Your red ink hypothetical is a non-starter Jay......
So you
don't know the answer and refuse even to guess. Why am I not surprised?
Were any of this real, if the Eagle had been out-of-plane...
Out-of-plane
by how much? The amount of error matters, Patrick. It determines what the crew will do about it. They will do different things depending on the magnitude of the error.
The out-of-plane correction was to be done during the "Concentric Sequence Initiate(CSI)" burn...
For that burn, only if the error at the node amounted to 5 fps or more. Did it? Do you know? Several people have asked you this, and you say the question is irrelevant. How can that question be irrelevant?
The documents you claim to have read and which you encourage others to read say that small errors are
not corrected by an explicitly designated burn, but by
ad hoc incorporation into other burns. In fact, if the dispersion is small enough, it's simply handled for free in the radar-guided terminal maneuvers.
This is the whole point of my argument. They never did that.
And my whole rebuttal is that they didn't need to, contrary to what you naively think. I and others have been trying in vain to get you to substantiate the need. But all we get instead is "OMG!! Out of plane!"
You don't make a final command module approach with the LM to "find yourself" 600-900 feet out of plane Jay.
That's your uninformed opinion. We experts beg to differ.
How ludicrous and absurd its that?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!????!!!???!!!
A plethora of punctuation does not mask the fact that, as usual, you are simply begging the question. Heaping undeserved scorn upon the judgment of skilled practitioners doesn't make it go away.
It's not at all ludicrous or absurd to people who know how spacecraft actually work. What's ludicrous and absurd is your insistence that a 600-foot crosstrack error is a "rendezvous disaster."
The "astronauts" claimed that their ship Eagle was in plane. They state that clearly in many places in the official Apollo 11 Mission narrative.
Except for where they state otherwise. Unlike you, they know what the tolerance is for out-of-plane conditions.
You fancy yourself as some kind of engineer. I've tried to instill upon you the idea of a tolerance, and you simply don't get it. And until you do, you'll continue to be puzzled by these documents.
They state that to be the case in multiple official documents. You know that to be true Jay. Do not deny that FACT!
More cherry-picking. The fact is indeed there, it just doesn't mean what you think it means and it's not the only relevant fact. You have no practical experience with orbits and a long history of misunderstanding how they work. Don't deny
those facts. Might it just be that all the world's experts are right and Patrick is wrong?
If I can make an aside here, your argument style lately falls into one of the classic pseudoscience patterns. Arguments typically incorporate documentary fact, reasonable assumption, basic background understanding, and logical inferences or deductions. All those must be valid in order for the argument to have any strength. Like most pseudoscientists, you emphasize one leg of the argument, buttress its strength, and ignore the weakness of the others.
Yes, the flight documents say both that an out-of-plane condition would be corrected in a particular way, and also that this was not done for Apollo 11. You think this one leg alone establishes your case.
The next step of this faulty pattern is to insist that your critics must rebut only that "strong" leg of the argument, and only in the way you specify.
Here you suggest that the only way your claim can be refuted is to show in the flight documents were the plane-adjustment maneuver was performed. In the real world there is no such ruling
in limine. You don't get to restrict your opponents to a rebuttal you think you'll survive. You get to claim victory only when you survive all the rebuttals, especially those against the weakest parts of your claim.
Where does your argument fail? Not in the factual claims made in the documents. It fails first by your assumption that significant INS dispersion was inevitable. It fails next by your colossal lack of background knowledge. You don't know how much error was involved and therefore how much correction would be necessary. You don't know how orbits work. You don't know how rendezvous works. It fails finally by your inexpert judgment of what should and should not have been done. These are as much a part of your argument as any document.
When people accuse you of not providing evidence, they're saying that you haven't substantiated your assumptions regarding navigation error, that you haven't shown that orbital rendezvous behaves the way you say it should, that you haven't shown that the significance of the error mandated the explicit maneuver, and that you have the ability to judge propriety in orbital operations. They don't want you to wave the NASA flight documents as if they alone were your argument; they want you to show that you understand those documents and can compute the implied values.
If they had been out-of-plane, were any of this real, the plane would have been appropriately altered at the time of the CSI burn.
And the plane
was appropriately altered, with all the other minor dispersions that occurred during the ascent. You wrongly think that such a small dispersion had to be corrected by that explicit burn you read about in a document somewhere.
Please try to understand that for some of us, orbital mechanics is not something we just read about. It's something we do.
Just read the reports Jay. Read the Apollo 11 Press Kit say. It is all spelled out plane as a genuine lunar day.
Patrick, listen to yourself.
I do this for a living.
I have successfully completed several adjudicated college level courses in orbital mechanics and spacecraft dynamics. For many years I have designed, supplied, built, and troubleshot
actual spacecraft control systems, among other things, as a professional engineer.
Not only have I read all the documents you specify and more, I actually understand them. When I'm telling you that you're completely misunderstanding this problem, that is not mere sophistry or idle chit-chat.
You have no clue what you're talking about.
Your hypothetical Jay, with all due respect is pathetic, not to mention ridiculous.....
Why so indignant? Why do you need to mash my question into the ground with your boot heel? Is it really
that vital to your interests for everyone to think I'm out of line for asking you to demonstrate just a little basic competence in orbital mechanics?
I asked you a child's-play question. And instead of answering it, you went off at length about how you shouldn't
have to answer it. That's what people do when they don't know the answer, but they want everyone to think that they do.
My "hypothetical" problem is actually just an exploration of the consequences of your hypothetical problem -- the one where IMU alignment error results in a 0.16x-degree error in the LM's notion of the inclination of its ascent orbit.
If you had known the answer to my question, it would have suggested an easy solution to the little straw-man dilemma you've manufactured. And it would also show the readers that you actually know what it means to be out-of-plane. All I'm asking you to do is to continue to think about
your proposed dilemma.
And anyone who has read even the first couple of chapters of an orbital mechanics text should be able to answer that question instantly
without even thinking. In other words, it was a Very Easy Question.
The answer is, of course,
no -- the spacecraft will
not still be laterally displaced 600 feet after 30 minutes. 30 minutes is one-quarter of the spacecraft's orbit. If the orbit is roughly circular and you begin counting an at anti-node, then after a quarter rev you'll be at a node.
The node is the point in the orbit where it crosses the reference plane -- in your scenario, where the LM's orbit crosses the CSM's orbit. If left alone, after another 30 minutes the LM will be 600 feet on the other side of the CSM. And after yet another 30 minutes, it will be at the opposite node, and again roughly coincident with the CSM.
So yes, even without a single hand on the controls the LM will close that 600-foot distance in your scenario
by itself over 30 minutes, at a leisurely average velocity of 4 inches per second. (That's barely fast enough to activate the docking capture latches.)
And in your scenario, when the LM got close enough, this is
literally all that Armstrong would have to do in order to correct the out-of-plane condition:
hold his joystick to one side for 0.7 second.
That's it. That's
literally all it would take to correct your "rendezvous disaster."
The component of the CSI maneuver you're babbling about is for 5 fps or more. Not 0.3 fps. Yes, Patrick, the "huge huge huge huge huge" error you're handwaving about in your dispersion is fully an order of magnitude smaller that the minimum error to even consider at CSI.
And actually Armstrong could have applied that delta-v at any time.
But, you say, Apollo 11's LM was "in a different orbit." Yes. And when Armstrong wiggles the THC and the RCS jets fire, the LM shifts into a different orbit. Every time he translates, the numbers that describe the LM's orbit change. The orbit changes. If he translates toward the CSM laterally, what it looks like from his point of view is that he simply moves toward the CSM. In orbital mechanics terms, he has changed the inclination of his own orbit and shifted the node closer to his current position.
I can describe the motion of a car driving down the road in terms of velocity states and reference frames. And if he applies the brakes, I can express the change in terms of those formalisms. Or I can say, "He stopped at the stoplight." Both explanations are true. You don't get to deny the simply observed effect by appeals to sophistry such as, "No, he was in a velocity state according to this reference frame."
You say "The LM was in a different orbit" as if that somehow precludes orbital maneuvering. An orbit is not a magical, immutable thing. It's simply a formalism for describing movement. Newton still applies, action produces reaction, and the numbers in the formalism change to reflect it.
) It's a simple question based on one of the most basic properties of orbits, with a clearly and easily determined right answer.