posted 09-07-2017 01:14 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
Garman was first to remember the meaning of the alarm and it was his call to the front room that jogged Bales' memory.

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posted 09-07-2017 03:04 AM               

So if you knew the computer programs and you had sort of memorized all these flag bits, you could stare at these octal numbers, and a single octal digit is a combination of three binary bits, so you have to do the conversion in your head. You can stare at these octal numbers, and they're absolutely meaningless. I mean, the label on the screen would be flag word one, flag word two, and we'd stare at these columns of numbers and say, "Yeah, the computer's doing this, the computer's doing that."

Well, it was one of those or a derivation of one of those, it was just a few months before Apollo 11, I'm quite sure it was May or June—and I'm sure you know by now exactly when—that a young fellow named Steve [Stephen G.] Bales, a couple years older than I was, was the Guidance Officer, and that was the front-room position that we most often supported because he kind of watched the computers.

One of these screwy computers alarms, "computer gone wrong" kind of things, happened, and he called an abort of the lunar landing and should not have, and it scared everybody to death. Those of us in the back room didn't think anything of it. Again, we weren't in touch with the seriousness of simulation to the real world. "Okay, well, do it again."

posted 09-07-2017 04:31 AM               

He obviously had the means to identify it without using even an ounce of memory, but that doesn't mean that's how he did it. As I mentioned, it goes back to the original point of the thread: who knew what and when they knew it.

To add to the overall confusion of the topic, there's actually apparently a question of what alarm was in the simulation.

Bales (who, in the interest of full disclosure, doesn't seem, from what I can tell, to have the best memory) is quoted in Houston and Heflin's "Go Flight!" as saying that the simulation was a 1210 alarm:

A few minutes into the decent, a computer alarm cropped up. Bales remembered it being a 1210 alarm, Kranz a 1201...

"1210 meant two users were trying to access the computer at the same time," Bales explained. "I've never thought that was a planned failure. I think something went wrong with the simulator. The never 'fessed up to it, nor would they. It didn't matter if it was planned or not."

posted 09-07-2017 05:23 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Mike_The_First:
As I mentioned, it goes back to the original point of the thread: who knew what and when they knew it.

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posted 09-07-2017 06:07 AM               

Garman may have known as soon as he heard the call or he may have known after checking his notes — the transcript wouldn't tell us that, which is why I'm asking if maybe he volunteered that information. I've checked my library and come up empty.

Bales, as Robert said, likely had his memory jogged when Garman made the call.

As for Duke and Kranz, even if they recognized the alarm and knew "Go" was the right answer, it wasn't their place to speak for Bales. That they didn't pass along the "Go" until he did speak to the chain of command, not their own knowledge or memory stemming from the simulation.

All the transcript and loop audio does is tell us that someone said something. It doesn't tell us how they knew the thing they said or whether the person they said it to also knew it.

posted 09-07-2017 09:55 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Mike_The_First:
Note the use of the word "only," rather than "in part," as well as the other strong wording.

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posted 09-07-2017 11:36 AM               

So this computer alarm happened, and Bales said, "What is it?" So we looked down at the list at that alarm, and, yes, right, and if it doesn't reoccur too often, we're fine, because it's doing the restarts and flushing. It can't happen, but because Kranz had told us to, we said, "All right. Theoretically, if it ever did get into overload, what's going to happen?" Well, the computer's going to have one of these alarms. It will clean the system of all the tasks that it needs to do out so any that are in there twice because of the overlap will be reduced to none, and then when it restarts, it'll only put one of them back. Right? So it's self-cleaning, self-healing, as long as it doesn't continually happen. Right?

Well, there's a two-second delay, just for starters, okay, you know, the speed of light. So obviously it's not recurring so often that the vehicle's going unstable. So I said, on this back-room voice loop that no one can hear, I'm saying to Steve, "As long as it doesn't reoccur, it's fine."

Bales is looking at the rest of the data. The vehicle's not turning over. You couldn't see anything else going wrong. The computer's recovering just fine. Instead of calculating once a second, every once in a while it's calculating every second and a half, because it flushes and has to do it again. So it's a little slower, but no problem. It's working fine. So it's not reoccurring too often, everything's stable, and he does his famous, "We're go, flight," or whatever it was.

When it occurred again a few minutes later, a different alarm but it was the same type — I forget which one came first — I remember distinctly yelling — by this time yelling, you know, in the loop here — "Same type!" and he yells, "Same type!" I could hear my voice echoing. Then the Cap Com says, "Same type!" [Laughter] Boom, boom, boom, going up. It was pretty funny.