Bethpage: Home of the LEM
July 19, 2009 by Bill Sobel
Filed under Technology
Many of you know I live in Old Bethpage…with a connection with the Apollo program. The LEM, the Lunar Lander,) was built by Grumman Corporation (Now Northrup Grumman) right it our backyard in Bethpage.
The following is an interesting story from click2houston.com
NY Lunar Module Builders Remember 1969 Landing
FRANK ELTMAN, Associated Press Writer
POSTED: Saturday, July 18, 2009
BETHPAGE, N.Y. — John Devaney and his colleagues weren’t exactly sure what Neil Armstrong would set foot on when he climbed down the ladder of the lunar module to the surface of the moon.
“We didn’t know what the moon was made of,” recalled the retired Grumman engineer, one of the thousands who helped make the module that landed on the moon 40 years ago Monday.
“Guys were writing us letters, MBAs, saying the astronauts are going to sink up to their waists in 5 or 6 feet of moon dust,” he said. “I always point out to people that Armstrong hung onto the ladder and he took his one foot off and then made his speech.”
The men who built a dozen lunar modules at a Long Island defense plant better known for making jet fighters were somewhat bashful about their place in history.
“We didn’t realize the significance at the time,” says Devaney, now 74. “We knew it was important, blah blah blah, but later on it became more important.”
After winning a contract in 1962, nearly 3,000 engineers and more than 7,000 people in all created more than a dozen hand-built lunar modules at a cost of about $2 billion, keeping President John F. Kennedy’s vow to put a man on the lunar surface by the end of the decade.
Because it was designed solely to fly in space after hitching a ride aboard a massive Saturn rocket, the lunar module, or LEM, was made of lightweight metals and other materials. No seats were necessary, because the astronauts didn’t have to worry about gravity. An early design featured large windows, but engineers downsized the view for astronauts to mere portals.
“Every one of these LEMS that landed on the moon was different,” says Gerry Sandler, 75, who worked intimately on many aspects of the project and retired as president of Grumman Data Systems. Later models left room for a lunar rover — think golf cart in space — and more space for toting hundreds of pounds of moon rocks back to Earth.
Sandler believes Grumman, now a part of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Industries, was chosen to build the lunar module because of its expertise making planes to land on aircraft carriers. The F-14 of “Top Gun” movie fame was a Grumman aircraft.
“They knew how to build small structures and landing gear that got knocked around and that was what was needed to land on the moon,” Sandler says.
The lunar module was actually two spaceships in one. The bottom, or descent stage, with the spidery legs, got the astronauts to the lunar surface. The top part, or ascent stage, featured a small rocket ship that ferried two astronauts back to the orbiting command module where one astronaut stayed behind.
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