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The Apollo Moon Landings Were a Water- Shed Moment for Humanity

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The Apollo Moon Landings Were a Water- Shed Moment for Humanity Retracing the FOOTPRINTS Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/143/3/49/6690390/me-2021-may4.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 The Apollo Moon landings were a water- shed moment for humanity. NASA’s new program to return astronauts to the lunar surface could well be a steppingstone to the cosmos. By Michael Abrams he plaque left on the Sea of Tranquility by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bore a simple mes- sage: “We came in peace for all Mankind.” But the Moon Race was part of a contest between nations and ideological systems and commanded military-scale budgets from both the United TStates and the Soviet Union. Today, more than 50 years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing (and nearly 30 since the end of the USSR), NASA is engaged in a new program to send astronauts back to the lunar surface. It ought to be a cinch, as our computers, design tools, and materials are radically more advanced than they were for the first trips to the Moon. But the demands of space travel haven’t changed at all—it is still a difficult and dangerous busi- ness—and dictate the shape of space exploration more than our high-tech gadgetry. Some elements of the new program, called Artemis, will seem like carbon copies of the 1960s roadmap to the Moon. The first step—which could happen as early as this November—will be to launch an unmanned crew capsule to lunar orbit, dipping to within 62 miles of the surface before returning to Earth and splashing down in the Pacific. Step two is the same as the first, but with the capsule carrying four astronauts; much like the famed Apollo 8 mission on Christmas 1968, the astronauts will get a closeup view of the lunar surface but won’t set foot on it. The third step was intended to be different from anything that has been tried before. Unlike the Apollo missions that launched every piece of equipment all at once, the plan was for the Artemis crew to dock to an orbiting waystation. The 0421_MEM_FEA_Moon Mission.indd 48 3/2/21 8:49 AM MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | APRIL/MAY 2021 | P.49 An artist's rendering of a lunar lander designed by Blue Origin . The goal is to land astronauts on the Retracing the Moon by 2024. Image: Blue Origin FOOTPRINTS Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/143/3/49/6690390/me-2021-may4.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 0421_MEM_FEA_Moon Mission.indd 49 3/2/21 8:49 AM Technicians dressed in clean-room suits install a back shell tile panel onto the Orion crew module. The tiles are designed to ward off the heat of re-entry. Photo: NASA Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/143/3/49/6690390/me-2021-may4.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 astronauts would hang out for a few orbits and then descend “The spacecraft looks similar from the outside,” said Carlos to the surface via a lander that had been prepositioned at the Garcia-Galan, Orion’s technical manager at NASA, “but from station. NASA has described the Lunar Gateway station as a an engineering perspective, it has many elements that are means to make Moon missions more sustainable, since equip- drastically different.” ment that shuttled between orbit and the surface could be By adopting the same gumdrop shape, the engineering team reused multiple times. It could even serve as a base camp for could borrow from the voluminous knowledge that NASA missions to Mars or near-Earth asteroids. had gleaned from previous lunar visits while adding today’s That plan was revised last year: To meet a stepped-up analytical and modelling tools. “The Apollo pod people were deadline of reaching the Moon by 2024, the first landing pretty smart folks and they had solved a lot of problems,” said leapfrogged the building of the Lunar Gateway and will send Larry Price, Lockheed Martin’s deputy program manager for everything to the surface in one fell swoop. Orion. One other, major difference between Apollo and Artemis But for all the button-downed competence we now asso- highlights the difference between the Cold War and today. ciate with the Apollo program, Price said that his team discov- In the 1960s, many of NASA’s main contractors, such as ered some design decisions flirted with disaster: “We learned Grumman and North American Rockwell, built military things were a little closer to the edge than we thought before.” aircraft. For Artemis, NASA is working with space-only com- One of those edges was the heat shield. To protect the panies such as Blue Origin and SpaceX. The new race to the spacecraft on re-entry, a fiberglass honeycomb was bonded to Moon may be more leisurely than the first, but if all goes well, its skin. Apollo technicians filled each honeycomb cell with it will plant not only the American flag on the lunar surface epoxy phenol formaldehyde resin called AVCOAT and let it but also modern American capitalism. sit. The material didn’t always cure the way it was supposed to. “You couldn’t get temperature constancy through the cure Re-Engineering Re-Entry process,” Price said. Workers would have to drill out faulty In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo. sections and refill them. Evidence of that work is on display at It is fitting, then, that elements of the Artemis program share the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum where the heat shield some DNA with its predecessor. Take the new crew capsule, on the Apollo 11 Command Module is pocked with one-inch called Orion. diameter circles. 0421_MEM_FEA_Moon Mission.indd 50 3/2/21 8:49 AM MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | APRIL/MAY 2021 | P.51 To get more a more predictable result, Orion engineers lightest materials, schemes to keep wiring as short as pos- switched to smaller blocks of AVCOAT-impregnated hon- sible, and jettisoning anything remotely superfluous. “I’m an eycombs, which also have the advantage of being cheaper to engineer: I want the Cadillac version in everything we do,” produce. In July 2020, NASA technicians finished gluing 180 Garcia-Galan said, “but we have to fight that urge, or you end such blocks of to the capsule’s concave surface. up working it to a point where it can never fly.” “Like every engineering solution, when you solve one For all that effort, Orion will in no way be lighter than its problem you create another,” Price said. Gaps between blocks predecessor. The Apollo command module weighed 12,251 also had to be filled. But then the behavior and performance pounds, while the crew module for Artemis comes in at Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/143/3/49/6690390/me-2021-may4.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 of the gap filler had to be tested and understood. “When it 21,900. Still, that is quite an achievement for a four-person erodes it changes the surface, the surface changes the local spacecraft designed to be robust enough to be reused. The aerodynamics, the local aerodynamics changes the heating, plan is to send up a crew once a year with one of four Orion which then changes the erosion,” Price added. “While we capsules while engineers and technicians refurbish the other tried to solve the problem that Apollo had in manufacturing, three. we created a challenge in engineering to show what the toler- ance was.” Lunar Logistics Re-entry isn’t the only high-energy event Orion engineers When the Lunar Modules touched down on the Moon’s have to plan for. While the Apollo missions managed to carry surface, they were met by a dusty emptiness. The plan for the its living cargo through the Van Allen belts and back with Artemis astronauts is to have resources waiting for them— minimal radiation exposure, that success was largely a matter kind of like FedExing your luggage to a hotel before you get of luck—no solar event sent a mission-spoiling dose their way. on the plane. But to absolutely, positively get the equipment “We have to account for solar storms,” Garcia-Galan said. to the Moon, the logistics company of choice may well be “We took a survey of solar storms over the last 50 years, took Astrobotic. The Pittsburgh-based space robotics company the worst radiation levels from the worst storm and said ‘We is scheduled to deliver 28 payloads (including a microprint need to be able to sustain an event like that.’ ” The Orion cap- edition of Wikipedia) to the flat Lacus Mortis via its Peregrine sule has storage compartments that can be emptied and used lander later this year. The company also has a contract to land as a temporary refuge in the case a radiation event. a NASA rover in 2023. Needless to say, Orion’s engineers have scoured the vehicle “We are building a lunar delivery service,” said CEO John looking for ways to minimize weight. That means using the Thornton. A test of the Orion's abort system in 2019 was a step toward a full lunar mission later this year. Photo: NASA 0421_MEM_FEA_Moon Mission.indd 51 3/2/21 8:49 AM BASE CAMP IN LUNAR ORBIT he Apollo Moon landings were virtually touch-and-go missions lasting as little as one day on the Tsurface. The Lunar Gateway is designed to serve as a base camp for longer expeditions. “The indi- viduals who did things like go to Mount Everest, or go to the North or South Poles—they went there very lean and very quickly,” said William “Rod” Jones, manager of the Gateway Vehicle Systems Integration Office for NASA.
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