

Apollo 11 Program Alarms (1998) - facetube
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html

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erbo
Gene Kranz, in his book _Failure Is Not An Option,_ describes one of the
simulator runs for Apollo 11 in which the Simsup (simulation supervisor) threw
a 1201 alarm at the Mission Control team. The controller receiving the alarm
panicked and called for an abort, and Kranz passed the abort order on to
CAPCOM. Afterwards, the Simsup told Kranz, "This was not an abort. You should
have continued the landing...You violated the fundamental rule of Mission
Control: You must have two cues before aborting. You called for an abort with
only one!"

The controller dug more thoroughly into program alarm codes after that
simulation, and wrote a new mission rule specifying a series of program alarm
codes for which an abort would be called. 1201 and 1202 were _not_ among those
alarm codes. Thus, when the 1202 showed up during the actual descent, the
controller was able to say, "We're Go on that alarm," and when the 1201
happened shortly thereafter, he could say, "It's a Go--same type--we're still
Go." Shortly thereafter, history was made...not just because the MIT
programmers had done their job well, but because the flight control team in
Houston had also done their job well.

