posted 08-21-2007 04:21 AM               

Mission rules said no radar was an automatic no go. Big Al hinted he might have gone without radar - but would he have made it?

Could a rookie crew (as far as a lunar landing was concerned) made it?

What about a crew that had already been there?

posted 08-21-2007 05:23 PM               

In Neal Thompson's book about Alan Shepard "Light This Candle" he states that during the lunar descent when Antares experienced radar lock on problems that Alan told Ed "If the radar doesn't kick in, we're going to fly her down". I recall reading in other books that when Ed asked Alan what he would have done had the radar not kicked in; Alan replied "you'll never know". This is a small discrepancy, but an interesting one. I expect that Ed is the only who knows for sure.

posted 08-21-2007 05:30 PM            

After landing, Young said: "Piece of cake!" but he wasn't boasting. He meant that during training he had to contend with endless abort scenarios. During the real landing (and after the lunar orbit problems were behind him!) everything went smoothly.

posted 08-22-2007 03:54 AM               

The depth perception problem would have been very real.

We have a case where the (PNGS ?) data was accurate, and would have given reasonable data.

What about if the altitude data was way off?

Did not having the radar affect the accuracy of their ROD data (I think it must have)?

Could a crew have landed on a relatively flat plain?

posted 08-31-2007 06:49 AM               

This has bit pilots in the rear before as during extreme cold conditions, it is possible for things to be visible at further distances then normal. There was a Canadian AF C-130 transport that went down in Greenland due to this when they began their descent way too far from the airstrip after visually sighting it and landed way too short. Granted though the biggest difference between that and a moon landing is it was during night, so there were NO shadows on the ground to see (and no horizon either). All they could see was the runway.

So my thinking is if you have a situation where indeed one can see the shadow of the LM on descent and the speeds are right on, then it is possible. But, say SIMSUP was to throw in another curve where the descent engine thrust drops a small bit, increasing the descent velocity, then it could be a problem as without the landing radar, one would not have the altimeter or descent velocity to tell that the LM is dropping too fast until it is WAY too close to the surface to realize it.

That being said though, the Apollo crews were very well trained for their missions. By the time of Apollos 12 through 17, they had some good imagery of the landing sites and a decent sense of the size of the craters and terrain features on their descent path. In an airplane a pilot is taught that when his altimeter and airspeed indicators are out, if he flies the approach and it looks just like it does when everything is working, he will land safely. As well as those descent paths were being designed and as hard as the crews trained, if the need came up and assuming nothing else went wrong, I think it could have been done.

As to the question of rookie vs. veteran crews, technically when it came to the landings, all the Lunar crews were rookies. Only Cernan might have been considered a vet, but for the most part on Apollo 10 he would have been watching the numbers inside the LM as opposed to facing out the window like Stafford was. That is why all the crews trained as hard as they did.

Edited by Jay Chladek