The Scientific and Technological Benefits of the Apollo Program

1

Moxley

The Scientific and Technological Benefits of the Apollo Program

Chris Moxley

Professor Bray

Math of the Universe

28 March 2016

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” -John F. Kennedy, 1961 (JFK Libraries)

With these inspirational words announcing the inception of theApollo program, President Kennedy launched America into the space race. Thechallengeto put a man on the Moon in the 1960s was undoubtedly a product of many incentives, as the scientific community, military advisors, politicians, and average Americans all hoped for the US to accomplish the feat for different reasons. Cold War historians typically emphasize national pride as the primary motivation, depicting the space race as yet another manifestation of the ideological duel between the US and USSR. Kennedy himself in the same speech went on to say, “Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory… was asked why did he want to climb [Mt. Everest]. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it,” suggesting that the main value of the mission was simply in accomplishing a tough challenge as a nation (Kennedy). Overlooked and underappreciated in this narrative are the actual scientific benefits of the Apollo program. With only a nascent understanding of spacecraft technology in 1961, the ensuing 8 years before Apollo 11’s first successful moon landing required a great deal of scientific innovation, and the moon landings themselves provided an assortment of new specimens and data. In order to fully understand the value of these benefits, it is necessary to first understand the scientific uncertainties that the Apollo program sought to resolve.

New technology had to be invented, tested, and implemented in every facet of the Apollo program. After first considering a direct launch to the Moon and the Earth orbit rendezvous method, in which a smaller landing craft would depart from a large spacecraft orbiting the Earth, NASA decided to pursue Dr. John Houbolt’s method of Moon orbit rendezvous, in which the larger spacecraft would lock into a lunar orbit that the smaller landing craft would then descend from toexplore the Moon’s surface (Hansen). This meant that the engineers had to design a larger command module to orbit the Moon, a fuel-cell module called the Saturn V, and a lunar excursion module (Hansen). Considered one of the greatest feats of engineering innovation in history, the rapid design of these modules from scratch and the rest of the Apollo programemployed about 400,000 scientists and engineers contracted from 20,000 different companies and universities, so volumes of books exist to thoroughly describe every challenge posed and consequently overcome (Dicht).In brief, three of the largest initial challenges included attaining, “the ability in space to locate, maneuver toward... and dock with another spacecraft”, “the ability of astronauts to work outside a spacecraft”, and “the collection of more sophisticated physiological data about the human response to extended spaceflight” (Launius 13). Other problems included improving resistance to heat, cold, and radiation for the spacecrafts and spacesuits, developing technology to keep astronauts physically and psychologically healthy during their cramped missions, and maintaining effective communication between the modules and ground control (Launius). In addition to benefitting by resolving these uncertainties surrounding the logistics of the task, the scientific community hoped to gain a much deeper understanding of the Moon itself from the missions.

While many of the Moon’s characteristics were understood from afar and in theory by the 1960s, questions remained that only investigating its surface firsthand could answer. Though, by building off of French mathematician Charles Delauney’s extensive research into the Moon’s orbital patterns in the mid 1860s to find the barycenter of the Earth and Moon’s two-body orbit, and by using this to calculate the Moon’s gravitational pull (St. Andrews), mathematicians had already made accurate approximations of the moon’s mass well before the Apollo program, these calculations could be improved upon by orbiting a satellite around the moon (NASA, Apollo 8). Another area for discovery was the origin of the Moon: with an uncertain understanding of the composition of the crust, scientists did not yet know where the Moon came from and how it was formed (Choi). Astronomers had also been able to map out some parts of the Moon’s surface through the use of telescopes, but obviously taking precise photographs would improve the accuracy of these maps greatly (Lowman). Scientists were additionally uncertain if any life existed on the Moon, leading them toquarantine the astronauts of Apollo missions 11 through 14 upon their return to Earth until they had been thoroughly checked for potential lunar diseases (Launius 29). Beyond this, mysteries concerning the Moon’s inhabitability, lunar magnetism, and others stood to be understood from a few visits to its surface. With such a vast amount of knowledge to be obtained, the Apollo program clearly had the potential to be scientifically valuable. To understand how it attacked theseobjectives, it is helpful to first generally understand each mission.

The Apollo missions were a series of manned missions aimed at accomplishing the overarching objectives ofinitially landing astronauts on the Moon and eventually using further landings to collect information about the Moon. Costing the United States an unprecedented peacetime expenditure of about 30 billion dollars, the missions ran from early 1967 through the end of 1972 (Spudis). The first mission,Apollo 1, was scheduled to launch in February of 1967, but during a pre-launch simulation on the ground on January 27th, 1967, a fire broke out in the command module, and on-board astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chafee tragically lost their lives (NASA, Apollo 1). The next manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, launched in October of 1968 as a “confidence-builder” after the tragedy of Apollo 1 and the subsequent redesign of the command module (Launius 27). Apollo missions 8, 9, and 10 were rehearsals for Apollo 11, with the astronauts first practicing leaving Earth’s orbit, then practicing undocking and re-docking the lunar excursion module, and finally using the lunar excursion module to approach within 9 miles of the Moon’s surface in order to survey Apollo 11’s intended landing spot in the Sea of Tranquility (Launius 27-28 and NASA, Apollo 10). At last, in July of 1969, Apollo 11 accomplished the groundbreaking feat of a first step on the Moon and, more impressively, a safe return to Earth, with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz”Aldrin piloting the lunar excursion module while astronaut Michael Collins remained in the larger lunar orbit module during their moonwalk to prepare it for the trip home (NASA, Apollo 11). Televised to over 500 million viewers worldwide, Armstrong and Aldrin’s spacewalk led them to collect “20.87 kg of lunar samples” while leaving behind “scientific instruments, an American flag, and other momentos, including a plaque” (Launius 28). Apollo 12 in late 1969 involved more in-depthdata collection via moonwalksas well as many photographs taken from lunar orbit, while Apollo 13 in April 1970 was actually compromised by an exploded oxygen tank in the command module, forcing the crew to crowd into the smaller lunar excursion module for four days and “swing around the Moon” to be able to reenter the Earth (Launius 29). Apollo missions 14, 15, 16, and 17 explored various other regions of the moon, collected large amounts of samples, and tested new lunar rover technologies (Launius 29-30). The Apollo program concluded in December of 1972 as a great scientific success, both in the technological innovations that made the program possible and in the actual samples collected.

The plaque left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew (Picture from Wikimedia Commons)

Simply trying to figure out how to put a man on the moon sparked a decade-long wave of technological innovations, called spinoffs, that have benefitted many seemingly unrelated aspects of life on Earth. In the sports world, shock-absorbing lunar footwear technology is being implemented in modern athletic shoes, and a durable fabric developed for the Apollo program is being used in the retractable roofs of stadiums such as the Houston Texans’ as a strong, light-reflecting membrane that “can help reduce building costs by as much as 30 percent” (NASA, Benefits from Apollo, 1). Additionally, NASA contracted General Motors to develop airlifting technology, which is currently used to lift and move large sections of metal, such as portable stadium seating, on a cushion of air quickly and with minimal energy (NASA, Benefits from Apollo, 1). The Apollo program also contributed to a variety of medical advancements. For example, Apollo innovations led to pacemakers that physicians can adjust wirelessly to best fit the patient after being implanted, heart monitors that will automatically deliver defibrillation upon sensing heart failure, sensitive valves that deliver a continuous and precisely measured stream of medication to a patient, digital image processing technology used in MRIs and CAT scans, and an improved, energy-saving kidney-dialysis machine (NASA, Benefits from Apollo, 2-4). Other miscellaneous inventions from the Apollo program that aid in everyday life include vibration sensors used in burglary alarms, a material called Durette, developed after the Apollo 1 fire, that was used to improve firefighters’ suits, wireless drills developed by Black and Decker, electrically-stabilized quartz crystal clocks used worldwide to accurately keep time, solar panel technology, and even the technology that made possible the DustBuster, a cordless and wieldy vacuum (NASA, Benefits from Apollo, 2-4). These and countless other unexpected spinoff inventions that improve mankind’s quality of life all developed out of necessity due to the Apollo program. In addition to these unexpected spinoffs, the actual space exploration of the Apollo astronauts led to helpful scientific discoveries.

The Apollo program led scientists to revolutionary discoveries about both the Moon and the Earth. The Apollo 8 orbit of the Moon confirmed a more precise measurement of the Moon’s mass, which is today known to be about 7.35x10^22 kilograms (Williams). Additionally, the 842 pounds of lunar rocks brought back from the Apollo program provided extensive insight into the formation and composition of the moon (NASA, Lunar Samples). For example, the Genesis Rock, “representing the most ancient crustal rocks on the Moon” and retrieved as a part of Apollo 15, provided evidence for the Late Heavy Bombardment or Lunar Cataclysm theory (Spudis). This suggests that roughly 4 billion years ago the planets were frequently colliding with asteroids at an unusually high rate, explaining characteristics found on the surface of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars and supporting the possibility that the Moon was formed from a massive collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized rock called Theia (Spudis and Choi). The samples also confirmed that there was no evidence of water or any living organisms on the Moon, confirmed that the Moon was initially a lava rock for “at least a 700 million year span”, and provided a record of the Sun’s past activities via radiation trapped in the lunar samples (Spudis and NASA, Lunar Samples). Additionally, photographs taken of the Moon have allowed for a more comprehensive map, and photographs taken of the Earth from space paved way for a deeper understanding of global weather patterns (Spudis). Radar from Earth-orbiting modules launched as part of the Apollo program revealed to scientists a previously unexplored phenomenon wherein the ocean’s sea-surface actually “forms a slight mound” over underwater volcanoes and forms sea-surface depressions over trenches, which “over the Puerto Rico trench is more than 20 meters deep” (Lowman). Finally, photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo 8 also “forced the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way” (Launius 20). As writer Archibald Macleish described after seeing Apollo 8’s pictures, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in the eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders of the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold” (Launius 20). This paradigm-shattering perspective made the divisions and tensions of the world’s nations seem trivial to some, and “the modern environmental movement was galvanized in part by this new perception of the planet and the need to protect the life that it supports” (Launius 20). Clearly, the Apollo program was not just a victory of nationalism; impactful contributions changed the scientific community’s understanding of both the Moon and Earth.

While pitched to the nation as simply an issue of national pride, the Apollo program actually yielded valuable scientific results, both directly and indirectly. At the time of Kennedy’s announcement, a great deal of uncertainty surrounded both the technological process of getting to the Moon and the expectations of what the astronauts would find on the rock when they landed. Resolving the logistical issues of landing on the Moon prompted a surge of technological spinoffs that continue to positively impact many aspects of modern living. After overcoming these technological barriers, the actual sampling and analysis conducted by the astronauts and scientists of the program provided insight into a broad variety of the Earth and Moon’s characteristics. Additionally, the Apollo program provided the general public with a revolutionary perspective on the Earth and its universe. Despite no longer having the Cold War’s space race as a motivational instigator, all of these benefits will hopefully be enough to continue justifying NASA’s initiatives and inspire the world to keepexploring more of the universe.

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