Surveyor Program

[LittleBird]

Confession: I'm being a bit obtuse in my replies here because I don't want to reveal much of what I have in the article before I publish it. I'm not going to revolutionize the Surveyor story or anything, but it's neat info and I want to have it appear in the article first.

One thing that is becoming apparent as I revisit Surveyor is just how big a gap there was between the promise and what actually got delivered. I know that is common for all space programs, but I get the impression that the people working on Surveyor initially expected that this would be the lunar surface exploration program for the decade and then of course Apollo became the lunar exploration program. But there may have still been some people who understandably thought that maybe, just maybe Surveyor could then contribute to future lunar surface exploration after Apollo.

And my most recent research highlights that issue during the Surveyor program itself. There were people who were proposing "hey, it can also do this cool thing!" And they submitted their proposal into a void. As Surveyor was being scaled back, both in what it would do scientifically, and because it was in this war with the launch vehicle capability, any suggestions for new payloads were almost pointless. When they were struggling to get the mass down on Surveyor (and the performance up for Centaur), program managers did not need somebody coming along with other neat new Surveyor ideas.

My 2-part article also goes into the Surveyor rover, and that leads me again to think that maybe I should propose to the mods that this thread and the rover thread be merged (although I would not want all the attachments to disappear if that happened):

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54383.0;all

[Edit: I realise that 1967-68 is later on than the period that Blackstar is talking about, and that Hughes' monopoly on comsats wasn't totally solid either, but I think the interaction between the needs of NASA and JPL and the needs of corporate strategy is an interesting issue that isn't often looked at.]

As I noted above, Tony Iorillo (and I think some others) have said that the Surveyor alumni were key members of Hughes' most ambitious projects in the late 60s and early 70s-some well known like Intelsat IV, some still partially (USAF/NRO SDS) or completely (NRO JUMPSEAT) shrouded in  secrecy.

 I wonder to what extent the Hughes side would ever have remained  motivated to propose extensions to a programme which was far more vulnerable to the vagaries of budgets than the commercial or national security realms ? Iorillo recalled https://hughesscgheritage.wordpress.com/2020/06/20/tacsat-preview-tony-iorillo/  in 2020 just how financially tenous the situation was in early '68:

In 1967 and 1968, even before TACSAT was launched, we used the TACSAT win as our relevant related experience.


With a large satellite configuration in hand, we beat TRW, and others, for the HS-318 and Intelsat IV contracts.  These wins came just in time to prevent having to lay off the Surveyor and Intelsat II teams whose programs were ending. Even TACSAT was to end in a year.  Thanks to Mr, Hyland’s foresight and faith, the bulk of these people were carried for many months entirely on company funding
   
Bob Roney became our new Space Division manager shortly before the wins were announced in 1968.  At an all hands meeting, the day he took over, Bob informed us that our division had but a 60-day backlog. Dick Brandes and I still recall the tension felt by all in the room.

and how important the Surveyor alumni were:

The “green” program   was much more demanding.  It was our first entry into the operational world of satellite reconnaissance.  And it was not a geostationary orbit mission.  The satellite was a multi-mission vehicle carrying an electro-optical precision pointed payload and a very wide band ELINT payload with large steerable receive and downlink antennas.  We also designed and built the elaborate ground data processing segments for both payloads along with the satellite command and control station. The Surveyor guys were perfect for the job

One thing is clear though, the lure of working on a moon mission was considerable-see this Hughes ad from AW&ST, 24th Sep 1962:

 

[Blackstar]

I'm going to continue being vague for a few more days, but I expect the first part of my article to appear next week in TSR. I should have some nice-quality images by this evening that I can put in the article.

The second part is about the Surveyor rover and how it contributed to later Apollo rover and Mars rover designs. I've written about that and others have done so as well (the book on the Apollo LRV that came out a few years ago covered this well). That's not going to be anything new on my part. However, what is interesting about that is the through-line, how a company did a bunch of research for something that did not fly, but made important contributions to things that ultimately did fly.

The first part opens up the Surveyor story a bit more. There is what is publicly known about Surveyor, but this now expands upon it and shows that people were trying to get it to do some more things. That leads me to believe that there's still more to this story than is public. If some of this information was hiding in plain sight, then it is possible that there's even more if somebody was willing to dig.

I'm a bit jazzed about that at the moment because The Space Review reviews a book about lunar programs that I find aggravating because apparently the author did no new research, just regurgitated what is already public. The information that I found about early Surveyor demonstrates that there is almost always new material to find if you put in the legwork. If you are writing about a subject, there's no excuse for being lazy.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4921/1

Surveyor sample return: the mission that never was
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, January 20, 2025

Early on the morning of January 15, a rocket lifted off from Florida carrying two small lunar landers. A NASA-sponsored mission called Blue Ghost 1 is scheduled to land on the Moon a month and a half from now as the United States seeks to make robotic Moon landings a routine occurrence. The last time that happened was in the mid-1960s with the Surveyor program. Surveyor started out as an ambitious project that included a lander, orbiter, a rover, and possibly even a sample return mission. That sample return proposal has been overlooked in histories of early American space exploration.
Surveyor’s ambitions

Between May 1966 and January 1968, the United States launched seven Surveyor missions to the Moon and successfully landed five of them. Surveyor was built to provide data on lunar conditions to be used for Apollo landing missions. But Surveyor was originally planned to be the premiere NASA lunar science program of the 1960s, with up to 17 missions. Before John F. Kennedy in May 1961 redirected Apollo from a program that might eventually send astronauts around the Moon to a program to land them on the Moon by a deadline, NASA planned for many robotic lunar landers, starting with a project called Prospector that was canceled and reborn as Surveyor. Surveyor was dramatically de-scoped by the mid-1960s, both in goals and numbers. (See “Dark side of the Moon: the lost Surveyor missions,” The Space Review, December 20, 2021.) But before this happened, NASA allowed its scientists and contractors to think big.

[copernicus]

Excellent article on the Surveyor sample return mission.  Perhaps NASA might want to request such a mission during the next round of commercial lunar proposals.

  In fact, a series of sample-return missions would be helpful, especially if paired with rock-collecting rovers.
Perhaps a company could clone, more or less, the Surveyor lander design.  After all, it is well proven! 

[Hobbes-22]

Well-proven but very limited. It has no terrain recognition or avoidance, these things landed blind. The main landing engine is a solid motor, so if you add terrain recognition, you may have to replace the motor as well with a liquid-fueled rocket so you can adjust thrust and have a variable-length burn. All you'd be left with is the frame.

[Blackstar]

Well-proven but very limited. It has no terrain recognition or avoidance, these things landed blind. The main landing engine is a solid motor, so if you add terrain recognition, you may have to replace the motor as well with a liquid-fueled rocket so you can adjust thrust and have a variable-length burn. All you'd be left with is the frame.

Yes, as I noted, Surveyor had a dry mass of approximately 300 kilograms, making it a lightweight compared to Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 lander, which masses 490 kilograms. I don't know anything about BG, but I assume that much greater mass also provides much greater payload capability.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4931/1

Of Firebirds and lunar rovers
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, February 3, 2025

In the mid-1960s, NASA landed five Surveyor spacecraft on the Moon. They took photos and tested the soil characteristics of their landing sites, providing data for future Apollo landings, including Apollo 12, which set down very close to Surveyor 3. But NASA had dramatically scaled back the Surveyor program both in the concept stage and later while it was underway. Instead of 17 planned missions, the agency only flew seven and succeeded with five. Surveyor also never carried drilling equipment, as scientists wanted, or a small rover, despite rover prototypes that were developed and underwent limited testing. Other than the flown Surveyor missions, much less is known about the program’s development and planning. But there are still untapped sources of information about the rover program and its connection to other NASA astronaut rover projects of the 1960s, including the role the American automotive industry played in the space program.

[Blackstar]

The crazier rover designs were when Norman James was told to go wild and come up with whatever ideas he had for a large rover for astronauts. The big tracked vehicle doesn't make much sense. But you can see how they refined the ideas down to the MOLAB concept. GM then realized that they were never going to get to build MOLAB and started looking at rovers that could fly on Apollo.

[catdlr]

Surveyor 2 to 7 Moon Landers - Atlas-Centaur, Pictures, Launch, Lunar Lander Mission, Audio, HD

Nov 6, 2025  #surveyor #moon #nasa
Documentary about the Surveyor 2 to 7 moon landers, based on existing historical footage and narration. Each mission is described in detail. Multiple camera angles of the launches are shown, accompanied by good-quality archive scans of surface photos. When no audio existed, ambient sounds were added.

_______________________________________________________
CHAPTERS

00:00 Surveyor 2
0:51 SD2 launch
03:44 Surveyor 3
07:35 Surveyor 4
07:57 Surveyor 5
09:07 SD5 launch
12:23 Surveyor 6
12:50 SD6 launch
15:07 Surveyor 7
16:37 SD7 launch
19:35 Surveyor Program Results