Dave Scott
As a teenager in our family I interpreted news of many space missions to my parents. According to the commander of the Apollo 15 mission, Dave Scott — Tom Hanks had that same role in his family. How I learned this? It was one of those rare times in my life where I had a chance to ask.
Dave had been invited to the Brown Planetary Geosciences group to dispense authoritative wisdom on the topic of lunar geology to recently recruited NASA astronauts and a small group of geology students. During breaks in our meeting I asked Dave about his consulting work with several motion picture projects. During one meeting session I focused on his career in space, partly for context and partly from pure curiosity.
Dave described how astronauts cultivate a sense of “being in the zone” as this would be labeled in later years — the ability to focus on a task or problem to the exclusion of all else. Baseball pitchers and batters do this, artists in the moment of creation also. By asking about Gemini 8, Dave’s first space mission, I figured his experience there might offer a good illustration.
Dave flew aboard Gemini 8 with the not-yet-famous Neil Armstrong. The goal of this mission focused on orbital rendezvous and docking with an Agena upper stage target vehicle. This would be the first docking between two spacecraft in orbit providing critical flight experience for Apollo missions to come. In future missions the rocket motor of Agena would be used for significant orbital maneuvers. This time around, Gemini 8 would simply test docking and attitude control. Once docked, Dave would control thrusters aboard the Agena while Armstrong tended to the Gemini.
Agena Target Vehicle Seen from Gemini 8
Soon after docking they found themselves struggling to maintain attitude control. The Agena was putting them into a roll — so they thought. Armstrong was able to stop the spin with thrusters aboard their Gemini spacecraft. Yet he couldn’t find a way to stop it entirely without ongoing thruster firings. Without added thruster output, the roll would pick up speed again.
According to Dave, Armstrong offered the stick to Dave. Of course if Neil Armstrong couldn’t find a way to stabilize the flight of a spacecraft — docked or otherwise, “I wasn’t about to either,” joked Dave.
Armstrong then asked Dave to shut the Agena off. Dave raised his hand from the Agena control panel and looked at Armstrong somewhat puzzled.
“It is off.”
With no other obvious options ground control suggested they undock and back away from the wayward Agena stage, which Armstrong did. Immediately the Gemini capsule began to spin faster and faster no matter what Armstrong tried. Dave calmly described how their vision began to narrow from the G-loading. At one revolution per second they were in danger of blacking out, and once unconscious — certain death. Finally, to save the ship and themselves, Armstrong shut down the primary attitude control thrusters, switched to thrusters used only during reentry — and quickly regained attitude control.
According to Dave, “once the reentry system was ‘wet’ we had to deorbit.” They couldn’t run the risk of another stuck thruster valve.
In 1966, at age 11, I slid from my bed to report what I’d just heard of Gemini 8 on the radio to my parents sitting around the kitchen table. I didn’t know any details, only that Armstrong and Scott were safely bobbing somewhere at sea. Later I read how they’d splashed down at an emergency site nearly ten thousand miles from their primary target. Instead of a mid-Atlantic aircraft carrier battle group waiting for them, they were picked up by a US navel destroyer near Okinawa.
Four years later I repeated this bedtime drill — sliding out once more to report on a space emergency to my parents. According to Dave that’s exactly what Tom Hanks did the same evening back in 1970. The Apollo 13 mission was in serious jeopardy with oxygen leaking into interplanetary space. I crawled back to bed, listened for more news and felt relief when the astronauts moved to the Lunar Module acting as a lifeboat.
NASA later found the problem, made sure it was fixed for later missions and then sent four more crews to the moon. As a kid I watched TV of Dave walking on the moon two missions after Apollo 13. Apollo 15′s visit to Hadley Rille is still etched into my memory. During a later break I told Dave that when I built my 12-inch telescope, Hadley Rille was one of the first places I looked.
To most of the dozen round-table members that day at Brown all of this reminiscing must have sounded like ancient history. Was the topic of mission emergencies useful to geology grad students, post-docs and newly-minted astronauts? Yet the point was simple — though often a perspective ignored — space initiatives should always begin with reality in its most obvious forms, and if we’re headed for Mars, it sure would be a good idea to remember the risks overcome during the exploration of the moon.
What would those of my father’s generation ask an aged Charles Lindbergh about his first flight to Europe? Would they pose questions to re-live the thrill or instead recall something critical that might otherwise slip through the sands of time? Lindbergh almost did not take off for all the extra weight of the huge fuel tank. He needed to stay awake for nearly 40 hours. He needed luck with the weather to navigate. If we only remember the glory and none the hardships behind it, we can never properly ride on the shoulders of giants.
Last night I coaxed Google Earth into simulating the soft landing trajectory of Dave’s Apollo 15 powered descent to the moon. With one screen I followed archival footage shot from the pilot’s window while at the same pace on my other screen I nudged the display along a similar approach using recognizable craters for landmarks.
Once on the surface, I could see how the lander stood behind a small rise that would hide it from view during much of the exploration of the surface. I can’t imagine how I would have felt to drive away in a rover leaving my own lander out of view. Dave simply says the he and Jim Irwin were ‘in the zone’ and didn’t even notice their spacesuits, much less worry about how they might get home.
Gerry Griffin also attended our meeting. Forty years ago he was the lead flight director running the Apollo 15 mission (later, directer of NASA’s Johnson Space Center). Gerry added a story about Pete Conrad from when their Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning right off the pad — crashing their command module computer. Inside a staging ring atop the third stage the rocket itself had its own guidance system, so their launch trajectory was unaffected. Yet with their command module gone bluey this was hardly comforting.
Somebody in Houston knew about a reset toggle. It was used for system setup, diagnostics and to return the command module to its start-up state after a simulated launch. No one expected it would ever be needed in flight — so the astronauts never practiced for this, or even knew the switch existed.
According to Gerry, news of this switch arrived from a ‘backroom’ controller. His reaction…
“What!!?”
Gerry then passed the info to the capcom — a backup mission commander as qualified to fly as Conrad who said…
“What!!?”
Then the capcom relayed details to Conrad who said…
“What!!?”
The choice — either find that toggle or ‘pull the handle’ for a solid rocket escape tower ride from hell.
I’ve known for years that Conrad found a way to reset the electronics. I never knew how it came down to just one person on the ground remembering how this could be done.
Those are the sorts of details of our flight history that we can never afford to forget.
Dave Scott - Ken Ramsley - Jerry Griffin
