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By Scott Longman
Sometimes, a single, squared away individual who can operate under pressure makes all the difference. While many people know about Apollo 13’s near disaster, fewer seem to know that Apollo 12 damn near hammered in, too. The mission launched into the edge of a rainstorm, and about 36 seconds after liftoff, the ship was shaken by some huge force, and the control panels lit up with a face full of warning lights.
Mission Commander Pete Conrad later said: “Sounded like a baseball bat whacking an aluminum pole, and we were the pole.”
Then it happened again, and this time, the entire set of panels went dark, and all the telemetry readings turned to streaming nonsense.
What had happened was that punching a 36-story tall Saturn V rocket, burning 28,000 pounds of fuel per second near a rainstorm had created a simply epic ionization path. They’d created “the world’s most truly awesome flying lighting rod.”
The consequences were potentially catastrophic.
Lots of Problems, Houston
Had they kept going, it could’ve killed the crew or left them stranded in space. If instead they aborted, it might still have killed them, in the various hazard-filled stages of explosive capsule separation, fall, parachute deployment or sinking before recovery. And it could have ended the Apollo program. The pressure was instant and immense.
Flight Controllers have a written Creed which reads, in part: “Always be aware that suddenly and unexpectedly we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.” So, they were at least prepared in attitude.
The problem was sheer complexity: The Saturn V system was, at the time, arguably the most complicated engineering ever devised. A staggering 400,000 engineers, scientists and technicians had been involved in its design and manufacture, which is roughly equivalent to the current entire population of Tampa.
NASA’s John Aaron
The Apollo 12 crew. Left to right are Charles Conrad Jr., Richard F. Gordon Jr., and Alan L. Bean.
NASA had done a yeoman job of marshaling the design, establishing procedures, testing everything and creating extensive and rigorous training simulations. But for something that byzantine, nobody—especially given the primitive state of computing at the time—could possibly have hoped to plan for and understand the exponentially many different ways those many subsystems could interact under every conceivable circumstance.
But they’d prepared for what they didn’t know, with a regimented system of having experts instantly available. The familiar mission control cavern with its huge monitors on the front wall and banks of people looking at their own consoles is what NASA called “the front room.” They were the people most deeply versed in the primary systems. But NASA also had “the back room,” which was actually often several other rooms and even offsite locations with the more highly expert staff, ready on subsystems and sub-subsystems.
But despite all that, the disaster was unfolding without anybody yet knowing what it was or how to stop it.
Steely Eyed & Mission Ready
Enter John Aaron. He was the EECOM, or Electrical Environmental Consumables flight controller. And he was a man who sought utterly immersive knowledge in his subject matter.
About a year before, he had just happened to observe a simulation that he was not involved in where the telemetry went all to gibberish, just as it had here. Outside of his duties, purely of his own initiative, Aaron tried to figure out why. He was ultimately able to trace it to a problem with a system called the Signal Conditioning Electronics, or SCE. And he figured out that it could, for technical reasons that we won’t get into here, be squared away by switching it to its auxiliary position, then followed up with other actions. He filed that away in the back of his brain housing group.
Until, randomly, a year later, it was suddenly critical.
Aaron called the Flight Director, voice cool. “Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to AUX.”
Nobody, not the Flight Director, not the Capsule Communicator, not any of his fellow flight controllers had the slightest idea WTF he meant by that. Aaron had to repeat it a few times: “SCE to AUX.” When it was finally relayed to Conrad, he had the same reaction: “What the hell is SCE and where the hell is it?”
Astronaut Alan Bean, in the right seat, was seated near it and hollered out “I know what it is!” He flipped it and that instantly started the fix, followed by several more steps. Lights came back. Telemetry was restored. After a moment, the crushing pressure now wonderfully relieved, Conrad began laughing. With his legendary panache, he turned to pilot Dick Gordon. “Okay, Dickie, fly us to the moon.”
The lives of the three astronauts, the immense rocket system, the mission and perhaps the entire program had been saved because of John Aaron. To this day, “SCE to AUX” lives in aviation infamy as a phrase that represents that kind of brilliant performance under pressure.
NASA had a funny nickname for just such people, and they duly bestowed it on Aaron.
He became a “Steely-Eyed Missile Man.”
The post The Steely-Eyed Missile Man That Saved Apollo 12 appeared first on Field Ethos.
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