Video featuring Neil Armstrong explains process of landing and taking first step on Moon

A recent YouTube video featuring Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon, explained the process of landing and taking the first step on the lunar surface. YouTuber and American engineer Destin Sandlin, who runs the channel ‘Smart Every Day’, explained how NASA trained its astronauts to land on the Moon when it sent its Apollo missions that landed a total twelve astronauts from 1969 to 1972 in a series of Apollo missions numbering up to Apollo 17. The clip uploaded on January 31 also features a lecture delivered by Neil Armstrong back in 2007 in front of Society of Experimental Test Pilots. 

In the clip, Sandlin added Armstrong’s lecture in which he talked about how the Armstrong Flight Research Centre in 1962 proposed a Lunar Landing Simulator Program consisting three parts - a preliminary study, a research test vehicle and an Apollo flight simulator. The astronaut explained that the research test vehicle was small, relatively inexpensive and independent of actual Apollo configuration. He also goes on to mention that the simulator was intended to investigate the inherent problems of lunar descents from altitudes up to 2000 feet and have the capacity to vary control characteristics, cockpit configuration displays and much more. 

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How to land on Moon?

Armstrong said that the simulations were necessary since the presence of gravitational force on the moon is much less than on Earth. Astronauts had to practice landing techniques that would be different from how the landing of flying objects take place on Earth. Armstrong said that NASA was thinking of landing on the Moon in a way that is like that of a helicopter that lands by hovering over the ground. 

However, the astronaut explained that the problem with that method was that a spacecraft had to tilt much more for the horizontal acceptation that a helicopter of the same mass. further, Armstrong explained that over moon where there is no atmosphere like earth to provide the drag and where its weight is 1/6th of that on the moon the same horizontal acceleration requires six times of the wild angle. 

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It was after two failed vehicles that NASA’s Lunar Landing Research Facility (LLRF) duplicated Moon’s 1/6th weight aspect to stimulate the landing of Apollo spacecraft, Armstrong said. He added that the vehicle’s apparent weight was lowered to its lunar equivalent by lifting upward by a vertical cable attached to a moving bridge crane. He also described the complex hydraulic structure as an engineer’s delight. 

But, even this method did not provide the pilot with actual flying experience since the spacecraft was tied to a string. Then the Armstrong Flight Research Centre came up with the Lunar Landing Training vehicle that modified the research vehicle into the 1/6th mass that would work on the Moon’s surface. In the end, the YouTuber said that it was this method that finally gave the astronauts the training on how to land on the moon. 

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