Author Description

This official NASA history document is the complete story of the important training vehicle for the Apollo moon landings, the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) and the later version, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV). In the foreword, Neil Armstrong writes: "Unconventional, Contrary, & Ugly: The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle tells the complete story of this remarkable machine, the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, including its difficulties, its successes, and its substantial contribution to the Apollo program. The authors are engineers who were at the heart of the effort. They tell the tale that they alone know and can describe. Six crews landed their Lunar Modules on the moon. They landed on the dusty sands of the Sea of Tranquility and the Ocean of Storms. They landed in the lunar highlands at Fra Mauro and on the Cayley Plains. They landed near the Apennine and Taurus Mountains. Each landing, in widely different topography, was performed safely under the manual piloting of the flight commander. During no flight did pilots come close to sticking a landing pad in a crater or tipping the craft over. That success is due, in no small measure, to the experience and confidence gained in the defining research studies and in the pilot experience and training provided by the LLRV and LLTV. Someday men will return to the moon. When they do, they are quite likely to need the knowledge, the techniques, and the machine described in this volume." When the United States began considering a piloted voyage to the moon, an enormous number of unknowns about strategies, techniques, and equipment existed. Some people began wondering how a landing maneuver might be performed on the lunar surface. From the beginning of the age of flight, landing has been among the most challenging of flight maneuvers. Touching down smoothly has been the aim of pilots throughout the first century of flight. Designers have sought the optimum aircraft configuration for landing. Engineers have s