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Team Moon By: Catherine Thimmesh Vocabulary

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Team Moon By: Catherine Thimmesh Vocabulary Team Moon by: Catherine Thimmesh Vocabulary 1) ascent A rocket’s ascent stage, or climb into space, begins with a powerful, fiery li<off. 2) perilous Movies and comic books o<en portray outer space as perilous, or full of danger. 3)unpredictability Even though astronauts are well prepared, there is always unpredictability about a mission. No one knows what will happen. 4)lunar Astronauts have brought back moon rocks that they gathered from the lunar surface. 5) likelihood After animals successfully traveled in space, there was a strong likelihood, or probability, that people would be next. 6) hovering This lunar module seems to be hovering over the surface of the moon. It looks as though it is hanging in space. 7)impending Impending bad weather may threaten to delay the launch of a space shuttle flight. 8) presumably Presumably, people knew the moon was not made of green cheese before Apollo 11 landed there. That is a safe guess 9)option In the future, space travelers may have the option of a window or an aisle seat. Which would you choose? 10) random Because of dust in the atmosphere, stars twinkle in a random order, not following a paern • The year is 1969. Aer years of prepara3on, Apollo 11 is minutes away from being the first space expedion to land a man on the moon.With only 3,000 feet to go, a so/ware alarm from Eagle, the lunar module (LM), puts astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Mission Control on high alert. • Their voices were rapid-fire. Crisp. Assured. There was no hesitaon.But you could prac3cally hear the adrenaline rushing in their vocal tones, prac3cally hear the thumping of their hearts as the alarms connued to pop up. • Then the Eagle was down to 2,000 feet. Another alarm! 1202. Mission Control snapped, “Roger, no sweat.” And again, a 1202! Then the Eagle was down to 700 feet, then 500. Now, they were hovering— helicopter-like—presumably scou3ng a landing spot. • In hundreds of prac3ce simula3ons, they would have landed by now. But Mission Control couldn’t see the perilous crater and boulder field confronng Neil and Buzz. Those things, coupled with the distracon of the alarms, had slowed them down. • More than eleven minutes had passed since they started down to the moon. There was only twelve minutes’ worth of fuel in the descent stage. • Almost Empty • “Sixty seconds!” • Not sixty-one. No wiggle room. No “just a couple more seconds—we’re almost there.” And no second chances. They had just sixty seconds to land on the moon. • Absolutely no one expected it to happen. They painstakingly planned so it absolutely wouldn’t- couldn’t happen. But here they were, less than 500 feet from the moon, and just about plumb out of fuel. • Robert Carlton, the CONTROL posi3on in Mission Control, who was in charge of monitoring fuel consump3on among other things, had just sent the shocking sixty-second no3ce through the voice chain up to the astronauts. Both Neil and Buzz knew when they heard the words “sixty seconds,” that was how much me remained unl they had to abort. Unl they had to push the buon, fling themselves away from the moon, never to land. Or else, they could possibly die. • “We wanted to give him [Neil] every chance to land,” explained Robert Carlton. “So we wanted it [the LM] to be as near empty as it could possibly get, but on the other hand, we didn’t want him to run out of gas ten feet from the surface. That would have been a bad thing to do, you know. So you had to hit both. You wanted to make the mission, but you didn’t want to jeopardize your crew, and you wanted to play it just as ght as you could safely.” The heavier the spacecraft, the harder it is to launch. And fuel is heavy. So it was critical to pinpoint the fuel needed, add a cushion, then take no more than necessary. But now, because the landing was taking far longer than planned, the fuel was almost gone. Mission Control wanted Neil to take as much time as he needed and fly the LM as near empty as possible only because they wanted him to make the landing. But if he ran out of fuel above the surface, in all likelihood, the LM would crash onto the moon. So they were trying to time it to the last possible second before calling an abort—calling off the landing. If they aborted, if they flung themselves away from the moon (never to land), they would be slung into lunar orbit, where they would meet up with Mike Collins in the command module and head home to Earth. If they landed, though, leaving the moon wouldn’t be a problem because there was a full tank of fuel in the ascent stage for liftoff (an abort also used the ascent stage). But the ascent and descent stages were completely separate. When the supply for the descent stage was empty, that was it. Sharing fuel was not an option. In every simulation, the LM had been landed well before the low-level sensor was tripped, indicating 120 seconds of fuel left. Bob Nance, backroom support for CONTROL, was calculating the seconds of fuel remaining on his paper strip chart. (Flight Director Gene Kranz would write in his memoir, “I never dreamed we would still be flying this close to empty and depending on Nance’s eyeballs. ”) Bob Carlton backed up the backup with a stopwatch Thirty Seconds. Now would not be the time for the two Bobs to miscalculate, miscount, or lose their superhuman powers of concentration. They could not afford to be wrong. “When we tripped low level, things really got quiet in that control center, ” recalled Bob Carlton. “We were nervous, sweating. Came to sixty seconds, came to thirty seconds, and my eyes were just glued on the stopwatch. I didn’t see [the control center as a whole]. The system could have [fallen] apart at that instant, and I wouldn’t have [known] it. I was just watching the stopwatch.” Eighteen seconds! Click “People [were] concerned about the amount of fuel you had le, the master alarms. I don’t believe anybody in the room breathed for the last five minutes. We were just hanging on every word. And trying to force the vehicle down by sheer willpower. Get down! Get down! Neil, get down. Turn off that engine.” — Charlie Mars, chief lunar module project engineer; listening in on a headset in one of the backrooms at the Mission Control complex “Forty feet, down two and a half, picking up some dust…” — Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from the LM force the vehicle down by sheer willpower. Get down! Get down! Neil, get down. Turn off that engine.” — Charlie Mars, chief lunar module project engineer; listening in on a headset in one of the backrooms at the Mission Control complex “Forty feet, down two and a half, picking up some dust…” — Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from the LM “You know it’s real when you walk in [to the Mission Control building]. Then you sit down and start doing what you’ve done a hundred mes and it becomes surreal —you don’t know or care if it’s real, you’re just doing your thing. And then all of a sudden it doesn’t go quite the same. Somebody calls out something that brings you . wakes you up—and says . ‘It is real!’ And that was what happened when he said, ‘We’ve got some dust.’ We’d never heard that before.” — AGC Jack Garman, in Mission Control. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” —Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, from the LM “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” (“I was so excited,” Duke later said. “I couldn’t get out Tranquility Base. It came out sort of like Tranquility.”) —Cap Com (and astronaut) Charlie Duke, in Mission Control Frozen Slug" After eight challenging years and countless hours, man was finally on the moon. Flight Director Gene Kranz would soon “go around the horn” for the very first Stay/No Stay decision. “You know, they landed, and everybody’s cheering and everything and then all of a sudden somebody notices that something’s gone wrong. Temperature’s building up. Uh-oh! It shouldn’t be like that,” explained Grumman engineering manager John Coursen. Up, up, up went the temperature in a fuel line on the descent engine. Up, up went the pressure. Rocket science rule number one? Do not allow the fuel to become unstable. Instability equals unpredictability — and unpredictability is just another word for random explosions and all sorts of unwanted chaos. Engineers John Coursen, Manning Dandridge, and a whole lot of others sprang into action. Back at the Grumman plant in Bethpage, New York (where Coursen was stationed), there was a frenetic burst of engineering pandemonium: from table to table, rushing; blueprints and schematics, unfurling; telephones, dialing; telephones, ringing. Do you remember that one test? What about when such and such happened? Remember when so-and-so talked about . Any ideas? . At 300 degrees, the fuel was quickly approaching its 400-degree instability rating. Engineers at Grumman, and their counterparts at NASA in Houston (like Grumman manager Tom Kelly), simultaneously deduced the likely culprit: a slug. A solid slug of frozen fuel had trapped a small amount of the descent fuel in the line.
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