“Unlocking the Secrets of the Moon: The Ingenious Strategies That Made NASA’s Historic Landing Possible”
While theoretically straightforward, in practice the Direct Ascent strategy suffered from a host of practical drawbacks – chief among them being that it was extremely heavy. The Command Module needed to be robust enough to survive the heat and stress of atmospheric reentry, while the Service Module needed to carry all the equipment and consumables needed for the entire mission to the moon and back. All this mass needed to be safely soft-landed on the moon and blasted off again, requiring the use of a massive Descent/Ascent stage and large quantities of fuel – so large in fact, that despite the moon’s gravity being 1/6th that of earth, early estimates put the total mass of the spacecraft at a whopping 90 metric tons! Such a gargantuan spacecraft would, in turn, require an equally gargantuan rocket to haul it from the earth to the moon and back. Known as the Nova, this behemoth would have stood nearly 110 metres or 360 feet tall, weighed 4.5 million kilograms or 9.9 million pounds, and had a first stage delivering a total thrust of 61,925 kilonewtons or 13.9 million pounds force. By comparison, the Saturn V rocket that ultimately took men to the moon stood 86 metres or 282 feet tall, weighed 2.8 million kilograms or 6.2 million pounds, and had a first-stage thrust of 34,500 kilonewtons or 7.75 million pounds force. Not only were engineers unsure if the Nova could even be constructed by the end of the decade, but the rocket would have been too powerful to launch from the pads at Cape Canaveral; indeed, one proposal called for the rocket to be launched from hollowed-out cliffs in Hawaii. Another early concept proposal called for Nova to be fitted with nuclear rocket engines, which would have required launching it from an uninhabited island or a giant barge to prevent contaminating populated areas with radioactive fallout.
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