Spacelog Apollo 11

Oops! Spoke too soon.

I'm making myself seasick doing it, Charlie. I'll just put you back rightside-up where you belong.

Roger.

You don't get to do that every day.

11, Houston. Could you describe, from your view, the polar cloudcap? It appears to us to extend down the western coast of North America. Would you estimate how far it extends down? Over.

Trying to fit everybody into the window.

It appears that the cloudcap comes down a little bit below the southern extremity of Alaska.

Roger.

We've—11, we've lost our picture here, now.

Okay. Apollo 11, Houston. We've got the picture back now.

Unfortunately, we only have one window that has a view of the Earth and it's filled up with the TV camera, so your view now is probably better than ours is.

Roger. We copy.

11, Houston. If you could comply, we'd like to see a little smiling faces up there, if you could give us some interior views. I'm sure everybody would like to see you. Over.

Okay. We'll reconfigure the TV for that.

Roger.

Apollo 11, Houston. It appears to us that we're seeing a view from outside plus a little of the inside. It appears you've taken the camera away from the left window now. Over.

That's correct. We're moving it back and reconfiguring for interior lighting.

Roger.

We can still see the Earth through the left window, and it appears that we can see a floodlight off to the left, either that or some Sun shafting through the hatch window.

It's a floodlight.

Roger.

Now we're coming in. Can't quite make out who that …

That's big Mike Collins, there —

You got a little bit of—Yes, hello there sports fans. You got a little bit of me, plus Neil is in the center couch, and Buzz is doing the camera work at this time.

Roger. It's a little dark now, 11. Maybe a bigger f-stop might help.

Yes, that's in work.

It's getting a lot better now, 11. Mike, you're coming in five-by. I got a good -

I would have put on a coat and tie if I'd known about this ahead of time.

Is Buzz holding your cue cards for you. Over.

Cue cards have a no. We have no intertions of competing with the professionals, believe me. We are very comfortable up here, though. We do have a happy home. There's plenty of room for the three of us and I think we're all learning to find our favorite little corner to sit in. Zero g is very comfortable, but after a while you get to the point where you sort of get tired of rattling around and banging off the ceiling and the floor and the side, so you tend to find a little corner somewhere and put your knees up or something like that to wedge yourself in, and that seems more at home.

Roger. Looks like Neil is coming in five-by there, 11. Mike, see you in the background. The definition is really outstanding. The colors are good. It's a real good picture we're getting here of Commander Armstrong. We—Buzz, when you take the camera over towards the window where the Sun's shafting through, it tends to blank it out, though.

Yes, Neil's standing on his head again. He's trying to make me nervous.

Roger.

He's disappearing up into the tunnel, of course, as he would going into the lunar module, only backwards.

Roger. We 'can see portions of the LEB now. The systems test meter panel, in the lower part of the picture, or we did have it, anyway.

Okay. And directly behind his head are our optical instruments, the sextant and the telescope that we use to take sightings with.

Roger. Copy. And we see the DSKY flashing with a 651. In fact, we can read registers 1 and 2 quite clearly.

We have the old high gain angles telling us which way the Earth is.

Copy. That's a beautiful picture. Clarity is outstanding.

We can also give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time. Elapsed time: 34 hours 16 minutes and umpteen seconds. Can you see that clearly enough, Charlie?

Roger, Apollo 11. We can see it counting up every—every second. We got 34 17 02 now.

Okay. Back to the high-gain angles.

Roger.

Now we have amputated those.

11, Houston. We have a beautiful rainbow there now as you move the camera around. … That looks like the star charts coming into view, now. Over.

Yes. Those are Buzz's two star charts that he is using right now as sun shades over the righthand window, window number 5.

Roger. We see the sun shining in through it behind him and plotting out the equatorial—correction, ecliptic plane, and the stars that you're using for the navigation.

Roger. He doesn't really need the charts. He's got them memorized. They're just for show.

We copy.

11, Houston. That's a lot better on the star chart now. We can make out the ecliptic plane and the planets and the Sun and the Moon as they have gone at various places throughout the ecliptic plane. Over.

Okay, Charlie.

If we can get some of the wires untangled here, we'll give you a demonstration of how easy pushups are up here.

11, Roger. Good view of Buzz, there.

When it gets pretty hard doing it that way, we just roll over and do it the other way.

Roger. We copy. We couldn't figure out whether that was a chinup or a pushup. Just take your choice, I guess.

Well, it looks like it's probably almost your dinner time down there, Earth. We'll show you our food cabinet here in a second.

11, Roger.

11, Houston. We see a box full of goodies there. Over.

We really have them, Charlie. We've got all kinds of good stuff. We've got coffee up here in the upper left and various breakfast items, bacon in little small bites, beverages like fruit drink, and over in the center part we have, oh, all kinds of things. Let me pull one out here and see what it is.

Roger.

Would you believe you're looking at chicken stew, here? All you have to do is—3 ounces of hot water for 5 or 10 minutes. Now we get our hot water out of a little spigot up here with a filter on it that filters any gases that may be in the drinking water out, and we just stick the end of this little tube in the end of the spigot and pull the trigger three times for 3 ounces of hot water and then mush it up and slice the end off it and there you go, beautiful chicken stew.

Sounds delicious.

Yes. The food so far has been very good. We couldn't be happier with it.

Roger.

Could I borrow that flashlight a second?

The surgeons are saying thank you, there, for that.

And it is sort of down in a dark corner, so we have a flashlight here to help us see things; and if I can let go of it carefully, it'll just hold itself right where it is.

Roger.

As long as it's …, it will.

Apollo 11, Houston. That's a pretty good demonstration. You started off really stable there, Mike. It's -

Well, the problem is, no matter how carefully you let go, you bump it just a tiny little bit and set it in motion, and once in motion there she goes. Try that again.

It looks fairly stable now with slow rotation.

Well, so much for the food department. I'm going to close up the store down here.

Roger. We copy.

Charlie, we checked out the cable lengths, and we're thinking we might want to see if we can take the TV into the LM with us tomorrow for part of the time. Over.

Roger. Good show. We'd like to see it if it'll reach that far. Over.

We'll give it a try.

Roger.

And where we sleep is down underneath this couch.

Houston. Roger.

Slowly sinking into the sack there.

It's really comfortable.

Forgot to give Buzz his flashlight back.

Apollo 11, Houston. Could you give the folks a view of your patch on your CWG's? Over.

Stand by one, Charlie; we'll try and give you a closeup.

Roger.

11, Houston. We have the patch. Could you attempt to improve the focus slightly? Over.

11, Houston. The scan on the camera makes the—that's a little bit better now. The flashlight seems to flicker, due to the scan on the TV. We can't see the eagle. Now it's a little bit better. Over. Could you open the f-stop a little bit more? Over.

It's open all the way. We're going to have to move Buzz around a little bit.

Roger.

Apollo 11, Houston. The color is better now. It's coming in. We could attempt a little bit better focus on it. There we go; it focuses a lot better now. We see the eagle coming right in on the lunar surface. Over. That's very good now.

Apollo 11, Houston. That's very good now. We can see the Earth in the background, Apollo 11, and the eagle coming in.

It's probably pretty hard to see the olive branch, isn't it?

Roger. It is.

Well, that's what he has in his talons, is an olive branch.

Copy.

Apollo 11, Houston. We're really impressed with the clarity and the detail that we have in the picture. The colors are—now, it's really an excellent picture now that I'm looking at it on our monitor, which is about 12 seconds before the networks can get it out due to the conversion that we have here on our TV converter. We're looking at the controls in the main display console. We can see the DSKY up on the panel. Over.

That would be nice if you could take a look at all the circuit breakers; make sure the right ones are in and the right ones are out.