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by AnimalMuppet
4205 days ago
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Some years ago, there was a video about the moon landing in Washington DC airport (it was at a Smithsonian exhibit or store or some such). It included video of the control room when the alarm went off during descent. There was silence and blank faces - nobody knew what to do. But by the time the alarm went off the second time on descent, it was completely different. Someone - whoever was in overall charge - called a role (something like "descent control officer") and that person responded "go", all within one second. But, yes, it wasn't a problem because the priority scheduling recovered from this problem, and that recovery was a really big deal. |
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You have to be careful interpreting something like that. Without the backstory, you run the risk of projecting your own emotions onto the events.
Mission Control was actually not very worried about the program alarms. According to Gene Kranz in his memoirs, the white team had been fed a program alarm during a pre-flight simulation. In fact, it was the last simulation they ran through before launch, so it was fresh in their minds.
During the simulation, Mission Control incorrectly called an abort. During the debrief, the instructors told them that the program alarm was non-fatal, and they should have continued to a lunar landing.
During the actual lunar landing, Mission Control was astonished to run into the same scenario. It was like running through the simulation a second time.
> But by the time the alarm went off the second time on descent, it was completely different. Someone - whoever was in overall charge - called a role (something like "descent control officer") and that person responded "go", all within one second.
Neil Armstrong did have to ask twice, but he did get a response from Mission Control on the first alarm. Mission Control did not ignore the first alarm.
The delay was caused by having to consult a list of fatal and non-fatal program alarms. Once they had that list, it was easy to call a Go on subsequent program alarms. However, they couldn't just give a Go to the first alarm without checking the list.
Armstrong and Aldrin hadn't participated in that earlier simulation, so they were probably a lot more worried than Mission Control was!
Here is the transcript with references to Kranz's book: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.landing.html