Charlie Duke's Apollo 16 Lunar Module Flown and Lunar Surface-Used A7LB Bio-Harness

This space suit wiring harness transmitted Duke's vital signs to Mission Control throughout the mission, including Duke's three lunar EVAs and Lunar Rover rides.

During the launch of Apollo 16, Charles Duke had a heartbeat of 144. It’s an absolutely natural response to the sensation of 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifting 95 tons into orbit. And it was his first space flight. John Young was commander of the mission, and this was his fourth. His heart rate was 70. He also got the lunar rover to skid and set a record for fastest driving on the Moon. Must have felt like Duke's Hazard.

Loss of potassium, a crucial body chemical, led to serious medical problems, including abnormal heart rhythm, on Apollo 15. So for Apollo 16, they prescribed a postassium‐supplemented diet and took daily high-res EKG heart scans. (NYT)

This Beta cloth-covered electrical bio harness, 8" x 10.5" overall, connected the sensors on Duke's chest to the main communications harness of his spacesuit. Printed on the harness are the words, "Harness Assy, Bio, S/N A7L 101054-04" which is crossed out with a red line and "A7LB 109043 01" stamped next to it, "Cicoil Corp 770A100-4", "S/N 117", and "Mfg date 468".

EE World: "The Cicoil assembly enabled continuous monitoring of the vital signs, such as blood pressure, respiration, body temperature and pulse rate for each astronaut during flight, orbit, spacewalk and lunar surface operations. Cicoil’s Space Flight approved Biomedical Instrumentation Harnesses were chosen for their unique ability to separately encase shielded signal pairs to eliminate electronic interference and provide uninterrupted signal integrity when exposed to temperature extremes (–65° to 260°C), UV Light, radiation and vibration...

The flawless operational performance of Cicoil’s Bio-Harness designs were, in NASA’s words, “Vital to the successful achievement” of these history-making flights."

The harness has three small metal female plugs (colored red, yellow, and blue for proper mating) that connected with the body sensors and a rectangular metal female plug that connected to the communications harness. This system transmitted Duke's primary medical data back to Mission Control during the entire flight. An interesting piece of equipment that spent twenty hours on the lunar surface.

Part of the Future Ventures’ 🚀 Space Collection. Complete Kennedy Space Center Documentation below.

Some rights reserved

Taken on: June 13, 2021

Tags:

Harness

Assy

S/N

A7L

101054-04

Apollo

Lunar

Module

Flown

Surface-Used

Bio-Harness

with

Complete

Kennedy

Space

Center

Documentation

Moon

Suit

Charles

Charlie

Duke

Heart

rate

A7LB « less

Sets appears in: • Space Collection 🚀 • Over the Moon 🌙

Stats: 4,611 views / 1 comment

go back

close tools panel

Badge creator

Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.

You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.

Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page

Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.

Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:

Embed on your Web site

To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:

Black background (preview):

White background (preview):

Firefox and Chrome addons

Adds a 'Flickriver' button to your browser. While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on this button to open the same view on Flickriver.

Install in Firefox
Install in Chrome

Search plugin

Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Install search plugin

"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script

A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.

Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.

Install "View on Flickriver" script

Bookmarklet

While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on the bookmarklet to open the same view on Flickriver.

To install: drag and drop the following link to your Bookmarks toolbar.
IE users - add the link to your Favorites under the Links folder