For which he was the first engineer to be called a “steely-eyed missile man”.
The full story is amazing.
So Apollo 12 was struck by lightning 36 seconds after liftoff, which caused a power surge for obvious reasons. Instruments began to malfunction, telemetry was garbled, and the Flight Director was about to order the mission aborted.
However, a year before, Aaron had been observing a test at Kennedy Space Center and noticed some unusual readings during the test. On his own, he dug into the data and equipment, and found that the weird readings came from the little known Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE) system, and that it could be set to Auxiliary, allowing it to operate in low-power settings.
So he’d seen the readings of Apollo 12 before… and knew what to do. And gave the recommendation, “set SCE to Aux”, which was passed up by the Flight Director and CAPCOM to Apollo 12. They obeyed the order, and what looked like a disaster in the making–the freaking spaceship was HIT BY LIGHTNING!–was averted, as telemetry was restored, and Apollo 12 went to the Moon without incident.
Let me just repeat that:
The spaceship was hit by lightning, and this guy knew exactly which switch to flip to fix it.
There’s a couple of neat things about this:
(and a point of order: The rocket was struck TWICE: once at 36.5 seconds and again at 52 seconds)
1) The ROCKET itself was fine. At this point in the launch, guidance was controlled by the Saturn V’s instrument unit, the Apollo spacecraft is what was affect but it was just shadowing the Saturn V’s guidance system.
2) The Commander (Pete Conrad) had no idea what that switch was, Alan Bean was the Lunar Module Pilot:
000:01:33 Conrad (onboard): We’ve got a short on it of some kind. But I can’t believe the volt…
000:01:36 Carr: Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to Auxiliary. Over.
000:01:39 Conrad: Try FCE to Auxiliary.
000:01:41 Conrad (onboard): What the hell is that?
000:01:42 Gordon (onboard): Fuel cell…
000:01:43 Carr: SCE, SCE to auxiliary. [Long pause.]
000:01:45 Conrad (onboard): Try the buses. Get the buses back on the line.
000:01:48 Bean (onboard): It looks – Everything looks good.
000:01:50 Conrad (onboard): SCE to Aux.
000:01:52 Gordon (onboard): The GDC is good.
The thing NASA took away from this:
“Don’t be stupid enough to launch in a thunderstorm!” –Dick Gordon