MSC-07631 25. Premission planning

Cernan

Mission plan - A lot of work went into the mission plan, with the right people. I think we came out with a mission plan and a Flight Plan which was not just a suitable one that would accomplish a purpose, but was a suitable one to be able to fly.

Evans

The mission plan was taken care of by a lot of people. The flight planning crew insured that everything in the mission plan was taken care of. And I did not have to participate in that part of it at all.

Cernan

Procedural changes - I think in my experience on past flights, procedural changes were held to a minimum. I think they were held to a minimum because we resisted a great many of them, particularly in terms of the lunar surface activities. Procedural changes if we would have allowed them to infiltrate the system, would have been with us right up to launch date. We put a cutoff on those several weeks before launch, accepted a few of them, and then forcefully would not accept any unless absolutely mandatory after the last 3 weeks. That was the key to keeping that Flight Plan and the lunar surface procedures intact.

Mission rules and techniques - I don't think these changed from any of the previous flights.

Evans

I don't think so either.

Cernan

They were in good shape and followed quite well. The only place we exercised a slight different approach in mission rules was the fact that we had a DOI- 1 which did not take us down to the minimum altitude that we had gone to in the past and then a DOI-2 in the LM.

Evans

Let me go back to the Flight Plan here. I think this was the first time we've ever tried this from the command module standpoint anyhow. This was that each person responsible for a section of the Flight Plan, whether it was from LOI to DOI or DOI to circ, was brought down to the Cape and utilized on the simulator console while I or the backup crew ran through the preliminary Flight Plans before they were even in the print stage. We essentially were debugging their part of the Flight Plan. They could see the problems involved and we worked together to get a good plan. This took a day to a day and a half at a time. I think it was well worthwhile.

Schmitt

There were periods of some difficulty, preflight particularly, in the area of medical requirements and in some last-minute possible scientific requirements particularly on the samples, but everything seemed to get resolved satisfactorily. I can't think of anything that was not handled very well by the support crew, Bob Parker in the science area, and Gordy Fullerton and Bob Overmyer in the operational areas. I guess the biggest single area that took time was the CMP's dealings with the lunar sounder. Most of our ALSEP changes were all taken care of prior to our training. We had a few minor suggestions, but they were taken care of early in the training cycle.

Mission rules and techniques were fairly well defined very early by Phil Shaffer and his crowd in the techniques area. The mission rules as defined by Jerry Griffin and his people were all in the right direction in that they enhanced the probability of making a landing in a successful mission. We really never had to exercise any of the mission rules in an abnormal way. I think that the one time that a mission rule tended to be a controlling factor was in the limitation on the work at station 4, Shorty Crater. We were up against the walkback constraint and terminated that work after only 35 minutes. Another 30 minutes there would have been extremely valuable. I hope that we got enough information on the phenomena exposed at that crater that can be understood.

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