Tag Archives: apollo 11

The Donor Making The Difference: The Eagle Is Being Restored

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Even in their retirement at the National Air and Space Museum, the Apollo-era artifacts lead busy lives and are counted amongst the Museum’s most popular objects, as Gar Schulin can attest to. Throughout his life, Gar has put on many “helmets” at the Museum, having been a docent, researcher, and now, a supporter as he contributes to the restoration of the Lunar Module 2’s descent stage.

Gar Schulin became one of the National Air and Space Museum’s youngest docents at the age of 15.  Needless to say, Gar wasn’t your average teenager in the 1970s – he grew up with the Space Age and studied many NASA technical publications; even Apollo Training Manuals received from Engineers who had worked in the program.

“I do not recall anyone else near my age giving tours or being turned loose to meet and greet the general public, ” he recalls, “ but it was a joy for me to share my enthusiasm with citizens from across the world, and turn their casual museum visits into a thrilling learning experience.”

Being a young, enthusiastic docent had its perks – such as stick-and-rudder flight training in an employee’s World War II PT-17 trainer, or befriending the legendary Paul Garber and listening to his firsthand accounts of the Wright brothers. Gar could certainly appreciate the good fortune of knowing men who witnessed flights by Orville Wright and men who flew the first Apollo lunar landing mission.

Gar’s work for the National Air and Space Museum didn’t stop on the museum floor.  He later mapped lunar geology as a Research Assistant in the Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies,  assisting Dr. Farouk El-Baz, the distinguished geologist who trained the Apollo astronauts in the art of visual and geologic interpretation from lunar orbit.

Today, Gar continues his involvement with the Museum through his financial support of the Apollo Lunar Module 2’s restoration, adding his story and perspective to its history.  The LM-2, a cousin of the Lunar Module 5 “Eagle” that touched down on the Moon during Apollo 11, was built for an unmanned earth-orbit test flight, a flight deemed unnecessary after the great success of Apollo 5.

These days, the descent stage of the LM-2 is dressed to resemble the Eagle during those first historic moments, complete with two astronaut mannequins beginning their lunar walk.   And while the aluminized plastic film wrapped around the LM-2’s descent stage may be fit to withstand space exploration, the rigors of museum exhibition over the last 30 years have resulted in its deterioration.

Gar Schulin lends a hand to the LM-2 restoration.

In offering his support, Gar recognizes the LM-2 as “an important icon, not only representing one of America’s greatest engineering and scientific achievements; it remains a tribute to the extraordinary efforts of over 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists who made the promise of Project Apollo possible.”

Now, on the eve of the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, Gar and his wife Kathryn are proud to help refurbish the LM-2, so that all Museum visitors can experience this “giant leap for mankind” as if it were July 20th, 1969.

Carolyn Stewart is a Development Associate in the Office of Development at the National Air and Space Museum.

Don't Know What a Slide Rule is For

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That’s a line from the song, “Wonderful World,” sung by Sam Cooke back in the 1960s. Forty years later, it turns out that Sam Cooke was not alone: very few people know about slide rules. At Space Day, held at the National Air and Space Museum last May, I had lots of fun standing in front of the Apollo 11 Command Module, explaining to visitors that, indeed, it and the rest of the Apollo-Saturn hardware were designed by engineers who relied on slide rules for calculations.
Paul Ceruzzi demonstrates the use of a slide rule to Museum visitors.

Paul Ceruzzi demonstrates the use of a slide rule to Museum visitors.

Of course the designers also used digital computers, but in the 1960s computers were giant machines that you programmed with punched cards, and they were strictly reserved for only the most complex mathematical calculations. As the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission approaches, we are constantly reminded of how incredible that voyage was. Add to the incredulity the slide rule: the basic mathematical tool that helped get the astronauts to the moon and back.

The visitors who gathered around the Command Module on Space Day generally fell into two camps. Older visitors told me that they used a slide rule in school but hadn’t seen one in years, and they had completely forgotten how it worked. The younger visitors (i.e., those under 40!) had never seen one before, although a few had heard of them. I belong to the former group, having once been quite proficient while in high school. For this presentation, I got out the manual and taught myself all over again how to use it. It was not easy.

The National Air and Space Museum has preserved a few slide rules, including one carried by Apollo 13 astronauts on their April 1970 journey. The Museum also has on display the slide rule owned by Wernher von Braun, who headed the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama during the Apollo era. It shows signs of heavy use. One other favorite of mine is the “Space Vehicle Pocket Designer,” a specialized circular rule that computes spacecraft payload and range, based on fuels and rocket engine efficiency. It was given to me by a mathematician who had just retired from a northern Virginia technology firm. When he gave it to me, the retiree said, “Congratulations, Paul, you are now officially a rocket scientist!” If only it were that easy.

Apollo astronauts carried slide rules, but by the time of the last mission to the Moon in 1972, the pocket calculator had been invented. On the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, the last to use Apollo hardware, the crew carried a Hewlett-Packard pocket calculator that had more power than the on-board Apollo Guidance computer.

Paul Ceruzzi is a curator specializing in aerospace computing and electronics in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum.

By the Moon's Early Light

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Flag Day is June 14 and it reminds me of one of the most famous “stars and stripes” in history – the one left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew in 1969. I remember clearly that day when, as a teenager, I watched with my family as the flag was planted on the lunar surface. It brought chills to us all.

It was only later that many people began to wonder why the flag appeared to be waving as if catching a breeze. How could a flag move where there is no wind, people wanted to know. But there is a simple explanation. NASA engineers, who must have had premonitions of a flag hanging limply in one of the most historic scenes ever captured on film, designed the Moon flag, and all subsequent ones, with a horizontal bar that allowed them to “fly” without the benefit of a breeze. I guess if you’re clever enough to land a man on the Moon, you’re clever enough to make a flag stand up horizontally.

You can see a replica of one of these flags – and see for yourself how it “waves” without wind – in the Lunar Module display in the National Mall building’s Lunar Exploration Vehicles exhibition.

Altogether, Apollo Moon missions have left six American flags on the lunar surface, but all are symbolic, not representative of any territorial claim. The United Nations Treaty on Outer Space precludes any territorial claims on the Moon.

For an interesting (though a bit technical) story about the creation of the Moon flags (and why they “wave”), read Where No Flag has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon.

So maybe next time you are at a night game at your favorite baseball park and see the flag waving high above the crowd, look beyond to the Moon and think of the six flags flapping in the “breeze” out there too.

Share your memories or thoughts about the Apollo Moon landings on our 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 Web site.

Kathleen Hanser is a Writer-Editor in the Office of Communications at the National Air and Space Museum.