Moon Landing - Transition From Direct Ascent Landings To Lunar Orbit Operations

Transition From Direct Ascent Landings To Lunar Orbit Operations

Within four months of each other in early 1966 the Soviet Union and the United States had accomplished successful Moon landings with unmanned spacecraft. To the general public both countries had demonstrated roughly equal technical capabilities by returning photographic images from the surface of the Moon. These pictures provided a key affirmative answer to the crucial question of whether or not lunar soil would support upcoming manned landers with their much greater weight.

However, the Luna 9 hard landing of a ruggedized sphere using airbags at a 30-mile (48 km)-per-hour ballistic impact speed had much more in common with the failed 1962 Ranger landing attempts and their planned 100-mile (160 km)-per-hour impacts than with the Surveyor 1 soft landing on three footpads using its radar-controlled, adjustable-thrust retrorocket. While Luna 9 and Surveyor 1 were both major national accomplishments, only Surveyor 1 had reached its landing site employing key technologies that would be needed for a crewed flight. Thus as of mid-1966, the United States had begun to pull ahead of the Soviet Union in the so-called Space Race to land a man on the Moon.

Advances in other areas were necessary before manned spacecraft could follow unmanned ones to the surface of the Moon. Of particular importance was developing the expertise to perform flight operations in lunar orbit. Ranger, Surveyor and initial Luna Moon landing attempts all utilized flight paths from Earth that traveled directly to the lunar surface without first placing the spacecraft in a lunar orbit. Such direct ascents use a minimum amount of fuel for unmanned spacecraft on a one-way trip.

In contrast, manned vehicles need additional fuel after a lunar landing to enable a return trip back to Earth for the crew. Leaving this massive amount of required Earth-return fuel in lunar orbit until it is actually used later in the mission is far more efficient than taking such fuel down to the lunar surface in a Moon landing and then hauling it all back into space yet again, working against lunar gravity both ways. Such considerations lead logically to a lunar orbit rendezvous mission profile for a manned Moon landing.

Accordingly, beginning in mid-1966 both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. naturally progressed into missions which featured lunar orbit operations as a necessary prerequisite to a manned Moon landing. The primary goals of these initial unmanned orbiters were extensive photographic mapping of the entire lunar surface for the selection of manned landing sites and, for the Soviets, the checkout of radio communications gear that would be used in future soft landings.

An unexpected major discovery from initial lunar orbiters were vast volumes of dense materials beneath the surface of the Moon's maria. Such mass concentrations ("mascons") can send a manned mission dangerously off course in the final minutes of a Moon landing when aiming for a relatively small landing zone that is smooth and safe. Mascons were also found over a longer period of time to greatly disturb the orbits of low-altitude satellites around the Moon, making their orbits unstable and forcing an inevitable crash on the lunar surface in the relatively short period of months to a few years. Thus all lunar orbiter satellites eventually become unintentional "lunar landers" at the end of their missions.

Controlling the location of impact for spent lunar orbiters can have scientific value. For example, in 1999 the NASA Lunar Prospector orbiter was deliberately targeted to impact a permanently shadowed area of Shoemaker Crater near the lunar south pole. It was hoped that energy from the impact would vaporize suspected shadowed ice deposits in the crater and liberate a water vapor plume that would be detectable from Earth. No such plume was observed. However, a small vial of ashes from the body of pioneer lunar scientist Eugene Shoemaker was delivered by the Lunar Prospector to the crater named in his honor – currently the only human remains on the Moon today.