Why havent the designers of the Lunar module won a nobel prize?

Question

This lunar lander worked flawlessly 6 times desending and asending from the lunar surface. Grumman Aircraft Engineering team should have been one of the greatest inventions ever. Also to mention the rendezvous with the csm in lunar orbit.

Answer 1

there are nobel prizes for physics engineering and inventions.

"In 2000, Jack Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit."

The LM was a  failure, in fact Neil Armstrong nearly died testing one on earth.

Neil Armstrong had to eject because he couldn't control it.

they couldn't get it to work on earth how the heck would it have worked flawlessly on the moon six times?

there is no nobel prize for a phony invention.

Answer 2

The LM was just a spacecraft, and it used rather old technology actually, as most design work was already done years before it flew. Gemini had more modern equipment, as it started after Apollo, but flew before it.

A Nobel prize of engineering is also pretty contrary to the intentions of Nobel. Success of Apollo, must be enough reward.

Finally, to stop a lie by moon hoax idiots from getting repeated too often: Armstrong was never nearly killed. Especially not in the Lunar Module. He ejected before a crash of a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV), which has nothing in common with the LM.  It was just a training and research vehicle to practice manually landing vertically. It was not even the prototype of the LM.

It used jet engines to compensate Earths gravity a bit and hydrogen peroxide monopropellant thrusters for simulating a lunar lander. The LM had no jet engine (which was a weak point of the LLRV) and MMH/N2O4 bipropellant thrusters. Also the LM had more redundancy in it's systems as the LLRV - and was thus far more expensive as the training vehicle. But still, the LLRV had over 100 successful lights until 1966, and only 3 crashes. Nobody died in a LLRV crash.

Armstrong later said, without the training flights in the LLRV, he would never been able to land on the moon in semiautomatic mode (Armstrong had to switch to this, because the originally targeted landing site was a crater surrounded by  boulders).

The LM was a first manned lunar lander - and it performed all it's missions well, thanks to the very timid testing on the ground. Technologically, there was no magic and no strings attached. It is also the best documented spacecraft of the Apollo program, you can read all details of it in form of various technical reports - and do you own calculations if you don't believe the numbers. You can be sure, the Russians did the same.

Answer 3

You forgot about the lunar modules used on Apollo 9 & Apollo 10.  They both worked perfectly too except for one slight glitch when the Apollo 10 LM separated from the descent stage.

You're right.  They do deserve something.  They deserve the satisfaction of knowing that half of what they designed will stay on the moon forever. I think that is reward enough for all the hard work they did.

Answer 4

I agree with you that the Apollo Lunar Module was spectacular achievement.  The entire Apollo Project was monumental.  When you think about it the U.S. went from wondering if space travel was possible to inventing from scratch the means to travel to the Moon and back.  The miniaturization of systems and electronics put the world on a fast tract to the computers and life saving equipment that we use today.  If that was not a service to mankind I don't know what is.

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One of our chief designers, and one of the unsung heroes of the U.S. space program was , Max F a g e t,  (pronounced fah-zhay) , . He was a major contributor to the design of all U.S. manned spacecraft up to and including the Space Shuttle.   He only recently passed away.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_modul...

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_*****

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Answer 5

It worked, but it did not work flawlessly. Every mission had its share of glitches. The reason there is no Nobel prize is that the LM was not designed and built by one person but by a team of hundreds at the Grumman facility, using other subcontracted companies to supply parts. There is no one individual to whom the award can be given.

And to reiterate: Armstrong nearly died in a crash of a training vehicle that had nothing in common with the LM save its ability to land vertically using a rocket engine, and the crash occurred because the machine broke, not because the whole concept was flawed. That same vehicle made hundreds of successful flights before the crash, as did others just like it.

Answer 6

The LM designers "only" applied known physics, they didn't invent or discover anything completely new.

5 Thumbs up, for Urwumpe for showing once again that Moonfaker is a LIAR.

Answer 7

There are no Nobel prizes for engineering or design. At any rate, it would not only be a team effort involving hundreds of people, it would also not be possible without the teams from Rockwell, who designed the CSM, and the companies involved in the computers, software, tracking and all the other components. It wasn't just the LM that made it all happen.

Probably the best tribute to all of them is that nobody died in space using the LM/CSM, and as Apollo 13 showed, the people and the hardware saved three lives that would otherwise have certainly been lost. I'd be d**n proud of that. Shaking Jim Lovell's hand would probably mean more than any Nobel prize.

Answer 8

I don't know who this guy Dr. MoonFake is, but he's just parrotting the long-debunked conspiracy theory authors without any apparent understanding of the issues himself.

I'm a qualified engineer who works in aerospace, and I have inspected two lunar modules themselves and have studied the designs extensively, as have many of my colleagues.  There's nothing bogus about them.

The Nobel prize is given for innovation.  While the LM is remarkable, and in fact one of my favorite flying machines of all time, its innovation doesn't rise to the level of Nobel consideration.  It was simply a unique application of several already-existing principles, combined for the first time in this sort of machine.  As for the underlying physics, nothing new there: the LM actually has a much simpler time flying than most aerodynamic craft because it deals only with motion, thrust, and gravity.

The vehicle from which Neil Armstrong ejected had almost nothing to do with the LM.  Ignorant people like to say it's somehow an engineering prototype for the LM, but it was really a pilot trainer built according to entirely different principles.  It was intended to give the astronaut the feel of flying something like the LM, regardless of what had to be done in the engineering sense to get that feel in an Earth environment.  Hence the trainer had a gimballed jet engine that the LM didn't have, and so forth.

These trainers were, for lack of a better description, essentially thrown together.  They weren't intended to last longer than the Apollo program and weren't "hardened" for extensive use.  That's why they had ejection seats.  Five were built.  Three eventually crashed, one because the control system broke in flight, and the other two for weather releated problems.  (They can't fly if there's wind.)  But among them they racked up several hundred successful flights.  It's completely ignorant of the facts to say that the LM concept was inherently flawed because of the fate of these trainers.