Lunar surface cuff checklist
Some people wear bracelets on their wrists. Other people wear watches or smartwatches. The bravest ones wear checklists.
Watches or bracelets serve as companions for many people. In the simplest version, they simply decorate, and in more complex cases they show the time or provide other additional information and monitor health. What to hang on your wrist if your task is unusually complex? You need to hang something truly serious, for example, a checklist.
Let's look at the photographs [1].
This is a photo of Eugene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission. The last person to date to set foot on the surface of the Moon. He's standing far away, but pay attention to his left hand. What is that white thing there? Let's look at other photos.
This is a different person, Harrison Schmitt. He was on the same mission. Moreover, his tasks included training previous Apollo crews to carry out geological work. Schmitt's left hand is now particularly visible. It seems as if there is some kind of book in the wrist area.
Here is a color photo. Although it’s still not very visible, let’s look even closer.
Here is the “Lunar Surface Cuff Checklist”, which gives the title to the post. On the right page one can see the instructions for exchanging water between the Personal Life Support System (PLSS) and the Lunar Module (LM). The personal life support system is a large backpack on the astronauts’ backs. The Lunar Module is the home of astronauts on the Moon.
Yes, even the smartest and strongest of us, the space explorers, require auxiliary instructions. Even if they are as small as in the photo above.
No man has set foot on the Moon in over 50 years at the time of writing this post. The Apollo 17 flight was the last of this lunar program. The first spread of the checklist, or rather the collection of checklists, contains the inscription “The beginning not the end….”
These words seem to express the then hopes for the continuation of the discovery of our satellite.
In addition to dry instructions and abbreviations, funny illustrations accompany the cuff checklist. Already on the first spread, we see a dog-astronaut. You can find it even further. See the full version of this remarkable checklist in my favorite Internet Archive.
What would your wrist checklist contain?
List of links:
[1] “Apollo 17” from Wikipedia
