Did NASA really tell the Apollo astronauts to "kick with lunar boot?"

November 14, 2023 8:03 AM

Did NASA really give the Apollo astronauts a "cheat sheet" troubleshooting card that ended with "if all of the above steps fail, kick with lunar boot?"

Thanks to this recent post I ended up finding a very interesting James Burke talk I hadn't seen before.

At one point he says that his greatest source for optimism re: human interaction with technology came in the 1960s when he was reporting on the Apollo program. He goes on to say that the astronauts were given a list of troubleshooting procedures for reference when out on the lunar surface, and they ended with "if all else fails, kick with lunar boot."

I have rummaged through the Apollo flight documents and Apollo Archives enough to know that it would take me a very long time to find this if it exists.

Does anybody know of a source/cite/image/etc? This artifact would make a lovely complement to the "this is stupid" card.

posted by range to Technology (7 answers total)

I mean, percussive maintenance is definitely a thing, especially in a "when all else fails" scenario, so...

I doubt such an instruction would appear in any official manual, though. I suspect, if such a thing exists, it would be in a more "unofficial" instruction.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:23 PM on November 14, 2023

Yes, to be clear his anecdote is that this was a printed card worn on the outside of a spacesuit during a lunar excursion to summarize troubleshooting steps if deploying Equipment X didn't go as planned, eg: First cycle power; Second unplug and replug this connector; Third kick. In the mission documents I've found the SOPs for all the lunar activities but haven't found contingency and troubleshooting procedures which I invasive have got to be documented somewhere.
posted by range at 1:30 PM on November 14, 2023

Given the consequences of suit compromise would be catastrophic this doesn't seem too likely to me.
posted by praemunire at 2:18 PM on November 14, 2023

Some of the cuff checklists had a funny little cartoons and images in them, so perhaps it was one of these? See for example Apollo 12.
posted by sizeable beetle at 5:23 PM on November 14, 2023

They did hit a TV camera with a hammer on the moon [116:16:02]. It didn't help.
posted by samj at 12:05 AM on November 15, 2023

This is not answering the question, but I clicked on sizeable beetle's link and then opened the Apollo 12 LMP Cuff Checklist PDF and looked at a page at random and apparently they sent pornography to the moon.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:26 AM on November 15, 2023

I don't know about Apollo. But in the movie Flight of the Intruder, set during Vietnam, one of the characters, a bombadier on an A-6 Intruder, does say that the manual says to kick the onboard targeting computer to get the rotors moving when there is a malfunction. The movie is based on a book written by an actual A-6 pilot, so I assume the movie didn't make that up.
posted by Stuka at 5:04 PM on November 15, 2023