Ed Fendell query

[dwight]

Hello everyone,

I'm having a discussion with an HB and they claim that in a documentary (which they conveniently can't name) Ed Fendell claims he was not aware of the delay a signal would take to the moon until Apollo 17. Dont laugh its true.

Now, in NONE of the interviews I have of him does he claim this. In fact I have JSC archive documentation where he specifically discusses the delay problems prior to Apollo 15. Is there perhaps a mockumentary where he jokingly says this? Like I said, I have nothing remotely coming to backing up the latest stupidity, but I thought I'd leave no stone unturned. There can't be that many interviews/ docos I havent seen.

[Rob260259]

Don't know. Never seen such a mockumentary. Just finished "How Apollo Flew To The Moon" by W. David Woods and searched for Ed Fendell again. Fendell anticipating the controls filming Challenger's lift off from the Moon is mentioned on page 291. And I recall Fendell saying it in an interview that is was not too difficult, after some practise with simulations on Earth.
Is this discussion on YouTube? Can I join?
 

[AtomicDog]

Scifi stories from the 1950s talk about the speed of light delay to the moon.

[dwight]

Yep its a good ol' YouTube discussion.

enter at your own risk.

[Trebor]

Yep its a good ol' YouTube discussion. --- enter at your own risk.

Ah, considering the person you are speaking to I suggest you don't bother.
For the sake of your own sanity run!

[raven]

I agree with demanding a source. But in the face of it, it's pretty ridiculous claim. There had been 3 rover missions in which the camera was being manipulated via remote control by, among others, Ed Fendell.
How could he not notice the speed of light delay over Apollo 15, 16, and 17, even if it was faked?
The mind boggles at what CT come up with.

[ka9q]

It's entirely possible that Ed might not have initially known the total round trip delay for his GCTA control; more than just light propagation was involved. The computers took some time to encode the commands, then the uplink transmitters took time to send them (the bit rate was not high), time for the LCRU to decode them, and so on. He would have had to determine the total delay, perhaps just by observing and measuring it, before he could plan his camera maneuvers for the Apollo 16 and 17 ascents.

[ka9q]

Never being one to trust hunchbacked's assertions at face value, I checked the videos myself and found that the tilts he complains about occur a full half hour prior to ascent. After then and prior to liftoff, with the exception of one out-and-in zoom that's still quite a few minutes prior, there are NO further camera motions.

I am really coming to the conclusion that HB is not, shall we say, right in the head. I'm hardly one to make that an officlal determination but there are few if any alternative explanations.

[Rob260259]

Never being one to trust hunchbacked's assertions at face value, I checked the videos myself and found that the tilts he complains about occur a full half hour prior to ascent. After then and prior to liftoff, with the exception of one out-and-in zoom that's still quite a few minutes prior, there are NO further camera motions.

I am really coming to the conclusion that HB is not, shall we say, right in the head. I'm hardly one to make that an officlal determination but there are few if any alternative explanations.

Found out that myself, too.
And I'm leaving HB and his nonsense videos because he seems a delusional paranoid.
 

[RAF]

That speed-up youtube vid is pretty funny...looks like Ed had too many cups of coffee that day.

[Kiwi]

On pages 60 and 61 of his JSC Oral History interview of 19 October 2000,
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/alsj/Fendell-OralHist.pdf
Ed Fendell spells out that they were completely familiar with the timing before Apollo 17. One of his staff, Harley Weyer, worked out in advance how to follow the Apollo 17 lunar liftoff, which Fendell did without watching the TV screen but instead by working from a script of commands.

This blows away some of the stories doing the rounds that he did it perfectly after practising on the previous two missions.
 

The other thing that I'll explain to you how it worked, and it's a little interesting, is you've seen this picture where the lunar module lifts off and the camera follows it. Well, on 15 the motor burned out and we couldn't do that.  On 16 the rover was not parked in the right place, so consequently we missed it.

Now, the way that worked was this. Harley Weyer, who worked for me, sat down and figured what the trajectory would be and where the lunar rover would be each second as it moved out and what your settings would go to. That picture you see was taken without looking at it at all. There was no watching it and doing anything with that picture. As the crew counted down, that's a [Apollo] 17 picture you see, as [Eugene A.] Cernan counted down and he knew he had to park in the right place because I was going to kill him, he didn't -– and Gene and I are good friends, he'll tell you that -- I actually sent the first command at liftoff minus three seconds. And each command was scripted, and all I was doing was looking at a clock, sending commands. I was not looking at the television. I really didn't see it until it was over with and played back. Those were pre-set commands that were just punched out via time. That's the way it was followed. That's the way we followed it.

On that same mission we tried to track it back in. I don't know whether you know that or not. You know, the lunar module crashed back in. There as a scientist who wanted to see it coming back in, and then they were going to look on the seismometer, whatever you call it, and get that data and so on. But everything that was figured out or whatever, we never saw it. But that's the way that was done but it wasn't done by looking at the camera, at the picture at all. It was all done via time.

[ka9q]

Ed is misremembering some of the details. The camera drive motor(s) didn't burn out on Apollo 15; a badly designed clutch on the tilt drive kept slipping. The camera got stuck tilted up or down many times during the EVAs and each time the Capcom had to ask one of the astronauts to restore it to level.

So Ed didn't try to follow the LM after liftoff because the camera would have been stuck pointing uselessly up at the sky, and the scientists wanted to use it for some more lunar surface surveys before the batteries ran down.

As luck would have it, a circuit breaker on the LCRU popped before the batteries ran down so they didn't get as much time out of it as they had hoped.