SCE to AUX?
- Thread starter BUDFORCE
- Start date
Very good Mr Budforce.
Apollo 12 launch, after the launch vehicle was struck by lightning
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I'm not @drakulton, but I can certainly answer.
Apollo 12 launched into a thunderstorm, and on the way up lightning struck the spaceship+rocket stack twice. It knocked virtually every system off-line, and scrambled the telemetry to the ground. The rocket continued to fly on quite happily, since the Saturn guidance was independent of the Apollo CSM. But the crew onboard had every warning light going, a shorted electrical system and no attitude indicator to tell them which way was up. On the ground things weren't much better, with the nonsensical telemetry readings.
The flight controller responsible for the CSM systems was John Aaron, and he remembered seeing something similar happen to the telemetry in a test when the Signal Conditioning Equipment power supply was interrupted. It had an AUX setting, and pushing this restored telemetry during that test. He made the call, which was passed up to the crew. Al Bean, the lunar module pilot on the mission, knew where the switch was (mission commander Pete Conrad famously replied to the call with "SCE to Auxiliary? What the hell is that?"
) and flipped it. Telemetry came back, the crew reset all their systems, and re-aligned the guidance platform once they were in Earth orbit.
Apollo 12 launched into a thunderstorm, and on the way up lightning struck the spaceship+rocket stack twice. It knocked virtually every system off-line, and scrambled the telemetry to the ground. The rocket continued to fly on quite happily, since the Saturn guidance was independent of the Apollo CSM. But the crew onboard had every warning light going, a shorted electrical system and no attitude indicator to tell them which way was up. On the ground things weren't much better, with the nonsensical telemetry readings.
The flight controller responsible for the CSM systems was John Aaron, and he remembered seeing something similar happen to the telemetry in a test when the Signal Conditioning Equipment power supply was interrupted. It had an AUX setting, and pushing this restored telemetry during that test. He made the call, which was passed up to the crew. Al Bean, the lunar module pilot on the mission, knew where the switch was (mission commander Pete Conrad famously replied to the call with "SCE to Auxiliary? What the hell is that?"
) and flipped it. Telemetry came back, the crew reset all their systems, and re-aligned the guidance platform once they were in Earth orbit.It's a good 'un. "1968", the episode about Apollo 8, is my favourite. 8 is one of the greatest stories in space exploration IMO - first time they put men on top of a Saturn V, first time heading out to lunar orbit (with no backup engine because no lunar module!), first re-entry into Earth atmosphere at those kind of speeds...