Spacelog Apollo 11

We're moving the camera over to the right window now to give you Langrenus, its—its several central peaks and -

Roger. We got Langrenus in our screen now.

Okay, 11. This is Houston. We're getting a beautiful picture of Langrenus now with its rather conspicuous central peak.

The Sea of Fertility doesn't look very fertile to me. I don't know who named it.

Well, it may have been named by a gentleman whom this crater was named after, Langrenus. Langrenus was a cartographer to the King of Spain and made one of the—one of the early reasonably accurate maps of the Moon.

Roger. That's very interesting —

… at least it sounds better for our purposes than the Sea of Crises.

Amen to that.

Okay. It looks like you're coming inside now on the camera.

Well, I can't get behind to see the monitor. I'll bring the focus in, but we're going to be looking down past one of the LM quads and one of the antennas almost straight down at the ground track that we'll be seeing coming in now. I guess there's maybe 2 or 3 minutes before power descent.

All right, that should put the LM structure about in focus, and I'm going to move it out to infinity and then expand the field of view.

Crater Secchi is out my window now, window number 2.

Hello, Apollo 11. This is Houston. We show you coming up on the terminator at 78 53, about 7 minutes from now, and we've also got the LOI 2 and TEI 5 PAD's ready for you after the TV whenever you want to terminate. Over.

Roger.

And we're getting a good view of the track leading into the landing site now and -

Okay, And it looks like we got Secchi K, went by about 10 seconds ago; coming up on Apollo Ridge.

And in the right hand portion of our screen right now, we can see Messier Alfa and Bravo with the light colored rays streaming off in one direction.

I don't know if you can make out, but in the Sea of Fertility there are a number of craters that are just barely discernible, old, old craters whose outlines are just barely able to be seen.

Roger. I think we can make them out. The color really enhances our ability to discern features and craters over what we see in real time on our black and white monitor.

Right. The—At these low Sun angles, there's no trace of brown, it's now returned to a very gray appearance and, like the 8 crew says, it has a look of plaster of paris to it at this Sun angle, which is completely lacking in …

Roger.

Okay. This is very close to ignition point for power descent. Just passing Mount Marilyn that—that triangular shaped mountain that you see in the center of the screen at the present time with crater Secchi Theta on top of the far northern edge of the mountain.

Roger. We're getting a good view of Mount Marilyn and the Secchi Theta.

And now we're looking at what we call Boot Hill; occurs 20 seconds into the descent.

The bright, sharp rimmed crater at the very right edge of the screen, Censorinus T. Now passing the—the 1 minute point in power descent.

Roger. And for your information, your current altitude is 148 nautical miles above the surface.

Don't you think?

I'm unable to determine altitude at all looking out the window. I couldn't tell whether we were down at 60 or up at 170.

I bet you could tell if you were down at 50,000 feet.

I wouldn't be surprised.

We're passing some steep ridges here. The edge of some old craters that were photographed by Apollo 10; and those—the crew of Apollo 10 was very impressed with the steepness of these ridges when they came over them at about 50,000 feet.

Roger. We can observe they're also steep even from this altitude. You got quite a shadow being cast by the Sun at these low angles.

Roger. During the LOI 1 burn, your engine burned a little bit more propellant than we predicted, and consequently, we'd like to update—or send you a new TEI 4 PAD. Over.

Okay.

Our chamber pressure onboard was higher that time, too. It's all on the onboard tape, the time entry, and the chamber pressure; but to make a long story short, it worked its way up to 100.

Roger.

And down here, we showed a chamber pressure of on the order of 103 to 104 psi during your burn on playback.

Okay.

Go ahead with the TEI 4.

Roger. TEI 4 revised: SPS/G&N: 38320, minus 055, plus 060 084 30 2749, plus 31380, plus 03475, minus 01032; roll NA, pitch 034. Rest of the PAD is NA. Ullage two jets 16 seconds, undocked. No LOI 2. Over.

Just in TEI 4 SPS/G&N: 38320, minus 055, plus 060 084 30 2749, plus 31380, plus 03475, minus 01032, NA, 034. All the rest of the PAD's NA. Two jets, 16 seconds, undocked. No LOI 2.

Apollo 11, this is Houston.

Roger. Go ahead, Houston.

Roger. We've been looking at your systems data on playback, and everything is looking good. In particular, the SPS looks good. I would like to remind you, though, of a request to perform this burn on the bank A ball valves only, and you are GO for LOI 2. Also, we have currently in the flight plan, you scheduled tomorrow to start entering the LM at about 96 hours GET, and we'd like to know if you have any plans to initiate this ingress into the LM earlier. If so, we can call the people in ahead of time. Over.

Well, we didn't have any plans to. No. We just wanted to be ready at that time.