13 July 2019 | New Scientist | 37>H
OW did the crew of Apollo 11 know how
to land on the moon? Practice. In the
early days of the space race, NASA engineers
spent countless hours simulating space flight
before the first astronaut ever left Earth. That
is why most Fridays in 1960, Harold Miller
and Dick Koos took the “fruit flight” from
Cape Canaveral in Florida to NASA’s Langley
Research Center in Virginia.
Miller and Koos had been part of a small
team working on space simulations at Langley
for about a year. But eventually they needed
to move their operations far from their homes,
to Florida, where the mission control would
be based. The passenger planes that flew them
home from Florida’s Patrick Air Force Base at
the end of the week were always loaded withFLY ME TO
THE MOON
Before anyone had even been
to space, engineers had to
figure out how to operate there.
Nancy Atkinson investigates
how NASA did itthe Sunshine State’s citrus bounty. When
travellers grabbed their bags at the end of the
journey, they could also get a large sack of
oranges for $3.
Cheap fruit was one of the few perks of
working at the Mercury Control Center and
launch facilities on the isolated and jungle-like
Cape Canaveral all week. If a test rocket blew up
(which happened about half the time in those
days) and a brush fire started, you had to watch
out for the alligators or wild hogs trying to
escape the flames.
Project Mercury, NASA’s first human space-
flight programme, had the goal of putting
humans in Earth orbit and getting them safely
down again – preferably before the Soviet
Union did so. But in those days, no one knew
for certain if a person could stay alive, let alone
work, in the weightless environment of space.
Even if they could, no one knew how humans
should operate a spacecraft.
Miller, Koos and the small simulation task
group were charged with figuring out not only
how to train the Mercury astronauts to fly in
space, but also with training the fledgling flight
control team on the ground. Like everything
else under NASA’s purview at that time, it
meant figuring out how to do things that had
never been done before.
“My first trip to Florida in 1960,” Koos recalls,
“Harold gave me a tour around the cape, and I
said, ‘it sure is sink or swim around here.’ And
he said, ‘That’s right. And we don’t have time
to teach you how to swim either.’ And that’sIn the 1960s, astronauts trained
in mock cockpits and rigs that
simulated the effects of thrusters
on a capsule’s orientationTHE PAST
NASA
JSC/NASAI
T USED to feel like the moon was
somewhere we visited half a
lifetime ago, then forgot about. But
as we approach the 50th anniversary
of the Apollo 11 landing on 20 July, the
world seems to be entering a second era
of moon fever. In January, China became
the first country to land a rover on the
far side of the moon. India is set to
launch its first lander before the year
is out. And the US has vowed to return
humans to the dusty lunar plains by
- The moon is cool again.
The second space race comes with
new, 21st-century challenges. To rise to
them, the world will need to consider
our satellite’s past, present and future,
as we do over the next 10 pages. If we are
to visit again, it is worth remembering
what a prodigious effort it took the first
time, not just in terms of cash, but
ingenuity (page 37). Samples from the
moon have taught us plenty about
Earth, and planetary systems beyond
our own too, and there is so much more
to learn if we pick the right places to
land (page 39). Most importantly, we
must understand why we are going back
and who we want to send (page 42).
For most of the past half century,
only robotic missions have made
it to the moon, such as the GRAIL
probes, launched in 2011