posted 07-03-2015 03:32 PM               

An unsung hero of the decision not to abort the landing is Richard Koos, a NASA simulation supervisor who, on the afternoon of July 5, 11 days before the launch of Apollo 11, put the team of controllers including Bales, Garman, and capcom astronaut Charlie Duke, through a simulation that intentionally triggered a 1201 alarm. The astronauts involved in the simulation were Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, the backup crew for Apollo 12 and the prime crew for Apollo 15. Unable to figure out what the 1201 was, Bales aborted that simulated landing. He and Flight Director Gene Kranz were dressed down for it by Koos, who put the team through four more hours of training the next day specifically on program alarms. When the 1202 and 1201 alarms occurred during the actual landing, Garman, Bales, and even Duke recognized them immediately.

posted 07-09-2015 10:07 AM            

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Originally posted by RobertB:
However, it was Steve Bales who knew what they meant!

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posted 07-09-2015 05:11 PM            

There is an interesting irony in the involvement of Dave Scott and Jim Irwin in that 5th July, 1969, abort exercise. If Bales, Garman and others had not been trained in how to deal with the rather obscure 1201/1202 program alarms, Armstrong might have been obliged to abort (as Scott had been told to do in the simulation). Pete Conrad would then have been next in line* to attempt the first lunar landing. As Conrad's back-up, Dave Scott would then have been a broken leg away from becoming the first man on the Moon.

posted 07-18-2015 05:05 AM               

Jack Garman, in an interview that can be found here says that the simulation took place a month before the actual flight and that he provided the software glitch that produced the alarms in that simulation.

posted 07-18-2015 08:14 AM               

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Originally posted by David C:
If you listen to the Flight Director's loop you can hear Charlie comment "same thing we had," when they get the first alarm, so it sure sounds like he recognised it.

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posted 07-19-2015 02:39 AM               

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Originally posted by R. Wandelt:
Could the comment simply mean that the 1201 is the same type as the previous 1202?

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posted 07-19-2015 05:12 AM            

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Originally posted by R. Wandelt:
So it wasn't till after the second 120X alarm that the comment was made.

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The MCC (audio only) combined console loops (can't recall the precise term) can be heard here.

It can be a bit hard to follow with several concurrent conversations over-talking each other at diferent levels. PDI occurs at around 18:39. After yaw around and landing radar lock on, the first program alarm is announced at around 24:01. The comment is made a few seconds later.

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Originally posted by moorouge:
Are you sure it was Duke that said this?

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posted 07-19-2015 07:27 AM               

At 23.24 into the tape comes the first 1202 alarm. Fourteen seconds later Garman gives the 'Go'.

At 27.20 is the 1201 alarm. Garman says, "Same type. We're go."

At 27.56 there is another 1202 to which Garman comments, "Roger. No sweat."

posted 07-19-2015 11:28 AM            

According to the ALSJ at MET 102:38:26 the first program alarm is reported. Fourteen seconds later someone (Gran/Charlie?) says, presumably on the Flight Director's loop:

"Yeah, same thing we had."

Assuming he's not talking about dinner last night, and since there have been no other program alarms at that point, it sure sounds like he's referencing the simulator session. It certainly isn't Garman's voice, and he wasn't talking on that loop anyway. There's plenty of chatter about it later on, and after landing, but who made that original remark?

posted 07-19-2015 02:30 PM               

However, I can confirm that the original posting on this thread is wrong about the date of the aborted simulation. Gran Paules in his oral history (Nov. 2006 on p36) agrees with Jack Garman that this took place in the second week in June — not in July as claimed.

posted 07-20-2015 06:49 AM               

As has been pointed out previously, this is completely at odds with both Garman and Paules who both say that this simulation took place in mid-June. So, who does one believe?

There are some other anomalies in the Jones transcript that appears to be based on NASA document AS11_TEC.PDF.

1. The first programme alarm, a 1202, Jones times at MET 102:38:26. He notes that the Mission Report gives this occurring at 102:39:02, a discrepancy of +36 seconds.

2. The 1201 alarm Jones times at 102:42:19 yet mentions that the Mission Report has this timed at 102:41:32, a discrepancy of -47 seconds.

3. At 102:42:41 there is a comment from Duke who says, "1202. We copy it." The NASA AS11_TEC document has this timed at 102:42:58, a discrepancy of -17 seconds. A curious feature about this comment is that the last alarm call from the LM was the 1201 call. So where did this come from, or was Duke mistaken and confusing it with the 1201?

posted 07-20-2015 09:29 AM               

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Originally posted by oly:
One point I am curious about, why were both the landing radar and rendezvous radar powered up?

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Simulators would not show this since they do not use the actual flight hardware.

As for testing, it would be hard to test both radars at the same time due to locations on the vehicle. They maybe could have done a bench test in the avionics laboratory. But likely, they only looked at each radars' interaction with the computer and not both at the same time.

posted 07-20-2015 10:07 AM            

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Originally posted by David C:
My understanding is that it was actually Jack Garman who knew what they meant.

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The computer alarms were caused because the computer was overloaded (executive overflow). The executive overflow was caused by the additional input from the rendezvous radar. The rendezvous radar was on because the flight manual told the astronauts to put it on. (Ref: Apollo 11: 25 Years Later)

posted 07-20-2015 10:51 AM               

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Originally posted by Paul78zephyr:
They all (Bales, Garman, et al) knew what it meant because they had been trained on it just two weeks earlier on 5 July according to Kranz in 'Failure Is Not An Option'/'Simsup Wins The Final Round' pg 267.

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posted 07-20-2015 12:18 PM               

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Originally posted by Paul78zephyr:
But why — why — were the computer simulations at MIT never done in this configuration which would have found this issue?

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posted 07-20-2015 01:02 PM               

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Originally posted by Paul78zephyr:
Are you saying Kranz is wrong?

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posted 07-20-2015 06:29 PM            

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Originally posted by Paul78zephyr:
They all (Bales, Garman, et al) knew what it meant...

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posted 07-21-2015 02:11 AM               

This extract is from a Garman interview for NASA Oral History Project made on 27th March 2001 -

But I clearly recall helping them come up with a couple of semi-fatal computer errors, errors that would cause the computers to start restarts. 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."

But Gene Kranz, who was the real hero of that whole episode, said, "No, no, no. I want you all to write down every single possible computer alarm that can possibly go wrong." Remember, I'm looking at this as, "Well, we should have thought up a better failure," and he's looking at it like, "This stuff can really happen," partially because he didn't understand the computers, but partially because he's absolutely right. He's looking at the forest and not the trees. So he made us go off and study every single computer alarm that existed in the code, ones that could not possibly happen, they were put in there just for testing purposes, right down to ones that were normal, and to figure out, even if we couldn't come up with a reason for why the alarm would happen, what were the manifestations if it did. Is it over? Is the computer dead? What would you do if it did happen, even if you don't know?

So we did. We did. I still have a copy of it. It's handwritten, under a piece of plastic, and we wrote it down for every single computer run and stuck it under the glass on the console. And sure enough, Murphy's law, the onboard computers ran in two-second cycles, which is horribly long in today's computer world.

"About a month before the flight they did one last one... They asked me to provide something that was a sort of software glitch. So I did and believe it or not it was one of those alarms."

At 3.41 he comments - "I want to tell you it was gruesome afterwards..."

"So what we had checked out with the simulation, and we'd done a lot of work after that sim kind of blew up on us in the second week of June, we had MIT run a whole lot of other checks to see if we had to fix the software on the spacecraft or do something differently. Well, by that time it was too late to really make any changes that anybody was going to be confident you'd get in and get right without screwing something else up. So we flew with it that way.

posted 07-25-2015 02:37 PM            

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Originally posted by moorouge:
Both Garman and Paules say so.

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posted 09-06-2017 01:53 AM               

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Originally posted by David C:
It had to be checked, and it was one guy's job to have that information - however he did it.

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Both your post and Eddie's (moorouge, quoting and paraphrasing Garman) indicate that it was Garman.

But cS's obit for Garman says:

In response, flight director Gene Kranz insisted Bales write down every alarm that could possibly go off. Bales, in turn, gave the assignment to Garman.

Him passing it off to a backroomer also makes logical sense to me, since it follows the hierarchy and doesn't shift responsibility. That buck still stops with Bales, regardless of whatever information Garman has or doesn't have.

I can't access the audio of the interview at the moment, but I'll take moonrouge's paraphrase as accurate:

quote:

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Originally posted by moorouge:
Afterwards, Gene Kranz having recovered from his fury at a simulation that resulted in an abort asked Garman to produce a document that listed all the possible alarms that might be encountered during the descent to the moon.

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Bucking his GUIDO and giving an assignment (of that much importance no less) to a backroomer supporting his GUIDO seems, per my understanding, to go against the chain of command that Kranz himself helped set up in his STG days.

Of course, the flaw could be my understanding of the chain of command. As I understood it, Garman was to Bales what Bales was to Kranz — a voice in his ear that helped him make the final call on how to proceed; a cog in the machine; a guy in a room that Bales spoke for, just as Bales was a guy in a room that Kranz spoke for.

If I'm wrong on that understanding, I welcome correction. My library is a bit light on Mission Control backroom information, so most of it was sourced in bits and pieces from where I could get it, and I may well have misinterpreted something along the way.

I also, as I mentioned, don't have the ability to listen to the audio at the moment, but we know Garman passed along a "Go" to Bales who passed along a "Go" to Kranz who passed along a "Go" to Duke. But did Bales ask Garman for a "Go"/"No Go" or did Garman just offer it since he had the list, knew the answer, and supporting Bales was his job? If the latter, has Bales ever commented on whether he was about to give the "Go" anyway?

I see a lot of comments on this subject that Garman was the reason that Bales gave the "go", but Bales was in that simulation and knowing this stuff (with the support of his backroomers) was part of his job. Do we actually know for sure (or have any evidence) that Garman's comments weren't actually superfluous with Bales' own knowledge on the subject? It's similar to Russell Larson, who was credited in his Boston Globe obit with flashing a thumbs up, and, thus, helping to make "the decision that the alarm was not important" — even though, as everyone here knows, Garman had the alarms all written out (regardless of what Bales did or didn't know).

posted 09-06-2017 06:33 AM               

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Originally posted by Mike_The_First:
I guess I'm asking how we know that Garman helped save the moon landing...

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Over the headset, Bales heard one of his backroom guidance specialists, Jack Garman, say: "Steve, Steve! It's a 1202. It's the if-it-doesn't-come-up-too-much rule."

"It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I agreed with him," Bales says. "We had said if the alarm didn't come up too often, we'd keep going."

posted 09-06-2017 10:00 AM               

The "...and I agreed with him" implies a level of knowledge of the material independent of the voice(s) in his ear. If someone tells me something that I have reason to believe they know but that I have no idea about, I'd defer to their judgement, but I wouldn't say that I agreed with them.

posted 09-06-2017 11:41 AM               

Over time, in some cases, perspective shifts. People feel that an individual either got too much or not enough credit for something and overcompensate shifting the scale in the other direction to make up for it. Then others see that, take it as gospel with no further digging, and run with it.

posted 09-06-2017 01:10 PM            

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Originally posted by Mike_The_First:
...if one looks, it's not too hard to find online comments that credit Garman for the first manned moon landing.

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posted 09-06-2017 04:45 PM            

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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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It means that Bales mind was occupied all the time with all the information coming in to him, even while trying to recall a solution to unanticipated problems.

Part of the concept then was to allow Bales to stay on top on the ongoing information/decision flow, while allowing Garman to concentrate solely on those individual issues that needed more focused attention to resolve.

This kind of teamwork, where one person remains fully engaged with the "routine" ongoing tasks while another troubleshoots a problem was unusual in 1969. It would become a very familiar part of what is known as "Cockpit Resource Management" in aviation in the 70's, driven to prominence by an accident in 1972 where an Eastern Airlines L1011 crew flew a perfectly good airplane into the ground because all three pilots in the cockpit were troubleshooting a failed gear extension light and nobody was flying the airplane.

posted 09-06-2017 04:52 PM            

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Originally posted by Jim Behling:
I believe I read this somewhere is that they didn't know about the intent to fly with rendezvous radar on.

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A deeper dive into it reveals that these alarms were actually intended only for debugging the system during development and checkout. The point being, that once the system was fully certified, as long as it was used as designed, there would never be a 1200 series alarm.

posted 09-06-2017 11:31 PM               

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Originally posted by David C:
Well I don't know about that. However...

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Here's just one of many:

That’s right. We only landed on the moon because our intrepid Jack Garman, hero computer engineer, had gone out of his way to learn and memorize every single system error, that error's possible cause, and the appropriate response.

As I said, just one of many.