My issue is when Derek raised fluid dynamics and the astronauts being engineers, and they should have known something. Yes, that is correct that they were engineers but again we need some context.
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Al Bean had said how there was so much to absorb in an Apollo mission that when he went to various functions, he would never remember anyone's name in case it pushed some vital piece of information out of his head.
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Sure, I know the basics but some of the detail has gone. [...]
What is to say the same did not happen to those astronauts?
The reaction from Conrad and Bean is what I would expect as a first-pass, knee-jerk opinion from engineers whose general knowledge might have gone stale in favor of recent, task-specific knowledge. It was my knee-jerk opinion too, and my knowledge isn't stale. But I'm sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned office, not bouncing around on the lunar surface. At the present, I have little else pressing on my attention; I'm not trying to keep to a tight schedule of exploration. And unlike the Apollo 12 crew, I'm primed to suspect that the first-order estimation is probably not enough to address the problem. So no, there's no reason to believe the crew's initial opinion was the authoritative (or even the best) engineering assessment.
Often in fluid dynamics analysis for engineering analysis purposes, the second- and third-order effects are what you're interested in. Conrad and Bean are naturally considering the first-order flow. But the minor aspects of fluid flow are often what you're interested in while solving some specific problem. For example, the stall characteristics of some wing may not be a problem as seen only in the major wing. But you may need to look at the minor flow around some fairing or collection of features that conspire to create the effect in question out of a minor flow. Similarly, if we want to consider that the post-impingement DPS plume is responsible for applying dust to Surveyor III, we may need to sit down and think of what the secondary and tertiary effects might be. That's definitely not something you do while standing on the lunar surface, and indeed maybe not even something you do while the mission is being flown. It takes careful consideration, and -- these days especially -- detailed and costly digital modeling.
What Bean said above rings true also in regards to the television camera. One of the problems that never quite got solved during Apollo was the tension between mission planners and crew operations. Today we would call it "feature creep," the cumulative effect of adding many small, seemingly insignificant tasks and requirements to an already busy schedule. This was felt most acutely in training. During training, crew operations tended to follow a priority-oriented plan. Evidently mission planners believed all the items were being trained on with equal emphasis and success. Bean didn't get a lot of training on the television setup, and didn't have a real camera to train with. What astounds us these days, but which was seriously considered for Apollo 11, was to delete the EVA television experience altogether. The mission was going to be difficult enough without "extra" obligations like minding the TV. In the larger sense, considering all the mission procedures written around camera and optics maintenance, I think it was David Scott who complained that most of the problems they were constantly having to face with respect to photography could have been solved with lens caps. That certainly would have solved Bean's problem in a very straightforward, simple way.