NASA would of course never turn off ***their ***communications, I assumed that was a given. I’m saying that as the two men in the LM started to asphyxiate they may have chosen to turn off their mics. Lovell famously disabled his medical monitor out of frustration during Apollo 13 (I don’t know if the other two actually followed suit as in the movie) but I seriously doubt Armstrong or Aldrin would have disconnected theirs in that situation, specifically not.
And they may have left the mic on. They were steely-eyed test pilots and were certainly very adherent to situational awareness. And leaving their mics on wasn’t going to hurt them at that point. But on the other hand, they were steely-eyed test pilots*!* They weren’t the kind of guys that would want their emotional death throws broadcast to the world, knowing that it wasn’t going to help them at that point either. Remember Aldrin turned the mic off while he took communion after landing (he had cleared it ahead of time)…
Is there not a history of steely-eyed test pilots calmly continuing to communicate by radio for as long as possible while they crashed to their deaths? Turning off the mic sounds exactly like something a test pilot would not do.
Yeah, I considered that. But the space program is a special case. Here it wouldn’t always be an instantaneous death. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think a similar situation of being absolutely hopelessly stranded, waiting to slowly die, with literally 110% no chance of rescue other than the guys in the LM on the surface of the Moon*!* Even in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean there’s still a chance…
Even so, communication is still data - potentially useful beyond the end of the mission - I would imagine from the point of view of a test pilot, continuing to report what’s happening would be an ingrained discipline that would incidentally help with keeping composure in the face of impending death - calling in with reports to the effect “oxygen low - experiencing some vision impairment now” etc has to be better than turning off the radio and weeping and flailing.
Plus, more simply, why do we assume that people want to be alone when they die? Common experience suggests that most people fear dying alone, and even if the only company you can have is voice communication via radio link I think a lot of people would want to retain that human connection for as long as possible.
Eight years after Komarov’s death, a story began circulating that Komarov cursed the engineers and flight staff, and spoke to his wife as he descended, and these transmissions were received by a NSA listening station near Istanbul. Historians regard this to be untrue, although a purported recording of the incident exists.
Didn’t the Command Module communicate on the same frequency as the LM? So wouldn’t NASA have to leave it on so Mike Collins could talk regardless?
Not that they wouldn’t have left it on anyway.
I don´t know whether they would have cut the line. But right know this discussion seems a bit one-sided for me so I am going give my two cents.
Let us say moon lander tipped over while landing. There would have been no way to get it up again.
In perfectly rational world they would have of course continued communicating until the bitter end, astronauts giving their observations etc.
But we don´t live in rational world but the one consisting mostly emotions. First, keeping the line open might have been extremely traumatizing for guys down on Earth. Depending of an individual, the death can be peaceful or really ugly sounding, with cursing, blaming and moaning etc.
Second, it might have been inappropriate to give the astronauts impression they need to work until the very end. What if they wanted to spend their last moments privately thinking about their family and their creator or how they are gonna die. Or that they wanted hide from everyone (not least their family) that they died painfully or committed suicide.
Traumatizing for the guys on Earth? They flight controllers were doing their job, and I’m sure that every one of them would be highly offended by the idea that contact with the (probably) doomed astronauts should be cut to spare their own feelings, before they go home at night and sleep in their own beds. Do you think that the flight controllers on Apollo 13 were thinking, even for a second, “gee I wish these guys would just turn off their radio because this is really upsetting me”?
Actually yes. Why torture yourself when there is nothing you can do? Maybe a volunteer priest might have been right guy to talk with them but how could an average NASA guy handle such a situation? There was probably no way to comfort them with earthly engineering chatter.
There is zero chance they would cut communications. Set aside that it’s a misreading of the memo that suggested communications would be turned off in the first place. Mission control would never close the line while the astronauts were alive, even if the astronauts told them to. What if they changed their mind, maybe had something interesting to report or simply wanted to say one last goodbye to a loved one? No matter how difficult it was, someone would be listening until the end.
So that 5 years from then you don’t lie awake at night almost, but not quite, certain that there was nothing else useful to hear. That nobody did in fact try at the last minute to say, “Hey Houston, good news, we fixed the engine problem after all!” Knowledge can be unpleasant, but doubt gnaws.
Well, did they cut communications after the Challenger shuttle exploded?
I seem to remember still hearing stuff – even one guy talking about how it looks while we could see that it had exploded.
Though we did hear afterwards that there was still an open channel to the vessel until it hit the water, but that was not being broadcasted, either before or after the explosion.
Hasn’t funding become an issue on some of these? I thought I remember hearing that it had become an issue due to the expense of maintaining the aging earth based equipment.
I see absolutely no way they would cut communication whilst the astronauts were still alive, I would be very surprised if they cut comms whilst any telemetary was being received. If I was stranded in space or on the moon, I would rather speak to an engineer who was working on a solution however remote than a priest. I imagine not many Astronauts (despite what they say for sound bites) are into God bothering. Cutting comms would be cowardly and against the bond between support and front line…
Both equipment and engineers and mission techs qualified to run the missions has often become an issue, but the cost to maintain communications so low and the scientific data at regions of space we have never before visited and will not have access to again in a generation that it makes little sense not to continue communications. And JPL is the antithesis of the typical NASA mission center; they run low cost, high value missions within budget and often vastly exceeding the stated mission objectives. Even the original Voyager program, which was a scaled down version of the Planetary Grand Tour proposal, it satisfied virtually all of the proposed mission objectives save for visiting Pluto with half the space craft and at a total mission cost of about US$2.5B adjusted for 2015 (US$865B in 1980 dollars). The maintaining cost of the post-Neptune mission is substantially less than a million dollars a year.
For the cost of the construction of the ISS, which has provided very sparse scientific data even for space physiology, and essentially no exploratory value whatsoever, JPL could have launched fifty missions of comparable or more complexity, blanketing the entire solar system including the neglected Uranus and Neptune systems which, despite their peculiarities and information they could provide about the formation of the solar system, have received only one quick flyby each by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.
