See listNOV 14 196666-FM1-148FM/Deputy Chief, Mission Planning and Analysis DivisionAGC 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 early in December. At that time all of the basic components of the program will have been compiled into a single working assembly. It is this assembly which Alex Kosmala's Program Integration Group puts through systematic debugging and then finally, when all of the systems are working together, through the final program verifi- cation. It is to be noted that this work is done with an assembly made up of the entire flight program – it is not broken down into subsections which are later assembled together. Of course, during the initial stages of this program integration the major task is to get the subroutines, which have been individually debugged and are running in this master assem- bly, to work with each other. That is, the task is to get these individual processors to run in sequential strings – the output of one serving as the input to the next – with astronaut inputs and displays all working properly.
As of last week all MDRB's [i.e., program modifications] under considera- tion were acted upon. Specifically, it was agreed to add the so-called universal update in both the CMC and the LGC. This was the only modifica- tion to the CMC and resulted in slipping the program delivery date about one week. Other LGC MDRB's approved were a GASTA transformation which was required in order to provide DSKY displays consistent with the FDAI eight ball and addition of a minimum impulse mode for the APS.
The affect of these modifications was to delay LGC program delivery approxi- mately a week and a half. Thus, our best current estimate of program delivery for the AS-207 program is April 28 and the AS-208 program is May 5. Of course, every effort will be made to improve this delivery schedule.
Since work is proceeding again on the orbit rate eight ball, I suppose there may be some special processor required to compute and display initial- ization quantities for that black box. Paul Stull is checking into that, as well as what spacecraft this would be needed for, if any.
MDRB's which were not approved for the AS-207 program were those providing the capability for AGC steering of the SIB simulating translunar injection and manual takeover of the Saturn during launch into earth orbit. These two routines would have resulted in an additional four weeks' impact on the AS-207 delivery, which was judged unacceptable. However, since a test of the AGC–SIVB interface is considered mandatory prior to the lunar landing mission, we have had no choice but to provide a unique program for the AS-503 command module. You recall it was our desire to fly both the AS-278 and AS-503 missions with the same programs, but this apparently is not possible for schedule reasons for the CMC. The LM programs will be the same. Since there is very little difference in the launch schedule of AS-278 and AS-503, we will have to maintain tight control on new pro- grams to be added to the AS-207 program for AS-503.
As I see it right now, the additional programs consist of:
a) Simulation of the TLI steering of the SIVB.
b) Manual Saturn steering into earth orbit. (Holy waste-of-time, Batman!)
c) Use of star/horizon and star/landmark observations in the on- board navigation process.
MIT has been directed to proceed as noted above and will assemble a pro- gram development plan for the AS-503 command module program. I assume that soonest possible delivery will be in the order of a month after AS-207 – say, May 26.