A Much Unsung Hero, The Lunar Landing Training Vehicle: And Other NASA Recollections
By James Bigham
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About this ebook
Among its other recollections, A Much Unsung Hero tells of the development of the Shuttle Training Aircraft. It was used to train the astronauts in the difficult unpowered landing of the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The astronauts were required to fly at least 1000 simulated Orbiter landings in the STA.
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A Much Unsung Hero, The Lunar Landing Training Vehicle - James Bigham
INTRODUCTION
This is the official NASA description of mankind's first landing on the moon:
When Armstrong and Aldrin reached
low gate"-- the point for making a visual assessment of the landing site to select either automatic or manual control-- they were still clearing computer alarms and watching instruments. By the time they had a chance to look outside, only about 2000 feet and three minutes time separated them from the lunar surface. Armstrong saw the landing site immediately. He also saw that the touchdown would be just short of a large rocky crater with boulders, some as large as five meters in diameter, scattered over a wide area. If he could land just in front of that spot, he thought, they might find the area of some scientific interest. But the thought was fleeting; such a landing would be impossible. So he pitched the Lunar Module (Fig. 1) over and fired the engine with the flight path rather than against it. Flying across the boulder field, Armstrong soon found a relatively smooth area, lying between some sizable craters and another field of boulders.
How was the descent fuel supply Armstrong asked Aldrin? But Buz was too busy watching the computer to answer. The lunar dust was a problem. Thirty meters above the surface, a semitransparent sheet was kicked up and nearly obscured the surface. The lower they dropped, the worse it was. Armstrong had no trouble telling altitude, as Aldrin was calling out the figures almost meter by meter, but he found judging lateral and downrange speeds difficult. He gauged these measurements as well as he could by picking out large rocks and watching them closely through the lunar dust sheet.
Ten meters above the surface, the lander starting slipping to the left and rear. Armstrong, working with the controls, had apparently tilted the lander to the left and rear so the engine was firing against the flight path. With the velocity as low as it was at the time, the Lunar Module (LM) began to move backward. With no rear window to help him avoid obstacles behind the LM, he could not set down and risk landing on the rim of a crater. He was able to shift the angle of the lunar module and stop the backward movement, but he could not eliminate the drift to the left. He was reluctant to slow the descent rate any further but the figures Aldrin kept ticking off told him they were almost out of fuel. Armstrong was concentrating so hard on flying the lunar module that he was unable to perceive the first touch on the moon nor did he hear Aldrin call out contact light
when the probes below the footpads brushed the surface. The lander settled gently down, like a helicopter, and Armstrong cut off the engine, 4 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes, 57 seconds after launch with 25 seconds of fuel remaining for the descent engine."
Fig. 1 - The Lunar Module
In the debriefing following his return to earth, Neil commented:
The Lunar Module flew very much like the Lunar Training Vehicle (LLTV) which I had flown more than 30 times at Ellington Air Force Base near the Space Center. I had made from 50 to 60 landings in the trainer, and it flew very much like those flown in practice. This, of course, gave me a good deal of confidence and a comfortable familiarity.
In further praise of his LLTV training, Armstrong, in his biography, First Man
, agreed with astronaut Bill Ander's description of the LLTV as a much unsung hero of the Apollo program
.
During my 23 years with NASA and the Johnson Space Center from 1966 to 1989, in addition to other projects, I served at the Johnson Space Center as the technical manager of JSC's contract with Bell Aerosystems to build the LLTV, and was also in charge of its flight testing at JSC. The LLTV was an improved version of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) designed by Bell Aerosystems of Niagara Falls, New York under the guidance of NASA's Flight Research Center. This book is my recollection of those 23 years.
The Apollo Program
In the United States, the first serious proposals for exploration of the Moon came from Werner von Braun, the noted German rocket engineer, scientist, space visionary, and director of operations at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. His writings about the possibility of a moon landing first appeared in the March 14, 1950 Huntsville Times, Rocket Flights Possible to the Moon
. This was followed by other such articles over the years. President Eisenhower appointed him Director of The Marshall Space Flight Center, founded when Congress established NASA in 1958. President Kennedy relied on von Braun's concepts when, in response to Vostok 1, Russia and the