How Neil Armstrong Trained to Land on the Moon - Smarter Every Day 250

[Music] hey it's me destin welcome back to smartereveryday this is the first video in a series of videos on going back to the moon the fun thing is i have no idea what these videos are going to entail because the opportunities have not presented themselves yet but i do know this i know nasa with the artemis program they have set their sights on the moon and i'm all about it so if you're a contractor a program manager if you're nasa and you have things you want to talk about about landing on the moon i'm your guy just give me a call we'll do a video about it here on smarter every day so that being said let's think about this i want to talk about the specific technical issues that have to be overcome in order for this to happen safely so number one if you think about a lander descending to the surface of another celestial body you basically have to solve the equation of velocity equals zero when you touch the surface of the moon or whatever right so that's been done before right when the apollo astronauts descended to the surface of the moon they actually piloted the craft all the way down and they made sure their velocity equals to zero right at the moment that they touched down on the surface contact light so how did they do that it seems like a simple question but it's very very complicated the reason this is so complicated is here on earth we are being pulled down towards the earth at 9.8 meters per second square one g right well on the moon it's 1 6 g 1.625 meters per second squared so think about that if you have a spacecraft and you have a rocket on it it's going to behave differently on the moon than it does here on earth so how do you practice landing on the moon when you're on earth many scientists and engineers among us right now they have the knowledge of how we went to the moon but what we need to reclaim is the understanding of why we made the decisions we made along the way and that is a task well suited for the scientific historians among us let's start this whole series with one of the most authoritative sources on the history of the lunar lander program that i can imagine it was a lecture given in 2007 in front of the society of experimental test pilots by none other than neil armstrong let's go get smarter every day in january of of 1962 frc proposed a free flight lunar landing simulator program consisting of three parts a preliminary study a research test vehicle and an apollo flight simulator the research test vehicle would be small relatively inexpensive and independent of the actual apollo configuration it was intended to investigate the inherent problems of lunar descents from at altitudes of up to 2000 feet and have the capacity to vary control characteristics cockpit configuration displays and landing gear geometry and so on neil goes on to explain that in the 60s they were thinking about the problem of descending to the surface like hovering a helicopter so that's where they started the problem with the helicopter though is it changes the way you move laterally let me explain if you think about a helicopter it has to offset its own weight right so if you've got the weight here then you have lift that's pulling it up at a certain amount to offset that right if you decide to translate forward meaning you want to tilt the helicopter forward and you want to move in that direction you still have a vertical component of lift that's going to offset that weight but you also have this horizontal component that will let you accelerate forward now that makes sense on earth but the problem is if you're in a spacecraft and your spacecraft has one sixth the weight of a helicopter even if they're the same mass you have to go with me here think about it if you have a very small thrust required to lift that thing if you tilt it over and try to translate in the same acceleration moving forward it's not going to work because as you tilt that thing forward the horizontal component of your acceleration is far lower because you're not thrusting as much so in order to get the same acceleration in the horizontal direction you would have to tilt the spacecraft over much farther than you would a helicopter this is the problem they had to figure out how to solve they considered a helicopter and a lunar vehicle of the same mass over earth in the helicopter and if there were no drag the horizontal component of acceleration would be approximately proportionate till the tilt angle of the rotor over the moon where there is definitely no drag and weight is only one-sixth of earth the same amount of acceleration requires nearly six times the tilt angle another problem they had with helicopters is the way you had to do the test for example if you're just hovering above the ground and you're descending in a straight line that's a very difficult thing when you're close to the ground because you're inside what's called dead man's curve basically when a helicopter you want to have enough altitude or velocity to be able to auto rotate to the ground if you lose power i made another smarter everyday video about that if you want to check it out but long story short helicopters could be dangerous for this specific test application after the helicopter thing they tried an experimental aircraft i didn't even know existed in the 50s and 60s the x-14 might be a useful simulator some thought although it could not duplicate the effects of reduced gravity yes what you're looking at is a vertical takeoff and landing airplane in the 1960s its reaction control system was quite variable and could uh replicate a wide variety of control characteristics that were directly applicable to lunar flight some lunar final approach simulations were performed in early 1964 but without the lunar gravity characteristics they were of limited usefulness i didn't even know the x-14 was a thing that's incredible anyway it didn't work neither did the helicopter and the whole reason is this 1 6 g thing so what do you do if every vehicle you put a pilot in is 5 6 2 heavy you have to take away 5 6 of the weights and if you think about the perfect physics way to do it you'd have like an infinite string going straight to the sky that would pull 5 6 of the weight up but that's like a very difficult engineering problem think about it if the pilot was over like commanding things as the pilot moved that stream would have to remain directly overhead because if it didn't you would start a pendulum oscillation that's like an impossible thing to build except nasa built it independently at nasa's langley research center an alternate approach to lunar simulation was initiated the lunar landing research facility llrf looked like a dirigible hangar after a tornado again the idea was to duplicate the lunar gravity and control characteristics the method was to lower the vehicle apparent weight to its lunar equivalent by lifting upward with the vertical cable attached to a traveling bridge crane a complex electro hydraulic system kept the crane platform directly over the machine and the cables vertical with an upward force equal to 5 6 of the vehicle weight it had a wonderful assortment of of structural and cable stretch and pendulous frequencies requiring innovative compensation networks it was indeed an engineer's delight after the kinks were worked out it worked reasonably well the flying volume 180 feet high 360 feet long and 42 feet wide was limited but it was adequate to give pilots a substantive introduction to the lunar flight characteristics so the llrf was awesome it gave pilots like a first order approximation of how to fly this thing but any pilot will tell you that's still not flying like when you're in the seat and you have total control of the aircraft there's something different that happens in your head like for example at the llrf if something didn't work you could just hit the emergency stop button and you would just swing right like everything would lock up it's not a big deal however free flight was preferred and they still didn't know how to simulate this until an apparent answer came out of nasa's flight research center out at edwards air force base interestingly the frc as it was known is now renamed the armstrong flight research center the proposed technique for simulating the lunar gravity was simple in principle reduce the apparent weight of the craft to its value while flying over the moon the proposed method install a jet engine underneath or within the machine on gimbals so the thrust was always vertically upward the engine thrust would then be adjusted so that the craft's net weight that is its gross weight minus the engine thrust would equal its lunar equivalent the force required to lift the net weight would be provided by throttle-able rockets and so the lunar landing training vehicle or lltv was born it featured a partially enclosed cockpit with a limb-like visibility the 3-axis controls mounted side stick a lift rocket throttle replacing the collective lam displays a rate command attitude holds system that closely approximated the expected lunar module performance the lltv proved to be an excellent simulator and was highly regarded by the apollo lunar module crews as necessary to lunar landing preparation but it was unforgiving three of the vehicles were lost nasa management was forever worried about the reliability and safety of these machines and continually wanted to shut them down but the pilots insisted they were vital to lunar landing preparation and they prevailed so this is ben feist ben has an amazing website that he created called apollo in real time and ben how long did it take you to make apollo in real time apollo in real time took a very long time the apollo 11 version took two years of work by a whole team of volunteers two years and basically you took every piece of footage across the whole the whole mission and you synced it together so i can go and listen to a specific person on console was that the idea that's their idea anything that's in the historical record should be there uh time to the moment that it occurred i know because i've seen this and i've talked to you a little bit i know that you have the entire mission memorized is that fair to say uh no that's not fair to say it's pretty dang close i'll go with it okay it's pretty close dude you pretty much have it memorized so here's my question so basically they slow down and come out of order and they start descending and once they do that are they pitching more over in the lunar lander than they would have in the lltv or do you think the lltv was a good simulator for what they were doing the lltv was an excellent simulator for that exact problem on the moon and that you're tilting much more than you do when you're hovering on earth and the the simulation the other simulations that they trained for like looking out the window and seeing the lunar surface and using the flight computer weren't all pulled together until they were actually in lunar orbit and doing it in real life when you watch the apollo 11 descent does it feel like they've been there before like do you do you feel like they were adequately trained they're they were very adequately adequately trained and and neil armstrong was a test pilot who actually helped to develop the training protocols for how that worked so him being the first one uh to do that was perfect in that he he could he was good at academically assembling different training protocols and the astronauts were adamant that they should be allowed to fly the lltv so they could get that experience before they were actually at the moon even though there was danger a lot of danger and actually the danger was a big component also why the lltv was important is that it put their hides on the line as they would say uh and gave them that aspect of maybe your heart pump it pumps a little harder than it would normally when you're flying something like that that that gives you the simulation of the kind of danger that they were in when they were landing on the moon i actually have some footage here of neil armstrong talking about the lltv after a flight and he's very clinical in how he speaks about it gosh i don't know i suspect it was around five or six minutes 559 they say the question was how does the machine fly and the answer is that we're very pleased with the way it flies it's a significant improvement over the llrv which we were flying here a year ago and i think it does a an excellent job of actually capturing the handling characteristics of the lunar module in a landing maneuver it's really a great deal different than any other kind of uh aircraft that i've ever flown it's the simulation of lunar gravity has some aspects that make this this type of flight sufficiently different from anything else we've ever done to make this vehicle very worthwhile and i'm very pleased that i've had the opportunity to uh get some flights in it here just before the apollo 11 flight quite a bit of noise i gathered up there well i it sounds a lot noisier outside the vehicle than it does sitting on the inside then the noise radiates out in all directions and since i have this helmet on that has a good bit of sound proofing in why it really isn't too loud although communication is a problem for us we have the radios picked up pretty well now and i could maintain communications with the crew here that's a very important part of this operation since it's a training vehicle we use telemetry and the people on that that interview that you just watched took place exactly one month prior to launch of apollo 11 which means even though nasa management thought that flying the lltv was dangerous they viewed it as an overall risk reduction technique for the mission in general they thought refreshing the algorithms in neil's brain was a smart thing to do just prior to launch and it worked here's the thing though we are actually going back to the moon so that being said we know how to build an ll tv but what we don't know is why they built certain things the way they did like the decisions that were made basically knowledge of how to do it is not understanding i wanted to speak to someone who actually does have the understanding of why all these things took place so i did a little bit of digging and actually found one of the engineers that was over the lltv program so i'm so excited to share this with you let's go speak to the man who literally wrote the book on the ll tv mr wayne ottinger hey is this mr ottenger yeah yeah here we go i just sent you the invite okay i'll get up and get to the computer ah we're gonna talk to the man like the guy who designed the lltv you talk about excited can you hear me yes sir i sure can so can i ask you a couple of questions about the lltv yeah so if i understand correctly you guys were offsetting the lltv's weight by 5 6 with the jet engine correct yeah we had a a real challenge because we were thrust limited on the available jet engine it was a 4 200 pound fan jet that had just been commercialized it was a g85 core there it had an half affine on it this i could talk to you for hours i really could so so here's here's a question so when the the turbine was spinning up or when the jet was spinning up did you have issues with gyroscopic procession yeah we did we uh we percepted our yaw rockets we're firing consuming rocket fuel uh to counteract the gyroscopic force and so what we did was to put a small port on the bleeder or the compressor and piped a little 12-pound thrust out of the bleeder to counter at the gyroscope that was a common design for all of our llrv you bled off a little bit of it and shot it to the side so you can counteract the spin right so so let me ask you this if the lltv um had the jet engine going up through it like that then you had a certain attitude that you could roll to before you would like 40 degrees and pitch and roll 40. so that you would gimble lock so to speak after that yeah we have pitch and roll then gimbals i've watched the video of neil armstrong punching out of the lltv so many times but i have no idea why he did it and i can't find a satisfactory answer online not only was wayne there that day he has intimate knowledge about what happened and he even spoke to neil armstrong immediately after that was a human error on the accident because the ground controller was too timid to tell him to i had an engineer behind him telling him to knock off the lift rocket he was running out of fuel a guy which i didn't train very well i take some responsibility for it because i didn't guess that he would be so dumb but he uh he let neil run out a few of them he let him run i had designed the tank so you could never lose you could always have 20 pounds of peroxide to feed your attitude rocket system and never let the lift system run out your attitude control but what he did was without paying attention to the radio he just let the nail leave the lipstick up and blow all the helium overboard so he had no pressure to push out the reserve attitude field so yeah i was going to ask you that when i look at the when i look at the ejection of neil i i thought it was a pio a pilot induced oscillation but you're saying he was he was out of pressure on his peroxide he lost total control of the attitude because that's why he pitched up and then punched out and then uh that afternoon when we picked up the wreckage with the crane the snake rolled out from underneath the fire and it was half burn i always wanted to make a cartoon about it what the hell was that [Music] from the snake's perspective yeah yeah i wanted to thank a cartoon never did do it mr ogier i i know that uh i need to let you go but i would like to ask you two more questions and these are big picture prep questions uh thank you for how generous you've been with your time but first big picture question is so back in the day the engineers and scientists on this program did amazing things with electronics right so do you think that engineers in the 50s and 60s were better than engineers today no no i i think we all had our unique place in history and they'll continue to be you know new challenges met and they'll be innovation that continues and and part of it's because they can build on our shoulders they can learn from what we did and then adapt to the new technology and so forth do you think the uh do you think something like the lltv needs to happen to train astronauts to go back to the moon they aren't going to go if they don't get a trainer a free flight trainer i can tell you that really yeah they won't go without it they're smart enough you know now the united states is planning to return to the moon and when that craft is on final approach to that flat ridge near shackleton crater i hope that the person at the controls has a simulation experience that is at least as good as the lltv provided the apollo crews a half century later thank you i hope you enjoyed this episode of smarter every day maybe we'll get to look at more landers in the future i don't know we'll see how that works out but i want to say thanks to the sponsor of this episode which is audible now i'm going to do something a little bit different this time usually i tell you a book that i've read before but this is the rare time where i'm going to tell you a book that i downloaded today that i'm about to start reading myself it's called carrying the fire by michael collins when neil armstrong and buzz aldrin touched down on the moon it was michael collins who was orbiting the moon waiting to pick them up michael collins if you know anything about him is known for his humility his poise and his wisdom so i am looking forward to this because a ton of people have told me to listen to it i downloaded it today i'm not hesitating to tell you about it because i'm looking forward to it so please consider getting that by going to audible.com smarter or texting the word smarter to 500 500 and a little link will just pop up on your phone click that and then you can just go get carrying the fire by michael collins there's an incredible selection of audiobooks to choose from you can also go to the audible plus catalog if you're an audible member you get a credit every month for any book you want however you can get as many books as you want from the audible plus catalog so you can have thousands of included titles at your fingertips it has changed my life i am devouring audiobooks at an incredible pace i downloaded two today i'm gonna listen to those over the next week but you really need to be listening to audiobooks it makes you smarter and helps you reclaim your time audible.com smarter or text the word smarter to 500 500. thank you very much for supporting the sponsor when you do that that's support smarter every day and i am grateful i'm grateful for you thank you for watching smarter every day please consider subscribing if you feel like this video has earned your subscription because i know that is a precious thing you don't just give away but if you'd like to there's a button somewhere and you can click a bell or whatever if not no big deal anyway i'm destined you're getting smarter every day have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: SmarterEveryDay

Views: 1,352,581

Rating: 4.9508533 out of 5

Keywords: Smarter, Every, Day, Science, Physics, Destin, Sandlin, Education, Math, Smarter Every Day, experiment, nature, demonstration, slow, motion, slow motion, education, math, science, science education, what is science, Physics of, projects, experiments, science projects, apollo, space, astronauts, nasa, nasa astronauts, nasa apollo, Rockets, physics

Id: _OXk4RKZhaY

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/yaboimankeez]

I can’t wait to watch this! I really appreciate you taking the time to interact with us this way, Destin. Love ya. u/MrPennywhistle

[u/meyersjs]

It’s surreal seeing so many channels gear up for these space events.

Makes me want to listen to JFK talk about why we go to the moon.

[u/slice_of_timbo]

I sure hope someone makes that comic for him

[u/AssholeInRealLife]

Am I misremembering or has Destin started multiple video series that aren't complete yet?

If I'm not mistaken he's teased at least another 1-2 videos from the Arctic Sub series, and at least 1-2 remain from the space series that included visiting the moon rocks and the ISS mockup tour with Scott Kelly.

I'm certainly not complaining... Mostly seeking to understand. If anything, maybe just an acknowledgement from /u/mrpennywhistle that these videos are still in there pipeline, or even cancelled. Not like I would have any right to be upset!

If I get bored enough in the snow storm I might go back and watch some of those old series videos and inventory the teaser clips and see what's left to come. 🥶😜

[u/wolflegion_]

Is it just me, or has this video not uploaded to patreon yet for some reason? Normally I get patreon notifications before I get anything from YT.

Anyway, loved the vid! Although I had a very hard time following the last interview, due to my hearing loss.

[u/NotThatMat]

Sweeeeeeet! The flying bedstead!

[u/nasduia]

Awesome episode and awesome interviewee. It's great to see an incredibly smart older person being so modest: Demonstrating that if you aren't insecure then there's no need to boast, bluster or criticise people that came after you.

[u/VMaxF1]

Thank you for this! I don't think it was mentioned anywhere (apologies if so!) but this seems to be the full talk by Neil Armstrong, on Mr Ottinger's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlqTPejkqrg

Probably best to just ignore that comment under it 🙄

[u/randomchaos0034]

Was that intro sound from 'That 70's show'?