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Life choices

From my decision decades ago to teach myself how to bake and cook – with Julia Child’s help – so as to lighten McDonald’s load of my money, to my spare room’s many months’ supply of staples like toothpaste, shampoo, paper towels, dental floss, dish detergent, cleaning supplies, &c. – because I hate wasting time shopping for that sort of stuff weekly or even monthly – to my house being basically a big man cave, decorated throughout in a manner not unlike a museum gallery, with framed vintage film one-sheets, insert posters, and lobby cards; 20×16″ enlargements of the best Apollo program photos; poster size signed prints of the Rita Hayworth airbrush artwork of Philip Castle, who did the poster artwork for “Full Metal Jacket” and “A Clockwork Orange”; display cases of intricately-detailed Apollo spacecraft models; and my own photos, pencil life drawings, and WWII-style flight jacket pinup paintings, some of my life choices are serving me well these days.

None of it was planned for the current circumstances, but it all seems ideally suited, and believe me, I feel extraordinarily lucky.

I almost forgot that I now get to see much more often this item from Charlie Duke that’s been on the lunar surface – with tiny flecks of moon dust on it, visible in the inset – because it’s on the wall just to my right at the home PC.

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That piece of netting likely came from the smallest and most easily unsnapped section toward the front of the Lunar Module – a souvenir that most if not all crews took home with them – which is visible behind Gene Cernan in this photo.

A side effect: Funnily enough, though these dishes and others that I’ve made in the last five or six weeks are all quite tasty and not exactly low-calorie, I’ve dropped several pounds eating only the things I’ve made and no fast food. Pretty telling, that.

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Christmas in April

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Godfrey Daniel! My buddy Carl, who owns one of the five best cheesesteak places around – his brothers own the others, and all are open for pickup only – felt bad when I said his subs were foremost of the three things I miss the most, and said on the phone today that he’d drop off a pita Western cheesesteak along with some cryovac packages of the special cuts of steak that are sliced each morning in a specific manner, a stack of cheese, and some of their custom recipe sub rolls that I can freeze and cook at will. Now that is a good friend.

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No need of a diner

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I’ve got everything right here, really, including the 2-½-pound 13″ oval plates, but that’s been the case for years. Nothing new.

When I do visit diners, my litmus test is this morning’s breakfast above, corned beef hash and poached eggs (I don’t expect marmalade and blackberry jam to be available). Some fail, most commonly for lack of a crust on the hash, a minor flaw, and/or refusing to poach eggs outright or poaching them as if they don’t know how, both full-stop errors that require head-shaking and tut-tutting.

Years ago, meatloaf would be another test of a diner’s goodness for me, but I forever gave that up when I started with the Manhattan-based Comfort Diner’s already excellent softer-textured meatloaf recipe (its secret: oatmeal instead of bread crumbs), ran with it, and made it really excellent – my enhanced version at the link. I guarantee without a second thought that all other meatloaf pales in comparison, so there’s no point to me trying some random diner’s meatloaf. I mean, c’mon:

Go ahead, click it

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Go ahead, build it – we’ll loan you the money

A print of “Clipper at the Gate” by William Phillips, which depicts Pan Am’s Boeing 314 “California Clipper,” is in my office

Ever wondered how much it cost to build the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s? US$35 million. To repeat it today? Engineers estimate it could be done for maaaybe a billion. The first four images below are from my 1938 copy of The Golden Gate Bridge: Report of the Chief Engineer to the Board of Directors of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, a 300-page book published several months after the bridge opened that’s filled with dozens of construction photos you don’t often see elsewhere, treatises on methods and techniques, lots of fold-out engineering drawings, and the like.

Seven years after the original construction estimate in 1930, the actual construction costs came in $40,000 under. And here’s how they came up with the then astronomical sum of $35M in the middle of the Great Depression: public subscription. The people of the Bay area, tired of lengthy and expensive ferry journeys, really wanted that bridge. Good on them.

You can click any of these for a larger version. Following the excerpts from the book are a few photos I took of the bridge.

Halfway down this Internet Archive page, there’s a link to a PDF of the 1970 reprint edition of the Chief Engineer’s report. Looks precisely like my vintage copy: https://archive.org/details/goldengatebridge1970gold/mode/2up

I took these photos of my favorite bridge from, respectively, Fort Point, Crissy Field, and the deck of the tall ship Hawaiian Chieftain, which was based in San Francisco at the time. I’ve always used the Fort Point one as my phone background. These were taken with a paltry 2-megapixel Kodak DC-280 and so aren’t of the finest resolution, but they still look pretty good to me.

Click any of these for a larger size.

The towers top out at 746 feet – twice the height of a Saturn V rocket

That small dish – actually about 10 feet in diameter – at the top of the tower on the San Francisco side is one of a back-to-back pair of microwave repeater antennas. There’s video of the 2,500-pound assembly being swapped out by helicopter in 2009 here: https://youtu.be/Kosw1yb2RFg

Three photos stitched together using the free open source Hugin

Marin tower; the building, on a spit of rock 150 feet in front of the tower, is what remains of the long-defunct Lime Point fog station and lighthouse

All of the deck suspension cables – also known as vertical suspender ropes – were replaced in the 1970s, and I have a slice of one of the original ropes. This four-inch long section is incredibly heavy for its small size at 2.1kg/4.6lbs, which says something about the quality of that steel. Each of the seven braids of the cable is, in turn, composed of thirty-two strands of steel, for a total of 224 strands in each cable.

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Just being the moon is enough

It doesn’t have to be super or blood or lentil or chicory or wolf or rabbit or water vole or what-the-hell-ever the latest foolish name is that some numpty came up with a few days ago while implying it’s been called that for millennia. It’s special and beautiful regardless of the month or the phase, and it doesn’t need extra names. I was prompted to post the unfiltered shots below that I’ve taken in the last decade or so when I saw all the suspiciously “pink” supposedly “super” moon pictures today but just kept seeing this dialog pop up in my head accompanied by a little “doink” noise:

I’d just like to point out once again that the term “supermoon” was coined by an astrologer writing in 1979 for Dell Horoscope magazine, published by Penny Publications primarily for the supermarket checkout trade. There’s no real basis for its current popularity other than as a handy column-inch filler and whatever the digital equivalent of that is called. My choice would be “dross.”

I offer no silly names, no patently ridiculous size claims, no fake colors. Just the moon. It’s plenty good enough as is. You can click any of these for a larger version.

Westford, Massachusetts

York Beach, Maine

Harvard, Massachusetts

York Beach, Maine – if your browser supports full-screen, try clicking on this and pressing F11

I didn’t take the following, but they’re a few of my favorites from a much closer perspective. You can click on them, too, to see a larger size.

Copernicus oblique view, Lunar Orbiter II Frame 162-H3, November 1966

Pete “Tweety” Conrad having the time of his life, Apollo 12, 1969

Apollo 12 Lunar Module “Intrepid” on its way to the Ocean of Storms

John Young packing for a field trip in the Descartes Highlands, Apollo 16, 1972

Not of the moon itself but related:

Apollo 15 launch, 1971

Apollo 16 launch, 1972

Neil Armstrong back inside the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle immediately after the first moonwalk

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“Lovely clams! Wonderful clams!”

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Gorgeous cirrus uncinus (“curly hooks”) clouds – sometimes called mares’ tails – over the Essex Salt Marsh in Massachusetts adjacent to Route 133. I took this picture on a hot day in July and it was oddly pleasing to know that’s snow falling at 25 or 30,000 feet.

The Essex marsh is part of the 20,000-acre Great Marsh that extends from Cape Ann in Massachusetts north into New Hampshire (map at the link). The nest platform just visible at the lower left of the top photo is one of a few dozen set up in the Great Marsh for ospreys. The shot below, which I took in April 2012, shows mom and pop (one high, one low) getting some grub for the two chicks in the nest. The year after I took that photo, the Greenbelt conservation trust set up their OspreyCam next to this platform for a few years, later moving it to another nest in Gloucester.

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Ospreys are cool, but marsh wildlife is not my chief interest at that location, nor are esoteric clouds.

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I’ll probably be internally hearing the Vikings from the Monty Python Spam sketch singing the title of this post for the rest of the day now, but I don’t mind too much.

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Strange times, odd scenes

Click for a larger version and then view at its full size of 2048 x 1448

This 1850 photograph, taken a year after the peak of the California Gold Rush, shows just some of the hundreds of ships from countries all over the world that had been abandoned in and around San Francisco Bay as passengers and crews alike joined the rush. The photo shows part of the not very large Yerba Buena Cove; more than 800 ships lay derelict in that cove alone. In the several years following this photo, the cove was entirely reclaimed with landfill and it’s where a good portion of downtown San Francisco is now around the foot of Market Street. The wood from many of these ships was recycled to make buildings and furniture, but some sank in place, got buried during the reclamation, and are still occasionally found today underneath new construction.

 

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As with most gold and silver rushes, relatively few individuals made a lot of money finding the shiny stuff. Because of the extreme tonnages of earth and water movement required after the brief initial somewhat easy pickings, large commercial enterprises took over most of the effort and profit within months, often hiring solo prospectors – almost all of them rank amateurs, remember – who were finding little or no gold and quickly becoming desperate. They weren’t paid well, which made it difficult if not impossible to save up for passage back home. A decade after the California Gold Rush, even Mark Twain tried and failed miserably at the Comstock (silver) Lode in Virginia City, Nevada, later documenting the mortification in his fantastic 600-page travelogue of the West, Roughing It (links to a sample from the book). The great majority of individuals who did make a bundle were the shrewd women and men who supplied hotel and boarding house rooms, hot meals, prospecting tools, and camping gear to the pipe dreamers – at prices commensurate with the times.

“How much is this hyar pickaxe?”
“Depends – how much you got?”

I think it’s almost a certainty that the value of all those ships in San Francisco Bay far exceeded the total riches found by their crews. One can only imagine their thousands of stories of lives changed forever.

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An affinity for the little-known

I watched with keen interest art historian Dr. James Fox’s new four-hour BBC Four series “Age of the Image” in recent weeks, then immediately devoured his just as excellent “A History of Art in Three Colours”. A few more of his series await me thanks to MVGroup.

Fox has a way of holding the viewer’s attention and a love of highlighting smaller but key points often overlooked that remind me somewhat of John McPhee’s writing and of Professor Iain Stewart’s BBC documentaries “Journeys Into the Ring of Fire”, “Rise of the Continents”, and others.

I happen to be in the midst of rereading McPhee’s 1967 book Oranges at the moment, so I can share an example that’s fresh in my memory of what I’m talking about. The book was one of McPhee’s first – bibliography here – and is a horticultural, commercial, and social history of the orange. I believe I just heard one of your eyebrows arching up at the thought of an entire book about oranges and pomologists (fruit scientists), but see here: It’s entertaining, informative, funny, sometimes surprising, and thoroughly deserving of the occasional reread. Plus it’s fairly short.

Early on in Oranges, he explains the basics of growing citrus, which are odd enough to start. Once you’re armed with that knowledge, he then proceeds to blow your mind a little later.

    Most citrus trees consist of two parts. The upper framework, called the scion, is one kind of citrus, and the roots and trunk, called the rootstock, are another. The place where the two parts come together, a barely discernible horizontal line around the trunk of a mature tree, is called the bud union. Seedling trees take about fifteen years before they start bearing well, and they bristle with ferocious thorns. Budded trees come into bearing in five years and are virtually free of thorns. In Florida, most orange trees have lemon roots. In California, nearly all lemon trees are grown on orange roots. This sort of thing is not unique with citrus. With the stone fruits, there is a certain latitude. Plums can be grown on cherry trees and apricots on peach trees, but a one-to-one relationship like that is only the beginning with citrus. A single citrus tree can be turned into a carnival, with lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time. Trees that are almost completely valueless for their fruit seem to make the most valuable rootstocks. Most of the trees on the Ridge are growing on Rough Lemon—a kind of lemon whose fruit is oversized, lumpy, ninety per cent rind, and all but inedible. As a rootstock, it forages with exceptional vigor and, in comparison with others, puts more fruit on the tree. Bitter Oranges, or Sour Oranges, the kind usually associated with Scottish marmalade and with Seville, make an outstanding stock in certain soils, notably on the banks of the Indian River.

    Citrus scientists have difficulty finding the property lines between varieties and species and between species and hybrids. One astonishing illustration of this came as the result of an attempt, at the United States Horticultural Station in Orlando, Florida, to grow a virus-free Persian Lime. This is the kind of lime, almost perfectly seedless, that goes into everybody’s gin and tonic. About fifteen years ago, many Persian Lime trees in Florida were affected by a virus that was drastically shortening their lives. The most common way to create a virus-free strain of a citrus fruit is to plant a seed, since a parent’s virus is not transmitted to its seedlings. Persian Limes contain so few seeds, however, that the researchers—Philip C. Reece and J. F. L. Childs—cut up eighteen hundred and eighty-five Persian Limes and found no seeds at all. So they went to a concentrate plant and filled two dump trucks with pulp from tens of thousands of Persian Limes which had just been turned into limeade. Picking through it all by hand, they found two hundred and fifty seeds, and planted them. Up from those lime seeds came sweet orange trees, bitter orange trees, grapefruit trees, lemon trees, tangerines, limequats, citrons—and two seedlings which proved to be Persian Limes. Ordinarily, a citrus seed will tend to sprout a high proportion of something called nucellar seedlings, which are asexually produced and always have the exact characteristics of the plant from which the seed came. The seeds of the Persian Limes, however, sent up a high proportion of zygotic seedlings, meaning seedlings which arise from a fertilized egg cell. If zygotic seedlings come from parents which are true species, the seedlings will always quite obviously resemble one or the other parent, or both. If zygotic seedlings come from parents which are hybrids, they can resemble almost any kind of citrus ever known. The Persian Lime itself is probably a natural hybrid. The trees that grew from Reece’s and Childs’ lime seeds are still young, and they copiously produce their oranges and lemons, grapefruit and tangerines every year. The lemons are a type that are not grown, except perhaps in a laboratory, within three thousand miles of Orlando. However, most pomologists who are familiar with this story think that it has only one truly remarkable aspect. They think it is fairly phenomenal that, out of two hundred and fifty seeds, Reece and Childs got two Persian Limes.

 
McPhee has taught his “Creative Nonfiction” course at Princeton every spring since 1975; last week, he and the students moved online.

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Comfort food all the way

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I wanted to have some biscuits on hand for breakfast and decided to try a different recipe this morning. They came out well – even the ones in the row on the left cut from the second gentle gathering and rolling of scraps. It’s not at all surprising because King Arthur Flour recipes have never disappointed me. I usually make Flying Biscuits from the cookbook by the café of the same name I often visited at Candler Park, long ago when they had just three restaurants around Atlanta. King Arthur Flour calls the ones I made today simply Baking Powder Biscuits. I followed their advice to use buttermilk instead of milk. Like most baked goods, biscuits freeze nicely and thaw quickly, so that’s where five of them are now.

Because you could probably call me an old geezer without me grimacing too much, and because I have a history of getting influenza and pneumonia at the same time – five days in hospital over Christmas 1997 and a much less severe episode stopped by speedy application of Tamiflu and antibiotics in 2016, when the vaccinations I had for both did not cover the strains I caught – I got permission to start working exclusively from home on 9 March and have self-isolated since then, encountering just eight people through yesterday, all at a distance. My company activated its remote work plan a week later on 16 March at noon.

Edited 23 March to add: The state of Massachusetts has followed suit a week later, shutting down non-essential businesses and issuing a “stay at home” advisory from 24 March through 7 April.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of monitoring the news minute-by-minute, so I’ve been trying to limit that to no more than thirty minutes once a day. I’ll admit I’m not successful every day, but I am certain that a normal work day followed by cooking, baking, reading, and watching shows and films from the many thousands of hours in my media collection are far healthier ways of spending my waking hours, and I remain pleased that I’ve never joined any antisocial media network. I wince at the endless hours of feverish scrolling a lot of people must be putting themselves through. During work, the twenty-one hours of live music from Transatlantic Sessions that I have makes for a mellow background. It occurs to me that this would be a fine time to bring out the data DVDs I have of the earliest series of The Great British Bake Off from a decade ago.

As far as cooking and baking go, in recent days I’ve made, along with a few other things, six quarts of my hybrid French onion pot roast beef stew, six quarts of split pea soup, corn bread, Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery bran muffins, banana cream pie partially based on a recipe from McEwen’s Restaurant in Memphis, and these biscuits – see the title of this post for the rationale. Slow-cooked bacon and some freshly-baked bread are on the horizon. I may make the simple but quite excellent River Cottage basic white loaf recipe or, if I’m more ambitious, I’ll refresh my sourdough starter, which will take a few days, to make a boule. Some of those recipes are here on the site – search at the magnifying glass under Mark Twain there on the left or, if you’re on a phone, search is at top right.

Today’s breakfast was poached eggs and sawmill gravy on a split biscuit:

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Edited 23 March to add:

Sausage, egg, and blackberry jam biscuit beats sausage, egg, and cheese

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The loons are a few weeks late this year

Is there absolutely no public or media memory of previous ridiculous Amelia Earhart theories and corresponding failed searches tied to the flimsiest of evidence? I mean, most of it emanates from the same guy at the same organization seeking to perpetuate itself year-on-year. Last time it was the History Channel that got hoodwinked by some new guys, now the National Geographic Channel has laid down a wad of cash and gotten Titanic guy Robert Ballard involved, all on the “strength” of the picture below touted by the usual suspect. An Electra landing gear? Come now. This photograph has been hawked as showing a landing gear and proving Earhart crashed at this island for many years. I don’t care what “classified technology” has been used this time – it’s an 80-year-old old photo, fercripesake. Could’ve been a squashed bug on the original negative for all we know. Sorry, but I’m not buying it this time either.

You might think that the New York Times is only writing about this new search because of Ballard’s involvement, but they, like everyone else, most often file breathless copy every time some guy – usually the same guy – excitedly says stuff like, “This lip balm case cannot have come from anyone but Amelia Earhart. You see? Case almost closed!” And the Times foregone-conclusion headline this time – like every other time – is maddening: “Finding Amelia Earhart’s Plane Seemed Impossible. Then Came a Startling Clue.” It’s not startling at all. The photo’s been shopped around since at least 1992, maybe earlier, with a new analysis we’re assured is of the highest tech done on it every few years. (“Hey, let’s try Image → Adjustments → Shadows/Highlights!”)

So once again, the media reword the press release en masse and ad infinitum and we’re off on another news cycle of steaming horse potatoes. It’s like Mars One, except that one at least died the undignified death it deserved. People don’t seem to realize that this Amelia Earhart malarkey is on a perpetual repeat cycle, with several different decades-old theories presented in an annual rotation. Another old theory they hope everyone’s forgotten about will be trotted out next year when they need more contributions. (“Whattaya think, maybe do the kinda sorta matching rivet pattern thing again this year even though it doesn’t really match and it’s the wrong aluminum manufacturer?” “No! Too soon.”)

Click this image and tell me that’s definitely for sure no doubt an Electra 10-E landing gear sticking out of the water at the left – which, I should add, no one noticed or investigated the day the photo was taken. I triple dog dare you.

In case you’re interested, here’s an IRS Form 990 for the non-profit that promotes this hooey, generally most visible around July of each year. There are just two salaried employees (line 15), the founder and his wife, and they’re paid handsomely. This group was founded in 1985 and is ostensibly devoted to historic aircraft recovery. They’ve collected millions of dollars in contributions, paid themselves quite a large chunk of that money (“Thanks, me!”), and have yet to recover any aircraft. This strikes me as being almost indistinguishable from a comfortable retirement plan.

The founder: “Amelia’s fame is like a faucet I can turn on and off with a press release.” And yes, he knew he was saying that out loud and in public.

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The ringmaster

Bill Tindall, NASA photo S72-36978; click for a full-size version

In The thousand-ring circus article last month, I mentioned that it was difficult to find photos of NASA engineer Bill Tindall bigger than a postage stamp. Well, that long-time dearth of pictures ends today and here with ten large photos of him above and in the gallery at the end of this post, all thanks to the the friendly folks at the Johnson Space Center History Office. One of the photos I included in the first article, a screenshot from the “Navigation Computer” episode of the “Moon Machines” series, seemed like it might be an official photo, so I wrote to JSC historian Jennifer Ross-Nazzal with a link to the article and asked if that was indeed a NASA photo and if it might therefore exist in an online repository.

They couldn’t find it in any of their image repositories, and so went to the trouble of searching the JSC negative library. There they found several negatives, including the one I asked about (the uncropped original above), generously had all of them digitized, and sent them to me. My virtual hat is off to them for their help.

In the previous article, I theorized that the “H. Timdell” [sic] sign on the wall behind him was perhaps an egregious misspelling of his name from some conference he attended, but I think I was wrong. This uncropped original of that 1972 photo plus the next photo in the series (included in the gallery below) reveal that the tag is centered under a framed picture indicating his membership in the rather exclusive Interstellar Association of Turtles – Outer Shell Division – usually limited to astronauts. Details on the member challenge mentioned in the text at that link that could not be answered in polite company are on the back of that card (in the second image) and described in further detail here (it’s pretty tame).

The inscription at the lower right of the picture frame is a little out of focus, but I believe it reads as follows:

To Bill,  
whose bright-eyed, bushy-tailed,
fearless, and unafraid attitude
epitomizes all that is great and good.
                   Your Intrepid Followers

Now that might have been presented to him by lots of people – say, the entire astronaut corps – but that “Intrepid Followers” leads my mind immediately to the crew of Apollo 12, whose Lunar Module was called Intrepid. And Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad was an unrepentant wise-ass, so it would be very much like him to mangle the name on the package to firmly tweak Tindall’s penchant for accuracy. (Remember that Conrad is the guy who gave Jim Lovell the nickname “Shaky” – not the most respectful nickname for a test pilot – which I believe Lovell banned from being used in the script for “Apollo 13.”) I also just confirmed my recollection that Conrad once said of the night before they landed Intrepid on the Ocean of Storms, “You settle down for the night bright-eyed and bushy-tailed because you know, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to land!'” Circumstantial? Sure, but that’s my new theory and I’m sticking to it. Unless corrected.

Conrad’s nickname? “Tweety”

In the third 1972 photo below, I’m pretty sure the even more out-of-focus sign above the bookshelf reads: “The more innocuous a design change appears, the further its influence will extend.” That’s one of the better of Murphy’s laws of general engineering.

So, here are the photos from NASA in chronological order, from his Gemini days in 1965 through 1979, the year he retired from NASA (the leading S number indicates the year). Click on any one to enter the gallery, and from the gallery any of the images can be saved by using the “View full size” link at the lower right, which you may have to scroll down a little to see.

Be aware that these are fairly large at about 3MB apiece – similar in size to modern digital camera images – so they make take a little while to show up in full size.

Bill Tindall, NASA S65-44350
Bill Tindall, NASA S65-66759
Bill Tindall, NASA S65-66760
Bill Tindall, NASA S67-50099
Bill Tindall, NASA photo S72-36978; click for a full-size version
Bill Tindall, NASA S72-36980
Bill Tindall, NASA S72-36981
Bill Tindall, NASA S79-35876
Bill Tindall, NASA S79-35877
Bill Tindall, NASA S79-35878
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“If we’re late in answering you, it’s because we’re munching sandwiches.”

That was Command Module Pilot Mike Collins about five hours into Apollo 11. CAPCOM Bruce McCandless answered, “Roger. I wish I could do the same here.” Collins: “No, don’t leave the console!”

If the Apollo 11 anniversary piqued your interest last month and you’d like to learn more, I have six book recommendations. There are, of course, dozens of fine books on the topic, but I think these are the crème de la crème – and three of them are free in PDF form.

  1. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin: Apollo from the perspective of the astronauts. In the years prior to the book’s release in 1994, he interviewed twenty-three of the twenty-four Apollo astronauts at length (one had died) – a feat thought by many to be a pipe dream, but astronaut word-of-mouth carried him through. They knew he was serious and good. There is a three-volume, profusely illustrated version as well, which you can find here – but you may find a set cheaper here on AbeBooks if any sellers have a copy (three very good condition copies as of this writing). For that set, Chaikin curated the photo selections from which the Time-Life editors chose.
  2. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox (titled just Apollo in its most recent reprint): This is the definitive Apollo history from the point of view of the technical people on the ground. Updated 11 August to add: I just looked at the going price for used hardcovers and paperbacks and blanched when I saw that it’s hovering at about US$100 for both, even on AbeBooks (I paid $24.95 for the hardcover in the photo when it came out in 1989). However, the link here is to the Kindle edition for $8, and in case you weren’t aware, you don’t need a Kindle to read it: Amazon offers free Kindle reader programs for Android and Apple tablets and phones, Windows, and macOS. There’s also an unabridged Audible audiobook for $27. Updated 23 October to add: prices on AbeBooks have now dropped back down to more reasonable levels, including, as of this writing, a sub-$20 very good copy of the hardcover.
  3. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys by Michael Collins: I and many others think this is the best of the astronaut memoirs – smart, honest, and funny. Unlike most or maybe even all of the rest of the astronauts, he actually wrote it himself. Read the footnotes, too – some of them are a hoot.
  4. Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft by Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, and Loyd S. Swenson, Jr.: How the Apollo Command-Service Module and Lunar Module spacecraft were designed, developed, and built. This one and the next two are nicely-scanned PDFs of the original NASA History Series books available for free on the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS).
  5. Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations by Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty: How the Vehicle Assembly Building, the Crawler-Transporter, Mobile Launcher, and all of Launch Complex 39 came to be.
  6. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo-Saturn Launch Vehicles by Roger E. Bilstein: How the Saturn rockets were developed and refined.

There are many more free Apollo-related books and technical reports in PDF form at NTRS, many of which are linked in an article I wrote two years ago: https://finleyquality.net/i-got-mine-at-the-gpo-bookstore/

Say, it’s Neil Armstrong’s birthday today. And mine!

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“Sakrafise!”

Huzzah! B.K. Taylor’s “Timberland Tales” and “The Appletons” strips from National Lampoon will be resurrected next spring – to wit: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Hes-Crazy-B-K-Taylor/dp/1683962877. Publication is set for March 2020, and the quality is bound to be excellent: Taylor told me in email a year ago that he was on a final quest for the original artwork for just a few remaining strips. I happened to think of that email this morning – strangely, it was one year ago Sunday – and just searched for “I Think He’s Crazy” in the last year…et voilà!

That years-ago post of mine in the first link here is consistently among the top ten visited pages on The Finley Quality Network (1,273 hits to date, with 277 so far this year), so I think sales ought to be pretty good.

I read a lot of books on Kindle, but this one’s too good for a puny screen – especially my monochrome e-ink one – so I’m going to buy the real 8½x11″ book. One assumes the “Lapoon” typo will be fixed by then (I pointed it out to him).

Edited 23 August 2019 to add: The corrected image is now on Amazon’s pre-order page for the book.

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“I got the Earth coming up…it’s fantastic!”

From the Apollo Flight Journal and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, this is the best annotated Apollo 11 descent footage I’ve seen yet. The 16mm/6fps film, shot from the top of Buzz Aldrin’s Lunar Module window 50 years ago later today at about 4pm Eastern, starts after a 3-minute explanatory intro. You’ll want to watch this full-screen.

That descent is the subject of the 12-part “13 Minutes to the Moon” podcast*, which you can find here. What they did to prevent those 1200-series program alarms on future missions is discussed in the comments on the Tindallgrams post.

Twenty-five hours later on 21 July:

Bigger and bigger the LM gets in my window, until finally it nearly fills it completely. I haven’t touched the controls. Neil is flying in formation with me, and doing it beautifully, with no relative motion between us. I guess he is about fifty feet away, which means the rendezvous is over. “I got the earth coming up…it’s fantastic!” I shout at Neil and Buzz, and grab for my camera, to get all three actors (earth, moon, and Eagle) in the same picture. Too bad Columbia will show up only as a window frame, if at all.
– Mike Collins in Carrying the Fire

And it sure is fantastic. A large version of this one is in my upstairs hallway.

The best of the 23-photo sequence taken by Mike Collins during approach and stationkeeping; click for a 4163×4125 version

Collins, one the most personable of the Apollo astronauts, narrated this week’s Google Doodle, where the animation was nicely done – and, I’ll add, more accurate than the animations in some recently-produced documentaries.

When I saw the animation below in the 3rd episode of Smithsonian Channel’s new “Apollo’s Moon Shot” series (edited to add: shown again in episode 6), I made a rather unpleasant just-ate-a-lemon face and said “Ack!” to no one in particular. The series is otherwise very good, with Andrew Chaikin, author of the iconic A Man on the Moon, one of the talking heads, and National Air & Space Museum curators showing historic objects, but see here: During Transposition and Docking, Collins used the sixteen tiny Reaction Control System thrusters, a photo of four of them below the screenshot, on the sides of the Service Module – each producing just 50 pounds of thrust – to move gingerly with short puffs. Using the Service Propulsion System engine’s 20,000 pounds of non-throttleable thrust as their animation showed would have been overkill in quite a literal sense, with the result two destroyed spacecraft, three dead crew, and probably one dead Project Apollo. This is just the sort of nit I’m not hesitant to pick.

I’m certain Chaikin will have had his head in his hands when he saw this in the completed episode. Gee, you’d think the producers would run stuff like this past someone with even passing knowledge of Apollo before sending it out into the world, wouldn’t you? I dunno…maybe someone who was already under contract to the production…say, how about Chaikin? How embarrassing for them.

One of the four Service Module Reaction Control System quads. The assembly, whose housing includes heaters, is about 33″/83.8cm x 25″/73.7cm and the engine nozzles have a 5 and 5/8″/14.3cm diameter. The heaters prevented fuel residue buildup of hydrazinium nitrate, which could eventually detonate and destroy the RCS engine.

*Over the nine hours of “13 Minutes to the Moon,” I noted only one minor error – in episode 10, when presenter Kevin Fong says CAPCOM Charlie Duke instructs the crew to “rotate Eagle and redirect their antenna.” Duke was actually giving them the pitch and yaw values (-9, +18) for the steerable S-band antenna, which Aldrin entered on the guidance computer using Noun 51 – Desired S-Band Pitch, Yaw Angles. Rotating the entire LM for better radio reception during descent would have been kind of a big deal, and inadvisable, which is exactly why that antenna was steerable. In any case, I’d say a single small mistake in nine hours is not a bad error rate.

The round black antenna pointed at Earth is the steerable S-band

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The thousand-ring circus

On the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, I thought readers might get a kick out of seeing this funny 1968 memo regarding a problem that needed to be fixed in the Lunar Module (it was), and learning about its extraordinary author, NASA engineer Howard W. “Bill” Tindall, Jr. I wrote about this memo five years ago with just a little information on Tindall, but I wanted to expand on that a fair amount this week because without his efforts, I’m pretty certain we would not have reached the moon before that decade was out.

Click for a larger version

I first learned of Tindall in 1989 when I read Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Murray and Cox, which I think will ever remain the definitive Apollo history from the perspective of technical people on the ground, and have since gathered the information that’s included here from 1,700 pages of his memos that the Kennedy Space Center History Office sent to me in 1999, individual memos kindly provided by the University of Houston-Clear Lake from their Johnson Space Center History Collection, some JSC oral histories, and several other books and online resources.

After his earlier work on Mercury trajectories and Gemini rendezvous techniques, Bill Tindall’s parchment-dry title was “Chief, Apollo Data Priority Coordination,” a position created by Apollo Program chief George Low that quite unusually cut across several branches of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Tindall worked with design engineers, contractors, mathematicians, programmers, mission controllers, and astronauts – everyone, really – to develop and hone the dozens of mission techniques that were used in each one of the twelve distinct phases of lunar missions. Guidance flight controller Steve Bales said of Tindall, “He had a thousand-ring circus going all the time.”

Flight Director Gene Kranz: “Tindall was pretty much the architect for all of the techniques that we used to go down to the surface of the moon. Tindall was the guy who put all the pieces together, and all we did is execute them. If there should have been a plaque left on the moon for somebody in Mission Control or Flight Control, it should have been for Bill Tindall. I respected Bill so much that when the time came for the [Apollo 11] lunar landing, the day of the lunar landing, I saw him up in the viewing room, and I told him to come on down and sit in the console with me for the landing. He didn’t want to come down, but I cleared everybody away and we had Bill Tindall there for landing, and I think that was probably the happiest day of his life. A spectacular guy.”

Late last month, the Johnson Space Center re-opened the painstakingly and beautifully restored Apollo-era Mission Operations Control Room, MOCR 2: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/behind-the-scenes-at-nasas-newly-restored-historic-apollo-mission-control/. How that restoration came about is discussed in detail by JSC Historic Preservation Officer Sandra Tetley and contractor lead Adam Graves in this hour-long episode of “Houston We Have a Podcast”: https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/restoring-the-apollo-mission-control-center

Tindall’s frequent memos – usually two to four a week – were all dictated because Patsy Saur, his secretary, said he’d better learn how because she was not going to lose her shorthand proficiency. They were called Tindallgrams by those who eagerly awaited their common sense, humor, and perfect condensations of discussions and decisions made during the meetings he conducted – and conducted is precisely the right word. Some of those meetings went on for two or three twelve-hour days, with anywhere from half a dozen to a hundred people in the conference room discussing – or, sometimes, shouting and arguing vehemently – and coming to a consensus on every item on the agenda – or, sometimes, accepting Tindall’s final decisions via Tindallgram. Tindall, Buzz Aldrin’s equal in orbital mechanics (Aldrin’s MIT doctoral thesis was “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous”), once estimated that he spent just 10 to 20% of his time on standard mission techniques and the rest developing finely-detailed “what if” contingency plans, many of which were never needed but some of which came in very handy indeed. The increased peace of mind I’m sure he had as a result was no doubt shared by many because they all knew that there was a precise plan for just about any problem imaginable. The “Lunar Module as lifeboat” on Apollo 13? That was one of the plans everyone knew about. That so many things had to go simultaneously and improbably wrong before a crew entered such dire straits reveals the depth of that planning.

057:24:12 CAPCOM Jack Lousma in Mission Control: It’s slowly going to zero, and we’re starting to think about the LM lifeboat.
057:24:20 Jack Swigert onboard: Yes. That’s what we’re thinking about, too.

 

They were after what was right, and everybody was passionate about it. Everybody was young so they were kind of brash and there wasn’t a lot of patience anywhere. So some of those meetings were very, very colorful. Some of the characters were colorful. At the end of this, you were just inundated with all of this stuff you’ve heard. And now what?

And the next day you would get this two-, maybe three-page memorandum from Bill Tindall written in a folksy style, saying, ‘You know, we had this meeting yesterday. We were trying to ask this. If I heard you right, here’s what I think you said and here’s what I think we should do.’ And he could summarize these complex technical and human issues and put it down in a readable style that – I mean, people waited for the next Tindallgram. That was like waiting for the newspaper in the morning. They looked forward to it. I just remember that I’ve always talked to people about this amazing skill.

– Ken Mattingly, Command Module Pilot, Apollo 16

Just how complicated could Tindall’s mission techniques get? Consider that Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Mike Collins put this CMP Solo Book on a string around his neck a few hours before Armstrong and Aldrin departed for the lunar surface (onboard audio: “Neil, I hate to bother you; could you get my solo book out of R-1 there? Big frapping book, with a bunch of updates on the cover.”). Starting on page 60 are summarized procedures – cheat sheets, if you will – for eighteen different Lunar Module rescue scenarios that Collins might have to execute if his crewmates “never made it to the lunar surface, or if they got there early or late, or departed crooked or straight” (Collins in Carrying the Fire). Some involved Collins diving the 32-ton Command-Service Module from its 60-nautical-mile lunar orbit to as low as they dared – possibly down to 35,000 feet, but I think they would have been a tad more conservative – in order to catch up to the LM if its orbit was higher and slower than the CSM’s, an example of how counter-intuitive orbital mechanics can be.

Here’s a YouTube link to an MIT “Engineering Apollo” class with the sharp and funny Collins in 2015. The interviewer/presenter is Professor David Mindell, the author of Digital Apollo.

Tindall also kept up with the latest scuttlebutt, which at times required that he step in to protect things that needed protecting. For example, when he heard that a NASA high mucky-muck said they should get rid of the Lunar Module’s rendezvous radar to save weight, and that people were beginning to take the idea seriously, Tindall took action to nip that in the bud immediately by writing this memo to George Low, the boss of all Apollo bosses. He didn’t name the official in the memo, but it was Associate Administrator for Manned Space George Mueller who made the flippant suggestion after a visit to Grumman on Long Island, where LM weight reduction was a constant focus for years. After Low read Tindall’s high-energy memo, some memos went between higher mucky-mucks and a few weeks later Mueller’s boss told him, in summary, “Yeah…no.”

Sometimes fairly unlikely scenarios gnawed at him a bit – such as whether their re-entry targeting was so good that a Command Module might, by mistake and with a catastrophic result, hit the aircraft carrier that was waiting for its splashdown. His method of dealing with small worries was the same as the large ones: address all eventualities completely through thorough planning. In this case, his memo titled Let’s move the recovery forces a little. (“PAO requirements for good commercial TV” refers to the NASA Public Affairs Office.)

Another of the 1,000+ Apollo memos Tindall wrote from 1966 to 1970 was on the topic of why Apollo 11’s Eagle overshot its intended landing site by four miles. It described how incomplete venting (that is, depressurization) of the docking tunnel prior to undocking caused the Lunar Module to pop like a cork off the Command Module with just a little extra velocity, which in turn caused significant changes in its descent profile. A new rule for subsequent missions required that Mission Control confirm complete depressurization of the tunnel. A related Tindallgram on other venting sources adversely affecting the descent trajectory was titled Vent bent descent, lament!, and he wasn’t shy about making his strong feelings on those vexing vents known to all the top brass at NASA, including chief spacecraft designer – also a culprit – Max Faget, in an unusually all-caps-titled VENTS (“This will either amuse you, waste your time, or just possibly accomplish something great.”)

After a three-day-long “Mission Techniques free-for-all” not even two weeks after Apollo 11, he wrote How to land next to a Surveyor – a short novel for do-it-yourselfers. That and a follow-up memo, in which he revised his previously pessimistic targeting prognosis, detailed new mission techniques that were key to Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad being able to set Intrepid down just 535 feet from the Surveyor 3 spacecraft that had, two-and-a-half years earlier, soft-landed on the Ocean of Storms after bouncing twice due to a slightly-too-early engine shutdown.

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Such pinpoint accuracy was life-critical for later landings, in particular Apollo 17, which landed in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, a box canyon surrounded by mountains on three sides.

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Here’s an excellent 2015 Apollo 17 documentary in two parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIGbOoZzlYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQOEC9gHpmA

Oh, yeah…for a period of about a year in 1966-67, Tindall, who grew up in Scituate, Massachusetts, flew up to Cambridge from Houston for two or three days every week to help organize, focus, and speed up – effectively manage, sometimes in a blunt manner – the MIT Instrumentation Lab’s previously somewhat free-form development of the COLOSSUS and LUMINARY software for the Apollo Guidance Computers (AGC) in the Command and Lunar Modules, respectively. (He visited often enough that he sent out a TripAdvisor-style memo every now and then.)

Early on, Lab engineers reported, to Tindall’s great alarm, that the Command Module code was about 30,000 bytes in excess of the 72,000 available in the AGC and the Lunar Module software was around 10,000 over its 72,000. 13 October 1966, the day Tindall directed them, in person, to eliminate much duplicated code that he had found, and to cut several elegant but non-essential and hence memory-wasting routines, became known to those in the Instrumentation Lab as “Black Friday.” Two weeks after Black Friday, he discussed his strategy in this memo, which began with the important point that “There are a number of us who feel that the computer programs for the Apollo spacecraft will soon become the most pacing item for the Apollo flights.” Despite the initial hard feelings at the Lab, they did what he asked, and over time came to realize just how beneficial his involvement was to their work – and best of all, that work was ready when it needed to be.

Here’s a profile of Margaret Hamilton, who, two years after the Lab’s early difficulties, became leader of the Apollo spacecraft software development effort: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/margaret-hamilton-led-nasa-software-team-landed-astronauts-moon-180971575/

In late 1965 just before his work on Apollo began, the New York Times profiled Tindall in a brief Gemini 6/7 sidebar titled “Rendezvous Planner Howard W. Tindall, Jr.” (reprinted in the January 1966 Brown Alumni Monthly here), but Charles Fishman, who contacted me while researching his new book, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon, says that when Tindall died in 1995, not one newspaper in the US ran an obituary. It’s even difficult to find any photographs of him bigger than a postage stamp, but here are a couple: below, one in his office (a screenshot from episode 3 of the also excellent “Moon Machines” series, playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTu8nanTJo7GvulBxz9JT9JcXeXimM1Vr) and he’s in the center of this photo taken during Apollo 13, chin in hand, looking at papers – some probably written by him.

I’ve always thought that more people ought to know about this remarkable man. To paraphrase him, if you are still with me, hardy reader, now you do.

Bill Tindall; click for a larger version

I think it’s safe to say he thoroughly disliked inaccuracy and inexactitude, which may be reflected in the “H. Timdell” [sic] name I noticed taped to the wall behind him in that photo, the misspelling perhaps from some conference he attended. I’ve no evidence for it, but I like to think he kept it up there to point out to visitors at appropriate moments, maybe with a raised eyebrow and a little flourish of sarcasm.

We’d all get in there and defend our [computer] requirements, and then Tindall would cut them. And then we’d cuss him. And Tindall would grin, and cuss back, and laugh his loud, infectious laugh, and keep right on going.

– Apollo Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth

We weren’t working overtime, we were playing!

– Bill Tindall

Edited 9 August 2019 to add: My theory above about that misspelling on his wall is now inoperative…defunct…shot down. The Johnson Space Center History Office has kindly found and sent me the original of that official photo along with nine others of Tindall from 1965-1979, which I’ve just posted here: https://finleyquality.net/The-ringmaster. In that post, I offer some deductive reasoning on the uncropped version of that photo that reveals the much more likely source of “H. Timdell” [sic]: the incorrigible Pete Conrad.

Edited 21 August 2019 to add: I just happened upon this tidbit while reading Harrison Schmitt’s 1999 Johnson Space Center oral history interview. Twenty-seven years after his Apollo 17 mission, Schmitt emphasized how important Tindall’s memos were, not just at the time but for purposes of mission planning in the future (emphasis mine):

Well, Frank Borman approached me, asked me if I would do the lunar orbit flight planning for their effort. And that meant that I began to interact with [Howard W.] Tindall’s group, the Flight Operations Planning group that met weekly that really was the focus of all of the operational planning for a particular mission. They were looking at all the missions, but the one up was the one they were concentrating on. And that’s another tremendous resource.

And I’m not sure where there is a complete collection of what were called Tindallgrams. They were his summary of each of those meetings. I have a partial collection at the University of New Mexico in the files there. Whether there would be a complete collection or not, I don’t know. But somebody ought to make a very, very specific effort to get a complete collection of the FOP minutes, Tindallgrams, and to get those in some kind of form and bound. Because that is a resource that should not be lost. I can understand it’s hard to put together. I hope somebody has been able to do that.

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