Mattingly: The Launch and Entry Checklist were super, you canÂ’t say anything about those things. They work fine. TheyÂ’ve been proven over many flights. I sure wouldnÂ’t change any of that now.
Cue Cards; I had no complaints about the cue cards, but I have some complaints about the system that gets them done. I didnÂ’t really care what the cue cards said, as long as they were basically correct. I always wanted to look up and see the same words. You donÂ’t use it as an item that you go through and check each item like you read it out like you would a checklist. But rather, itÂ’s a reminder, and your eyes need to be able to get used to looking in the same location for the same cue. But our system somehow gets wrapped around the axle of correcting spelling, correcting typographical errors, introducing typographical errors and reprinting them. We reprinted a whole new set of cards because they changed a Velcro patch on the back of one. Then you got to go through and proofread the whole thing all over again. Finally, a week before the flight we got a whole new set of cue cards, and they didnÂ’t fit the spacecraft. TheyÂ’re like 10 percent larger than theyÂ’re supposed to be. Those are big things. They sure are a terrible nuisance when you ought to be able to put that stuff to bed 3 months before flight. I feel rather personal about those cue cards. Those are mine, and anyone else that wants to deal with the checklist can. But I donÂ’t want them to put it in words that mean more to them on the cue card. I want it in my words.
Duke: You actually had somebody change the words on your cue card.
Mattingly: Yep.
Duke: ThatÂ’s amazing.
Mattingly: They improved it. And I canÂ’t argue that it wasnÂ’t in fact a clear statement. But you know thatÂ’s not the purpose of those things.
Young: ItÂ’s just a reminder for the individual crewmen of the things that get him through the operation.
Mattingly: On the other hand, I donÂ’t mean to be bad mouthing the people that are doing the job because I think they really have gone way out. This guy Wes Jones really puts his heart and soul into doing that stuff. One of the problems there is that Wes Jones lives in Houston and the crew lives at the Cape. Any time you want to deal with something, you go through a rather lengthy chain of command and channels to communicate with each other. ThatÂ’s kind of difficult. Although I think everybody in the loop recognizes it and works real hard at trying to help. Star Charts were fine. I thought they did a good job on those things.
GNC Checklist was good.
Systems Checklist was good. The data was all fine.
The Malfunction Procedures, we didnÂ’t do much with those things this time. I had no problems with them.
Time Line Items was a real problem. LetÂ’s first talk about the mechanical aspects of the Flight Plan. We ended up with two volumes. I asked them to print it on heavy paper so we wouldnÂ’t tear it up while we were handling it. And I think that was a good thing to do. But it also ends up that these two volumes are so large that you canÂ’t put a clip around it. When you get in the cockpit, the thing is forever floating closed. You really ought to be able to put one of those little clips on it, even if it means breaking it down into three volumes instead of two or something, so that it stays a more manageable size.
Young: Also, from a standpoint of being able to do simultaneous operations of logging, like medical data and food data, there ought to be separate books.
Mattingly: I think we probably could have helped ourselves in real time if weÂ’d have gone through and just pulled out those kind of things like the menus and the medical logs and taped them together somewhere. I didnÂ’t think about it at the time. The Flight Plan is always in demand. Another thing about the Flight Plan is the timeliness of it and the thoroughness that you use in preparing it. It turns out that we had a lot of problems. I really never had the feeling right up the launch that I had reviewed the Flight Plan to the level of detail that I think the Flight Plan should be understood. The primary cause was the fact that we changed our launch month by one month at a time when we had a Preliminary Flight Plan and it was being reviewed and screened. Then we changed and we had to wait while the Flight Plan changed. Then when it finally did come, we had only one version of the Flight Plan and that was final. That was 6 weeks before launch. But it was really a preliminary, and we were changing it as rapidly as we could. Again, it was through no oneÂ’s carelessness or anything else, it was just that you canÂ’t do everything at once. And these guys were really doing all they could to catch things that go through and review, make sure they hadnÂ’t left something out, correct the numbers in it, but we never got finished. We were still catching those things launch week. On 13, I launched with a Flight Plan that I knew, and I think thatÂ’s the way you ought to fly. I think IÂ’m paid to know that Flight Plan, and I never was able to get to that level of proficiency with this Flight Plan.
Young: Some of the real time changes were corrections, in the Flight Plan. I knew that.
Mattingly: I donÂ’t think so. I donÂ’t know how you handle that problem, except that the people that decide when to slip launches should be aware of what theyÂ’re doing. YouÂ’re never going to do something thatÂ’s unsafe, because of this problem. WeÂ’re going to do the big things - LOIs, TEIs, and landings, and that sort of stuff. ItÂ’s a much more difficult problem than the landing, because you can change the calendar day of landing, but the EVAs remain the same. The only thing you have to worry about is Sun angle and the approach azimuths. But then, we come into what really drives the Flight Plan and why we had to re-juggle it so much. And itÂ’s all the inertially-related items in here. I think dim-light or low- light-level photography and photography of celestial features is the thing that really is the tail wagging the dog. Because, those things change as the Moon moves around in the sky. You might have a sequence of - say a gegenschein sequence on a Rev 12 and that would be followed by a near-terminator photographic strip of the Moon at the next sunrise and so forth. Then you come up and the first thing you have to do is move the low-light-level photography to a different rev because of the inertial angles were different and the Moon occults on that rev. So you have to put that photograph on a Rev 60 now. So, you take whatever was on Rev 60 and it moves back, and the first thing you know youÂ’ve got a completely out-of-control situation, where everything is juggling and you start all over again to fit this Flight Plan together.
Young: Yes. I still think if Tom and those guys had done all that work and got the Flight Plan in shape, then these kinds of changes, boy, are...
Mattingly: These problems were caused before flight, and I give those guys a great big "atta boy”, for ever settling it down.
Young: Okay. But they got it settled down, and then in flight we did something else.
Mattingly: And then we turned right around and threw it all away.
Young: Yes, and I think thatÂ’s unforgivable.
Mattingly: And I think thatÂ’s unforgivable.
Young: Particularly after KenÂ’s run through all the many hours of checking the stuff out. We found situations where the spacecraft is going to fly through gimbal lock and not be at the attitude at the time the pictures are suppose to be taken. In real time, nobodyÂ’s running through all these changes that are coming up on the simulator somewhere and making sure that they have sufficient time to go.
Mattingly: Think you should fly this kind of a Flight Plan in one or two ways. Either you should not put the density of data collection in it that we have, which may be a valid thing to consider, or, when you miss something, youÂ’ve got to work on the principle that IÂ’ve missed something and thatÂ’s it and IÂ’m going to stay right on the pre-planned time line and do what I know I can do, instead of trying to think originally. Because thatÂ’s where you can really get yourself in a bind. The other problem with the Flight Plan, and it relates to the experiments in the relationship to the Flight Plan, is the flight planners live in a force in Houston and. the flight crew, again, lives out at the Cape. The communications link just isnÂ’t adequate, and I donÂ’t know what you do about it except I think the flight planners ought to live where the flight crew does.
Slayton: They do. They are down here full time, and thereÂ’s no other function to perform.
Mattingly: But the guys that are writing the Flight Plan are seven strong and they live here. ThereÂ’s only one guy who runs back and forth.
Slayton: Whether you got seven down there or one wouldnÂ’t make any difference. ThatÂ’s the only one youÂ’d ever see anyway. Because thatÂ’s the way the systemÂ’s set up. We donÂ’t want a whole gang down there.
Mattingly: I guess I never knew what was ever going on. I kept getting a new set of changes, and I felt like I was always out of the loop. It ended up that I wrote a lot of crew notes and changes on my own that, at first glance, I think it looks pretty unprofessional. But I think itÂ’s the only way because I put in little notes like, "If you donÂ’t start this maneuver by here, you wonÂ’t get there in time and youÂ’d better get the map out for the next thing at this point, because youÂ’re not going to get another change." Or, where we find a sequence where it just wasnÂ’t getting performed properly if you did it this way and we had to go through and change it based on trying it in the simulator. By the time you go fly these things and look at all the things and you run around and you ask questions, there never was a guy at the Cape that had a good enough handle on it that you could just drop the question n his lap. Generally I was the only guy that really understood the problem, and I had to go back and find the guys in Houston that I could talk to, because they were the only ones that could fix it.
Slayton: That ainÂ’t right; something is wrong here.
Mattingly: YouÂ’re right, boss.
Slayton: Let me find out what the problem is. You wouldnÂ’t have had that problem either if you would have said something, because here again, that was something we could have fixed in 10 minutes flat.
Mattingly: IÂ’m not sure it can be fixed.
Slayton: Sure it can be.
Mattingly: Tommy and his guys just bent over backwards to really do a super job on this thing, and I feel like they really did. I think they were working from behind and we all were. But, somewhere in there the communication link was driving us up a wall.
Slayton: Something wrong; shouldnÂ’t have been.
Mattingly: We just didnÂ’t stay in time together. I would end up reviewing three times, I read a Flight Plan cover to cover only to find out I had just read the wrong Flight Plan.
Slayton: But, who was changing them?
Mattingly: ItÂ’s in a constant flux. And I donÂ’t think thereÂ’s any way to stop that.
Slayton: There sure is. As late as we got into this new launchment, I donÂ’t know that there would.
Mattingly: But somewhere thereÂ’s gotta be a freeze, even if itÂ’s wrong. It seems to me that a month before launch, that Flight Plan ought to be frozen.
Slayton: It was frozen in another Crew Procedures meeting after that.
Mattingly: There sure were a lot of changes.
Slayton: ThatÂ’s what IÂ’m trying to find out. WhoÂ’s generating them? Where are they coming from?
Mattingly: Well, IÂ’ll tell you, maybe I donÂ’t even understand the whole problem. A lot of the things were things we did after we saw what we had. We had to change it to make it work, and we didnÂ’t see those things. I donÂ’t think I could have reviewed the Flight Plan any sooner. I donÂ’t think it was a matter that we didnÂ’t get hot on the job. But as a result of flying them in the simulator and flying a page, weÂ’ve learned that there were things that really wasnÂ’t the way to do it. And the guys back here were trying to do that, but they donÂ’t have unlimited access to the machine time either, and we just never really got ourselves in sync. And I was really concerned that I didnÂ’t have a good enough handle on what was here to make sure that I could get that thing executed. As it turned out maybe some of my fears were uncommon. We did make it, but I thought it was a real struggle and I thought I was putting more into it than you really ought to have to. The Experiments Checklist falls into the same category, because itÂ’s subject to the same problems. Like poor old Bob Nute and the guys that put that thing together were really stuck in the middle, because they were given ding-a-ling procedures without the authority to go in and change them. They were told, hereÂ’s what you should accomplish and IÂ’d get the thing. TheyÂ’d write it down for me; IÂ’d get it and IÂ’d go try to fly it in the simulator, and it wouldnÂ’t work and IÂ’d come back and, say, "Why are we doing this?" "Why donÂ’t we do something else?" And then theyÂ’d run back and see if they could chase it down to this communication link, with me at the Cape, talking to these guys on the telephone in Houston. Then theyÂ’d have to go run around and, boy, we just got the Experiments Checklist - what - 2 weeks before flight. But when we got it the last time it was rough. I asked them not to print it until it had been proofread and flown. There was no sense in that, we were just going to have to print it over. So, itÂ’s not their fault that the thing came out late. Because I asked them not to do it until we could print something that was right. There ought to be some guy who works out all the details on our Experiments Checklist. Then, if we run something in the simulator and find that this didnÂ’t work very well, then IÂ’d try to give it to one of the guys down there to take care of. But by the time I explained all the experiment, went and sat down and take anybody that didnÂ’t know what it was about, and explained it to them, hell, I could have saved a lot of time and finally I gave up and I just make the call myself because it took less time than trying to explain it to a third party, who would then go chase it down. And again the guy that does that ought to be living in close proximity to you. And it just got very cumbersome and I donÂ’t know if I really have an answer. I want to give Maurice Walters and Ron Weitenhagen the biggest "atta boy" of the mission. When they got down and got into the loop, they kept that Flight Plan up to date the last couple of weeks there on a minute-by-minute basis. And I finally got some confidence that I knew what the real Flight Plan looked like. We were verifying one Flight Plan in the simulator although they knew it wasnÂ’t quite the one we would fly with. But they really jumped on that problem and that problem disappeared in the last couple of weeks. They really were a help.
Rescue Book, that was a good job. Gus Wallace put that together in good shape. Trained me in the CMPs. IÂ’m perfectly happy, I think thatÂ’s a good job.
Duke: Contingency Checklist - We used it for the docked deactivation stage. The appropriate pages were clear even though some things could change. It was a good checklist.
Young: The Lunar surface checklist though was excellent.
Duke: Outstanding.
Young: Cuff checklist.
Duke: Bob and Roger did a great job on that one. It was only a couple of weeks before flight that we finally got the flight ones printed up. We did get a chance to review it leisurely and use it, and it was excellent.
Young: The Cue Cards and Star Charts, I think were excellent. We did need the star charts.
Duke: Early in the program we went back to the Apollo l1 cue cards because nobody could understand what Dave had on his - at least I personally couldnÂ’t.
Young: TheyÂ’re good, but he had a lot of stuff on there where weÂ’d have trouble getting at.
Duke: They were too busy, I guess is what it was. But anyway, after that iteration I donÂ’t think anything changed on those cue cards.
Young: Systems Activation Checklist, great.
Duke: That was super.
Young: Subsystem items - G&N dictionary was good. Systems data was good. Charlie was in there and. found out right away what the double reg. failure on the RCS was.
Duke: Malfunction procedures were never opened. I thought they were adequate to cover anything. We had a good feel for those.
Young: Time Line Book, excellent. Rendezvous Charts, excellent.
Mattingly: IÂ’m not sure which one of these theyÂ’re referring to but there are four lunar orbit charts, the A, B, C, D. They were very good, couldnÂ’t ask for anything more. One of the things the guys had a hard time with is: they wanted to hold up printing the ground track on the charts, and holding up putting the charts together, until they had all of the visual targets and all of the photo targets to put on them. As a result we got them late. We finally decided to take what data was available and print it. Any further annotation, weÂ’d pen and ink it. I think that was a good thing to do. I only wish we would have done it earlier in the game and gotten the charts out in time to look at them a little earlier. ThatÂ’s an area you ought to just think about - just print the ground track, just a basic ground-track, with nothing else on the map. Get it out early and then do the other stuff on an annotation basis. ItÂ’s hard for the flight planners to get a handle on things like visual and photo targets. YouÂ’d like a set of those things 6 months before launch but the way our program feeds back on past experience I doubt that youÂ’re ever going to get the right ones more than a month or two in advance. It depends on how much study you do and how much time you have to put into it. I think we need to build in that kind of flexibility.
Young: Sun Compass. We knew how to use it but we didnÂ’t have to. You didnÂ’t need it. There were so many familiar landmarks around there, we never had any doubt about where we were. Even if the nay hadnÂ’t worked, I donÂ’t think we would have needed the navigation system at our site.
Lunar Orbit Charts. I think thatÂ’s what I really just talked about.
Young: LM Landing Site Monitor Chart. We didnÂ’t use that. I think you only use that in case you donÂ’t know where youÂ’re landing. I donÂ’t think we had that problem.
Ascent Monitor Chart. We didnÂ’t need or use.
Duke: We didnÂ’t even break it out.
Young: Lunar Surface Maps.
Duke: IÂ’d like to make a comment about the Lunar Surface Maps. When your photography is only good to 20 meters, I think youÂ’re wasting your time carrying the photos of the traverse.
Young: I agree.
Duke: Really all you need and all you can use, due to the Rover, is, the topo chart with the headings and distances on the back of it, and one chart that you wedge up there on that camera.
Young: The rest of them you canÂ’t get at.
Duke: The rest of them you canÂ’t get out while youÂ’re driving and once you stop you donÂ’t have time to look at them. We had some tremendous craters that showed up on the topo maps that now that IÂ’ve just looked at them again in detail, did not show up on the photographs. The photographs were not necessary on the lunar surface map when you have the resolution that we had in our photos.
Young: I donÂ’t think the Apollo 17 guys will have this problem, except the problem of accessibility of the map when youÂ’re on the Moon is going to be still with them. No sense taking a whole bunch of maps out there if you can only get at one. Look at one while youÂ’re enroute. If youÂ’re enroute to a place, all you need to know is what your bearing and heading and distance is to go.
Mattingly: CSM Lunar Landmark Maps were fine.
Young: TheyÂ’re adequate.
Simulated Obliques in CSM Lunar Landmark Maps.
Mattingly: I think we ought to save the Government some money and quit making those.
Young: You didnÂ’t need those, did you?
Mattingly: No.
Young: Simulated obliques are where they take the orbital pictures, or something like the orbital pictures, and rotate them. It must cost a heck of a lot of money to do that.
The Contingency Chart.
Mattingly: ThatÂ’s just a big scale chart. I think youÂ’re probably obligated always to carry that. ThatÂ’s a good one.
Young: EVA Traverse Maps.
Duke: I just talked about those.
Young: The LM Lunar Surface Maps are maps of the whole landing site area in case you get off nominal and have to redo your EVA on the order of a couple of miles.
Duke: If you land long.
Young: In which case youÂ’re going to be sitting in there drawing on them, I expect. You probably ought to have those. TheyÂ’re really contingency lunar surface maps is what they are.
Mattingly: Visual Study Data Package. ThatÂ’s one that Ken Paterson put together this time. He did a super job on it. I thought it was very useful, but IÂ’m not sure that everybody wants to like to study it to the same level, IÂ’d suggest that before he puts that much effort into it, he better check and make sure. I didnÂ’t know he was going to do it. IÂ’m glad he did. But someone else might find that he can save himself a lot of trouble. He ought to check to make sure that the CMP would like to look at it.
Level of activity and. recommended changes.
Mattingly: There is a lot of question in everybodyÂ’s mind, including mine, whether we had scheduled too much during lunar orbit. A lot of that depends on the individual. After trying it during the solo phase I had no problem whatsoever staying with it. The fact that we could even handle all the real time updates in addition to the kind of things we were doing says that it was a reasonable work load. It is really a drag to live for 6 days in the lunar orbit on a minute-by-minute basis without a break. I donÂ’t think I would recommend somebody do that unless they really have a personal desire to want to do that kind of thing. I think you have to take the activities in lunar orbit when three guys are onboard and shoot for about a third of what you think you ought to do. I find that it is just slow operating with three men in there. That kind of took me by surprise. ItÂ’s just one of those things. When you go to reach for a film magazine IÂ’d either have to explain to John where it was and I always was faced with the choice of trying to explain where to go and what to do.
Young: Or telling me to get out of the way.
Mattingly: Or telling him to get out of the way. Which way is going to be faster, I never came to any good conclusions on what was the right thing to do.
Young: Part of the problem might have been that we could have learned where the stowage was in better detail and worked with you more, except I donÂ’t think we had the time to do that. No, I think we did all the right things. I donÂ’t think we misused our time at any point. I think that itÂ’s just one of those things that the whole system has to be aware of - that when thereÂ’s three guys in the spacecraft, no one is very efficient.
Young: ItÂ’s kind of like a big Gemini especially when you get all the rocks on there and you get all the suits in there youÂ’re just crowded.
Mattingly: You got to pull your horns in a little bit and be a little more relaxed about it.
Young: O.K.
Level of Details Provided in Onboard Documentation.
Mattingly: I thought it was just right.
Young: Pre-flight Support, I guess we talked about that.
Slayton: Poor, you said.
Young: Up to a point until about the last month. In the LM we didnÂ’t have any problems.
Duke: We had good support.
Young: We didn't make any changes. I mean, we werenÂ’t making any changes; all we were doing was going down and landing.
Duke: My statement is still correct. We had good support. The training exercises were ready. We never had any delay for suits, the Bendix people were always there with the air.
Young: WeÂ’re talking about the flight plans.
Duke: Anyway we didnÂ’t have any problem with the flight plan or the time line.
Young: ItÂ’s good to get a good handle on those things early. ThatÂ’s one thing that I would recommend if there is any way, and I donÂ’t know if there is or not, is to get all those sightings down and come up with an early time line on the lunar surface station stops. I donÂ’t know if you can do this or not, let the guys get into working station stops early in their training. It was the last month or so before we started getting really into serious working station stops. Until we had done it two or three times, I didnÂ’t have a lot of confidence how I would handle it. It worked out okay. It gave us something to do for the last month. You know how we kicked that around and how we eliminated all those stations. We cut back and cut back, and we still ended up cutting out things real time. We added a bunch of things. It didnÂ’t seem to bother us any, if you can get an early hack on what your stations are going to be, and what the activities are going to be. The tendency, of course, is to overlook that surface operation by about 150 percent. I think we cut them back 40 percent, which was a long, hard struggle because they didnÂ’t want to give up a thing. I donÂ’t know that I blame them. You want the most you can get out of a mission. That may be one of the reasons we came out doing pretty good.
Duke: You single handedly did that John. If it wasnÂ’t for you we would have had all that extra stuff.
Young: What you need is a couple of beers and then sit down with those guys and get reasonable.