On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 00:27:45 GMT, Robert Casey
wrote:
Now officially, if you reached that point and
weren't actually on the ground yet, you were supposed to abort --
otherwise you lost your escape route -- but in practice, most of the
Apollo CDRs would probably have said "don't bother me, I'm busy landing"
and carried on to touchdown.
We're talking about a surface that no one was familiar with.
Not totally unfamiliar, in that a few surveyor landing moon
probes (and some of the Russian probes) demonstrated that the
lunar surface could in fact support spacecraft. There was some
concern that that Moon might be covered by a thick layer of fluff.
Or thick with cheese
But Neil had to hunt around some to find a clear spot without
big rocks to land on.
That's what I was addressing. The first spot turned out to be
too rough.
How bad a landing could the LM take and still have a flyable
ascent stage? Say the legs got busted up so forget about the
moon walks.
I bet they could have made adjustments if the legs snapped. With
the low gravity it wouldn't have been that difficult to set up the
LM so that it could return.
--
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Member,Board of Directors of afa-b, SKEP-TI-CULTŪ member #15-51506-253.
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