Mattingly: The most significant thing about LOI, to start with, is the alteration of our procedures, based on EMP 509, that we put in because of the attempt to avoid any problems with transients. Coarse aligning of our platform is part of the LOI. I think, considering the fact that you only get one chance in a mission to do LOI, that we did the right thing, starting the gimbals early and all those things.
Young: Actually, I felt pretty good about that. I donÂ’t mind the ground looking over my shoulder when I canÂ’t see what is going on back there, which is the way you are for LOI.
Mattingly: I thought that was a good plan. I thought the idea of the EMP was a good one, because fortunately, in preparation for the mission, we had all told the truth, and I told them what erasable programs I knew about. They told me what ones they had on the console that no one had ever heard about, and we wrote them all down and we had MIT look at them, got it all above board so that these kind of things have been looked at and checked out. I felt real comfortable about it, knowing this very problem of a CDU and the way to work around it had been tested. IÂ’d even flown this one in the simulator.
Young: IÂ’ll tell you what did bother me about it was the fact that theyÂ’d been having CDU problems at Downey, and nobody had. ever mentioned it to us before we were on the flight. Maybe it happened at Downey after lift-off, for all I know.
Mattingly: It may have happened last week. It may have happened on 012. I donÂ’t know where it was.
Duke: No, it was spacecraft 117. ItÂ’s the Skylab vehicle.
Young: Okay, to make the thing go, youÂ’ve got to have the feedback. When things go wrong, everybody who is going to be operating the gear should know about it.
Duke: Except for that oversight, I think they did a super job of getting things ready procedurally.
Mattingly: The execution and preparation for the burn were absolutely nominal. The other thing that strikes me as being a surprise (and. everyone said thatÂ’s the way it is) is that when we lighted the thing, it started on bank A and when I brought bank B on, I got a "chug." IÂ’m not sure thatÂ’s the right word. But there was a change in propulsive force and there was a decrease in chamber pressure when I brought the second bank on. And I would guess it was about a 3-psi decrease.
Young: Sort of like the reverse of a nozzle closed burner light. It sort of sagged a little and it was a sharp one. It went "clunk."
Mattingly: It didnÂ’t feel the recovery. It wasnÂ’t like a pop where it dropped down and picked back up. It dropped down and then subsequently, it picked back up. That was something that took me by surprise. I guess it gave us some concern during the burn. I remember considering that maybe I should turn this bank off because I felt something had gone wrong with it.
Young: You said it was a 3- to 5-psi chamber pressure drop.
Mattingly: Yes.
Duke: I think it was probably the helium or whatever it was in those lines between the ball valves and the injector.
Mattingly: The ground said that is normal. The first time you burn that thing, thatÂ’s whatÂ’ll happen. All IÂ’m saying is that if thatÂ’s normal, somehow in the last 6 years, I had missed all that. I donÂ’t remember anyone every saying that they could feel any difference at all when you put the second bank on. I donÂ’t think you could have missed this. IÂ’m just surprised. The simulator certainly doesnÂ’t show anything like that.
Young: It is sure a noticeable thing.
Mattingly: Other than that, the LOI was just super. The countdown clock on the CMC was just lined up with the burn time prediction from start to finish. The rates were good and stable. Everything was just as nominal and. perfect as it could be, from what you could monitor.
Duke: As far as my side goes, skipping on through the sounds, I didnÂ’t have a sensation of sound, but of sight. The ball valves came open before you could feel the thrust definitely leave. Then you could feel the thrust build up. The PUGS, we left it just like it said, and didnÂ’t touch it, with the guarded switch down. It performed just perfectly, I thought. It regulated at exactly on the DSC. It was around 100 decrease where it had always been in the simulator, and then at crossover went right on up and regulated around zero. I think we ended up with something like 50 increase or 50 decrease at shutdown. But thatÂ’s in the Flight Plan.
Mattingly: Did you see anything at crossover? I saw no chamber pressure changes.
Duke: The PUGS jumps a little bit but thatÂ’s all. The SPS pressures at ignition: The oxidizer side came down from 210 to 200 just as they predicted, and the fuel side went up from 165 to 170 just as they predicted. They were stable throughout the whole burn. It was just like they predicted.
Young: Excellent prediction. The EMS, the time, and the guidance system in the CMC were in perfect agreement.
Mattingly: DOI, IÂ’d say, worked exactly the sane way. It was an automatic shutdown.
Duke: Right on time.
Young: And we had a plus 0.4 of a foot per second, which we didnÂ’t trim.
Duke: A little underburn and you trim no underburns.
Young: That put us in a little high orbit but that didnÂ’t bother us.
Young: Gravitational Effects on Spacecraft Attitude.
Mattingly: I didnÂ’t do any maneuvering with the stack manually, to detect it. I would hope that the Flight Control guys with their changes, in the biasing of the attitude, in looking at the different dead bands, can tell us. They can answer that Question for us. I donÂ’t think we can.
Young: I didnÂ’t notice any. You have to do manual pulse maneuvers and we didnÂ’t do any of that. We were all working P20s.
Young: SIM Experiment Prep.
Mattingly: ThereÂ’s absolutely nothing you can say about the SIM preparations; just followed the checklist down, and it all happened like youÂ’d expect. It all went fine. The only thing that I was a little surprised at was that when I released the boom tiedowns and the solar monitor door, I heard those. Or felt them. It was a very, very low sensation, but when I threw the switch, there was something that took place. Maybe I heard the door bang, but I was surprised. I didnÂ’t expect to hear anything. The gamma ray and the mass spec had written in one of the malfunctions procedures that if you donÂ’t get a boom retraction (and since this has been a previous problem), one of the first things you do is look and see if theyÂ’re extended. So the first thing we did after the first extension was to go look and see where they ought to be, if they looked normal. You could see two feet of the boom plus the instrument. Both of them. I thought that was worthwhile, that we had learned where to look for them. They really were not where I had expected them to be. And subsequently, it paid off in knowing whether the boom had moved.
Young: Communications. I didnÂ’t see any problem with communications at that time.
Young: The PGA donning problems have already been referred to. We talked about the trouble we had when we were donning, with the restraint zipper. Scrambling in and out of that thing is no piece of cake. With the LCG, with the WMS, the FCS, and the LCG on, and getting the suit up over a guy's rear end, what you have to do is start way back where the zipper starts and then go back and pull the zipper out, because the zipper invariably gets tucked under and you just canÂ’t get the suit on until you do that. It results in taking 5 minutes longer to do it in zero gravity or one-sixth gravity than it does in one gravity. I guess IÂ’m at a loss to understand why it doesnÂ’t get hung up that badly. The problem is that you canÂ’t push on anything in zero gravity. In one gravity, you push on a guyÂ’s rear end and pull the zipper out; and in zero gravity, if you push on that, you just keep right on going. I donÂ’t think itÂ’s any problem but it just takes more time. On activation day, we started a half hour early on everything, primarily because I had trouble with CharlieÂ’s restraint zipper. We woke up a half hour early and just leaped right into everything. We didnÂ’t eat very much. We got that out of the way in a hurry and jumped right into donning our suits.
Duke: I still believe that the reason that half hour paid off so much was that we got up and got our half hourÂ’s head start without talking to anybody, and as far as the rest of the world was concerned, we were still asleep. And I think we got more done in that half hour than we would have, had we let anybody know we were awake. IÂ’m sure the EKG showed that we were up but nobody called us and we didnÂ’t call them, so it was a great half hour to have.
Young: The reason IÂ’d like to emphasize that is that it seems to me adding an extra half hour to the Flight Plan on getting ready to go into the LM day isnÂ’t the total answer, unless youÂ’re going to let the ground let you alone.
Mattingly: YouÂ’ve got to have time to do those things undisturbed. It seems that when the ground calls you on something, it takes far more time than the total amount of time it takes because they ask you to write something down. You stop what youÂ’re doing and you go get something, and you have to treat every word as being important. It just seems that when you stop and start things, itÂ’s just a waste of an awful lot of your time.
Young: I guess the one thing that I was concerned about that weÂ’d forget was some piece of equipment on the CM to LM transfer list, so we checked that and checked that. ItÂ’s a fairly straight thing, but thereÂ’s no single piece of equipment on there that you donÂ’t really need. So you better have them with you. MATTIGLY The tunnel worked like a champ. Everything was in there just right, and that little procedure that Jake worked out for how you can verify that youÂ’ve got all the unibilicals hooked up I think was a good plan.
Young: What procedure was that.
Mattingly: You open one of the latches on each system so that it will show a barber pole, and then you put power on the probe. It lets you know that youÂ’ve done your thing right. The only thing on the tunnel business that I got a little concerned about was that we were slipping behind at the end. We were ahead of almost everything until you were late on the P52 or something. I was hung up waiting for you and you were waiting for me, and I was afraid we werenÂ’t going to get the tunnel bled down to zero in time for a doff. That thing takes 20 to 30 minutes. It seems like an eternity when youÂ’re sitting there waiting for that gage to go down.
Young: It takes a while.
Mattingly: Other than that, I thought we were ahead on everything we did.
Young: IVT to the LM. Condition of the CSM Thermal Coating. LM Entry Status Checks.
Duke: All of that from IVT to LM down to IVT to CM is all nominal and is adequately covered in the transcript and the activation checklist.
Young: Except for the PGA donning, and weÂ’ve already talked about that. I wouldnÂ’t change a thing either because it sure worked.
Mattingly: One of the things I want to comment on was the pressure equalization valve in the tunnel hatch and the way it was used during LOI. We altered the nominal procedures for that equalization valve being opened pre-LOI and remaining that way. And it seemed like by the time you do the burn, you would like to have the LM pressurized so you could go in there if you needed to for an abort. It seemed more prudent to have the two vehicles isolated during dynamic flight, so we ran the valve in the closed position after equalizing first and opened it up afterwards. I think this is a reasonable mode of operation. It differs from the Flight Plan. We ran the experiment booms out right after we entered lunar orbit according to the Flight Plan, and they checked out nominally. Subsequently, we ran the mass spec out after DOI, and on its first attempted retraction, we had no indication on board that the mass spec boom had retracted. The ground did receive a TM indication and shoved an almost retracted contact, and we flew the circ burn with it in that position. The mapping camera went out nominally on the first deployment, and we operated the camera. On the first retraction, it took approximately 3½ to 4 minutes to retract. This is an excessive number, and the ground played with that for the rest of the mission. When I checked the rendezvous transponder, I had obtained the CSM 113 calibration values for the transponder self-test. There was one value - test A on the transponder - which I had obtained as being 2.8 volts, and it turned out to be 2.1 in flight. All the rest matched up perfectly. The pan camera was turned on the rev after DOI. As soon as we turned the pan camera on, we got a main bus B undervoltage, and the pan camera was turned off immediately. We let the ground take a look at it. Subsequently, they determined that the pan camera was merely coincident with a whole lot of heaters coming on. Following this, we put the pan camera to operate, and the main bus B undervolt light came on. I turned it off, and while we were talking about it, we had another main B undervolt light. It came on just momentarily and by the time we could look at it, all the voltages and occurrences looked nominal. We did nothing and I never saw another undervolt light for the rest of the flight. Apparently, it really was the heaters. The other thing that bears some comment is the windows. At the time we entered lunar orbit, we had a small amount of what looked like condensation on the inside of the outer windowpane on windows 1, 3, and 5. Window 5 had a small residue on the plus-X into the window, and it made a strip which had a very sharp line across it about 2 inches back from the leading edge of the window. It looked like a salt spray residue. It was there to the end of the flight, and it seemed to me that it mar have gotten a little bit enhanced as the mission went on. But the thing that struck me about it was that the trailing edge was a very sharp line like it had been masked at some time in the process. I couldnÂ’t tell if it was on the inside or the outside of the outer pane, but it appeared to me to be on the outside of the outer one. But I never was completely sure.
Speaker: During the boost phase there was a lot of smoke flying under that protective cover. I guess thatÂ’s been commented upon. I was watching and it looked like smoke trickling down the side.
Young: I never noticed it.
Mattingly: I didnÂ’t see that. I didnÂ’t see that pattern on any window except number 5. The rest of them had condensation. They had a small amount of it inside which stayed with us the whole flight. As far as the UV photography out of Window 5, we didnÂ’t make any comments about it because the area that the camera was looking through looked like it was clean. All the UV photography log sheets will say that Window 5 was a clean window, which it was, as best we could tell through the area where the photos were taken. The systems people are going to have to tell us where the mass spec boom really was, since we ended up jettisoning it.
Young: Yes, when we looked at it, it looked like the door was closed but it didnÂ’t look like it was all the way down. It didnÂ’t look like the door was all the way closed.
Mattingly: By the time you got nect to it, both doors should have been partly ajar. We had both of them malfunctioning by rendezvous.
Young: Do we have pictures?
Duke: IÂ’m not sure that'll show up.
Mattingly: I think it will, Charlie, if you know what to look for. You people familiar with the hardware can do that.