One astronaut could have taken off alone, lifting off was a lot less involved for the crew than landing was. Docking between the two craft in lunar orbit was done by the astronaut in the command module, so that wouldn’t have been a problem either.
The toughest part would be the live astronaut trying to get the dead one up the ladder and through the tiny hatch. Making it tougher is that you can’t work on it from both sides - once he’s in the doorway you need to get him through all by pushing from the outside or all by pulling from the inside. The astronauts were all physically fit, smart, highly motivated men, so maybe he could get it done, but I think it may have been pretty much impossible.
Although, he’s dead anyway, so wouldn’t taking him out of the suit make it easier to maneuver him through the doorway? I don’t want to think about them being crammed in a small spacecraft with a floating dead body for a few days on the trip home however…
And as others have said, they may have decided it would have been more the deceased’s wishes to stay on the moon.
Moon rocks can’t be left in open atmosphere on the lunar module without risking issues. Even the dust caused problems for the astronauts. It’s a fine powder that is microscopically sharp and chemically unstable. I think one of the astronauts commented that it smelled like burnt gunpowder.
I myself need a cite on that one - they’re saying that they could detect seismic activity from a machine weighing maybe 20,000 pounds crashing into the moon with a gravitational pull only 1/6th the gravity of earth from 1/4 of a million miles away!?!? :eek:
I’m pretty sure seismic equipment was among the scientific package left behind on each landing. I don’t know how long the packages were able to transmit, but surely longer than it took for the astronauts to get back to earth. This is the source of the pictures of the ascent stage taking off.
ETA: I’ve actually had idiots argue with me that this is proof we never landed on the moon, otherwise how could we have film of the takeoff?
I guess I misunderstood the statement. When I read that scientists back on earth would record the seismic shock, I thought it meant that they detected the seismic event using equipment back on earth. My Bad. :smack:
I didn’t mean because of the weight, I meant because of the general awkwardness of trying to push a lifeless spacesuit up a ladder and through a tiny hatch while you yourself are in a spacesuit. Or alternately tying a rope around the body, climbing up and into the lunar module and trying to pull it up and in after you.
The hatch was 32" square, a tight fit for a living astronaut to go thought:
Nope, no airlock. They depressurized the whole compartment to exit, and then left it unpressurized until they returned. The entire habitable volume of the lunar module wasn’t all that much bigger than a two man airlock would have been anyway.
If I were to guess, I’d say CO[sub]2[/sub] poisoning. The CO[sub]2[/sub] scrubbers would probably be saturated long before they ran out of O[sub]2[/sub].
Not sure how long it would take, but on Apollo 13 the LM was designed to support two people for two days.
I’m not sure that there’s somewhere you could attach him that wouldn’t get in the way of the maneuvering thrusters, plus if he fell off during the lift off it’d probably throw off the weight balance causing the craft to crash. They could strap him down on top of the ascent stage, but then he’d be in the way of the docking hatch.
Wives or Astronaut’s wives or something along those lines as opposed to women who’s husbands are about to die but haven’t yet.
They were still married to living men at that point.
Yes, as a kid I was an avid watcher of the moon missions. The astronauts did exactly this. They would plant sensors at the landing site, then when they jettisoned the LM, they would calculate the trajectory so it would crash near the sensors. The sensors radioed the data back to earth.
Related question: suppose they buried the body on the moon. How long would it take to decay, both with or without the suit? Burying it underground would shield it from most radiation, though bacteria in the body begin eating it from inside out after death. Still though, I imagine parts of the body (and the suit) would be well preserved for a long time.
