DEVELOP THE PROCEDURES AND TECHNIQUES TO ACCOMPLISH THE MISSION

This vast assembly of systems, subsystems, components, astronauts, flight controllers, support staff, and many others, had to be tightly integrated and they had to play in harmony just like a 100-piece orchestra. Everybody had to be on the same page, the same line, and the same note; or there would be no music. In preparing this orchestra to play the complete symphony, four concepts were key: (1) crew’ procedures, (2) mission techniques. (3) mission rules, and (4) the “flight plan.” Crew procedures. To fly the mission, the spacecraft had to be operated in a manner consistent with both the functions of its systems operation as w’ell as with the sequence of mission aeiiviiics. The crew procedures were developed for this purpose in the form of step-by-step checklists. Together they amounted to several volumes of switch-by-sw’itch procedures for each system, each spacecraft, and each phase of the mission, stating whether they were to be operated either in primary modes, backup modes, emergency modes, or trouble-shooting to determine the cause of a failure or an anomaly.

Procedures had to be developed, integrated, and tested, time and again in order to ensure that in flight every action was performed in precisely the correct, and verified, sequence. This involved countless hours of training in mission simulators, procedures trainers, part-task trainers, mock-ups, and other representations of actual hardware and software, and even a simulated lunar surface.

Mission techniques. These defined the manner in which the mission would be flown, or more specifically, the manner in which the spacecraft “trajectory’’ would be controlled. Once the mission objectives, the crew procedures, and the trajectory are defined, it becomes necessary to specify exactly how the various components of the guidance, navigation, and control systems, as well as the rocket engines, should be used during each phase of the mission to maintain the “trajectory” for that phase. The mission techniques development task was basically: how do you decide how to fly an Apollo mission? It required detailed planning on precisely how well the systems must work to achieve the mission, including all of the options for use and/or failure of primary or backup systems. This was also termed the "data priority” task, and its detailed planning was absolutely essential to success.

As an example, LOR was key to both mission success and crew safety. During the LOR phase, five first-class systems computed the rendezvous manoeuvres – two in the LM, one in the CSM, the MCC. and even some simple charts used by the crew. If all of these sources agreed, the solution was clear. But if there was disagreement, there had to be a rationale for deciding which one to use.

Mission rules were established as a combination of crew procedures and mission techniques whereby, if any failure or anomaly occurred, a “rule” defined the action to take. Mission rules essentially answered the “what if’ question. Even so, there were events during Apollo that had not been foreseen, and required thinking and action beyond mission rules – an excellent example being the oxygen tank explosion that aborted the Apollo 13 mission.

Flight plan. The flight plan was developed as an integrated time-line of events and activities to bring together the mission objectives, the mission techniques, and the crew procedures for each phase of the mission. It served many functions and included references to the particular technique to be used, an index to checklists, the equipment to be used, constraints on the use of spacecraf t systems, limitations on consumables, specific tasks for each member of the crew, ground tracking coverage, day-night cycles, and even eat and sleep periods. Alternate and contingency flight plans were also included.