Following up on yesterday's lightning strike:
To Pete Conrad, the launch of Apollo 12 exemplified one of the most important differences between flying airplanes and flying in space. Conrad could remember narrowly avoiding a midair collision with another plane when he was at Pax River; after the miss his heart pounded for several minutes. But during the lightning strike it was different.
There was no terror, nor would there be at any other time in Conrad’s four spaceflights, because things just didn’t happen fast enough for that. And it proved one of spaceflight’s emerging maxims: If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. Conrad never gave the abort handle a moment’s thought.
But now, in orbit, Conrad worried that the lightning had damaged something, and that Houston was going to call off the mission. They’d ride around the earth a couple of times, and then they’d have to go home. The first order of business was to check out Yankee Clipper’s systems, and as soon as Apollo 12 reached orbit Conrad put his crew to work.
Dick Gordon went down in the lower equipment bay, sweating through an effort to realign Yankee Clipper’s navigation platform with the stars. He kept talking to Bean, saying, “I don’t see anything, Al,” and for a while he wondered—what happened to the stars? Finally he realized he hadn’t given his eyes a chance to adapt to darkness.
Bean, consulting the star chart, told him he ought to be seeing the constellation Orion, and sure enough, there it was in the telescope, with brilliant Sirius nearby. Gordon made the alignment, with little time to spare.
During breaks in the work, Conrad and Gordon gave Bean a guided tour of earth orbit. “Here comes sunrise, Al,” they said, or, “Hey, there’s an island down there,” and then in darkness over Africa, “Look down there; those are campfires,” and he looked up from his checklist to witness the most amazing sights of his life. But for Bean, as well as his veteran crewmates, the lightning strike had been just as memorable.
“That’ll give them something to write about tonight,” said Conrad, thinking of the press. “I’ll bet your wife, my wife, and Al’s wife fainted dead away.”
Gordon said, “I bet they did when you started calling out about eighteen lights.”
“Every time I close my eyes,” Conrad said, “all I see are those lights.” For Conrad, Gordon, and Bean the launch of Apollo 12 had already become a sea story that they would tell again and again, for the rest of their lives.
To their relief, everything on the command module (and the lander, which was undergoing scrutiny in Houston via telemetry) seemed to be checking out perfectly. At 2 hours, 28 minutes Jerry Carr radioed the message they’d been waiting for: “Apollo 12, the good word is you’re Go for TLI.”
“Whoop-de-do!” crowed Conrad. “We’re ready! We didn’t expect anything else.”
What mission control did not tell Conrad was that they feared the lightning had damaged the pyrotechnic system used to deploy the command module’s parachutes. Chris Kraft in Houston had conferred with other NASA managers at the Cape, and they decided to continue the mission. The rationale was simple: Conrad and his crew would be just as dead if the parachutes didn’t work now as they would after coming back from the moon, 10 days from now.
Minutes later Conrad, Gordon, and Bean were strapped in, waiting for the third stage to relight. When it did, all three men felt it rumbling away, speeding them out of earth orbit. Conrad said, “Al Bean, you’re on your way to the moon.”
“Yeah,” Bean replied. “Y’all can come along if you like.”
Here's Al expanding on that spaceflight maxim in '98:
So I flipped the switch, and they then said, "Try to reset the fuel cells." Well, I didn't much want to reset the fuel cells, because I didn't think three fuel cells had failed, and so you don't want to put power on a short. That's a dumb idea, get a fire going.
At the same time, you need power, and the primary rule of flight that a lot of people don't know is, if you're going the right direction, don't do too much, because at least you're going the right direction.
So many pilots have been flying an airplane and one engine quits, and in their big haste to do something, they feather the other engine. Then they haven't got any engine. Or they get a fire in the right engine, they shut off the fuel to the left engine. Then they've got a big problem, see.
So you don't do things like that. You always think about them a little while, because if you make snap judgments, a good percent of them will be wrong. You don't want to be snapjudging, because that's only a myth: test pilots make snap judgments. Not the ones still around. Those guys in the ground, they were doing that.
So I'm saying to myself, "That's a good idea for them, but I think I'll think about this a minute." In fact, I might have just said, "Well, let me think about this a minute." So I'm thinking, "What should I do? What should I do? Okay, I'll reset one of these, and if it trips off again, then I'll reset another one on the other bus to see if I can get something going."
But I wasn't in any big hurry, because we were headed up to orbit, and I didn't want to screw that up by messing around over here. So I tried one and it stayed on. So I said, "Wow. That doesn't even show—" you know, I checked the amps and volts. It worked good. It was great. I put on another one. It did the same thing; it worked great. I put on the third one.
Each time I was waiting for something to go "Beep!" you know, and everything go off again. It never did. Suddenly we got that. Then I reset the AC buses and all that other.
So by the time we got into orbit, we were okay, but it wasn't because I had done anything that I had learned in training.
Now that's something to ponder.
Selah.
* Well, actually: "Thirty-six seconds after liftoff, a bolt of electricity discharged right through Apollo 12 and onto the launch tower 6,000 feet below. The command module had shut itself off in response to the tremendous electrical surge. A second strike at 52 seconds, unnoticed by Conrad and his crew, had wiped out the navigation platform."
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