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Thanks to Ben for sharing these drawings he found in his Grandfather’s files. These are drawings from the original proposal by North American Aviation for the Apollo Command Module. These were made in September 1961 before the Apollo program had decided to use Lunar Orbit Rendezvous to reduce mass requirements. As such the designs are built around landing the command module on the moon using a big lander.
Ben has shared the high resolution scans of the designs at https://apollopreliminarydrawings.com/
@Scott Manley The BBC mentioned the Bacon Hydrogen Fuel Cell, without which the apollo mission couldn’t have happened.
A British invention.
That J-2 engine on the Apollo lander might be a pressure fed variant with an injector head designed to be stable at lower flow rates.
This is a lot like the Gemini landing concept
Loved that intro
Love the intro
I think possibly there was just very little information understood by the polititians deciding along with the engineers knowing things would change drasticly with testing equals some “place holder / serving suggestion” type submissions.
I would love to see a video about how feasible it would be for the Soviets to have attempted a moon landing with multiple Soyuz/Proton/Zond launches, kind of like Von Braun’s original Earth Orbit Rendezvous idea. Build infrastructure in Earth orbit first, then use that to go to the Moon. Doubtful they could have beat us to the Moon, but they could have been the first to establish a semi-permanent Moon base 🤔
Wasn’t it Martin that came in first but was passed over for North American?
curious what the grumman guy got to say about this
Loving the new intro!
These are hand-drawn, aren’t they?
I can’t even draw a circle that is round or write in a manner that is readable to a normal person!
the first contact awarded to Apollo was the guidance computer, since the computer
ended up being a fly by wire system and a virtual representation of the capsule
Luna docking, became possible because it was a virtual reality experience?
maybe Apollo should be looked at in a different light altogether, the beginning of big data projects
“Few weeks ago, somebody came to me saying they could repair my car on the highway … ” I like that new intro, atleast something good happened from it
Nice bit of history there. Glad it wasn’t lost!
Oooooh I would love those drawings Scott. A little scant on detail though these look like concept plans only.
A lot heavier? The J-2 alone weighs almost 2 tons.
That lander has a lot of struts. I approve.
The intro is so cute
The story of how lunar rendezvous got adopted is one of my favorite stories from Apollo.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while: does throttling an engine down increase the effective size of its bell?
Related, but in KSP, specific impulse only increases as atmospheric pressure decreases, is this realistic?
Interesting design
Thanks for sharing👍😀
@Scott Manley >>> FWIW, I am pretty sure I have seen drawings in at least one Rogallo-related NASA Technical Note showing an Apollo capsule using a parawing. {I have a few TNs, either ordered in print or downloaded.}
Great find! Thanks for posting the link.
Excellent. Thanks to Ben and his grandfather for this priceless historical artifact.
My Father also worked for North American/Rockwell in the early 1960s. Though I don’t have drawings, I do have orbital calculations in his collection of papers. But it would be pretty hard to tie to the Mercury, Gemini or Apollo programs, since they were classified documents at the time and he didn’t label anything. I’ll have to check with my brother.
Quite interesting. I have a document covering a test in 1962 using the same spacecraft design.
You should build it in RO.
Man Scott those are some very….Interesting drawings All slid rule stuff ….Great going my friend…..As always thanks a bunch…..To be sure…!
Amy Shira Teitel would be interested in this website.
Could you do a video on targeting the ocean since you mentioned it? I have wondered about that… I just wish they would fix the trajectories mod so I can land shuttles a little more accurately 😢
My dad was involved in that!
Cool, Think it was North American Aviation not Aerospace.
great to see you in the apollo agc video
If you get a positive response with a digital copy of the actual drawings – that would be awesome.
Mind you, that 100 short tons: 2000 lbs each. Long tons, aka metric tons, or “tonnes” is 2200 Lbs.
Just sayin’.
the original NAA proposal was a giant ship… so impressive.
RSS + RO then is properly tested!
These drawings are clearly for a direct ascent architecture.
The original designed LEM had five legs, and modelled from a block of wood, with bent paperclips showing leg placement.
KSP Challenge: Fix the EU’s navigation system
Crowd fund heaven……..c’mon Scott build it !!
Landing legs would have worked on the moon’s 1/6 gravity… Never seen a design like that…
I got whiplash of the eyeballs trying to look at the drawings. Scott was switching between drawings too quickly!
Early designs for the Grumman LEM used a rope instead of a ladder. No idea if North American had a similar idea.
I’m so glad that someone preserved this important and fascinating piece of history. Thanks for doing a video on it.
I love this so much. I think I am going to print and frame some of these next to a photo of the physical finished design
7:46 translation: stay tuned for vintage space to shortcut and half misrepresent a couple things seem here!
All hand drawn by men with slide rules and pencils tucked behind their ears while smoking no doubt. Legends.
It was cool you got to see the apollo agc those guys restored. Waiting on the next video and hoping they eventually try to replicate parts of the flight!
Hey Scott, Can you please do a KSP video about What happened to the Lunar Lander descent stage
8:17 What you have been waiting for
I’ve always found engineering drawings to be elegantly beautiful.
Will you do a video about when you visited CuriousMarc for the first running of the AGC? It was a nice surprise to see you show up on his channel!
I could “google it” but I thought the LEM design and manufacturing contract was awarded to “what was” the Grumman corporation.
You should use the Scot Manly intro from SWDenis’s “Random Compilation 13”
i knew you’d mention toroidal tanks the second I saw that torsor
I bet you could do a series on different Martian landing Proposals as well
I always felt so sorry for the CMPs, having to remain in lunar orbit while the other two landed. This design would have enabled all three to go to the surface.
Never saw any of these prototype drawings before. Very interesting!
My Dad worked at Convair at this time, and they bid on the
LEM, including a full size mock-up. Some of us employees kids got to see that one Saturday. There must be drawings somewhere for all the proposals. That would be great to collect and publish.
The intro
you had all the little gerbils’ heads bouncing around during thrust maneuvers-cool…
Fun fact: The AJ10-137 engine that was used on the CSM was twice as powerful as needed because the engine was initially sized for a trans-earth injection scenario. The Apollo variant used Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide. This engine has a long and storied history – Atlas, Titan, Apollo, the Shuttle, and even the upcoming Orion. Perhaps a video on this engine would be of interest to your followers Mr. Manley Man?
Originally the astronauts were to use a pulley system to hoist themselves to and from the lunar surface. When this proved too cumbersome, they opted for a ladder.
Please keep that intro
Probably still better than Orion/SLS.
5:54 – Maybe they were going to circumvent the landing problem entirely and have the astronauts eject from the capsule on the way down and land under their own personal parachutes, Vostok-style?
It’s nice to see that some of this information is finding its way to being viewed by the interested public. Years ago, I was working for a contractor who were preparing a bid for Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral. To assist in the preparation for the bid, we were supplied with a ream of drawings for the original construction of the pad. There were civil drawings, concrete and rebar drawings, structural steel drawings of the structures on the pad, piping drawings, and plot plans of the entire area surrounding the pad. As an engineer,
I was fascinated with the history of these documents.They were very detailed, and given the period, all created by hand.
Almost oall of them were made just before I was even born. To give you some idea when that was, the first moon landing coincided with my seventh birthday. So naturally, the event captured my attention then and most certainly has had a lasting effect on my career choice.
As was common at the time, the contract documents were considered confidential so no copying was permitted. Many of the documents still had the original CLASSIFIED stamps among others denoting the confidentiality of the documents for national security. I was very eager to make a site visit to satisfy my own curiosity (and to secretly fulfill a decades old childhood wish to stand on the very spot where the moon rockets lifted off). My operations manager denied the request, saying I’m a foreigner (Canadian) and not eligible to enter high security sites operated by NASA. I reminded him that a large number of the original NASA team of engineers and technicians in the late 50’s and early 60’s were Canadians, having been recently dismissed from the Avro Arrow project by the newly elected Canadian government at the time.
I would love to see those drawings one more time. In the end, our bid was unsuccessful based on pricing, but I later found out that the winning bidder’s technical proposal employed a very similar method to that I designed. Still, it would have been nice to put a NASA project on my resume.
I saw you on the CuriousMarc channel, when can we expect a video on that apolo computer refubish?!
GE had a really neat idea, like a bigger Soyuz.
This thing is huge, most flying with a giant rocket.Nova probable .
Somewhere else on Youtube, who’s knocking on the door? I knew who it was before the door opened, hope you got some good footage Scott.
Shouldn’t the title of this be: Scott Scoops Vintage space?
3:20: did you say Aerozine 50 *or* UDMH or Aerozine 50 *and* UDMH. Because Aerozine 50 is just UDMH+Water
I’ve heard of the Apollo parawing design before and saw a picture and one major difference between the Apollo and Gemini parawings is that instead of the capsule nose being pointed forward like the Gemini parawing on the Apollo the capsule would have the nose pointed up and the heatshield on the bottom. Also you should check out the Bono mars glider it was pretty insane.
These are obviously blueprints from the Nova rocket that was initially proposed by Werner von Braun back in the late 1950s when flying to the moon was just a dream. However, according to legend, the proposal was rejected because the US government felt the rocket to huge, expensive, and cumbersome for going to the Moon. Which is a shame because if official records are correct, it would have been suitable for The Mars Project, a follow-on mission that was supposed to take humans to Mars in 1982. Imagine how things would have turned out if the people writing the checks listen to Von Braun. Here’s a hyperlink below to a NASA archive page with more details. ┌( ಠ‿ಠ)┘
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch4-6.html
Recently prepared a summary of a book in my university, it was “Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity” by a Russian American author Slava Gerovitch.
It has a lot to offer if you’re interested about the cultural processes behind and around all this stuff.
Buzz is a damn legend, my favourite of the Apollo astronauts.
A big round of applause for Ben. 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
I wonder if that J-2 was for primary burns, with the verniers speced for enough thrust for the final landing. The J-2 does the orbital insertion and deorbit (at higher ISP), and then is switched off for landing.
My grandfather also worked at N.A.A. He was an instrumentation and hydraulic engineer and was a project engineer for Apollo 3. He left us with a few promotional posters published by N.A.A. Great stuff ! !
I’d just read “The Man Who Knew The Way To The Moon” – all about John Houbolt’s fight to get NASA on the path to LOR and was going to suggest you try to build a Kerbal lunar mission without LOR. Awesome timing!
A J2 is a bit overkill for a lunar lander.
Scott, could you share your KSP craft file which you used for this ship? I’m curious how it goes together.
Has anyone else duplicated this ship in KSP?
Thanks Scott! I appreciate the thoughtful reply. Love your content!
Amy Shira Teitel will be all over this
Those design drawings are awesome! I love everything about the Apollo program – the history, the design concepts for the vehicle and facilities, its all just fascinating how all these people went from knowing virtually nothing of what needed to be known — the best way to get there and back, how to survive in the hostile environment, how to rendevous with another vehicle and survive to tell about it, the best designs for the needed facilities and just what facilities would be needed, and on and on.
When I worked at KSC I read an excellent book that covered literally every aspect of the design, development and implementation of what would become KSC and the Apollo moon landing program. You have to be the kind of person that enjoys knowing every detail, because this book is just that, a highly detailed accounting of KSC and Apollo, including all the specialised structures and ground support equipment needed to make it all happen. Nothing is left out. The book was called “Moonport”. I can’t remember who authored it. I remember it was about 3-1/2 to 4 inches thick. Highly detailed from beginning to end, and full of detailed drawings and histories of all the major players along the way.
Someone such as yourself, Mr.Manley, I suspect would enjoy and appreciate this accounting of this period of America’s manned space program. I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard of or read this book…most interesting.
Also, to your question at the end – it’s a matter of adherence to the LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) philosophy of creative, production, and other processes. It’s common for people on deadline to take stuff home either to work on, look at, or have an extra copy of. There’s an interesting story about how it saved Pixar’s Toy Story 2 when someone had an offline copy at home which more or less saved the production when corruption cascaded through all the hot copies and backups, and there were no cold backups to be had.
I love the Apollo designs! I need to build those and try them out for myself.
Everyone should go listen to the “13 minutes to the moon” podcast..
WOW what a find I just HAVE to go and see.. thanks BEN! and thanks SCOTT!
This is such a nice break after the conspiracy theorist-ridden comments of the 60 minutes video with Neil Armstrong
There were coffee-table books in mid 60s with Apollo concept artwork.
The design in these drawings didn’t get very far, they never saw public release probably because they were revised into oblivion faster than the draftsman could draw them.
its frikkin amazing what NASA (and the USSR) were able to achieve in such a small amount of time, !! starting from almost 0, all these designs, all the fabrication, all the testing, thinking about eeeeverything !!! what an achievement !
I love these hand-made engineering drawings. It is a bit like a lost art form.
On how things get saved, my Dad was part of the team that mapped out the landing sites for Apollo. On thing the team started doing at one point was to create large (I seem to recall about 3′ x 4′) 3D vacuform models of the landing site. These were really thin and large; so, eventually, they usually got tossed. My Dad saved an entire set in the attic of our house and there they set for 40 years until my Mom was cleaning out the attic and decided they needed to go some place safer; so, she sold them to a museum. I imagine this happens a lot.
I’d have to say that if the corpse dies _during_ the funeral instead of before it, that should probably be called a “Herculean” funeral, instead of a “Viking” one.
Para wing concept for the Apollo bid? Well that’s gonna make Amy of Vintage Space pretty happy.
The space laboratory is obviously for housing the mystery goo to see how it reacts.
My neighbors father worked at Grumman in the 60’s. She inherited a 3 ring binder that was a manual for the LM, about 7-800 pages. She let me look at it once, it was like holding and looking through the Apollo bible!
Scott could you do a video on rocket throttling, maybe a ksp doesn’t teach or something like that?