Apollo Lunar Lander Trainer: How they landed on the Moon
John Williams explains how the Apollo astronauts trained in a mock up lunar lander on earth before they attempted landing on the surface of the moon at the Virginia Air & Space Center
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Space Intelligence shares fun facts and excitement about space history, current space missions and future space exploration. John Williams is an avid fan and young space historian. His videos are designed to educate others to learn more about space history and technology.
Attributed content below:
Virginia Air & Space Center, Hampton, Virginia
Link: https://vasc.org/
Wikipedia Information Below:
The Bell Aerosystems Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV, nicknamed the Flying Bedstead)[1] was a Project Apollo era program to build a simulator for the Moon landings. The LLRVs were used by the FRC, now known as the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, at Edwards Air Force Base, California, to study and analyze piloting techniques needed to fly and land the Apollo Lunar Module in the Moon's low gravity environment.[2]
The research vehicles were vertical take-off vehicles that used a single jet engine mounted on a gimbal so that it always pointed vertically. It was adjusted to cancel 5/6 of the vehicle's weight, and the vehicle used hydrogen peroxide rockets which could fairly accurately simulate the behavior of a lunar lander.
Success of the two LLRVs led to the building of three Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTVs), an improved version of the LLRV, for use by Apollo astronauts at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, predecessor of NASA's Johnson Space Center. One LLRV and two LLTVs were destroyed in crashes, but the rocket ejection seat system safely recovered the pilot in all cases.
The final phase of every Apollo landing was manually piloted by the mission commander. Because of landing site selection problems, Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 commander, said his mission would not have been successful without extensive training on the LLTVs. Selection for LLTV training was preceded by helicopter training. In a 2009 interview, astronaut Curt Michel stated, "For airborne craft, the helicopter was the closest in terms of characteristics to the lunar lander. So if you didn't get helicopter training, you knew you weren't going. That sort of gave it away."[3] Even Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan did not get LLTV training for their Apollo 10 mission which was the first flight of the Lunar Module to the Moon, because NASA "didn't have plans to land on Apollo 10" so "there wasn't any point in ... training in the LLTV." Cernan only got this training after being assigned as backup commander for Apollo 14, and in 1972 was the last to fly the LLTV while training as commander for Apollo 17, the final landing mission.[4]
NASA Information below:
50 Years Ago: The Lunar Landing Training Vehicle
Lunar Landing Training Vehicle-2
Neil Armstrong in the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle-2 at Ellington Air Force Base in 1969.
Neil Armstrong ejecting from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle-1 on May 6, 1968.
Neil Armstrong ejecting from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle-1 on May 6, 1968.
Lunar Landing Training Vehicle-3
The only surviving model, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle-3, on display at Johnson Space Center outside the Teague Auditorium.
Critical to the Apollo training program, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) allowed astronauts to master the intricacies of landing on the Moon by simulating the Lunar Module’s (LM) performance. Dubbed the “flying bedstead,” the ungainly contraption is “a much unsung hero of the Apollo Program,” according to Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. The open-framed LLTV used a downward pointing turbofan engine to counteract five-sixths of the vehicle’s weight to simulate lunar gravity and LM-like thrusters for attitude control. The astronauts were thus able to simulate maneuvering and landing on the lunar surface while still on Earth.
The first training vehicle (LLTV-1) arrived at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston in October 1967. Joining it and two earlier Lunar Landing Research Vehicles (LLRV’s) from which they were derived, LLTV-2 and LLTV-3 arrived on December 7 and 10, respectively. The LLRV was the first pure fly-by-wire aircraft to fly in Earth’s atmosphere, relying exclusively on three analog computers to execute the pilot’s commands, and aided in the development digital fly-by-wire technology for future aircraft. The LLTV’s were overall similar to the LLRV’s, but used newer electronic technologies that made them lighter and allowed for improvements in their structural integrity.
LLRV-2 is on display at the Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base (on loan from Armstrong Flight Research Center) and LLTV-3 is part of an exhibition on the space program outside the Teague Auditorium at Johnson Space Center.
For more on LLRV’s and LLTV’s, see https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/LLRV_Mon...