🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1699@infinet.UUCP> rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn) writes:
>In article <4304@eos.UUCP> eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) writes:
>>                 ...  You will see the great unknowns at the time:
>>Was the surface of the moon hard or miles of dust for a lander to sink?
>
>There were even two series of Lunar probes launched to specifically
>answer this and related questions.  It was nice back in the days when
>you could have short turnaround simple missions.  Specific focused
>goals and specific focused schedules are so much easier to work with
>than ongoing generic projects.

Whoa.

Assuming Zond doesn't count, there were two programs where unmanned
spacecraft touched the lunar surface: Ranger and Surveyor.  Ranger was a
hard ballistic impact probe which relayed TV pictures on the way down.
The final pictures were taken a few thousand feet above the surface;
nobody really knew what happened when a Ranger hit.  Dust or basalt
would have extinguished the craft with equal efficiency.

The first real answers about Lunar composition (remember to forget Zond)
came from Surveyor.  It did everything you could have asked -- it was a
terrific program, my all time favorite until Viking.  (After Viking,
it's a tie.)  But it was NOT a short turnaround mission.  In fact it was
one of the few vestiges of the PRE-Apollo, pre-Kennedy-challenge notion
of the US space program.  Surveyor had been on the books for about six
years.  With the crash Kennedy program, the three manned spacecraft
became top priority and Ike's stuff languished at JPL, underfunded and
behind schedule.  In 1963 or 64 it was realized that Surveyor could
provide key answers needed to build an LM.  (I don't think anyone at
NASA took Gold's theory of mile deep dust oceans very seriously, but it
still makes a difference whether you're landing on bricks or sand.)  So
Surveyor got a funding and management push along with the Lunar Orbiter
cameras (now THERE was a simple mission).

For me, Surveyor was the real first glimpse of the Moon as another world.
When Apollo astronauts followed in its footsteps (literally with 12),
we saw an awesome sight -- one which had run in LIFE three years before.


-- 
"My God, Thiokol, when do you     \\	Tom Neff
want me to launch -- next April?"  \\	uunet!bfmny0!tneff