During Apollo missions to the moon, the command module pilot (CMP) stayed in lunar orbit while the two other astronauts landed and explored.
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| Dick Gordon was the CMP on the second moon landing mission, Apollo 12, in 1969. Photo: NASA |
After the mission, CMP Dick Gordon attended a debriefing in December 1969, and he had this to say about sleeping in space...
Sleep is probably an individual preference. I definitely had a preference for actually sleeping in the couch. I slept in the couch all but two nights.
These two nights, I slept in the sleeping bag underneath the number 1 couch, the left-hand couch. But it was always my preference to put the sleeping bag on, then get in the couch, and tie myself in the couch with a harness.
For some reason , I slept better with the lap belt and the shoulder harness on, and securely lashed down to the couch, rather than free floating or being suspended in the sleep restraint under the couch.
That was just a personal preference and it seemed to work better for me.
During sleep periods, I would wake up maybe two or three times. I would look around the spacecraft and make sure everything was okay and then really go back to sleep.
I got extremely tired at the end of that first day of lunar orbit activities. That sleep period was scheduled to be a relatively short one anyway. It necessarily turned out to be so because at the end of the day was the ... lunar orbit plane change number l occurred.
The CMP was alone in the command module during the lunar excursions. When his orbit went behind the moon, he was completely out of contact with every human everywhere. Gordon goes on to say:
But then I found that I had to do all the housekeeping and presleep activities by myself, whereas the 3 of us had been able to do them before and to clean them up in fairly rapid order.
It took a considerable length of time to wade through all that by myself, and this cut short the sleep period. So I actually was pretty tired in lunar orbit and didn't really catch up until one day out of lunar orbit on the way back.
I don't think anybody's performance was affected by fatigue and I'm not sure that fatigue really came into play. But certainly most of us in this particular occupation are used to performing while we are fatigued.
Source: "Apollo 12 Technical Crew Debriefing"; December 1, 1969; https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a12/a12-techdebrief.pdf
