On October 5th, we had the second of our weekly all day program development plan meetings at MIT. Most of our attention was given to the open items on the AS-278 program which I will discuss later, but first I would like to pass on some general comments regarding the work at MIT. Based on…
Category: Transearth injection
AGC program status for AS-278
I guess enough things have happened affecting the status of the programs for the AS-278 mission that I ought to issue another status report. According to MIT, work is progressing along basically on schedule. The major effort is currently in Ed Copps’ area where coding of the program is going on which should be completed…
Landing point dispersions given communication loss in lunar orbit
During Chris Kraft’s staff meeting of July 17 there was a long discussion regarding the necessity of a beacon to help the recovery people find the spacecraft. It was pretty well concluded that it was not needed as long as we knew where the spacecraft landed to within several hundred miles. Of course, if the…
Data Priority meetings schedule
In order to get a little bit more orderly in our conduct of the Trajectory Control Data Priority business, it’s evident that we must schedule meetings on a pre-established, periodic basis. Accordingly, the Ascent and Descent meetings will take place on alternate Tuesday afternoons; Rendezvous meetings will be held of Wednesdays, one mission in the…
Lunar Reentry Mission Techniques meeting – March 7
On March 7 we had a Data Priority Mission Techniques meeting on lunar reentry. This was the first on this mission phase with contractor participation. Our objective was to understand the current status of the business and to begin pinning down the operational procedures to be used onboard the spacecraft and on the ground. We…
C’ Mission Techniques
Attached are a list of ground rules and working agreements I compiled from my notes taken at the September 13 and 14 Mission Techniques meetings and the September 20 Lunar Abort meeting, all on the C’ mission. This list is far from complete. Basically, these items are only the changes and additions to the material…
C’ Earth Orbit and TLI Mission Techniques Open Items
It appears we have the Earth Orbit and TLI Mission Techniques for the C’ pretty well under control. The only two significant open items that I know of deal with the optics check and the crew procedures for protecting against an SIVB engine cutoff failure during TLI….
Transearth Spacecraft Navigation
During Jim McPherson’s Transearth Spacecraft Navigation Mission Techniques meeting of October 8 and 15, a potpourri of ground rules, working agreements and constraints was established. I may be duplicating other reports with this memo but figure better too many reports than not enough. All of the following apply specifically to the first batch of sextant…
Some more C’ Lunar Orbit Mission Techniques
At our October 14 C’ Lunar Orbit Mission Techniques meeting we settled on a few things I would like to tell you about. Along with the TEI block data to be sent up each revolution in lunar orbit, we are also going to update the spacecraft state vector in the CMC every revolution. This will…
C Prime Maneuver Monitoring Mission Techniques into cement
On November 2 we went over the C’ Maneuver Monitoring Mission Techniques for the last time – that is, we all hope and expect it’s “final.” Although, the detailed procedures will be documented elsewhere, I would like to describe the new things we established at this meeting. They deal primarily with overburn protection by manual…