What happened on the flight of Apollo 12?
Apollo 12 launched on schedule, during a rainstorm. 36.5 seconds after lift-off from Kennedy Space Center, the Saturn V rocket body was hit by a bolt of lightning. The CM’s instruments momentarily went off-line and Mission Control lost the telemetry feeds from the spacecraft for several seconds. When ground control regained telemetry lock with the spacecraft, the feeds were garbled and reported incomplete and possibly inaccurate information. EECOM John Aaron thought that the garbled telemetry might be caused by a malfunction in the launch vehicle’s Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE), since the SCE converted raw instrument data into forms usable by spacecraft instrument displays and ground telemetry equipment, and it would have automatically gone off-line in response to the kind of disruption to the spacecraft’s electrical systems that a lightning strike would cause.[2] With this in mind, Aaron suggested the crew “Try SCE to aux” – thereby forcing the backup SCE on-line. The command wa
