Space Mission Burn Strategy: Why We Played It Safe!

[00:00:00]At uh 76 hours, and about 30 minutes, we went over the uh uh rules with the flight crew.

[00:00:08]Again, the uh uh we were being very conservative on this particular burn because I think you were aware that uh if we did not perform the burn, uh we were on a free return trajectory and would splashdown in the Indian Ocean at around 152 hours.

[00:00:25]So, we wanted to uh set the limits for the crew monitoring of the burn very tight. In other words, we had to have a uh nominal performing decent propulsion system in order to uh initiate and continue the burn. And if for some reason uh the decent engine should start deviating in performance, we wanted to shut down the burn.

[00:00:48]Uh we were doing this primarily because we could make a small midcourse correction sometime later on uh in the mission and bring us back to a free return trajectory again. So, we played that particular maneuver very conservatively.

[00:01:02]Uh I believe you've probably got a transcript of the air-to-ground communications at that time, so that I don't think there's any need to go through uh all of the rules we read up to the crew.