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Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, when it says "at the point when NASA ends communication with the men", why did it say that ? Wouldn't it be possible to maintain communication until long after they would have died ? Would they cut it off beforehand ? Was there something like a movie to alleviate the boredom while the oxygen ran out ? Which one ?

Additionally isn't there more analysis ? What are some scenarios ? I mean crashing after a failed launch attempt on the moon would perhaps be less disastrous than on earth, but can you realistically hope to survive a fall of several kilometers ?

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From what I've heard, they would plan to deliberately cut off communication, so that the entire world would not listen to two men slowly dying.

I had always assumed they brought cyanide pills with them just in case of disaster. I know that if I was stranded on the moon with no hope of escape, I wouldn't want to sit there for 2 or 3 days until dying of starvation. I'd rather just eat a pill and be done with it.

They probably would have died of CO2 poisoning, since the air filters were only available in limited quantity.

they could probably have just depressurized their suits and would have lost consciousness extremely quickly.

This.

Whenever asked about cyanide, the astronauts always laughed, because if they wanted to kill themselves, there were about a million ways to do so. They didn't need cyanide.

> Additionally isn't there more analysis ? What are some scenarios ? I mean crashing after a failed launch attempt on the moon would perhaps be less disastrous than on earth, but can you realistically hope to survive a fall of several kilometers ?

I am not an expert, but I guess that the letter was mostly intened to cover cases where the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascent_Propulsion_System failed to ignite at all, or perhaps sputtered early enough that the astronauts had a relatively soft landing after failing to make orbit.

Agree about the case when APS fails to operate. There were emergency procedures that involved disassembling some part of it and directly wiring a power connection to the oxidizer and propellant valves. See the end of https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/LM11HandbookVol2.pdf

I think the latter scenario is virtually impossible: the ascent stage didn't have any landing gear and the engine wasn't throttlable, so even a relatively soft landing with fully operational APS would be impossible.

I think that's just a euphemism for when NASA is no longer able to communicate with the men, which is also a euphemism...

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