Apollo 12 pre-launch, Some shots from a VIP tour of KSC, August 1969 Options

[ilbasso]

This thread had me going back through some of my dad's slides from when he toured KSC in August 1969. I thought you'd enjoy these - which have never been seen publicly before!!!!!


The ascent stage of Intrepid, the Apollo 12 lunar module


The base of the first stage of the Saturn V. S-IC-7 at the top of the picture identifies this as the Apollo 12 Saturn V. Note that the fairings just above the fins have been removed. These fairings covered retro rockets that were fired when the first stage separated from the second stage.


The Apollo 12 Saturn V stack, viewed from above.

[nprev]

...OOO...AHHH...and I mean that sincerely!!!!

Thank you VERY much for sharing these, Ilbasso!!!!

[ElkGroveDan]

This thread had me going back through some of my dad's slides from when he toured KSC in August 1969. I thought you'd enjoy these - which have never been seen publicly before!!!!!

Pretty impressive for him to be able to use available light for slides in those days. As I recall the typical slide film speed was something like ASA 64. The ambient lighting must have been significant since the person walking by isn't much of a blur. Love that full stack Apollo 12 image.

[ilbasso]

A few more from the same batch:

A view of the high bay, with what appears to be a boilerplate of the CSM and LM adapter. Next to it, the large ring structure is what they use to lift the first stage of the Saturn V.


Another view of the first stage of the Saturn V:


And a view looking up the stack, although you can't see very much:

[lyford]

WOW! Thank you for posting these....

[climber]

Yesterday night I started watching the Apollo 15 complete Nasa DVD's so I get a pretty good idea of what you're showing Ilbasso, particularly the ascent stage of the LM.
Thanks SO much.

[ilbasso]

Pretty impressive for him to be able to use available light for slides in those days. As I recall the typical slide film speed was something like ASA 64. The ambient lighting must have been significant since the person walking by isn't much of a blur. Love that full stack Apollo 12 image.

I think he was shooting high speed Ektachrome in those days. He liked to have it "pushed" to ASA 400. The color has faded a lot more than his Kodachrome slides from the 1950's. I don't know what he was shooting in the 1980's and 1990's, but the reds have completely faded out of his slides from those years.

[Airbag]

The color has faded a lot more than his Kodachrome slides from the 1950's. I don't know what he was shooting in the 1980's and 1990's, but the reds have completely faded out of his slides from those years.

With a little Gimp "White Balance" magic it is amazing how much of that yellowish cast can be removed; I took the liberty to try that on the first three of your Dad's wonderful pictures; results below.

Airbag

[ilbasso]

Wow, that's great! I hadn't thought about playing with these much, other than one brief "sh*ts and giggles" pass with an unsharp mask over the LM picture.

I think I'll start another thread with the rest of the pics from his tour, for historical purposes and reminiscences for those who may have been there. If nothing else, you can get some laughs at the cars parked outside the buildings.

Doug, can you please move these over to the Apollo 12 thread? Thanks!

-Done. Tesheiner. BTW, impressive pictures!

[ilbasso]

Pictures of the tour of KSC will be coming up tomorrow when I get around to uploading them...

But in the meantime, let's take a tour of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Rocket Garden on a sunny day in August 1969.


We see a couple of Atlas boosters...


and

[ilbasso]

Now, can you identify these?

[ilbasso]

and how about these?

[nprev]

....wow!!!

Okay, another reason I gotta, just gotta, no excuses, make a pilgrimage to the Cape at least once before I die. Thanks, IB!

[mchan]

Hound Dog, V1, Snark, Rascal (sez it right there), Matador, Navaho, Firebee.

When I was there in '76, I could see it from the tour bus, but that was it.

[ilbasso]

OK, so now we hop on the tour bus for Launch Complex 39:








and then over to the Vehicle Assembly Building:

[ilbasso]

Once inside the VAB, we see the low bay:


The bottom of the first stage of the Saturn V (see previous posts for other views):



And looking down in the high bay:



This CM was sitting in the facility but I don't believe it was the Apollo 12 CM:

[ilbasso]

Now we leave for some of the other buildings at the Cape:

First, one of the firing rooms, adjacent to the VAB:



Then this building, which I believe houses the centrifuge for G-training: (great 1960's car, huh?!)



And the centrifuge itself:



I believe this is a vacuum or space environment chamber:

[ilbasso]

And finally:

The CSM translation and docking simulator:


The CSM simulator:



Control panels for the CSM simulator (badly scanned in conversion from slides, sorry about the stripe):



The LM simulator:



A lecture on the Portable Life Support System (PLSS), and you can see some water-cooled undergarments in the background. Anyone recognize the lecturer? He looks familiar to me but I can't place him.



One of the Apollo 11 moon rocks, less than two months after being taken off of the Moon. oDoug can probably tell you which one it is!


And this CM, not sure which mission it was.


That's it! Wish I had been there to see this in person!

[djellison]

I'd feel the need to go 'hmm- too many images in these posts' - but WHAT images - they're amazing!

Doug

[ilbasso]

I'd feel the need to go 'hmm- too many images in these posts' - but WHAT images - they're amazing!

Doug

Thanks for indulging me, Doug. When I started putting these up, I just couldn't stop. I don't think I appreciated how rich a history was in these images.

My dad would have been happy to know these were being shared with such an austere community! He would have turned 81 this past week, I think this was a good way for me to celebrate all that he did.
--Jonathan

[PDP8E]

Jonathan,

What was your father's job?
Not many people got the cook's tour of that particular kitchen at that particular time!
Thank you for sharing!

Cheers

[ilbasso]

My dad was a design engineer for ... well, let's say "the intelligence community." His office was the one from whom NASA solicited low-light TV camera technology, when it was decided relatively late in the game to send a TV camera to the lunar surface on Apollo 11. That may have been why he was invited to take this tour.

[Tesheiner]

> Wish I had been there to see this in person!

Me too, me too!!! Thanks for sharing these slides and keep them on a safe place. That's a treasure.

> ... 'hmm- too many images in these posts' ...

Jonathan, if you have time may I suggest to edit the posts and substitute the pictures by thumbnails linking to the real goodies. That would greatly reduce the bandwidth demand on both yours' and the client's sites. The code in the post would look like:

CODE

[url="http://your.site/the-picture.jpg"][img]http://your.site/the-thumbnail.jpg[/img][/url]

[ilbasso]

> ... 'hmm- too many images in these posts' ...

Jonathan, if you have time may I suggest to edit the posts and substitute the pictures by thumbnails linking to the real goodies. That would greatly reduce the bandwidth demand on both yours' and the client's sites. The code in the post would look like:

CODE

[url="http://your.site/the-picture.jpg"][img]http://your.site/the-thumbnail.jpg[/img][/url]

Thanks, I got wrapped up in trying to get them all online rather than Doing The Right Thing. Hopefully everything is corrected now, and also ready for when I transition off of my ISP next month.

[Airbag]

Those pictures of the CSM and LM simulators and associated control equipment are quite rare!

Airbag

[nprev]

For real. I've never seen the like before, ever. Thanks again for sharing this with us, IL! Your Dad really added to the history of Apollo in our minds with these shots; really never visualized the magnitude & difficulty of the task before.

[Airbag]

nprev, you will *really* like this DVD set:

"Mighty Saturns"

Maybe some library near you has copies. The quarterly status reports are the best part I thought and show all problems as well as successes and tons of manufacturing processes related segments.

Airbag

[ilbasso]

For me, the astounding juxtaposition is seeing that clunker car outside of the building. You have to say it over and over again to make it sink in: we went to the Moon with 1960's technology, and we no longer have the technology to do it!

To give you youngsters a feel for what 1960's technology was like: When Intrepid came around the edge of the Moon, in powered descent and en route to landing, the engineers in Mission Control were frantically trying to compute an adjusted flight path. They were using paper and pencil and slide rules because THERE WERE NO COMPUTERS IN MISSION CONTROL THAT COULD DO MULTIPLICATION AND DIVISION!!!!

[nprev]

Well, the old adage is 'spit & baling wire'...they always forget to mention genius & dedication, for some reason. Astounding.

[ilbasso]

Those pictures of the CSM and LM simulators and associated control equipment are quite rare!

Airbag

The big boxes over the window displays are very interesting. They had to simulate a view that would be like looking at infinity - no parallax even if the astronaut moved his head. so they couldn't use a straightforward TV display. They had an elaborate series of beamsplitters and projectors, and even so, the "exit pupil" (i.e., usable area from which the crewman could view) was such that the crewman could only move his head up to 4 inches (10 cm) from the center position and still have the display look realistic. The window displays were expensive; according to NASA Technical Note D-7112, they accounted for about 30-40% of the total cost of the simulators!

[nprev]

The window displays were expensive; according to NASA Technical Note D-7112, they accounted for about 30-40% of the total cost of the simulators!

Here's an old and almost forgotten word in today's virtual world: "craftsmanship". Physical modeling is nearly a dead art now. We should remember such efforts. God, I'd give a lot to look at these displays...<grits teeth>...

EDIT: Airbag, forgot to thank you for the tip...I'll go hunting for those DVDs. The Saturns are by far my favorite rockets ever, and probably a lot of people feel the same way!

[dvandorn]

For me, the astounding juxtaposition is seeing that clunker car outside of the building. You have to say it over and over again to make it sink in: we went to the Moon with 1960's technology, and we no longer have the technology to do it!

As for that car -- those weren't clunkers, then. That car in that pic, which is the size of a Cadillac of today, was considered a *sub-compact* car back in '69. And it was stylish for its time, too!

And, well -- it's not exactly like we no longer have the technology to go to the Moon. We don't have the infrastructure. There's a difference.

To give you youngsters a feel for what 1960's technology was like: When Intrepid came around the edge of the Moon, in powered descent and en route to landing, the engineers in Mission Control were frantically trying to compute an adjusted flight path. They were using paper and pencil and slide rules because THERE WERE NO COMPUTERS IN MISSION CONTROL THAT COULD DO MULTIPLICATION AND DIVISION!!!!

Exactly right! The first electronic calculators to come into wide use wouldn't come around for another year or so. And those were *desktop* calculators, with tiny layered neon tubes comprising the numeric displays. A single digit was made up of elements receding down into the display 'cube' up to 6 or 7 cm.

The roomsfull of IBM mainframe computers ran very narrowly defined and specific trajectory plots, calculating location and vectors in three-dimensional space. They ran a single program each at any given time, with dozens of computers running to support dozens of consoles. There was no such thing as "click on System Tools and pull up Calculator" on those computers.

They actually had a name, back in the '60s and '70s, for computers with the processing and storage capabilities of the computer I'm using right now.

Supercomputers.



-the other Doug

[mchan]

Adding my thanks for sharing those photos. Official, professional photos sometimes seem contrived compared to personal snapshots which do more for me in giving a sense of life to the history.

[stevesliva]

And, well -- it's not exactly like we no longer have the technology to go to the Moon. We don't have the infrastructure. There's a difference.

Yeah, I always think about the pyramids in Egypt. If we really wanted to invest in huge stone edifices....

The Concorde is a more modern example.

[edstrick]

"...and we no longer have the technology to do it!"

We no longer have the technology to build a 1965 vintage color TV.
Mostly, that's a good thing. we have better now.

We have the technology, but not the will, and the money to rebuild the CAPABILITY.

Beyond that, is the really hard question: Why do "Apollo on Steroids"
The essential concept coming out of Griffen and NASA is something like the science bases in Antarctica.

My mantra is that our goal should be the 1.) exploration, 2.) exploitation, 3.) commercial and industrial development, and 4.) settlement of space.
We're still not going beyond 1 and 2, and the Constellation program, using throw-away-hardware, does little to advance beyond those.

<sigh>

[SpaceCat]

Jonathan, let me add my thanks for sharing- I'm just getting caught up on web-reading after after a week of work travel.
These are a real trip down memory lane for me- I arrived in Florida- transferring to Florida Tech [then F.I.T.] in September '69. Apollo 12 was the first launch of any kind that I saw live, despite the rain!
By 13, I had a part-time job at the Cape breadboarding Skylab stuff-- so I got to see 13, 14 and 15 from inside the fence.

A salute to your Dad, too- guys from that generation taught me everything I know!

[dvandorn]

I just wanted to say again how appreciative I am of these images.

And, BTW, I just noted that the VIP tour was in August, just the month after Apollo 11. Which explains the relatively advanced state of Apollo 12's assembly and check-out. Had Apollo 11 failed to make the lunar landing, Apollo 12 (SA-507) would have flown in September from pad 39B. Had Apollo 12 failed to make the landing, Apollo 13 (SA-508) would have flown in November from 39A. And if 13, too, failed, it was thought that Apollo 14 (SA-509) could be made ready to fly in December, from 39B.

That gave NASA a maximum of four shots to get the landing accomplished by midnight on December 31, 1969. Fact is, *no one* believed that Apollo would succeed in its very first landing attempt, and that none of the preceding missions would need to be re-flown.

So, these wonderful images show a Saturn stack that was nearly ready to be rolled out. The Apollo spacecraft (CSM and LM) weren't quite in as advanced state of readiness, but by this time, they knew they had an extra couple of months to play with. Besides, final fitting-out of the spacecraft depended somewhat on its mission, and you would configure things (especially the LM) a little differently for a first landing than for a second. (For example, had 11 failed, LM-6 wouldn't have carried an ALSEP, it likely would have carried another EASEP.)

I think the documentaries don't really give you a feel for the expedited timelines NASA was willing to use to get that landing done by the end of the decade. One telling point is that the last practice run of a lunar landing before Apollo 11 flew used not the prime or back-up crew from Apollo 11, nor even the prime Apollo 12 crew. That final simulation saw Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, the back-up LM crew for Apollo 12, flying the simulator. So, here we were, before Apollo 11 flew, and the crew in the simulator didn't fly for another two years. But had problems developed and it had taken three or four shots at making the landing, Scott and Irwin might have found themselves flying in not much more than 7 or 8 months' time, hence the perceived value in giving them the simulator time.

-the other Doug

[ilbasso]

I think it was in the discussion doc about the simulators that I referenced above that I read that simulator time was a critical resource, for the reasons you mentioned, Doug. They had these at the Cape and ones at Houston running pretty much 24 hours a day during 1969 to accommodate all of the crews that were getting ready to go. The display technology was so delicate that it broke down constantly. Missions changed. Apollo 12 didn't know for sure that they were going to the Surveyor III site until late August or early September, barely 3 months before the mission. It was a crazy time, driven by that end of the decade deadline!

One piece of trivia that I read yesterday: There were only three astronauts who trained as backups for Apollo missions and who never flew an Apollo mission: Gordon Cooper (who was backup CDR on Apollo 10 and lost his Apollo 13 slot to Al Shepard [whose crew later moved to Apollo 14]), Joe Engle (backup LMP for Apollo 14, would have gone on Apollo 17 but lost his slot to Harrison Schmitt), and Don Lind (backup CMP for Skylab 3 and 4). Cooper resigned after losing his slot; Engle and Lind went on to fly years later on the Shuttle.

[dvandorn]

If you're counting Skylab, both backup crews included a few other people who didn't fly until Shuttle. The Skylab 2 backup crew was Rusty Schweickart (CDR), Bruce McCandless (PLT, or Pilot) and Story Musgrave (SPT, or Science Pilot). The backup crew for Skylabs 3 and 4 was Vance Brand (CDR), Don Lind (PLT) and Bill Lenoir (SPT). Yes, there were only two backup crews for the three Skylab flights.

Of those backup crewmen, Schweickart had already flown in Apollo, on Apollo 9. Brand flew in an Apollo on the Apollo-Soyuz flight. The other four did eventually fly in the Shuttle, McCandless waiting an eternity for his first flight (selected along with moonwalkers Mitchell, Irwin and Duke in 1966, Bruce didn't fly until 1984). Then again, he was the astronaut involved in the AMU jet backpack project, so he waited to fly until the AMU was ready, and became the first person to fly it. But McCandless does have his own place in history, as the CapCom during the Apollo 11 EVA.

-the other Doug