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How NASA Created a Flight Simulator For The First Astronauts Landing on the Moon
A pair of Langley employees theorized that computer-controlled navigation would be insufficient to land on the moon, so they advocated for this $2 million dollar simulator. It was intended to familiarize astronauts with the alien surface, hopefully helping them identify visual cues that would let them aid the programs. (space.io9.com) और अधिक...
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Great story! Fascinating. They really tried to think of everything. Even though it was deemed unnecessary, I'm sure that it at least gave the astronauts something to build on. I wonder if anything still exists from it. More amazing is that by 1980 we had moonlander games on computers that anyone could buy.
Back when LRC had a museum right in the center and they had quite a bit of memorabilia about their involvement in the moon landings including a reaction tester that was pretty cool. I do not recall anything about this particular simulator ever being discussed. When the Va. Air and Space Museum opened, LRC moved or donated many items including the Apollo 12 Command Module as well as the LEM simulator that was used with the derrick that was special built to help train the astronauts to land on the moon while simulating the gravity of the moon, but again, nothing about this simulator was ever shown unless they changed something recently.
NASA still uses that derrick to crash planes with to test where it is best to put black boxes. You can't miss it driving down Wythe Creek Rd. from Poquoson.
NASA still uses that derrick to crash planes with to test where it is best to put black boxes. You can't miss it driving down Wythe Creek Rd. from Poquoson.
Same kind of analog simulator used at the start of the Space Shuttle program to train Young & Crippen (and the other astronauts) to land the Orbiter at both KSC and Edwards. TV cameras fed the images to the cockpit windows on the simulators. Various scale models were used depending on the altitude. All camera positions were slaved together so scene switching was seamless (except for a brief flicker). There was a big setup at the Rockwell (North American Aviation) facility in Downey, CA. My recollection was that all the model boards were cut up with a Skilsaw one weekend afternoon and a few select pieces were sent to the Air & Space museum - NASA had the rest completely destroyed so nobody could have a 'national artifact' in their personal possession.
See the circuit board someone saved from sim in the comments below the article. Man is that primitive, they weren't half desperate to beat Ruskies to the moon with that tech.
Ed Barr was sent to the Lowell Observatory in Flgstaff to view coloration of the Moon's surface.
The clay models were then used as forms in a vacuum machine to mold plastic sections of the final relief model.
We must have done ok as nobody got lost.