Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Apollo Lunar Module

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

When President John F. Kennedy set the objective of landing on the moon before the end of the 1960s, no one really knew what it entailed.  The Apollo program involved many incredible feats of engineering, but perhaps the most impressive was the development of the Apollo Lunar Module.  The Lunar Module was unlike any spacecraft before or since. It was the first spacecraft designed to fly only in the vacuum of space and the first to land on another celestial body.  Learn more about the Apollo Lunar Module and the incredible design challenges it had to overcome on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When President John F. Kennedy set the objective of landing on the moon before the end of the 1960s, no one was really sure what that entailed. The Apollo program involved many incredible feats of engineering, but perhaps the most impressive was the development of the Apollo lunar module. The lunar module was unlike any spacecraft before or since. It was the first spacecraft designed to fly only in the vacuum of space, and the first to land on another celestial body. Learn more about the Apollo lunar module and the incredible design challenges it had to overcome on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast. from NPR. When people think of the Apollo program, one of the first things that comes to mind is the giant Saturn 5 rocket. To be sure, the Saturn 5 was indeed an incredible feat of engineering.

However, it was not the most impressive engineering accomplishment of the Apollo program. The Saturn 5 was just a bigger version of the rockets that had come before it. There have been decades of experiments and progress in rocket design, and the Saturn 5 was just the culmination of that process. The real gem of the Apollo program was the lunar module.

The lunar module was completely novel. Nothing like it has been created before or since. It required a host of new innovations, never seen in previous spacecraft, and it had to function in an environment that no one had ever experienced. The story of the lunar module begins with President Kennedy's call to land someone on the moon. When the idea of going to the moon was first floated, there wasn't any agreement. meant on how to do it. Two basic ideas were proposed, direct descent and Earth orbit rendezvous.

Direct descent would involve building a giant spaceship that would be launched from Earth, land on the moon, and then return to Earth. There would just be one ship that would pretty much do everything. The other proposal involved launching multiple rockets into Earth orbit, where a ship would be assembled to then go to the moon and return. If you remember back to a previous episode, the method that was eventually selected was neither of these. What they went with was called Moon orbit rendezvous. The problem with direct descent and Earth orbit rendezvous was mass. A large ship that did everything would have to be massive, requiring an enormous amount of fuel. Moon orbit rendezvous recognized that a massive ship wasn't necessary. A smaller shuttle was all that was

needed to travel from lunar orbit to the surface. The smaller vehicle would be cheaper, faster to build, and wouldn't require multiple launches for the same mission. Once the decision to go with lunar orbit rendezvous was made, a contractor had to be selected to design and build the vehicle, which was initially dubbed the lunar excursion module and called the Lem. The name was changed to just lunar module in 1966, as the word excursion seemed too frivolous. However, everyone kept calling it the LEMU. Lem. Eleven aerospace companies were contacted to submit proposals, and nine of them responded.

The contractor who won the bid was the Grumman Corporation of Long Island, New York. Grumman won the bid, but faced a massive problem. No one had ever built a lunar module before, so they had absolutely nothing to go on. There was no past examples that they could use to determine a timeline or a budget. No one was really sure what the surface of the moon was. was like. Some thought that it was deep in powder so that anything that landed on it would sink. The biggest issue that the Grumman engineers had to deal with was weight. If you remember back to my episode on the tyranny of the rocket equation, the more mass you have, the more fuel you need,

and then you need more fuel to launch that fuel, and so on and so on. The lead engineer over at Grumman was Tom Kelly. His team of engineers mercilessly removed everything, in the lunar module that was not necessary. The initial design had seats for the two astronauts and very broad windows. It was determined that the astronauts didn't need chairs and zero in low gravity, so the seats were removed, which then allowed for much smaller and lighter windows because the astronauts would be standing closer to them. The entire vehicle had to be built out of lightweight materials,

mostly aluminum and aluminum alloys. Where they could, they even got rid of the aluminum. another problem they had to face was with the extreme heat and cold they would experience in space. Depending on whether the ship was facing the sun or the shade, temperatures could range from plus 200 to negative 200 degrees Celsius, or plus 392 to negative 328 degrees Fahrenheit. They solved this problem with extremely thin layers of mylar and capton. The reflective surface materials help protect against the intense sunlight and the cold vacuum of space. Another engineering challenge was that the lem didn't have to worry about traveling

in the atmosphere and being aerodynamic. It could be as boxy and ugly as necessary because it only operated in the vacuum of space. Another challenge was that the lem was actually two different spacecraft. At the bottom was the descent stage, with legs actually touching the surface. Nothing of the descent stage was necessary to return to lunar orbit. It was just extra weight. So when the astronauts return to orbit, the bottom descent stage would just serve as the launch pad for the ascent stage. Because the moon only has one sixth the gravity of the Earth, and because there's no atmosphere to plow through, the amount of fuel needed to get from the lunar surface to lunar orbit was

only a fraction of what is necessary to get to Earth orbit. The lemm also had to work flawlessly. Every system had to be checked and double-checked because there was no possibility of rescue if something happened on the moon. By April 1963, the general design of the lemm had been frozen, and that began the process of building and testing every single component and subsystem that would be part of the lemm. In addition to the extensive testing, astronauts had to be trained to pilot the lemm.

The lem was nothing like any of the astronauts had ever flown. Most of the astronauts were former test pilots. Astronaut Gus Grissom joked that instead of test pilots, what they should have done is recruited experienced helicopter pilots because that was the thing most like piloting the lemm. In 1964, Bell Aerosystems was commissioned to build the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, or LLRV, which allowed astronauts to have more realistic training in an actual flying vehicle. Neil Armstrong was almost killed in an accident involving the LLRV in 1968. He managed to eject just moments before it crashed into a fiery ball.

The Apollo 1 disaster in January of 1967 delayed the entire program and gave the engineers more time for testing and safety checks. After the testing phase was complete, several testing and prototype lunar modules were built, and the production of actual lems began in 1968. Each lemm had to be built by hand with custom-made parts. There was no assembly line or mass production. This made construction slow and extremely expensive. Each lemm was numbered, and there were 15 production lembs made in total. Lem one flew on Apollo 5 in January of 1968.

This was an unmanned mission designed to test various Apollo systems in space. Apollo 5 was designed to test the lem engines to see if they would fire, especially if the ascent engine would fire while still attached to the descent stage. Lem 1 burned up on re-entry into the Earth orbit. Lem 2 was built for testing and never actually flew in space. Lem 3, nicknamed Spider, flew in March 1969 on Apollo 9. This was the first manned flight of the lem in space. The lemm traveled 115 miles or 185 kilometers from the command module

before returning and performing the first orbital rendezvous of manned spacecraft in history. Lem 3 also burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Lem 4, nicknamed Snoopy, flew on Apollo 10 in May of 1969. Apollo 10 was a dress rehearsal for the actual moon landing. The mission went into lunar orbit, separated the lem from the command module, and the lem came within 14.4 kilometers or 7.8 miles of the lunar surface. The descent stage crashed somewhere on the moon. The ascent stage is still somewhere in orbit around the sun,

and it is the only surviving Apollo Lem Ascent Stage that still exists. It might have actually been discovered a few years ago when it was confused for an asteroid. Lem 5, nicknamed the Eagle, was the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon in July 1969 with Apollo 11. The descent stage was left on the surface, and the ascent stage was jettisoned and crashed somewhere on the moon. And this is the fate of all Lem Ascent stages which successfully landed on the moon. Lem 6, nicknamed Intrepid, landed on the moon with Apollo 12 in November 1969. Lem 7, nicknamed Aquarius, famously never landed on the moon with the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.

The lemm ended up saving the crew's life when they retreated to it to serve as a lifeboat. The entire lemm was destroyed when it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. Lem 8, nicknamed Antares, landed on the moon as part of Apollo 14 in January of 1971. Around this time, Congress cut funding for the Apollo program, eliminating the missions that would have been Apollo 18, 19, and 20. Lem 9 was supposed to fly on Apollo 15, but it never did. That was because plans had to be moved up after three of the missions were eliminated. Apollo 15 became the first of the J missions rather than the last of the H missions. The J missions were intended to be advanced missions for more extensive exploits.

of the lunar surface. And these missions introduced the extended lunar module. The extended lunar module had increased fuel storage and capacity. Its payload increased from 15,200 kilograms or 33,510 pounds to 21,500 kilograms or 47,400 pounds. This increased capacity was used to carry the lunar rover and to bring back more moon rock samples. The extended lunar module also had upgraded engines on both the ascent and descent stages,

as well as improved life support, which increased the amount of time astronauts could spend on the surface to 75 hours. Lem 10, the first extended lunar module, nicknamed Falcon, was launched in July 1971 as part of Apollo 15. Lem 11, nicknamed Orion, flew on Apollo 16 in April of 1972. and Lem 12, nicknamed Challenger, flew on Apollo 17 in December 1972. This was the last lunar module ever to fly in space and to land on the moon. Construction began on Lem's 13, 14, and 15, which were supposed to fly on the canceled Apollo missions. However, they were never completed and were scrapped. If you paid close attention, you may have noticed that a couple of the lemms never flew in space.

These lunar modules have been donated to museums and can be visited today. Before the production of the actual lunar modules, there were several prototype and testing versions that were created. These prototypes can be found at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island, New York, the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the White Sands Missile Testing Facility in New Mexico, and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Three actual production lemms never flew. Lem 2 can be seen at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Lem 9, which was supposed to have been on Apollo 15, is on display at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And finally, Lem 13, which would have flown on Apollo 19, was partially completed by the Grumman Corporation and is on display at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in New York. If you ever have a chance to visit any of these museums, I highly recommend it, as these are the only places on Earth where you can see an actual lunar module. New plans for lunar landers have been proposed with the renewed interest in returning to the moon in the 21st century. Not all of these involve lunar orbit rendezvous. SpaceX has proposed repositioning one of their starships as a lunar lander, a ship that would normally be an orbiter.

The starship lander would be more of a direct ascent lander like the type originally proposed at the start of the Apollo program. Despite the initial design of the Apollo lunar lander now being over 60 years old, it remains one of the most impressive engineering accomplishments in human history and is still the only piloted spacecraft to have ever landed on another astronomical body. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers.

Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes. Thank you.