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How Duct Tape Saved Apollo 17's Moon Buggy
Ant points out a story
spotted on Boing Boing in which NASA "shares a story that turns back the clock 36 years to reveal the "key roll of duct tape in the Apollo program." The quality of the photographs from the moon always grabs me, and the duct-taped fender here is no exception.
It just proves the old adage that "If you can't fix it with duct tape, then it's broken."
Remember, if the aliens don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
You can't hear duct tape rip in the vacuum of space. That is a sad fact.
Key Roll of Duct Tape or Key Role?
I guess both are valid...
Sealing ammo cans with cloth tape. Though the origin of the name is a controversy, the term is originally "Duck Tape" because water is repelled by the outside surface, thus making it good for ammo cans. You can get the can wet, pull it out of the wet, and since the water rolled off, open the can right away without getting much water in the can. Or, so the story goes.
The quality of the photographs from the moon always grabs me, and the duct-taped fender here is no exception.
Medium-format sized negatives. Shitloads of light (large depth of field and high shutter speeds.) No atmosphere to bend light between subject and camera.
Also, you've got really hard shadows because the light isn't diffused at all by an atmosphere.
Please help metamoderate.
I would say that the roll of tape used on the Apollo 13 was much more important.
It is interesting to think about dust in a vacuum, where if it is kicked up with a large forward velocity, it will fall back down on you or even ahead of you, whereas on Earth it would get pushed behind you by friction...
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
One day he found a roll of duct tape lying around somewhere on a sub that was in for repair. It didn't appear as if anyone was using it.
However, one was not permitted to just remove stuff left lying around - someone might still be needing it.
So dad went through the proper channels, which involved filing a form in which he requested the removal of the duct tape. This had to be signed by his manager. I don't remember clearly, but maybe it had to be signed by his manager's manager.
Once the paperwork was all squared away, someone was sent in to the sub to remove the roll of duct tape - only to find that it wasn't there anymore!
Your tax dollars at work!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Didn't NASA have a preference back then for Hasselblad medium-format cameras with really good Zeiss lenses?
Pro-level gear with big film can give some really incredibly detailed photos.
light side, dark side, holds the universe together, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, George Lucas ruined this joke, since duct tape isn't made my symbiotic microorganisms living inside everything.
Duct tape saved the day during Apollo 13 too, when they were having CO2 problems. Those guys jury-rigged the Lithium Hydroxide canister of the command-module (which were square), into the LEM(which had round canisters).
Saved the day. Without it, the astronauts would have died of CO2 poisoning. Apparently, the design was so good, it became a standard emergency procedure in future missions.
They also used duct tape to fix the stereo, so they could keep driving their moon buggies through our neighborhoods at all hours of the night playing that theme from "2001" real loud.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I think we should go back a bit to that kind of space exploration. Boot-strap, Cowboy style. There are so many regs and safety issues with today's space program that with all the bureaucracy it's a wonder we get anything off the ground at all. Lets just start with some quantity, launch anything with a higher than 50% survival rate.
How many people do you know that would jump on an opportunity for a manned mission to mars? Just to be the first to do it. Even if you don't make it, you'd still provide useful information and go down in history as a great pioneer. Hell there is a certain religion or two down here that have people clamoring all over their selves to die for some glorious amorphous cause. Put them to work. Launch those space monkeys up there so they can be closer to their [Deity].
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
Why are there no tracks before or after that tire?
Was the photo just after assembly, but before movement?
There's an astronaut sitting in it, how could he possibly wait for a photo shoot before hitting the gas?
I would expect more footprints around the thing if it were just after assembly.
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
That's cool, but does it really matter if rifle ammo gets wet? Cartriges are pretty well sealed, and you can store a round of ammo under water for months, pull it out and fire it immediately.
Maybe for other stuff like electronics or such. But ammo?
The Lunar Surface Journal over here: (more specifically on the Apollo 17 page of course)
:)
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html
Craploads of imagery from all surface missions, full transcripts, and audio.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I thought it was orginally called "Duck Tape" becasue the man who invented it used it to repair his boats. Back in those days it was made of duck cloth or "cotton duck", much sturdier than today's tape, and tar was used as the "glue" and waterproofer. When the modern manufactuer took over in world war two the tar was replaced with (then) moden glue and the waterproofing was a spray-on synthetic rubber, much like the macintosh raincoat. However the tape was used, as you said, for waterproofing ammo cans. It was soon used for much more.
Yes, I call BS on you, too.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Well, sort of...My housekeeper was cleaning and noticed (or perhaps caused) a hole about the size of a silver dollar in the drain pipe underneath my kitchen sink. The area around the hole was a corroded and basically everything that went down the drain ended up going out of the hole. I live in an apartment building where the super takes forever to fix things, so I had to come up with a stop-gap solution. First, I just put a bucket under it when I was just using water, but that was going to start to get really gross when I wanted to wash that night's frying pans, so I did not wash them that evening.
The next morning, it hit me, I could wrap the pipe with duct tape to seal the hole and it worked! I cleaned my dishes, pots, pans and made pasta on Saturday; it even held up when I poured the boiling water down the drain.
Not quite a NASA moon mission, but I did gain a new appreciation for duct tape.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I seem to recall the "Huston, we have a PROBLEM" mission (Appolo 13?) that they used duct tape to make the other CO2 filters mechanically compatible when they had to spend more time in orbit than they could manage just on the service module's filters. (one set was round and the other set was square)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Gaffer tape is vastly superior to duct tape.
Easier to tear, less residue, matte surface.
Need I go on?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Try searching for "Moon buggy" in Wikipedia.
And good luck with that. You'll turn up nothing but "articles" linked to commercial products. You have to use "Lunar Rover". (And it's an article ripped form a single source (albeit NASA))
I wonder if someone could fix Wikipedia's search engine with duct tape? Though I suspect that it's far beyond that kind of repair.
How would Duck Tape be applied in this scenario to protect the pursued duck?
..."
"The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.
from:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1432991,00.html
Regards, Non.
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.