![]() ![]() “On this day I climbed a very, very small cherry tree at the back of the barn … and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet,” Goddard said in Milton Lehman’s book, “This High Man: The Life of Robert H. While sitting in a cherry tree as a young boy, he envisioned launching a craft into space. ![]() From breaking the sound barrier to successfully escaping the Earth’s gravity, acceleration remained the key.ĭr. Īcceleration, that basic Newtonian force, played a key role in the development of space travel. Space Center Houston is home to the modified lithum hydroxide canister built by the NASA engineers as a prototype. Thus, the astronauts could use the extra scrubbers from the command module and make it back to Earth. In a thrilling example of the ingenuity of the American space program, these people rose to the challenge and adapted the command module’s square CO2 filters to fit the lunar module’s round system. The lunar module was about to run out of carbon dioxide scrubbers when the NASA engineers were presented with this problem. Putting three in a cramped space overwhelmed the module’s carbon dioxide scrubbers, which helped recycle the crew’s supply of breathable air. The problem with this is that the lunar module was designed to support only two astronauts on a trip to the lunar surface. ![]() For starters, that meant sheltering in the lunar module for much of the return. Solving it was a matter of life and death for Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise.Īfter an oxygen tank explosion scuttled plans for the trio of astronauts to land on the Moon, NASA had to return them safely to Earth. “Gentlemen, we have to fit a square peg into a round hole.”ĭirector Ron Howard’s enthralling space movie “Apollo 13” featured a scene of NASA engineers presented with this very basic, very old problem. ![]()
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