![]() ![]() ![]() “Had the felt-tip pen not worked, I’m certain that Mission Control and the crew would have worked hard to find other ways to close the circuit so that the ascent engine could be fired,” he says. If the engine arm circuit breaker remained open, Armstrong and Aldrin likely would have been stuck, says NASA Chief Historian William Barry. To this day I still have the broken circuit breaker switch and the felt-tipped pen I used to ignite our engines.”īuzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong training in a mock-up lunar module in 1967 in preparation for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. We were going to get off the moon, after all. “After moving the countdown procedure up by a couple of hours in case it didn't work, I inserted the pen into the small opening where the circuit breaker switch should have been, and pushed it in sure enough, the circuit breaker held. I had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of my suit that might do the job. “But since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end. “After examining it more closely, I thought that if I could find something in the LM to push into the circuit, it might hold,” Aldrin writes. The broken switch was reported to Mission Control, but after a fretful night trying to get some sleep, Houston had not figured out a solution the next morning. “Regardless of how the circuit breaker switch had broken off, the circuit breaker had to be pushed back in again for the ascent engine to ignite to get us back home,” he writes. Somehow, he or Armstrong must have accidentally bumped the switch in the cramped space with their cumbersome backpacks. “The broken switch had snapped off from the engine-arm circuit breaker, the one vital breaker needed to send electrical power to the ascent engine that would lift Neil and me off the moon,” he writes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |