The first question is one I think I alreay know the answer to, but I have never heard anyone actually say it, so here goes: When the CM turned around and extracted the LM, did they bring everything to a full stop first? Or did they do so while still hurtling along at great speeds?

Second question: The onboard computer had readouts in two columns marked "noun" and "verb." Wassem? Are those like command and argument? Was it, like, some crazy Mac thing?

Both craft were moving at the velocity imparted to them by the Saturn stages ( around 25,000 mph IIRC ). There is no full stop. Slowing down would cause the CM/LM to fall back to Earth. Here is a link that explains it in more detail.

Something like that. They were used by the astronauts to get different readouts and to enter various flight parameters. Here is a short explanation.

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Unsure of what you mean. But it unfortunately sounds Aristolian. The S-IVB did the trans-Lunar injection burn and the space vehicle (CSM-SLA-S-IVB) was travelling at high speed (24,000mph) relative to Earth. By the time of TD&E, they had obviously slowed due to the nature of their orbit, but they were still travelling at a high speed relative to Earth. But this matters not, because the maneuvers of the CSM during TD&E were slow, about a few feet per second relative to the S-IVB. So, if you were sitting on the S-IVB, you'd see the CSM moving very slowly and carefully, but if you were on Earth, you see them hurtling away at phenominal speed.

You can't really bring everything to a full stop. There is no such thing. Relativity does away with it. If you mean full stop relative to Earth, this would be very difficult and stupid considering they'd begin falling directly to the centre of the planet. It's also unnecessary since as far as TD&E was concerned, speeds were slow anyway, because we are only concerned about speeds relative to objects involved in the procedure.

A noun was an item of data. A verb was a process.

Thank you both for your responses.

That's pretty much what I thought. It's just that I've never heard anyone explain that before. When the missions were originally run, I was just a kid, and I have no recollection of reporters saying anything of the sort. So I filled in the rest on my own -- why wouldn't they stop? After all, you wouldn't change a car tire while you drive down an expressway at 60mph, would you? In my tiny little pea-brain, I figured that space was little different than a road. I then carried that assumption with me for some 35 years. It wasn't until I read a book about relativity that it occurred to me that stopping (relative to Earth) would be a really dumb idea.

But I just needed someone to tell me that no, they didn't actually stop.

Ah, "hurtling", one of the media's favorite words, with connotations of barreling along almost completely out of control.

No, as Glom mentioned, all of the equipment was in trans-lunar trajectory initially going at 25,000 MPH. Ever drive in traffic where everyone's going 65 MPH? If you're a passenger, focus at the car next to you (don't do this if you're the driver). Block out the background. It will seem as though the car next to you is not moving. Relative to you it isn't.

Ditto for the LM, CSM, and S-IVB. All going the same velocity, so relative to each other, not moving.

Relative to the Earth and Moon, they're all going (initially) 25,000 MPH. BTW, they had slowed to about 2800 MPH by the time they reached the transition zone where the Moon's gravity became stronger than the Earth's, about 202,000 miles from Earth. :wink:

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Really? That seems awfully slow. Did they use the Moon's gravity to speed back up?

And the related question, how fast does one need to go to maintain a lunar orbit?

Once the lunar G-field becomes stronger than the terran G-field, the spacecraft begins to pick up speed.

A 60NM orbit would require a speed out about 3½ thousand statute miles.

Yes, once they were beyond the transition zone the Moon's gravity would begin to accelerate the CM/LM.

IIRC, the CM/LM orbit was about 60 nautical miles. If I did the math correctly the CM/LM velocity would be about 3700 mph.

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"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent." -- Elbert Hubbard