Author Topic: (Historical) The Lunar Module Presentation (Read 15797 times)

Chris Bergin · « **on:** 02/11/2007 02:06 am »

(EDIT: Thread move from L2 after notification the document is public (and L2 has no publically available information contained within, thus moved, file download removed and replaced with URL.)

(Link from Jorge, edited into first post - James Lowe)

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11LM5structures.html

jbk024 · « **Reply #1 on:** 01/01/2008 12:57 pm »

Fascinating document. My favorite page is the quaint pulley mechanism for manually deploying the EVA antenna...

The whole program was state of the art then, but looking back it continues to amaze me that they pulled it off with the tools they had available...

pippin · « **Reply #2 on:** 01/01/2008 01:56 pm »

Apart from computers I don't think we have a lot available today that they didn't.

But really interesting stuff...

meiza · « **Reply #3 on:** 01/01/2008 04:14 pm »

Great stuff there!

LeeAnne · « **Reply #4 on:** 01/03/2008 01:09 am »

This is really interesting stuff! Thanks!

Rube Goldberg would've been proud of all of the pulleys and cables and the like.

Lee Anne
-----------
Also Hoosier by birth... 8-)

Jorge · « **Reply #5 on:** 01/05/2008 01:41 am »

Quote

Chris Bergin - 10/2/2007 9:06 PM

(EDIT: Thread move from L2 after notification the document is public (and L2 has no publically available information contained within, thus moved, file download removed and replaced with URL.)

(Link from Jorge, edited into first post - James Lowe)

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11LM5structures.html

Thanks for moving this, James!

My motive for posting the ALSJ link was not to get the thread off L2 per se, but to hopefully draw attention to the great work the folks at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal have done. Here's a link to the main site:

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/

which also links to their companion site, the Apollo Flight Journal. In addition to the LM structures training handout linked above, they have all kinds of other Apollo documents such as Flight Data File, Mission Rules, Apollo Operations Handbooks, and oodles more. The Apollo Operations Handbooks, in particular, are a highly valuable reference for the inner workings of the CSM and LM.

While I'm at it, I'll share a couple of other sites that contain some significant historical documents on Apollo. This link is to Virtual AGC:

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

These guys have way too much time on their hands - they somehow got ahold of the source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer and enough hardware documentation to build an AGC emulator and a cross-assembler for it. Then they turned around and repeated the feat with the LM Abort Guidance System (AGS), one of the more obscure computing devices in spaceflight history. Their links page includes the Guidance System Operations Plan, which is the god-document for Apollo guidance, navigation, and control.

Finally, the NASA Technical Report Server:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp

has almost all of the Apollo Experience Reports (116 of 121) online now.

Anyone else have links to sites they'd like to share?

rsp1202 · « **Reply #6 on:** 01/05/2008 02:02 am »

Those sites are terrific. Reading about Gene Cernan's knowledge of PINGS and AGS, for example, provided great insight into what these guys had to master to get to the moon. I liked his comment about by the time his Apollo 17 mission came up, he had so much experience dealing with LM guidance systems that he felt he could have flown the landing with AGS alone.