guys can ship one up. They've shipped up some other pretty good ones.

It's also been suggested that if you don't have the chart it's on the tape recorder.

Well, if I don't have a chart, I'll put it on the tape recorder.

Okay. I think, unless you guys got some more comments along these lines, maybe we ought to give these guys a chance to get to sleep, and I'll recline here for a while. If you've got something to brief me on, well, go ahead; but I'd like to keep my answers to yes's and no's and whatever else you think you really need.

Okay. Fine, Bill, and I'll check with you like every 30 minutes, just to make sure we still have voice contact.

Okay. I've got some log writing to do and whatnot. So keep an eye on the systems and the gimbal angles, and we'll be all right.

And, Ken, if your EECOM man wants to play the OMNI-switch game, we're on Dog—Bravo at this time, actually on Bravo but also configured for D's—correction, we are on D and also configured for Bravo. If you want to switch, we'll go ahead.

Okay, we'll give that a try, and we are cranking up some Background music for you.

Okay. The last time they did that, it sounded like they were running at the wrong speed on the tape, but we're a little closer now. Maybe it'll be a little better.

Would you also believe Doppler shift?

Might be another way to range.

Probably it was Doppler shift; we're heading back out again,

Looks like we can use your humming for backup ranging in case everything else fails.

Roger.

Apollo 8, Houston. You don't need to answer this transmission, but doctors observe that it looks like your—some of your sensors may be working loose, so you might just kind of push on them and see if they are in place.

That do any good?

Looks like it is one of your sternals, Bill.