A lightning fast rescue
QUESTION Was Apollo 12 damaged by a lightning strike?
Apollo 12 was the second to land on the Moon. It launched on November 14, 1969, from the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, with Commander Charles ‘pete’ Conrad, lunar module pilot Alan l. Bean and command module pilot Richard F. Gordon on board.
A lightning strike shortly after launch didn’t damage the rocket, but did scramble the electrics, which would have ended in disaster had it not been for a quick-witted flight engineer.
president Richard Nixon and Vice president Spiro Agnew were in attendance to watch the launch on a rainy day. At 11.22am, the five F-1 engines, generating 7.6 million lb of thrust — the biggest engine ever built — lifted the massive Saturn V rocket into the air.
Just 36.5 seconds after the launch, a lightning bolt carrying up to 100,000 amps and 100 million volts struck the capsule and passed down the metal rocket, riding its ionised plume all the way to the Earth. A second bolt struck at 52 seconds.
Saturn V kept flying, hurtling 15,000ft per second in space. Inside the command module there was havoc.
The guidance system was compromised and hundreds of warning lights were flashing. Scrambled data flowed to mission control. Commander Conrad shouted: ‘The hell was that?’
Ground control had to rapidly analyse the Apollo 12 data before the mission was lost. It was being monitored by 24-yearold flight dynamics officer John Aaron, working as electrical, environmental and consumables manager.
He made the recommendation to flight director Chris Craft: ‘Flight, try SCE to Aux.’
Capsule communicator Gerald p. Carr asked ‘What the hell’s that?’ before relaying the order to the capsule: ‘Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to auxiliary.’
Alan Bean turned the SCE switch inside the capsule to aux, restoring the electrical system to normal and allowing the mission to continue.
This earned Aaron the lasting respect of his colleagues, who declared him to be a ‘steely-eyed missile man’.
This nickname is still used for an astronaut or engineer who quickly devises an ingenious solution to a problem while under extreme pressure.
The Apollo 12 crew made an exact location landing on the Moon, which had not been achieved by Apollo 11.
The danger was not over. Ground control was concerned that the lightning had damaged the landing gear — a fact they chose not to relay to the crew.
There was a tense ten days until November 24, when the landing parachute deployed properly and the crew landed safely in the pacific ocean.
Analysis showed the lightning was triggered by the combination of the weather and the electrical field created by the rocket and its exhaust plume. Since then, there are launch restrictions for certain weather conditions.
Simon Jacobs, Mansfield, Notts.
QUESTION We know what it is to be reckless, feckless or gormless, but what about ‘reck’, ‘feck’ and ‘gorm’?
THESE historic words have dropped out of everyday use.
Reckless means heedless of or indifferent to the consequences of one’s actions. An early use is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Nun’s priest’s Tale: ‘lo, swich it is for to be recchelees And necligent and truste on flaterye.’ Reckless is the adjectival form of the old English verb reck, which means to take care or thought for or notice of something.
It can be found in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies of 303AD. Reck is still used infrequently, as in S.E. Finer’s Man on Horseback, 1969: ‘The army is too big a machine to reck of individuals, and the soldier becomes a number.’
Feck is a Scots term that means effect or majority and comes from an alteration of the Middle English word effect. Something without feck is without effect, ineffective or latterly irresponsible. The word feckful, meaning efficient, sturdy or powerful, is a forgotten derivation.
James VI of Scotland may have had a hand in introducing feckless to England when he became James I in 1603.
He is known to have used the word in a letter to his son Henry, Duke of Rothesay in 1598: ‘A fekles arrogant conceat of thaire greatnes & pouaire.’
Fans of Emily Bronte will recognise the use of gormless in Wuthering Heights: ‘Did I ever look so stupid, so “gaumless”, as Joseph calls it?’
It comes from the now obsolete Midlands dialect word gome or gaum, meaning heed, attention, notice or care. It was mostly used in the phrase to nimen (or take) gome, to pay heed.
Louise Horgan, Hampton-in-Arden, W. Mids.
QUESTION How did Flagstaff in Arizona get its unusual name?
AFTER Arizona became American territory from Mexico in 1848, the U.S. Congress sent out missions to locate resources and create trails.
In 1857, lt Edward Beale was sent to build a road across northern Arizona. He reported that the area was rich in grasslands, water and timber. A semi-permanent encampment was established on the Beale Road from Arkansas to California.
In 1876, a group of pioneers made camp on the Fourth of July at a spring below the San Francisco peaks.
To celebrate the centennial of the U.S., they stripped the limbs from a tall pine and raised the flag. The flag staff became the symbol and name of the settlement.
Brendan Jones, Salford, Gtr Manchester.
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