Photo of a piece of artwork at the Ira G. Ross Aerospace Museum archive depicting an early Bell design for the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle. Equipped with a single turbojet for vertical thrust, the vehicle was supposed to operate in the same manner as the planned lunar landers… vertical landing with attitude control provided solely by hydrogen peroxide monopropellant rocket thrusters.
The design shown here differes greatly from the LLRV as actually built. The cockpit is mounted at the top center of the vehicle, directly in front of the turbojet inlet; in the actual vehicles the cockpit was offset well to the side, moving the pilot away from the inlet and putting him in a position somewhat closer to what he would have in an actual lunar module.
Note the early LEM design in the background.
7 Responses to “Lunar Landing Research Vehicle”
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The hydrogen peroxide RCS thrusters on the base of the legs are a little strange, as LEM wasn’t going to have those, so the “feel” of the vehicle was going to be different compared to real spacecraft.
Wasn’t the RCS control in the LEM heavily computer modified anyway, as with the descent stage attached there was a large offset between the center of mass and the center of the axis the thrusters were mounted on?
ISTR that without the computer management there was a big problem with coupling between control axes.
BTW, see if you figure the origin of this thing, which looks one step up from those “flying sofa” type minimalist LEMs:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kielbryant/1390389247/in/photostream
It seems a shame that all the LEM mock-ups by various companies probably got destroyed.
They would have been fascinating to put on display together in the NASM to show how the final design was arrived at.
That’s not a mockup; it’s the training vehicle that operated by suspension from a huge outdoor “skeleton” of girders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LunarLandingResearchFacility.GIF
http://atomictoasters.com/2011/05/lunar-landing-research-facility/
http://blackhole.xerces.com/showthread.php?t=1646&page=37 (ignore the “hoax” crap)
http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/atmosphaerenfahrt-ESP/17_centro-de-simulacion-Langley-Houston.html
http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasaNAS~2~2~6693~108315 (“Matt Mason in training”)
That last one sure does look like the Matt Mason spacesuit, doesn’t it?
Doing landing practice with the tethered trainer looks miles safer than doing it with the free-flying one.
Even NASA realized that the free-flier was probably more likely to kill a astronaut than actually landing a LEM on the Moon was, after losing three of the five built in crashes.
Soviet training for their LK lander was a lot more basic, consisting of doing multiple auto-rotating landings in a small (Mil Mi-1) helicopter; Alexi Leonov figured that if he kept that up for long enough, he was going to get killed that way rather than crashing on the Moon’s surface.
What’s surprising is that the Soviets had something a lot like the LLRV/LLTV, but didn’t use it for LK lander training: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o_AzOVWu90
I just noticed that the LEM in the background has three engines on the descent stage; a main one flanked by two smaller ones.
I’ve seen a engine layout like that on early design conceptions of the SM but never on the LEM; it looks like the idea may have been to have the main engine have fixed thrust, and have the two smaller engines do the throttling for final landing braking.