Did you know there were geotechnical engineers evaluating the bearing capacity and settlement potential of the lunar surface for the Apollo 11 mission? There were some prominent scientists in NASA at the time that thought the lunar regolith consisted of a thick layer of Moon dust and that the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), better known as the Lunar Module or “LM”, might disappear entirely into it! Thanks to some incredibly smart scientists and engineers, we know that this fortunately was not the case!
July 20, 2024 was the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and around that day I always remember my mentor and late colleague Ed Nowatzki who wrote a fantastic article for GeoPrac.net about his time at Grumman Aerospace, NASA’s prime contractor for the LM, working on the geotechnical engineering aspects. He and his colleague Les Karafiath were the ones tasked with making sure that the LM didn’t settle so much that the exhaust nozzles of the LM rockets became too close to the surface, or that differential settlement didn’t cause the LM to be more than 15 degrees off of horizontal to ensure it could make it back to orbit. It truly was the Ultimate Geotechnical Engineering Challenge as he described it, and I highly recommend the article to geotechnical engineers and history buffs.
Just last week, without even thinking about the anniversary, my wife and I went to see the movie “Fly Me to the Moon”, a fictional but very entertaining movie based on the Apollo 11 mission. The movie plot centers around a fake Moon landing, which is to this day still a conspiracy theory (that I don’t believe). But the dramatization of the actual Apollo 11 landing was riveting, and a couple of moments gave me chills as I remembered Ed’s article and discussions we had about his time working on the LM.
After Buzz Aldrin had successfully managed to manually control the LM’s decent to avoid a large boulder field and the LM was just about to touch down, a probe about 10 feet below the LM foot pads made contact with the surface, and there was a closeup shot of a blue light activating in the LM labeled “Lunar Contact”. I remembered Ed talking about the commemorative button that he all Grumman employees received recreating that light, he even brought it and all his mementos into the office one day for us to see!
When Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder, before he said that iconic line, he stepped down onto the LM pad, and said this:
I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. (The) ground mass is very fine.
Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969 – https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a11/a11.step.html
We’ve all heard bits of the radio chatter from Apollo 11, but I had never heard that portion before. They always just skip to the “One small step…” line. But I felt a tremendous swell of pride for Ed and Les and the others that supported their work hearing that the LM indeed did not settle into the lunar surface and those brave men would be able to take off again after their work on the Moon was done.
The movie did a great job capturing the patriotic feeling and the emotion at the time of the mission, and how everyone was glued to their TV set to watch. I feel that even now, but remembering Apollo 11 is also one of the ways I remember one of the great mentors of my career, Ed Nowatzki. There are so many aspects to his legacy, as a man, an engineer, an educator…but not many people can claim to be a part of such a historically significant event! Ed was a wonderful human and I was lucky to have known him and learned from him.
