Glassy Eyed Naked Lunar Zombie
Sure, why not? Watching you flail is kind of entertaining. Btw, you really should be getting some sleep, rather than posting at 0300 on the sub-continent.
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Let's see. They were somewhere along the track of their orbit around the Moon, on the Sea of Tranquility. They weren't sure of where they were within a few nautical miles. That is not "lost"; that is not having a precise position. That's a huge difference.
Since the problem is one of timing, that is launching at the right moment to match orbits with the CSM with the least expenditure of fuel, as long as you're on the same orbital plane as the CSM, it doesn't matter at all where you are. All you need is a good datum using the CSM to figure out the launch window. The single most elegant solution was to use the rendezvous radar and back into the answer.
Please Don't ever speak for me again. They weren't lost as in not knowing where they were. They had a somewhat imprecise location on the Moon. Speaking for myself, as long as consumables weren't critical, taking time to things the right way is the correct answer. That is what is drilled into every pilot's head from the start. And if you're unsure of your position, the worst thing you can do is rush to a solution. That's why Reed was unhappy, in fact; before going with the radar solution, his worst case scenario was to burn a lot of fuel to match orbits, which he had to consider as a real possibility.
No, find your position relative to the other spacecraft and you can execute an economical rendezvous. As for cramped? Spend some time with me in IMC on a bumpy night in a Cessna 172. I'll show you cramped.
It was real. As for your existence, I'm not so sure...
Well maybe you don't think the astronauts are uncertain with regard to their pretended location SUSpilot, but reading that Apollo 11 script tells a different tale indeed. The astronauts themselves say they didn't know where they were, and I have pointed out numerous times, the launch FIDO H. David Reed indicated the degree of confusion in this regard was quite significant. If he was worried, which he was, it was IMPORTANT!
Parked somewhere on the make believe lunar surface were boy scouts Neil Armstrong and Fuzzy Buzzy Aldrin. Let's see what the boys themselves had to say about the situation. First ol' Mike, from everyone's favorite space pulp page turner, CARRYING THE FIRE;
"Of course the ground can take its measurements as well, but it really has no way of judging where the LM came down, except by comparing Neil and Buzz's description of their surrounding terrain (lurain?) with the rather crude maps which Houston has."
Doesn't sound like ol' Mike thinks the boys in Houston have a good way of "judging where the LM came down".
What Mike is telling us here SUSpilot, is that Neil gives this in no way credible jivey rap about what the landing site area looks like, and then based on that in no way credible jivey rap and with dedicated study of the "crude maps" to which Michael Collins referred, the Apollo Team pretends to be able to actually find where the Eagle never landed, right there, where it never was on the surface of the moon.
Here are Neil's descriptions of the landing site. From the Voice Transcript;
TIME: 04:07:03:55
"Armstrong: The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain cratered with a fairly large number of craters of the five-to-fifty-foot variety, and some ridges that are small, twenty, thirty feet high, I would guess, and literally thousands of little, one-and two-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.
04:07:04:54 CapCom: Roger, Tranquility. We copy, over.
04:07:05:02 Collins: Sounds like it looks a lot better than it did yesterday at that very low Sun angle. It looked rough as a [corn] cob then.
04:07:05:11 Armstrong: It really was rough, Mike. Over the targeted landing area, it was extremely rough, cratered, and large numbers of rocks that were probably—some, many—larger than five or ten feet in size……"
And later during the simulated EVA;
Time: 05 03 10 32
"CDR: And, Houston, Tranquility Base is going to give you a few comments with regard to the geology question of last night. We are landed in a relatively smooth crater field of elongate
secondary - circular secondary craters, most of which have rims irrespective of their - raised rims irrespective of their size. That's not universally true. There are - There are a few of the smaller craters around which do not have a discernable rim. The ground mass throughout the area is a very fine sand to a silt. I'd say the thing that would be most like it on Earth is powdered graphite. Immersed in this ground mass are a wide variety of rock shapes, sizes, textures, rounded and angular, many with varying consistencies. As I said, I've seen plain - what looked to be plain basalt and vesicular basalt. Others with no crystals, some with small white phenocrysts, maybe one to less than 5 percent. And the bould - we are in a boulder field where the boulders range generally up to 2 feet with a few larger than that. Now, some of the boulders are lying on top of the surface, some are partially exposed, and some are just barely exposed. And in our traverse around on the surface and particularly working with the scoop, we've run into boulders below the surface - it was probably buried under several inches of the ground mass.
CC Tranquility, Houston. Roger. Very fine description.
CDR I suspect this boulder field may have some of its (TRANQ) origin with this large sharp-edged rocky rim crater that we passed over at final descent. Now yesterday I said that was about the size of a football field, and I have to admit it was a little - little hard to measure coming in. But I thought that it might just fit in the Astro- dome as we came by it. And the rocks in the vicinity of the - of this rocky rim crater are much larger than these in this area. Some are 10 feet or so and perhaps bigger, and they are very thickly populated out to about one crater diameter beyond the crater rim. Beyond that, there is some diminishing, and even out in this area the blocks seem to run out in rows with irregular patterns, and then there are paths between them where there are considerably less surface evidence of hard rocks. Over."
Too bad it's not literally "over", living with this nonsense for as long as we have had to.
So SUSpilot, we're expected to believe that after map specialists and so forth hear that utter nonsense from Armstrong, they can look at these images and figure out where the LM landed within 200 meters? The whole thing is ever so ludicrous. Here's one of their maps, an "enlarged" image no less of the landing site.
And with Armstrong's descriptions as above, they are going to find the Eagle simulator on the simulated lunar surface? I don't think so.
Neil for one ain't buying it either. From the authorized biography FIRST MAN, subtitled, "How in the World Did I Ever Let those Jerks Talk Me Into this Super Dumb Hairbrained Scheme?", here's our commander;
"In retrospect, two items may seem curious about Apollo 11’s technical situation immediately following touchdown. First, no one in NASA knew exactly where Eagle had landed. “One would have thought that their radar would have been good enough to pinpoint us more quickly than it did,” remarks Neil. When a spacecraft was in a trajectory or when it was in orbit, with all the optical and radar measurements being taken, both the ground and the crew had a pretty good idea of where the flight vehicle was, but it was a different problem when the object was sitting in one spot and all that anyone was getting was the same single measurement over and over again. “There was an uncertainty in that that was bigger than I would have guessed it would have been.
” 04:07:02:03 Armstrong: Houston, the guys that said we wouldn’t be able to tell precisely where we are, are the winners today. We were a little busy worrying about our program alarms and things like that in the part of the descent where we would normally be picking out our landing spot, and aside from a good look at several of the craters we came over in the final descent, I haven’t been able to pick out the things on the horizon as a reference as yet.
Up in Columbia, which was passing over Tranquility Base at a height of sixty miles, Collins peered hard through his sextant trying to spot the LM. Over his radio he had heard the whole thing and rightfully felt he shared in the achievement. “Tranquility Base, it sure sounded great from up here,” Mike had radioed to his mates. “You guys did a fantastic job.” “Thank you,” Neil replied warmly. “Just keep that orbiting base ready for us up there.” “Will do,” answered Collins. With his right eye straining through his eyepiece, Mike had tracked them as long as he could during their descent until they disappeared from his view as a “miniscule dot” about 115 miles from the landing site. Now even with the ground sending up tracking numbers for him to input on his DSKY (display-keyboard) unit so that the command module’s guidance computer could accurately point his sextant, it frustrated Mike that he could not see them.
04:07:07:13 Collins: [To Houston] Do you have any idea whether they landed left or right of centerline? Just a little bit long—is that all you know?
04:07:07:19 CapCom (Charlie Duke): Apparently that’s about all we can tell, over. The limited information provided by Houston was no help to Mike: “I can’t see a darn thing but craters. Big craters, little craters, rounded ones, sharp ones, but no LM anywhere among them. The sextant is a powerful optical instrument, magnifying everything it seestwenty-eight times, but the price it pays for this magnification is a very narrow field of view, only 1.8 degrees wide (corresponding to 0.6 miles on the ground), so that it is almost like looking down a gun barrel. The LM might be close by, and I swing the sextant back and forth in a frantic search for it, but in the very limited time I have, it is possible to study only a square mile or so of lunar surface, and this time it is the wrong mile.”
Collins never did locate Eagle down on the surface, not on any of his passes, which was more of a concern to Mike than it was to anyone else. The main concern at Mission Control over the LM’s exact location did not come from the geologists—they were happy enough that Apollo 11 had landed anywhere in the mare. “They just wanted us to get out there and get some stuff!” Yet the question of where exactly the LM had come down did bother Mission Control, as Neil explains: “A lot of people were interested in where we landed, particularly those people who were involved in the descent guidance trajectory controls. After all, in later flights, we were going to try to go to specific spots on the surface and we needed to get all the information we could regarding methods that might help precision. However, not knowing exactly where the LM had landed did not affect what we did very much. Nor did people on the ground think that this was a disastrous occurrence. But the fact was, they didn’t know exactly where we were and they did want to know if they could.”
Hansen, James R. (2005-10-18). First Man (pp. 480-482). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
I am that way. just like the space program folks. I tend to like to know where I am if I can.
And as Pointed out previously, even a day after the simulated landing, Armstrong and Houston still hadn't figured out where Neil had pretended to land. The Voice Transcript if you will;
TIME: 06 07 33 59
CC: Roger. For 64 thousand dollars, we're still trying to work out the location of your landing site, Tranquility Base. We think it is located on LAM-2 chart at Juliet 0.5 and 7.8. Do you still have those charts on board? Over.
CDR: Yes. Stand by one. They're packed.
CC: Roger. You may not have to unpack it. The position which I just gave you is slightly west of West Crater. I guess it's about two-tenths of a kilometer west of it, and we were wondering if Neil or Buzz had observed any additional land- marks during descent, lunar stay, or ascent which would confirm or disprove this. One thing that we're wondering about is that if you were at this
position, you would have seen the Cat's Paw
during ascent just up to the north of your track. Over.
CDR: We were looking for the Cat's Paw, too, thinking we were probably downrange, beyond the Big V. But I think that it's likely that that might have been West Crater that we went across in landing, but - Stand by.
CDR: We're hoping, Bruce, that our 16-mm film was working at that point in descent, and we'll be able to confirm our touchdown position. We thought that during ascent we might be able to pick up some recognizable objects close to the landing site, and we did see a number of small craters, and crater rows, and things like that, which we may be able to pick out after the fact, but we haven't been able to yet.
So ol' Neil is hoping to put things together "after the fact".
My favorite line of Dr. Simulated Rendezvous, Fuzzy Buzzy, from the ALSJ, here's Fuzzy/Aldrin;
"Somewhere, we had a state vector (three-axis position and velocity) update because of the tracking data that Houston got once we came around. But, how that happened and whether we were aware of it, I don't remember. I know that a lot of people got credit for developing the tracking filter that allowed them to do that. That neat capability contributed to the accuracy of our touchdown, even though nobody knew where we were.
(exactly)"
No one knew where Fuzzy Buzzy was, $130,000,000,000 and we couldn't provide Fuzzy with a compass, nor a flush toilet. And you'd think with a full fledged space strength vacuum right outside the front door, and all those smart technical people, engineers and what not, that the flush toilet part at least would have been easy. This whole thing has gotta' be fake. Oh well.........., back to business.....
I wanted to remove the word "exactly" from the quote altogether, but since Fuzzy was probably the one that told the editor to put it in there after he had told the truth to begin with by saying nobody knew where the Eagle simulator was located, thought it fair to include it as a parenthetical Fuzzy Buzzy afterthought.
What I don't understand about all this is Armstrong's nonchalance. Doesn't the guy care about where he is, his predicament? Think about it. Lost on the surface of the moon, in cramped quarters with Fuzzy Buzzy. Buzzy's funny big sweaty head, and those glassy eyes, breathing heavy into that bubble, taking off his space suit right next to you preparing to do you know what. At any moment the guy could turn into a zombie, and then what!!!!?????? One would think Armstrong more motivated to be sure he knew where he was so that he could get the heck out. Fuzzy Buzzy breathing heavy down your backside?!!!! Yikes!!!!! Get me outta' there!!!
Some of my favorite "Lost Astronaut" Quotes;
"While Houston and Eagle prepared for liftoff, feeding coordinates into the computer that would, with luck, achieve a smooth rendezvous with Columbia on its twenty-fifth lunar orbit, there were two nagging worries. One was a slightly embarrassing technical failure: Houston wasn't precisely sure where Tranquility Base was located on the lunar surface. Ever since touchdown, NASA's geological survey team had been scrambling to unravel just how far away from the planned landing site Neil had gone while scrambling to avoid the deadly escarpment.
The United States Geological Survey in Houston and the Center for Astrogeology in Flagstaff, Arizona, desperately studying maps and analyzing information available, had finally come to a consensus. But it was just an educated guess. There had been no provision for an aborted site and a zig-zag, last-second dash to find a safe landing zone. The one hope for a completely accurate fix was the laser retro-reflector experiment Aldrin and Armstrong had assembled a few hours prior. But, thus far Houston hadn't been able to locate the reflector with the laser.
Less than an hour prior to scheduled liftoff, Capsule Communicator Ron Evans apologetically briefed the astronauts on the situation: "We have fairly high confidence that we know the position of the Eagle. However, it is possible that we may have a change of plans. But in the worst case it could be up to 30 feet per second, and of course we don't expect that at all". Meaning: If they were far off Eagle's location, a successful rendezvous would require some quick and accurate throttling up or down to thread the needle properly tricky work at 5,000 miles per hour. Of course, it was for such contingencies that Buzz Aldrin, a man with a genius for astrophysics, who held a Ph.D. in space rendezvous from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Neil Armstrong, one of the coolest hands in the history of aviation, were chosen for the job. NASA believed the Apollo 11 team could do it, and so did they. In the end, NASA's failure to ascertain the exact location of Tranquility Base had no great impact on the docking of Columbia and Eagle, which was fortunate, because it wasn't until 5 days after splash-down on July 29, when film taken by the astronauts was processed and studied, that an official determination was reached."
Leon Wagner's biography of Neil Armstrong,* ONE GIANT LEAP.
"In the meantime we were monitoring the signal sent back by the passive seismic experiment and attempting to find the LRRR that the astronauts had left behind. This latter operation was not as easy as we expected, since the exact location of the landing site was not immediately known. Mike Collins had attempted unsuccessfully to locate the LM from orbit using the command module sextant. After analyzing the flight data and the returned photographs, we passed our best estimate to the LRRR PIs, and the LRRR was found on August 1, 1969 by the Lick Observatory in California."
Apollo experimental scientist Donald Beattie, book, TAKING SCIENCE TO THE MOOON.
"But no one, not Armstrong and Aldrin nor anyone in mission control, knew just where Eagle was. The location would be a helpful, though not essential, piece of information for this computer to have during tomorrow's rendezvous. It fell to Collins to try to find the LM on the surface, using the command modules 28 power sextant.…………
Each time he went around from the far side, mission control had a new set of coordinates for him to try, but on his map, one guess was as much as 10 grid-squares away from the last. It didn't take long to realize no one had a handle on the problem. His search continued fruitlessly for the rest of his 22 solo hours."
Andrew Chaikin, book, A MAN ON THE MOON.
"They wondered about their exact location, glancing out the windows and describing what they saw to give flight control and Collins some clues to aid in the search. While waiting to be found, Armstrong relayed all that he could remember about the landing. They knew they were at least six kilometers beyond the target point, although still within the planned ellipse.
While his crewmates had been active on the surface, Collins had been busy in the command module. There was not much navigating to do, so he took pictures and looked out the window, trying to find the lunar module. He never found it; neither did flight control. There was just too much real estate down there to be able to search the whole area properly. Collins divided the part of the moon he was flying over into segments, but he had no better luck. Armstrong and Aldrin had taken the 26-power monocular with them, but Collins did not think it would have helped much, anyway. He did complain that all this searching cut into the time he needed for taking pictures on each circuit, but he was philosophical about it. As he said, “When the LM is on the surface, the command module should act like a good child and be seen and not heard.”
Brooks, Courtney (2008). Book, CHARIOTS FOR APOLLO
"For the next couple of orbits, I tried very hard to spot Eagle through my sextant, but I was unable to find it. The problem was, no one knew exactly where Neil had landed, and I didn't know which way to look for them. Oh, I knew approximately where they were, but the sextant had a narrow field of view, like looking down a riffle barrel, and I need to know exactly which way to point it."
Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot/"NAVIGATOR!", from FLYING TO THE MOON, AN ASTRONAUT'S STORY.
You are entitled to your opinion SUSpilot, but looks like Mike, Neil and the big sweaty headed, glassy eyed, heavy breathing, naked zombie disagree with you.
