Rocket Age by George D. Morgan

Author:George D. Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2020-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

19

EOR, LOR, AND LEM

One of the many things NASA operations . . . had in common with the military was that rest was a scarce commodity.

—Gene Kranz

In the early days of the space program, as hardware design was first being conceptualized, engineers followed a model laid down early on by science fiction writers and movie companies. The world of entertainment envisioned Moon rockets that were tall, silver, sleek, and aerodynamic, with tapered nose cones and wide tail fins. They would descend to the lunar surface as a single vehicle, then later take off with their structure still fully intact. The astronauts inside the rocket would be strapped down to large, comfortable reclining seats as they fought against the forces of several g’s of acceleration. The rocket would then return to Earth looking the same as it did when it left the Moon. Such a scenario was seriously considered for a time—so seriously that NASA even gave it a name, referring to it as “direct descent.” Wernher von Braun had once exchanged his engineer’s cap for a writer’s in 1958, publishing a novella entitled First Men to the Moon. In the story a giant rocket, carrying several astronauts, launches a smaller rocket toward the Moon, which lands in one piece, then later takes off and returns to Earth in a single stage.1

It did not take long for reality to trump the fanciful imaginations of authors and filmmakers, and direct descent as a viable option was discarded. There were two aspects of landing on the Moon that made a direct descent spacecraft impractical, and far too expensive: the Moon’s much weaker gravity, and the lack of any atmosphere. Since there was no atmosphere, there was no need at all for a lunar-landing rocket to have a sleek aerodynamic design. A nose cone and fins would be superfluous—even ridiculous. And utilizing the now well-understood benefits of staging, there was no reason not to leave part of the lunar landing ship behind. Anything that was used up and not needed for the return flight could be left on the Moon as dead weight—no reason to carry it home.

Disposing of the direct descent concept of lunar travel was all a violation of the romanticized vision of Moon and planetary landings served up by Jules Verne and Hollywood—a fanciful image that had been around for decades by the time the 1960s arrived. But it was not just authors and filmmakers that promulgated that vision; they were assisted by the ultimate space seer himself, Wernher von Braun. A fully complete ship landing on the Moon and taking off again was what he had envisioned since boyhood.

Some spaceship of some sort would need to land on the Moon. But what would it look like? Or, more important, what should it look like? At first the engineers just referred to this future unknown ship as “the lander.” Throughout its design phase, the lander went through many conceptual changes. Every pound that landed on the Moon was a pound that

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