As you come to STEM Moon Shot area, you will get your Flight Plan to begin your exploration of the event and BSU’s Engineering & Science Festival. Well, this has a basis in the Apollo program AND every spaceflight since NASA started sending rockets into space.
A flight plan is an incredibly detailed and “engineered” document that allows all members of both the ground crew and spacecraft astronauts to complete their mission. Every aspect of the mission is planned down to the minute–even down to the second at certain points.
Look at these pages and you will see some of the significant milestones of the Apollo 11 Mission that landed humans on the moon!
Last year, I funded a project on Kickstarter to do a master reprint of the Apollo 11 Flight Plan. They only had a poorly scanned copy to start from. They digitized, cleaned, sharpened, and printed on a sturdy archive grade paper. They did NOT correct the 11 typos (or some other very small number) that they found, since they were in the original.
Deke Slayton was one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts who, due to a health concern, did not fly in that part of the program, but became the first Chief of the Astronaut Office - in charge of selection who goes on each mission. Ultimately he did go to space after the Apollo program was done. Chris Kraft literally wrote the book on the Flight Director role and was key to the success of the whole program.
So a flight plan is a detailed listing of all activity over the course of a mission.
At launch, the plan is in minutes and seconds. Here you see liftoff and 2 minutes and 42 seconds later, the second stage ignites!
After liftoff and in orbit, the plan shifts to one hour pages. On this page, you see that if there was a problem, the plan had a branch that would eject the lunar module and burn to prepare for an abort. Certainly glad this was never used in the program.
Did you know that the astronauts actually confirmed their flight path using the stars? They did this as a backup to the navigational computers of the day, which were not as powerful as a programmable calculator, and way less capable than your phone today (smart or not)!
They even had little sketches of the spaceships. Here was the burn required to stay in orbit around the moon. Otherwise, they would swing around the moon and return to earth.
Heat is a major problem in any space craft, as is cold. One side of the spaceship will be hot because of the sun, and the other super cold. Here is show how they want the ship oriented to keep antennas pointed at the earth. They would then also rotate to even out the temperature.
Well, after 103 hours, the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) has landed on the moon. Seems kind of a simple thing when you see it in the plan, but can you imagine how excited everyone was? I was watching this live, as were millions of millions of people all over the world.
Before anyone could celebrate (or breathe, probably) they had to decide if they could stay on the moon's surface. Stay they did, and for all mankind, they walked on another world.
On this page, the LEM (just a portion of it) returns to orbit, and the two astronauts and a bunch of rocks transfer to the Command Module for the return home. The ascent portion of the LEM was left behind.
I wonder, is that ascent portion still in orbit? I am going to have to look that up!
The last page of the plan is the Command Module splashing down into the Pacific ocean. The work of the flight director and the hundreds of engineers guiding and monitoring the space ship are done... until the next mission!
There were consumables on the space ship, with no resupply along the way. Here is the budget of propellant and everything that was required to be done in the mission. This was tracked carefully for the whole time in space.