From Mojave to the Moon by Annie Jacobsen
With a moon touchdown in their sites, scientists and engineers gathered in California’s Mojave Desert to plan, design and eventually fly a futuristic contraption called the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle.
Forty years ago this summer, three men—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins—left planet Earth in Apollo 11, headed for the moon. Their mission, with its predicted 60 percent chance of success, was to be the first humans to set foot on another celestial body. Getting to the moon’s orbit was not the hurdle—we’d done that with Apollo 8. It was the second part of the equation—how to physically land on the moon—that presented unknowns and made the odds so dramatic.
For starters, there would be no air on the moon. This meant that the existing principles of aerodynamics wouldn’t be in play. The lunar landing vehicle would have to be controlled entirely by propulsion—or thrust. And because the moon is covered with refrigerator-size boulders and pockmarked with asteroid craters, ranging from a few feet deep to hundreds of yards wide, it would have to be piloted by an astronaut and not controlled robotically by NASA scientists back home.
“There were no runways, lights, radio beacons or navigational aids of any kind,” Neil Armstrong said. Which is why, beginning seven and a half years before the big event, a bevy of scientists and engineers got to work, largely in California’s Mojave Desert, planning, designing and ultimately flying a contraption called the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV). In case you’ve never seen one, it can only be described as looking remarkably like the flying bedstead from the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Ugly or not, so important was the LLRV to Apollo 11’s success, a poster still welcomes visitors to the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base north of L.A. that reads, “Before we landed on the moon, we practiced here.”
Read the rest of the article here.
