Spacelog Apollo 8

Okay. On step 5 on E-11, there's—the first subtitle there is Helmets and Gloves, and the items that follow beneath that are affected by whether you wear suits or come in shirt sleeves, but they do have to be accomplished. And the suit return air valves would actually be OPEN for a shirt-sleeve entry. And you should have a line penciled in of optics power to OFF between an emergency cabin pressure valve and the time when the CMP moves to the couch.

Right.

Okay. And the step shows the tape recorder to REWIND at minus 30. Now that's an onboard step rather than a ground step, just to verify that.

Okay.

Okay. Under step 6, almost at the bottom—in fact, it's three lines from the bottom of step 6—there's a section that says secondary coolant loop evaporator to RESET, and should be a note that that's 58 seconds if you hold it in RESET prior to moving the pump OFF.

That's it; that's in it.

Okay. Okay. The next comment is on page E-13.

Okay. I'm there.

Alright. This is a general comment that refers to any time you're working around P62 or when you're going between P62 and P63, and you should be careful not to call an extended VERB during this time. This is here in the program notes, and it is just a reminder. What will happen if we get into an extended VERB such as an 83 or an 82? We may get hung-up in P62 and have to recycle through it in order to get the 63, and neither of these displays are normally used, and it's just a good practice. And we're just trying to remind you that we don't want to call an extended VERB while we're in P62.

Okay. Neither do we. That's right.

Okay.

Okay. In going through the rest of it, we didn't find any other things to make comments on. You have all the latest corrections in your checklist.

Roger. The main thing, that is to come up with a way to determine that the boiler—water boiler is not dry and make sure that Bill gets it activated at TMS 7.

That is correct, and we will talk to you some more about that next time we catch both you and Bill up.

Ken, this is Frank. I am going to be off the headset for about 5 minutes here.

Okay. Fine. When you come back, I will have a systems rundown for you.

Houston, Apollo 8.

Okay. Loud and clear.

Back with you.

Okay. I've got a few good words for you. The erasable memory has been taken completely apart and looked at, and it looks like it's all okay. Your P01 didn't have any effect. The one thing that might be questionable is if you used a VERB 67 when you get to the NOUN 99 display, you may find that one to be unreliable, and what you're going to get there is the—that's an error display for the W-matrix. And it's something you probably won't be using again anyhow; and if the occasion arises, we can update that one, but it's not a normally used display and everything else, all the operational functions, are good.

Very good.

Okay. As of 114 hours, your batteries—you had battery A with 39.32 amp-hours, battery B had 35.21, and battery C 38.46. Your cryo quantities remaining at SEP were the same we gave you the last time, 180 pounds of oxygen per tank and 11 pounds of hydrogen per tank. At present, the service module RCS, using the computer values for the quantities, you have quad A with 45 percent, Bravo with 50, Charlie with 58, and Delta at 48. What we plan to do with the secondary tanks is to go ahead and turn them on at 37 percent actual, and in the event of lost COMM or something like that, recommend that you use 50 percent onboard gaging as being the time to turn the secondary propellants on. However, as long as we can use our own calculations, why, we might as well leave them tied up. We probably won't get into the secondary propellants prior to entry anyhow.

Roger.

Okay. A couple of items I want to check up on: I'd like to confirm that the hatch Dog will be taken off while you're on the chutes if you can. If not, you're going to do that in the water. Is that affirm?

…

Okay. Now we've got a little better signal. Like to confirm that the hatch clamps on the side hatch will be taken off either on the chutes or in the water, whichever you can get to. Is that affirm?

Roger. That's affirm. As a matter of fact, we didn't even put—didn't even put them on.

Okay. Do you plan to put them on for an entry?

I don't think so. It's held pretty well so far. I don't think—everybody tells me it wouldn't help much anyway.

Okay. And we realize we never did find out what happened to the Mae West. Did you leave it blown up, or did you dump it?

We dumped it.

Okay. Who was the lucky guy?

The same guy that tried to launch us this afternoon again.

Okay. And just as a gee whiz item: you're now a 137 915 out, and you've only accelerated the 4883. You might check to make sure you don't have a speed brake hanging.

Uh-oh.

Those are nominal values.

Roger. 137 000 miles out, huh?

Houston, Apollo 8. Over.

Loud and clear.

Good morning, or good afternoon, or whatever it is. The JOD is back at the CON; CDR went back to bed.

Okay.

Looks like all the junior guys have the midwatch.

I know what you mean. I had a little sleep earlier, so I am pretty well rested and want to make sure Frank gets a good snooze here prior to entry. This might be a good time to try out your background music, and see if you have any better luck.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Okay. I guess we can figure that out for ourselves, can't we?

Yes. Why don't you let me know. I have kind of lost track of time it was when I went to bed. But it was about—I went to sleep about 15 minutes after that and woke up about 10 minutes ago. Good sleep.

Okay. So I see it is now 142 hours.

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.