Designing America's Return to the Moon - Part One

The designing of the spacecraft is underway that will someday soon return man to the moon. The actual construction won't be far behind. This new NASA program to return American astronauts to the moon and eventually to Mars is called CONSTELLATION, and I have to wonder whether this project will be any easier to complete than the Apollo Project of the last Century?

Apollo 17, last manned mission to the moon, sits in early morning bathed in floodlight and the gathering sunlight. When will we return to the moon?

Which young man or woman in today's high schools, or which college freshmen will be members of the first crew of astronauts to return to the Moon? It could just as easily be an Arkansas-led crew as to have a crew leader from any other state. I'm just biased towards the youth of our area. Who knows, but how wonderful that day will be when we finally return with the first lunar landings of the new millenium no matter where they may call home.

The knowledge that what we do this time around will be in preparation for an eventual permanent moon base, one designed for long-term lunar stays will make it all the more special. Much of what we leave behind on the surface with these next missions will in some way be utilized as permanent structures or storage facilities from where many truly far-ranging lunar exploratory excursions will depart.

NASA's Constellation Program will become the new "Apollo Program" of today, with the eventual long-term goal being nothing less than a manned mission to our sister planet, MARS!

The APOLLO Program - 1963-1972

An early NASA illustration of the Saturn I, the "mid-sized" Saturn V launch vehicles alongside the gigantic (proposed but not built) Nova rocket design which would have used 5 stages instead of the four used in the Saturn V.

President John F. Kennedy rallied the entire country to [achieve] the goal of landing a man on the moon, and [return] him safely to the Earth" in a speech to the joint house in 1963. And though Dubya is no "Jack" Kennedy by a long, LONG shot, he did lay out the goal for America to return to the Moon and establish a permanent moon base as a precursor to an eventual manned trip to Mars sometime in the future. So far, engineers are only working on the new designs for both a new heavy-lift rocket and a new crew rocket. I can liken it to how the Apollo program grew and evolved from what was first envisioned to what we finally had later when we actually began our first exploration of the moon between 1969 and 1972.

Early in the "Race to the Moon" when America and Russia were competing to see who could put a man on the moon ahead of the other, there was no definitive design for what our first moon rocket would look like. About the only thing most engineers could say for sure was that it would take an enormous vehicle to achieve the launch to orbit of whatever we'd be sending on out beyond Earth to the moon. Whatever it was to be would have to achieve a speed of at least 25,000 mph while pushing dozens of tons in the right direction. Not even the design of the flight plan was in place when we saw one of our first concept pictures such as the image above.

Some engineers wanted to build a gigantic single-stage behemoth that would go directly from Earth to the moon as a single unit. The laws of physics demanded that that idea be scraped in favor of smaller multi-stage vehicles. Weight was going to be the deciding factor in how we got to the moon, if indeed, we could even get there at all.

The evolution of designs for the Lunar Module for the Apollo program. What was first designed was not especially similar to what the final version looked like. Weight decided nearly all of the design changes seen in this image.

The flight plan that was finally settled upon was for a very large rocket with four stages that would place in orbit the crew module and another craft designed ONLY for landing on the moon, a "Lunar Module". These two components would be shot away from Earth by the third stage at the required speed of 25,000 mph in order to escape the gravitational pull of Earth, and allow the two primary components to reach and finally orbit the moon.

The crew module, called the Command Module, would sustain a single astronaut in orbit around the moon while the other two of a three-man-crew would enter the Lunar Module for the trip down to the surface of the moon. All the consumables for the trip would be contained in what was called the Service Module which would remain mated to the Command Module until just before re-entry into the atmosphere by the Command Module and the crew.

This flight plan was referred to as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous due to the Command and Lunar Modules being required to dock, undock and descend, and later return to orbit to once again dock, and allow for the three man crew to return safely to the Earth in the Command/Service Module leaving the now useless Lunar Module behind. In the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon", the fifth episode called "Spider" deals specifically with all that went into the Luner Orbit Rendezvous mission and the extremely difficult problems involved with the creation of the Lunar Modules by the Grumman Corporation. Enormous difficulties were encountered, and overcome, and this is my personal favorite episode of this outstanding and important series.

Click read more for the rest of Part One including images of our new rocket designs.

Buzz Aldrin sets up a seismometer experiment in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969.

It all finally came together when on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module (LM) "Eagle" with astronauts Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin undocked from the Command and Service Module (CSM) leaving lone astronaut Micheal Collins aboard, to begin their descent to the surface of the moon on the flat plains of the Sea of Tranquility. After their short first-ever walk on the moon was completed, Neil and Buzz returned to the LM and blasted off of the lower descent stage of their craft to re-ascend to orbit and rejoin astronaut Collins for the trip back to Earth.

It is time now to think about returning to the moon, and to set up shop....maybe, stay awhile. That's the plan.

A side-by-side comparison of the scale of America's next-generation rockets next to the earlier Saturn V and the current Space Shuttle.

While experiments have been done to utilize lunar soil as a kind of cosmic cement to use in some future eerily human structure, our first few landings at least will have to make do with soil hastily heaped up over some man-made, space-born craft as our first "pup-tent" structures. A dozer blade fitted to some newer model of Lunar Rover will suffice for that.

We must all hope that this will someday become a reality, at least for now. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, but apart from some national catastrophe, the work will continue towards this newest goal. With any luck at all the next administration we elect will push to speed-up the entire process and funnel all the money needed to do it properly, AND provide for returning science to all the NASA projects that have been gutted from it in the last few years.

The new launch vehicles will continue to grow on the drawing boards of engineers and scientists in a dozen or more NASA facilities, and soon, untold numbers of workers will go about building these machines in the factories of a dozen more gigantic corporations. We're awfully far behind where I would have thought we'd be 37 years ago last week when I watched Neil and Buzz first set foot upon the surface of our moon. But then there are so many other things that are not as I'd imagined as a 14-year-old back then, either.

But I do wonder what 14-year-olds today will look far enough into their own futures and will make the plans for his or her future as a visitor to the moon? Who will pilot the first Command Module for the first return mission....or pilot and land in the next Lunar Module....or become the first human crew in history to spend the first seven-day week, and then the first 30-day month on the surface of our moon? They are already out there, somewhere, maybe not yet even knowing themselves what celestial wonders await them in the next decade.

If we're lucky, or perhaps I should say if I'm lucky, I'll live long enough to see the first moon base. But what I really, really hope and dream for, is to live long enough to see a human, setting that first foot on the planet Mars! That will truly be a day for the history books, won't it?

Part TWO will deal with the new spacecraft that will return mankind to the moon.