posted 04-09-2004 10:23 AM               

• CMDR Slayton
  
• CMP Mike Collins
  
• LMP Buzz Aldrin

posted 04-13-2004 11:18 AM               

• I disagree with the complaints on the Skylab crew. My recollection, without looking up to confirm, is that MC did not give the new crew sufficient time to acclimate to life on Skylab and expected them to step immediately into the shoes of the second crew. Space sickness caused delays and the crew kept battling to try and catch up until things reached a point where they need to declare a break or risk safety. Anyway, unless people are willing to point a finger at the Apollo 7 crew for their actions, then the Skylab IV crew should be left off the list.

• The real challenge goes to assessing the Gemini crews. As much as one might wish to have seen CC Williams, Bill Anders, Alan Bean or any of the other Group 3 folks in the pilot seat, who are you going to bounce? The two closest calls that I can find would be Bassett and Aldrin. Both were as qualified and Aldrin's training made him the most logical pick to serve as pilot for GT-12. Certainly, the personalities and constructions of future crews might have been very different if Anders had flown on GT-12 instead.

• The only obvious crew selection that requires scrutiny is Apollo 14. Yanking Gordo out of the flight rotation and jumping Alan Shepard back to the front of the line is inconsistent with all prior crew selections.

• As a variation on the theme, did NASA err in selecting Carpenter over Conrad or Lovell as part of the Mercury program?

posted 04-13-2004 12:16 PM               

Regarding the 1959 selection of the Project Mercury astronauts, I commend Carpenter's memoirs, described by Jim Oberg in his review for the IEEE's Spectrum (Feb. 2003) as providing the "best published account" of this important but still little-understood chapter in space medicine.

It is clear from the scientific literature (including NASA memoranda and published papers), and suggested in THE RIGHT STUFF, that Conrad was considered too immature in 1959 for inclusion. This was essentially a psychological assessment determined a couple of different ways--peer ratings, observations by clinicians in Phases 3 and 4, self-assessments, and various psych-testing tools.

Of the 32 men who advanced to Lovelace and Wright-Patterson, Conrad and about a dosen others were ultimately recommended "with medical reservations," important language the working group devised to mean "not recommended." Lovell fell in this group somewhat by chance, as he had contracted some virus or bacterial infection prior to the Lovelace and Wright-Patterson trials. It affected some of his bilirubin readings--readings that medically disqualified him.

It is difficult to tell from the NASA literature how his performance compared with the top contenders.

Perhaps one day, through an FOIA, we can find out the actual numerical rankings of the 32. Of the seven ultimately chosen, all we know is their numerical rank (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, and 15), not who was ranked HOW.

Who was 4? Who was 6? 7? The Selection Committee asked the Working Group NOT to provide specific recommendations, only general. It made its selection not knowing the numerical rankings devised by the human-factors specialists at Lovelace (Dr. Sam White, Dr. Ulrich Luft), Wright-Patterson's Dr. George Ruff, and the US Navy's Dr. Robert Voas.

Interestingly, of the 32 semifinalists who were recommended "with medical reservations," only Conrad and Lovell (and perhaps another) showed up for the Group 2 selection process held in 1962.

posted 04-13-2004 12:23 PM               

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
Interestingly, of the 32 semifinalists who were NOT selected, only Conrad and Lovell (and perhaps another) showed up for the Group 2 selection process held in 1962.

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posted 04-13-2004 12:34 PM               

I'll find it today and post the names.

Bob Solliday, a Patuxent classmate of Conrad and Lovell and Schirra, was one of the 32 finalists (and the only other Marine besides Glenn) from 1959 who reappeared for Group 2 selection.

posted 04-13-2004 02:40 PM               

I would have liked to have seen a Cunningham, Lind, Lenoir crew fly.

We could then speculate endlessly about if Skylab B had ever been launched giving the possibilty of three more crews. How about:

• Cunningham
  
• Lind
  
• Lenoir

• Stafford
  
• Brand
  
• Musgrave

• Gordon
  
• McCandless
  
• Allen

posted 04-13-2004 07:57 PM               

However, the one choice that always bothered me was when he didn't use the entire Gemini 7 back-up crew (White and Collins) to fly Gemini 10.

posted 04-13-2004 10:43 PM               

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Originally posted by KenDavis:
...but I have never understood why Cunningham was never named to a prime Skylab slot as he did so much development work.

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What if Slayton had bumped Cernan's Apollo 17 crew and put Gordon's in? Gordon would have been the first and only person to go to the moon on two successful lunar landings.

posted 04-14-2004 10:03 AM               

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
It would be nice to lay this old canard about Carpenter to rest.

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The program, obviously, was in its infancy in 1958/59 and most of the medical tests deviced were needless and pointless. Subsequent performance certain obliterated any medical concern that kept Lovell and Conrad out of the first group. I suspect that part of the problem with Conrad was not a matter of immaturity, but more a matter of being both smarter than any of the doctors testing him and brasher than most with a sense of humour consistent with both his intelligence and gusto.

posted 04-14-2004 11:35 AM               

I had always assumed that selection to these earlier crews bespoke a confidence in the chosen astronauts and almost guaranteed a seat on a later lunar landing mission.

According to Deke quite the contrary. He certainly rated the abilities of Chaffee, White, Cunningham and Eisele but only for Earth orbital missions. From the outset his intention was to move them all over to Apollo Applications following their flights.

I'm surprised that Deke should have had the same opinion of White (a Gemini veteran) as he had of three rookies.

posted 04-14-2004 12:57 PM               

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Originally posted by WAWalsh:
Subsequent performance certain obliterated any medical concern that kept Lovell and Conrad out of the first group.

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While we all have our favorite astronauts and favorite Beatles (I always liked George), and WA appears to have a soft spot for the fun-loving wiseacre Conrad, we need to be able to distinguish our opinions from the facts, which is to say, WA's opinion of Conrad is not the same thing as the facts concerning Conrad in 1959.

The facts of the 1959 selection process are that Conrad was considered unsuitable for pioneering spaceflight. His more mature rivals, among them Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Sheperd, and Slayton (and 11 other candidates recommended w/o medical reservations), were considered suitable for a host of reasons.

WA rejects the historicity, if you will, of the entire 1959 selection process. In doing so, in fact, he rejects almost all the premises of cutting-edge human-factors practice and theory of the time, with its premium man / premium mission thinking coming out of Wright-Pat and Lovelace.

NASA was looking for three 9s--.999 percent reliability in selecting astronauts, one chance in a thousand of failure. Lovell was not 3 9s at the time of selection. Other men were. It's as simple as that. Was Lovell a worthy candidate and a afine pilot? Yeah. They all were. But that's not the same thing as 3 9s. Same thing happened to Deke, when he was grounded. He wasn't 3 9s.

Oberg wrote that the Carpenter book offered "the best published account" of the 1959 selection process. WA may disagree, if he likes, but it would be interesting to hear the facts that support his opinion that the Carpenter book does NOT offer the "best published account."

WA may refer, if he prefers, to the risible Kraft account of the events in 1959. But WA should know that Kraft was in Langley, working on operations while an entirely different group of men was focused on human factors.

Kraft, in fact, had no human factors expertise. He did not belong to either the working group or the selection committee. He was privy to none of their deliberations. It appears, in fact, that he didn't even LIKE astronauts very much.

It shows in his deeply flawed account of the 1959 selection process in FLIGHT.

posted 04-14-2004 03:50 PM               

My point is, regardless of Kraft's comments, if Cunnigham spend a good 2 or 3 years working on the Apollo Applications Project between 69 & 72 how could folks like Conrad and Bean roll off of Apollo 12 and Weitz, Lousma, Carr, and Pogue all roll off of Apollo back-up postions into prime Skylab positions ahead of him?

posted 04-16-2004 01:19 AM               

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
Solliday's recall of the 1959 selection process is heroically vivid. Someone should conduct an oral history.

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posted 04-17-2004 01:16 PM               

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Originally posted by 4allmankind:
Could someone enlighten a rookie as to why Kraft was not fond of the Apollo 7 crew? What happened up there to turn him sour?

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posted 04-17-2004 06:33 PM               

But I'm with Wally. In this inherent tension between ground control and the commander doing the actual flying, deferring to the commander's informed judgment makes sense. As Wally said, the worst thing a ground controller might encounter--after a decision affecting three (or seven) astronauts--is falling out of his chair. It's a little different for the guys in space, whose lives are at stake.

posted 04-17-2004 06:47 PM               

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
I often wonder how the astronauts aboard Columbia would have fared had mission control shared information about the foam strike and asked the commander what HE would have elected to do about the damage to the leading edge. Share ALL the information--air to ground and ground to air--let astronauts make command decisions.

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The problem wasn't that Rick Husband and his crew didn't know of the foam strike -- they did -- but that NASA underestimated the severity of the damage. Here is the e-mail that was sent to Husband and McCool on January 23:

You guys are doing a fantastic job staying on the timeline and accomplishing great science. Keep up the good work and let us know if there is anything that we can do better from an MCC/POCC standpoint.

There is one item that I would like to make you aware of for the upcoming PAO event on Blue FD 10 and for future PAO events later in the mission. This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter.

During ascent at approximately 80 seconds, photo analysis shows that some debris from the area of the -Y ET Bipod Attach Point came loose and subsequently impacted the orbiter left wing, in the area of transition from Chine to Main Wing, creating a shower of smaller particles. The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.

That is all for now. It's a pleasure working with you every day.

Thanks a million Steve!

And thanks for the great work on your part AND for the great poems! I saw the word Chine below and thought it was "China". I guess it's believeable (sic) that you might meet someone from China by the name of Main Wing.

posted 04-17-2004 10:56 PM               

Wally Schirra's Apollo 7 concern (and that of John Glenn, MA-6) about pilot autonomy is well taken. Do not deprive me, they would say, of information about my spacecraft.

"The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry."

posted 04-18-2004 09:48 PM               

When a sensor on Donn Eisele's biomed package started to burn his chest, he took it off and stowed it rather than consult the ground crew about it. MOC, still caught in the shadow of Apollo 1, suggested several fixes for the problem, which Eisele rebuffed saying, "it doesn't matter now, i'm not putting it on."

posted 04-21-2004 12:45 AM               

1. In 1966 Deke left the choice of Conrad's LMP up to Pete and he wanted Bean but Deke said "no"... Bean was stashed away Apollo Applications. Conrad then chose CC Williams, however he was killed in a T-38 crash in 1967. Conrad again wanted Bean and Deke gave in.

2. The original LMP for Apollo 17 was Joe Engle but intense pressure from the scientific community caused NASA to give Deke a directive... Jack Schmitt

posted 04-22-2004 01:02 PM               

This struggle, in essence, for control ("Put that biomed sensor back on and sustain burns during reentry!" ground control commands. "Nope!" a hot and angry astronaut replies.), is a POV (point of view) difference at its purest, or rawest.

The Project Mercury astros (who were all military officers) in particular were exquisitely aware that NASA was a civilian enterprise, and they were military officers on loan. Mission control sought to impose a chain of command, military fashion. The early astronauts would have none of it. Gilruth was the only true boss they recognized. In time, more compliant astronauts were found and assigned to flights.

posted 04-23-2004 01:43 AM            

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
I bet Wally had a different take on Apollo 7 events and shared it quite freely. I do not have his book handy, perhaps another poster could weigh in.

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"I'm afraid others didn't always like it - they didn't realize what a command was. Particularly Chris Kraft. He didn't make a big issue out of it, but he did say I was kind of grumpy. I wasn't grumpy, I was merely asserting my authority. The flight controllers felt like they had the right to the last word - they still do! But I was taking the risks. I have yet to hear of a flight controller killing himself by falling off his chair! They were younger men who had not really put themselves physically at risk. They could wear black armbands, but that wouldn't help me any. The result of it was, when we lost three men on the launchpad, I knew we were facing up to a real problem. I said, 'We are going to do this one right.' By then I had responsibility for two crewmen. Then you have the responsibility, much like the skipper of a submarine - it's your problem. You accept command. That's the way it goes - if you give me the ship, it's mine. Then I'll tell you what I'm going to do or not do, within the rules of the ship. That comes down from the Royal Navy, the authority invested in the commanding officer."

posted 04-23-2004 02:45 PM               

Paul Purser said much the same thing to me, in a letter written before he died. As Flight, Kraft was virtually omnipotent, Purser observed, something Kraft touts in his memoirs, and repeated on book tour, writing and saying "Flight is God!" No one could overrule his decisions at the console, he said, not even President Kennedy.

The shame of it was, Kraft confused his being all-powerful as Flight, during a mission, with being actually omniscient.

But Kraft wasn't all-knowing. Sometimes he didn't know stuff. Sometimes he was wrong.

posted 04-26-2004 07:21 PM               

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
Perhaps one day, through an FOIA, we can find out the actual numerical rankings of the 32. Of the seven ultimately chosen, all we know is their numerical rank (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, and 15), not who was ranked HOW.

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posted 06-11-2008 10:08 PM               

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Originally posted by dave:
For sure the Apollo 11 Prime Crew

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