In their own words
A change of plans
in charge of planning and monitoring the maneuvers to
remove the command module from lunar orbit and head
it back toward Earth. He recalled an unplanned schedule
change after the lunar module (LM) lifted off from the
Moon and rejoined the command module in lunar orbit.
On Apollo 11, once you get all the rocks and stuff out
and close out the LM, you really don’t want to hang
around it. They had another rev to go before they were
going to close the hatch. Well, they come around the
corner [from the back side of the Moon] and the hatch
was already closed. We go, hey, we don’t really want to
stay on this thing, because it’s got the engine with things
armed, and it’s ready to do stuff. So we had to separate
one rev early. We would deorbit that thing out of lunar
orbit, and then we’d check the seismometers from the
ground on the Moon’s surface.
This is an excerpt from the book, “Space Pioneers: In
Their Own Words” which was authored by Loretta Hall and
released last month. The book is available for purchase at
www.amazon.com.
A half-eclipsed Earth as seen from the Moon’s orbit during the Apollo 11 mission.
www.RocketSTEM .org
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