Meeting a Moon Walker
	On the 6^th February 2009 the Astronomy Group had the great honour of attending a lecture in Norwich by Brigadier General Charlie Duke, Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 16 and the 10^th person to walk on the Moon. After the lecture Charlie answered questions, four of which came from our group. We didn’t record the lecture so the students have written the answers from memory although we are sure that much of it is directly quoted. James: How did the autopilot work if there were no computers? Charlie: Well, we did have computers in the lunar module but they weren’t like computers we have today; there were no chips. It was just a storage system which was eight kb. People made them out of wire and soldered them together. All the commands were numbered, like P64. You had to type in a number and the module would follow that command. When we got near the Moon we would then land it manually because the computer only knew how high you were, it couldn’t tell if you were landing on the side of a hill or on a giant boulder. If we had left it to the computer it could have landed it though. But we may have ended up upside down. Apollo computer input David: In aeroplanes when you take off yours ears generally ‘pop’, does this happen when you take off or during the flight? Charlie: Well of course when I took off it did that. The pressure in the spacecraft was only 5 PSI which is about a third of atmospheric, but our air was pure oxygen so the amount of oxygen we were breathing was about the same as on Earth. At the start this gave us headaches and light headedness but this wore off after a while and we carried on enjoying ourselves. The Apollo 16 crew enjoying themselves in the simulator Bradley: What did it feel like when you landed on the Moon? Charlie: There were contact wires that dangled down from the landing pads. When they touched the Moon’s surface a light came on in the cabin and we cut the engine. It was then a five foot drop in one sixth Earth’s gravity. There were no seats on the lander; you just stood there with straps tying you down. We bent out knees to absorb the shock. It was quite a bump. Ten foot was the maximum drop it could take, higher than that and the module would break Footpad of the lunar module showing the contact sensor wire George: How long could you spend on the surface in one time? Charlie: Our space suits could hold oxygen and cooling fluid to last up to eight hours before going onto reserves. You need a lot of cooling because of the heat you generate moving about. The longest I spent on the Moon in one go was seven hours and thirty five minutes. The backpack contained both the coolant fluid and the oxygen. The coolant fluid ran through a network of tubes in our underwear. At one point when I was getting the record for jumping on the Moon (four feet) I fell over backwards onto my backpack. I was really worried I might have damaged it. That was the only time I was scare in the whole mission. The Lunar rover, which was battery powered, had a range of a hundred miles but we never ran it past five miles because if there was a breakdown or a power failure we would have had to have walked back to the lunar module. If we were further out then we probably would have run out of oxygen or coolant and not made it back. Fortunately we never had a failure. Bye the way, if you want a nice $8,000,000 car in pristine condition, there’s three of them on the Moon. You’re very welcome to them. They just need a recharge and you’ll have to find a way of getting them back! Charlie Duke’s image of the Apollo 16 Lunar Rover and Commander John Young