12/15/2023 0 Comments Auxl latile fish![]() ![]() Arron's call went down as one of the great Mission Control decisions in the history of manned spaceflight, and earned him the nickname, "Steely-eyed Missle Man" by his colleagues. The rocket was hurtling upward at supersonic speed on backup batteries only.īack in Houston, controller John Arron, a twenty-something engineer, remembered an obscure command, involving a set of switches on the instrument panel, from a training exercise a year before, and called up to the CAPCOM, "Tell them to try SCE to AUX (signal conditioning control to auxiliary)!" On board Apollo 12, Commander Pete Conrad exclaimed, "SCE to AUX? What the hell is THAT?" Yet, Lunar Module pilot Alan Bean remembered it from the same exercise, and threw the switch.the computers and instruments reset, and the Saturn V was back on line, ready for the historic second landing on the moon.Ĭonrad, Bean, and Gordon could be heard on the communications loop laughing all the way into orbit. ![]() In the command module, the astronauts puzzled over their control panel, which signaled a malfunction on pretty much every system on board. Just 36.5 seconds after liftoff, a colossal Saturn V rocket, en route to the moon as Apollo 12, with astronauts Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Allan Bean aboard, experienced one of the most dramatic failures in the history of space travel: The vehicle triggered a bolt of lightning through it's exhaust plume, which traveled up the rocket, taking all three fuel cells off line, along with much of the onboard instrumentation. "Try SCE to AUX" - Or, the value of remembering obscure stuff. ![]()
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