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July 26, 2019 09:53 AM

From protective films and fibers and PC helmets, plastics helped man reach the moon

Bill Bregar
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    Nasa
    Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin salutes the flag planted on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Parts of the lunar lander, Aldren's spacesuit and the flag itself were made of plastics.

    The lunar lander that took Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to the moon 50 years ago needed to be strong, safe and lightweight.

     

    On July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 team successfully stepped onto the lunar surface, plastics and other strong, lightweight materials helped make it happen — often not alone, but in combination with rubber, aluminum, other metals and high-tech fabrics.

     

    That was especially true on the lunar lander, the astronauts’ space suits and the ablative heat shield that protected the command module when it reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

    ‘The Eagle has landed'

    Neil Armstrong's words crackled through the speakers at NASA's Mission Control in Houston, signaling that men first touched down on the moon.

     

    The Eagle lunar landing module was one of the world's most important engineering achievements. The key challenge: to keep it as light as possible.

     

    Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., later Grumman Aerospace Corp., designed and built the lunar lander at its facility in Bethpage, N.Y., under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. It was first of six lunar landers built for the Apollo program. Grumman beat out nine other companies for the contract.

     

    According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, before the program ended, more than 3,000 engineers and 7,000 other Grumman employees hand built 13 full versions of the craft.

     

    Little was known about the lunar surface when construction began in 1962, so the engineers designed cantilever landing gear consisting of four leg assemblies, each ending in a dish-shaped landing pad, so the craft could land safely and remain upright on a variety of surfaces.

     

    What would later be named the Eagle measured, with its legs extended, 23 feet high and 14 feet across.

     

    Don Rosato, a plastics industry veteran, was then a young materials engineer at Grumman, working on composite lunar modular struts for the lunar lander, among other Apollo-related projects.

     

    Rosato said that originally, four composite lunar module struts were fabricated by Grumman and the Hercules Powder Co., later part of Ashland Inc., from boron (from AVCO Specialty Materials), graphite (Union Carbide and Courtaulds), and epoxy (Ciba Geigy, now Huntsman) to save weight while retaining high strength.

     

    But he said NASA ultimately returned to more traditional, heavier aluminum struts on Apollo 11. Remembering the tragic Apollo 1 cabin fire that killed all three astronauts on a launch rehearsal test on Jan. 27, 1967, composites were deemed potential flammability threats from outgassing, Rosato said.

     

    Rosato said boron/graphite epoxy composites were used as leg inserts on three of the later moon flights, Apollo 14, 15 and 16. The cylindrical inserts were fabricated by pressurizing a nylon bag inside a metal tubular female mold using filament-wound cross plies and longitudinal tape layers, he said.

     

    Rosato said Grumman was his first plastics industry job. He worked under George Lubin, who was Grumman's chief materials scientist. Lubin, a pioneer in advanced structural composites, was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1982.

     

    At Grumman, Lubin was in charge of all materials, not just composites.

     

    Rosato was a boy when the Russians sent up Sputnik in 1957, starting the space race. That was something he had in common with other young engineers who worked on the Apollo project.

     

    "It was a generation of Sputnik-inspired engineers. In high school, we were taking advanced math and science classes," he recalled.

     

    Apollo 11 was demanding and exciting, he said.

     

    "It was a big team effort. You worked long hours. You thought, this is teamwork and this is something that's bigger than ourselves," Rosato said. "The biggest thing is you had very experienced engineers, probably in their 40s, 50s and 60s."

     

    They demanded hard work and excellence, he said.

     

    Grumman provided details about the lunar module to NASA for a detailed press kit in 1969.

     

    The piston-loaded primary strut absorbed the compression load of the landing and supported the Eagle on the lunar surface. Engineers developed crushable aluminum honeycomb cartridges to act as shock absorbers — eliminating the need for thick-walled, heavy, pneumatic-type struts.

     

    Because the lunar lander would be exposed to solar radiation and tiny micrometeoroids, the ascent stage was enclosed within a thermal blanket and a protective shield. Glass-fiber standoffs, with low thermal conductivity, held the blanket away from the structural skin.

     

    Parts of the lunar module were wrapped in film that had the appearance of gold foil — a multilayer blanket of DuPont Kapton polyimide film and Mylar PET film, which acted as an insulator to protect the Eagle from solar radiation and unrelenting heat-cold cycles.

     

    The film reduced the impact of the extreme temperature variations, from about 250° F in the sunlight to -250° F in the shade.

     

    The insulation was intentionally crumpled by hand to minimize contact points that could leak between the layers. Like all components, weight reduction was a big feature — the film blanket was much lighter than more solid types of heat shields.

     

    The U.S. flag the astronauts placed on the moon was made of DuPont nylon.

    NASA

    Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin lunar module pilot, descends the steps of the lunar module ladder as he prepares to walk on the moon. The picture was taken by Neil Armstrong who had exited the LM a few minutes earlier.

    Extravehicular Mobility Unit?

    Dubbed the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the space suits used by the Apollo astronauts were designed by ILC Dover, the industrial division of International Latex Corp. — a company better known for Playtex bras and girdles. The suit weighed 180 pounds on Earth but just 30 pounds on the moon.

     

    The space suits had to maintain enough pressure to maintain life, deliver oxygen and still be flexible. Earlier versions by competing companies were stiff and rigid, robotlike, or blown up like big balloons.

     

    ILC's master seamstresses did much of the meticulous stitching work by hand.

     

    The garment included the space suit and an internal liquid cooling garment worn next to the skin, a nylon-spandex outfit with a network of vinyl tubing for circulating cooling water and a backpack with a portable oxygen supply.

     

    Following the Apollo 1 fire, researchers wanted materials that would be more resistant to very high temperatures. Dow Corning Co. produced Teflon-coated silica micro-fibers, coated with Teflon to create an anti-flammable material called Beta Cloth, according to the National Air and Space Museum. Beta Cloth was the outermost covering of the space suit. A layer of Nomex meta-aramid cloth was underneath.

     

    According to the National Air and Space Museum, DuPont fabrics were found throughout the more than 20 layers of the spacesuits worn by the Apollo 11 moon walkers, including Neoprene-coated nylon fabric to hold pressure, five layers of aluminized PET Mylar interwoven with four layers of Dacron polyester fiber for heat protection and two layers of Kapton for reflective insulation.

     

    DuPont's website says that for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, 20 of the 21 layers in each space suit were made with DuPont inventions.

    The space helmets featured a polycarbonate shell with white Tempur open-cell polyurethane-silicon foam cushioning inside that takes the shape of the wearer but returns to its original shape — memory foam, later commercialized as the Tempur-Pedic mattress.

     

    Udel polysulfone polymer from Union Carbide Corp. (later from Amoco and now Solvay) was developed in 1965, just in time to be used in the visors for spacesuits worn by Armstrong and Aldrin. The tough and transparent plastic can resist extremely high temperatures. The shell was molded from UV-stabilized polycarbonate supplied by GE Plastics.

    Return to Earth

    On July 24, 1969, Command Module Columbia hurtled back home through the Earth's atmosphere, for splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Temperatures on the command module soared up to 5,000° F, but ablative shielding protected the inner structure and the lives of Armstrong, Aldrin and Mike Collins.

     

    Ablative heat shields are designed to melt and erode away from the command module, diverting heat, Rosato said. From the ground, it would look like the spacecraft had caught on fire during its descent.

     

    Rosato said the ablative heat shields were made with about a thousand pounds of reinforced asbestos-phenolic and glass-phenolic composites, carefully layer laminated on the re-entry surface of the command module. Suppliers were AVCO Specialty Materials, now Textron Systems, and American Cyanamid, now Solvay, he said.

     

    The atmosphere acted like a braking system on the command module. The craft deployed parachutes. Then came splashdown — and a heroes' welcome.

     

    After Apollo 11, nobody looked up at the moon in the same way again.

    Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

    A lunar module, one of 12 built for Project Apollo, on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. What appears to be gold foil is is a multilayer film made using polimide and PET.

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