[X] My Assistant

[DDAVIS]

I have a page on Apollo which is updated annually. Do others feel more optimistic than i do on the prospects for return? I for one won't believe we will leave LEO until the hardware to do it is actually being built.

http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/Apollo30.html

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

There was never any plan to put a MET on Apollo 13 (although, as one might expect, it would have been carried on Apollo 15 if that had been flown as an "H"-class mission as originally planned). I had forgotten that the Apollo 13 crew would have dropped off their tool carrier at Flank Crater for the final walk up the flank of Cone. (Given the extent to which the 14 crew had to pick up the MET and portage it across big rocks, if they hadn't had it, they might have made it to the rim of Cone.)

It's interesting to speculate on the unpleasant choice the 13 crew would have been confronted with on EVA-2 if they had landed. The #15 crew, you may recall, went through the torments of Hell trying to pull their 8-foot drill core back out of the ground. (After giving up on the first two EVAs, they went through something like half an hour of grunting "one-two-THREE!" on EVA-3 before extracting it. Meanwhile the panning TV camera on the rover -- whose elevation clutch was starting to stick -- kept slewing back and forth looking down at the ground immediately underneath it as the ground operator tried to jolt the elevation clutch loose, until it finally popped loose and saw them working literally just a couple of seconds before the end of the core finally came out of the ground.) This would have happened on #13 -- the problem was fixed later by adding a hand jack and also running the drill briefly in reverse at the end to loosen the core -- and so that crew would have been faced with the choice of either abandoning their 8-foot core or abandoning the walk to Cone Crater. They might well have ended up losing both.

(By the way, another copy of the the drill and the heat flow experiment were added to Apollo 15's ALSEP only after the #13 failure. Until then, #15's ALSEP was the one originally scheduled for Apollo 11 before they decided to simplify it -- it would have been a duplicate of #12's ALSEP, with the drill and heat flow not carried again until #16.)

[GregM]

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