Should you constructed a automobile in, say, Germany, to be used in Canada, you can assume that the roads can be roughly the identical. Gravity will work the identical. Whereas the climate won’t be precisely the identical, it gained’t be completely totally different. However think about designing the Lunar Tour Module that might land two astronauts on the moon for the primary time. Nobody had any expertise touchdown a craft on any alien physique earlier than.
The LEM was wonderful for a lot of causes, however as [Apollo11Space] factors out, the legs had been a very thorny engineering downside. They needed to land on largely unknown terrain, keep upright, enable for the ascent module to take off once more, and, in fact, not overwhelm the tiny spaceship. Additionally they needed to survive the blast of the LEM’s engine.
Certain, there have been some automated probes that landed in 1966 (the Soviets obtained there first, however NASA was only a few months behind). However by 1966, the primary LEM was already three years previous.
The video exhibits what number of choices had been on the desk, however the four-legged splayed footprint design was the winner. A Canadian firm was instrumental within the profitable manufacturing of the legs. One attention-grabbing factor is that the legs had a one-shot aluminum honeycomb shock absorber that destroyed itself because it absorbed the affect of touchdown.
It presents an interesting glimpse into the way it will need to have been to design one thing for the unknown, which couldn’t be correctly examined till it was truly used. It was additionally enjoyable to see the enormous gantry they used to simulate lunar gravity for the check articles (that didn’t look very similar to the true factor, by the way in which).
The LEM famously served as a lifeboat for Apollo 13, however the legs in all probability didn’t matter for that. In fact, what we often speak about is the wonderful software program onboard, however that’s solely a part of the story.
