Apollo 11 training and simulations

How the crew rehearsed the first landing — and where the rehearsals matched or missed the Moon. A recurring motif across the crew’s testimony is the simulation-to-reality comparison: most things flew like the sims; the exceptions (the ascent’s ride, an hour of EVA prep, never-rehearsed cabin depress) are where the record gets interesting.

The syllabus

The pre-flight Press Kit tallies more than five hours of formal training for every hour of the eight-day mission — over 1,000 hours per crewman, beyond normal technical briefings and study. Highlights:

400+ hours per man in the CM and LM mission simulators at MSC and KSC, including closed-loop runs with flight controllers in Mission Control;
LLTV proficiency flights (the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle) for the commander — the free-flying rehearsal for the manual final approach;
1-g walk-throughs of the surface EVA: lunar geology and microbiology briefings, EASEP deployment, the sampling tools and containers, cameras, and the MESA;
Zero-g aircraft flights (suit donning/doffing, EVA practice) and underwater zero-g work in the Water Immersion Facility (tunnel transfer, pressurized-suit EVA);
spacecraft checkout participation at North American Rockwell and Grumman, guidance briefings at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, centrifuge entry profiles, water/pad egress, and planetarium star-field reviews.

Where the sims were right

The crew’s debriefing repeatedly banks on the rehearsals: egress and ladder work “matched the tank/aircraft simulations well”; surface tasks run “once, maybe twice, in the simulator” turned out “fairly straightforward”; ascent rates and attitude excursions were “consistent with the simulations” (Vol 2 §12).

Where they missed

EVA prep ran ~an hour over its ~2-hour simulation estimate — not a bad checklist but a real, cluttered cockpit (planned vs. actual); the ~30-minute cabin depressurization had never been run end-to-end on the ground (EVA equipment).
The ascent ride wasn’t in the sims. A rig years earlier had primed the crew for “quite a roller coaster ride” (Vol 2); the real ascent was far gentler — and its rocking-chair pitch pulsing (down-firing jets only) “the simulators never included,” as Armstrong still noted in 2001. Note the inversion against the “right” column above: in 1969 Armstrong banked the sims for this same ride (“consistent with the simulations” — the needles), while 32 years on he filed it under what training missed (the felt motion) — the thesis in miniature, traced in Memory vs. record.
Star fields didn’t match. During rendezvous navigation the simulators had misplaced stars relative to the horizon — “why our simulations did not correctly place those stars … I don’t know” (Vol 2).

The pattern the crew reported is the one the plan-vs-actual analysis shows in the timeline: simulation fidelity was excellent for procedures and weakest for environment — clutter, dust, lighting, and ride qualities that only the Moon could supply.

Sources

Topics

Planning, procedures, and training