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Apollo 11

Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Operations Plan (Final Edition)

  • Source document: 1969-06-13-apollo-11-lunar-surface-operations-plan.pdf
  • Original: NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), Flight Crew Support Division; Final Edition dated June 13, 1969. NTRS accession 19710016668.
  • Note: A second scan of the same document (uploaded as a11flsp.pdf) was supplied but not included — it is a lower-quality OCR of the identical plan, so only this copy is kept.

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

The pre-flight operational plan governing what the crew would do on the lunar surface during the first crewed landing. Prepared by W. H. Wood, Jr. of the Lunar Surface Operations Office (Mission Operations Branch, Flight Crew Support Division) and approved up through Donald K. Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations. It lays out mission purpose, a phase-by-phase mission description for a July 16, 1969 launch, a minute-by-minute nominal EVA timeline, alternate and contingent EVA plans, and the assigned surface experiments. The document was under configuration control of the Crew Procedures Control Board (CPCB).

Key takeaways

Section titled “Key takeaways”
  • Primary purpose: perform a crewed lunar landing and return; subordinate objectives were selenological inspection, photography, survey, evaluation, and sampling, plus assessing astronaut/equipment capability in the lunar environment.
  • Profile (July 16 launch): ~100 nmi Earth parking orbit → Pacific translunar injection (S‑IVB reignition) → transposition & docking → lunar orbit insertion (≈60×170 then 66×54 nmi) → descent to Landing Site 2 (0°43′N, 23°42′E) at a Sun elevation of 10.5–13.5°.
  • Surface plan: ~22 hours staytime with a single two‑man EVA of ~2 h 40 min, bracketed by rest and eat periods.
  • Priority surface tasks (in order): cabin-window photography → contingency sample → EVA evaluation → LM inspection → bulk sample → deploy experiments → documented sample.
  • Assigned experiments: S‑031 Lunar Passive Seismology, S‑078 Laser Ranging Retro‑Reflector, S‑080 Solar Wind Composition, S‑151 Cosmic Ray Detection, and T‑029 Pilot Describing Function. The plan defines the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP) as S‑031 + S‑078, with S‑080 set out separately during the same EVA.
  • Recovery & quarantine: biological isolation garments, flotation collar, Mobile Quarantine Facility, transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at MSC, and ~21 days of crew quarantine to guard against back-contamination.
  • Derives its requirements from “Mission Requirements SA‑506/CSM‑107/LM‑5, G Type Mission, Lunar Landing” (April 17, 1969, rev. May 1, 1969).

Concepts extracted

Section titled “Concepts extracted”