Half arguments and problems for the hoax

[JayUtah]

Is your Apollo knowledge just an accumulation over the years or are there certain sources you continually reference?

Both.  This is my profession, and I learned it at the hands of Apollo engineers.  In a broader sense, the literature commonly makes reference to techniques developed in Gemini and Apollo, and lately STS.

In a narrower sense, there is no one singular work I refer to.  My printed technical library regarding Apollo spans some 3-4 feet of shelf space.  My digital library amounts probably to the better part of a terabyte.  That said, start with the Apollo press kits.  Then move on to the science and mission reports, both preliminary and full.  These can be obtained in print from Apogee.  Then tackle the ALSJ, which will probably take you until summer to digest.  The Apollo News Record reports are next, followed by the operational handbooks for the LM, CSM, and Saturn V and the annotated mission flight plans.  For specific subject matters, try the NASA technical reports servers, paying special attention to the experience reports.

If at any time you get lost, fall back to such books as Chariots for Apollo, the various works of Chaiken, Murray, and Cox, and of course our own "dwight," who has written the standard work on television in space.  By far the best repository of visual information is spacecraftfilms.com.  The executive producer, Mark Gray, occasionally posts here.  Pay whatever price he is currently asking; he works tirelessly to preserve and restore the visual record of space flight.

And as usual, thanks for the compliments.

[Willoughby]

Is your Apollo knowledge just an accumulation over the years or are there certain sources you continually reference?

Both.  This is my profession, and I learned it at the hands of Apollo engineers.  In a broader sense, the literature commonly makes reference to techniques developed in Gemini and Apollo, and lately STS.

In a narrower sense, there is no one singular work I refer to.  My printed technical library regarding Apollo spans some 3-4 feet of shelf space.  My digital library amounts probably to the better part of a terabyte.  That said, start with the Apollo press kits.  Then move on to the science and mission reports, both preliminary and full.  These can be obtained in print from Apogee.  Then tackle the ALSJ, which will probably take you until summer to digest.  The Apollo News Record reports are next, followed by the operational handbooks for the LM, CSM, and Saturn V and the annotated mission flight plans.  For specific subject matters, try the NASA technical reports servers, paying special attention to the experience reports.

If at any time you get lost, fall back to such books as Chariots for Apollo, the various works of Chaiken, Murray, and Cox, and of course our own "dwight," who has written the standard work on television in space.  By far the best repository of visual information is spacecraftfilms.com.  The executive producer, Mark Gray, occasionally posts here.  Pay whatever price he is currently asking; he works tirelessly to preserve and restore the visual record of space flight.

And as usual, thanks for the compliments.

Wow!  What a guy, man!  Thank you for taking the time for this.  Printing it now!

[Kiwi]

The LM lifeboat scenario just wasn't considered probable enough to mandate the necessary design changes.  The respective ECS systems had much more pressing design goals: chiefly mass, volume, and power consumption constraints.  The linear-versus-annular flows through each filter were aimed at optimizing for those things, not interoperability.  It's not just square-versus-round.

Is your Apollo knowledge just an accumulation over the years or are there certain sources you continually reference?  If it's the latter, would you share where you get your information?  I'm impressed with you consistently having detailed knowledge on this - and I want some.  I've read what I can find, but I have nowhere near the detailed knowledge that you have to know something like "the LM lifeboat scenario wasn't considered probably enough...".

Careful!  There's a big difference between Jay's meaning of probable enough, and your probably enough. What I gather he means is that the need for LM lifeboat mode wasn't considered likely to arise, or at least not likely enough to warrant changes to the filters. One letter can make a difference in technical matters.

Jay mentioned the Apollo Press Reports -- I can supply a word-processed copy of the Apollo 11 press report which can be a little more useful than the PDF of the original, though it would pay to have that too. PM me with email address if you want a copy. The same applies to other members.

Have you looked at Jay's website Clavius?  It has more of his Apollo knowledge and includes a superb and easy-to-follow explanation of why the Apollo 11 lunar TV was of such poor quality:--
http://www.clavius.org/tvqual.html

Many of the other reports he mentioned can be obtained from the ALSJ:--
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html

[Willoughby]

That's just a bone-head mistake on my part.  I understood what he meant.  It was just a typo.

Oh yeah, I've gone through clavius; I had no idea it was his site.  It's a great site!

[JayUtah]

Indeed, one can't change just the LiOH filters.  If you've owned more than one car you have probably experienced both kinds of filters that were used on Apollo.  The CM used linear pass-through filters.  The air goes in one end and comes out the other sans carbon dioxide..  Most modern cars use this mode for their air filters.  Within the frame, the filter material is fanfolded to maximize surface area.

The LM used annular filters, like the circular ones in older cars.  Air is taken in around the entire circumference and then extracted from the middle, at right angles to the plane of the circle.  There's no difference in effect, but there's a difference in the geometric arrangement of piping fans, and filter chamber (which must be accessible for change-outs).  To make the filters interchangeable would require quite a lot of redesign.

That's balanced against the probability of the CSM becoming uninhabitable, yet still navigable.  That's a narrow slice of contingency, even if you're running those numbers after Apollo 13.

[bknight]

But Apollo 13 gave the press something to report other than the "routine" landings on the moon, two at that point in time.

[nomuse]

So do I take it the difficulty of the Apollo 13 filter adaptor was more than getting a square peg to fit in a round hole...that it also had to direct the air properly for the filter to work well?

[raven]

And they found a workaround using on-board materials, so compromising the engineering for an unlikely fail-safe ended up not being necessary.

[JayUtah]

So do I take it the difficulty of the Apollo 13 filter adaptor was more than getting a square peg to fit in a round hole...that it also had to direct the air properly for the filter to work well?

Indeed.  Luckily the ECS had fittings for suit hoses, since it could be used to scrub air in the suit circuit.

It's not hard to find pictures of the CM filter.  It's just a square box with the front and back square faces open to pass air.  Because of how the suit fittings had to be valved through the ECS to rig this up, the crew had to figure out how to suck air through the filter, into a suit hose, and then into the ECS.  That is, the hose worked by suction in this arrangement.

Once you see what you need to do, this is actually easily within the realm of the home MacGuyver.  You really don't need much engineering knowledge, just practical know-how.  And of course, the ability to use only what you have on hand.  You can leave one face of the CM filter open and draw cabin air in through it.  The trick is to adapt the other face of the filter to a hose that's going to suck air.  This was done using one of the many plastic bags used to pack equipment for the flight.  You just tape it around the perimeter to seal it to the edge.

Then you make a hole in the bag just big enough for the hose and tape the hose into it.  But when you turn on the LM fans (which are prodigious), they'll suck the plastic up against the outlet face of the filter.  That's no good because then only the portion of the filter right in front of the hose gets used.  So you modify your adapter to allow a rigid structural piece that makes a "tent" out of the bag and holds it away from the face.  For this they used the thick paper cover of the flight plan.

Starting over, you tape one edge of the paper to one edge of the filter, and then the other edge of the paper to the opposite edge of the filter.  This makes a little Quonset hut over the downstream (outlet) side of the filter.  Then you tape the plastic bag around it to make the airseal.  You attach the hose to the bag as before, although obviously along the ends of the dome created by the paper.

You need a physical filter.  That is, what we've been calling a "filter" all along is the lithium hydroxide canister that removes carbon dioxide.  It doesn't really function as a particulate air filter, and you need one of those somewhere between the inlet and the fans because the fans and other parts of the ECS fit with very narrow tolerances.  Particles that make it through the canister can foul the fans, and that's dangerous since the ECS is not crew-serviceable.  So you wad up a sock (preferably clean) and slip it into the hose.

That's pretty much it.  You turn on the circulating fan and it sucks air through the LiOH canister into the tented bag, into the hose through the sock, and into the rest of the system that removes odors, adds fresh oxygen, and (were the electrical systems operating normally) heats or cools the cabin air to a tolerable temperature.

When one canister is saturated, you just tape a fresh one onto the front of the assembly you already have.  It doesn't matter that air gets sucked through saturated canisters; you just need a fresh one somewhere along the line and a means of making sure all the cabin air is forced to pass through it.

[JayUtah]

And they found a workaround using on-board materials, so compromising the engineering for an unlikely fail-safe ended up not being necessary.

Taking Apollo 13 into account, a redesign still would not have been the best solution.  Better simply to provide additional canisters so that either spacecraft's ECS can support the crew for the whole mission, or provide an engineered and tested version of the Apollo 13 adapter.  If you were starting over with a new set of spacecraft, then you could, if you wanted, stipulate in the design requirements how you wanted to provide redundancy or other means of reliability for different ECS systems.

[raven]

Taking Apollo 13 into account, a redesign still would not have been the best solution.  Better simply to provide additional canisters so that either spacecraft's ECS can support the crew for the whole mission, or provide an engineered and tested version of the Apollo 13 adapter.  If you were starting over with a new set of spacecraft, then you could, if you wanted, stipulate in the design requirements how you wanted to provide redundancy or other means of reliability for different ECS systems.

Do you know what the decision with Constellation's Orion and Altair would have been, or was it cancelled before it got to that point?

[JayUtah]

Do you know what the decision with Constellation's Orion and Altair would have been, or was it cancelled before it got to that point?

I don't know what they were planning to do.

[raven]

Do you know what the decision with Constellation's Orion and Altair would have been, or was it cancelled before it got to that point?

I don't know what they were planning to do.

An honest answer from an honest man. Thank you, you are much appreciated for taking the time to do so.

[bknight]

At least Orion  will fly sometime in the 20's.  It has been a long time  to go back further than LEO.

[sts60]

Well, to be pedantic about it, Orion has already flown on EFT-1, and beyond low Earth orbit. 

And will fly around the Moon, if all goes... well, we'll see if 2018 holds.

But, yeah, it will be good to see people go that far.