TO THE MOON AND BACK

Flight Journal, Dec 2004 by Oberg, Jim

In a very excited voice, Conrad reported to earth: "Hey, there it is! There it is! Son-of-a-gun! Right down the middle of the road!" Famous for his salty language on earth, Pete controlled his tongue in space with the same precision as he flew the lander. "Hey, it's targeted right for the center of the crater! I can't believe it!" he exulted.

During the third manned lunar landing, veteran astronaut Alan Shepard was faced with the failure of the landing radar. As they got lower and lower, it refused to provide accurate altitude and rate measurements. Shepard discussed his options with his copilot, Ed Mitchell, and the two decided to bend the flight rules and to try for a fully manual landing. They knew that if they found themselves in an uncontrolled descent with impact imminent, they would be able to punch out and fire the ascentstage engine to throw themselves safely back into space. "No question," Mitchell told me. "We would have landed; I knew that, and so did Al."

"Everyone who knew Al never doubted he would have given it a shot," legendary Mission Control flight director Gene Kranz later wrote. "We also never doubted he would have had to abort. The fuel budget was just too tight."

For the last few hundred feet, the LM commander took full manual control, and the autopilot was demoted to the role of data generator. "I took over manually at about 700 feet and immediately killed the rate of descent/' Pete Conrad wrote in his post-mission report. "I had plenty of gas, and I wanted enough time to look around."

And he was glad he did look, since the LM's rocket was blasting dust out from directly below them. "At that point, the dust was bad, and I could obtain absolutely no attitude reference by looking at the horizon and the LM," he wrote. "I had to use the eight-ball. I had attitude excursions in pitch of plus ten [degrees] and minus ten, which happened while I was looking out the window, making sure that the lateral and horizontal velocities were still nulled."

Other astronauts have described the view as similar to the view when making a helicopter landing in a fast-moving ground fog. "It's a good thing we had a simulator," Conrad remarked later, "because that was an IFR landing."

Every pilot who landed on the moon did so using manual control and diverting the automated approach path to set down on a smoother area. The commander looked through the window while the copilot kept his eyes on the instrument displays of altitude and remaining fuel. During the final few seconds of descent, they awaited a signal from one of three "stingers" that extended six feet beneath three of the four LM legs (the front leg with the ladder didn't have a stinger, as it would have cmjnpled and crpated a hazard to the moonwalkers).

John Young (Apollo 16) wrote: "When we goVthe contact light, I " counted the One-potato' and shut the engine down. The thing fell out of the sky the last 3 feet. I know it did. I don't know how much I we were coming down, maybe a foot a second. I wouldn't [want to] ' stroke that gear [by shutting down the engine earlier], man. I'll tell you that would really jar your teeth."