

Its World Space Week!
Didn’t you know?
Yes, yes we know there are a lot of these. But, as space travel piques the interest of many engineers we thought we’d celebrate this week by appreciating the design of the first Apollo Lunar Module.
This remains the only crewed vehicle to land anywhere not on earth. A craft that was incapable of flying inside earths heavy atmosphere.
The team of engineers who developed this amazing vehicle were having to solve a lot of design challenges that were largely untestable, or at least very expensive to test.
If we were to receive this today as a Design brief it would look something like this:
- Design a craft that can safely transport the crew from low moon orbit to the surface and back again. Something which has never been done!
- Make it as light as possible, airtight and structurally strong in case of a rough landing.
- Any unreliability could lead to fatalities, so all systems (many of which have never been invented before) have to be failure proof.
- Do all this within budget (of course) and with no CAD because it hasn’t been invented yet.
All we can say is hats off to Thomas J Kelly and his team.
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