Half a century ago, Apollo 10…NASA’s dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 Landing…sent the spacecraft into orbit around the Sun.
Apparently, it has been “Found”…and close to earth once every 15 years…could it be recovered?
https://www.universetoday.com/142505/apollo-10s-snoopy-lunar-lander-may-have-been-found-in-space/Somebody Call Elon Musk!
Could it? Sure, no reason we couldn’t.
Who’s footing the bill for this wildly impractical and fundamentally meaningless mission?
Moderator Note
This is completely useless and irrelevant answer for General Questions, as well as a threadshit. In the future, keep your personal opinions to yourself. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The youtube vid shows 2 problems if we could get there (which we should because we sent it there in the first place). That of the craft might be spinning, and it also is very fragile. Typically those 2 don’t go together well, and worse if we need to stop that spin to recover it. While we might be able to pull it off, it might be something better to wait till we can do it better if we want to preserve it mostly intact and not cause damage in the attempt, if it’s still intact that is.
Also is there any legal or political issues as it is a US NASA spacecraft, can it be considered abandoned and freely taken, would recovery be allowed even if we have the ability to do so?
I’ve read descriptions of the ascent stage of the lunar module being essentially like a beer can in space- very lightweight construction- enough to hold pressure, not collapse on landing/takeoff, and when the service module/third stage perform their burns, but not much else.
I’d also bet that the strongest part is the docking hatch, and probably longitudinally- i.e. in the direction of docking.
So while I’d think that there wouldn’t be anything significantly wrong with it, save 50 years of micrometeoroid strikes, if it’s spinning, then grabbing hold and stopping that spin could be hellaciously difficult to do. To speculate a little, if they were really serious, they’d probably do something like fly over a bunch of little drones with motion sensors and low thrust, high impulse thrusters that could attach in some non-destructive way, and then have the mothership slowly fire them in a pattern based on the drones’ motion sensors to slow down the spin and orient the craft correctly.
But what would they do with it once this ship docked with it? Outside of the difficulty of getting into and out of such a weird orbit, once they got it back into Earth orbit, they’d have to figure out a way to return it to Earth without destroying it.
The laws governing outer space are modeled after those governing the open ocean. I think that would make Snoopy jetsam. Does anyone know the maritime law on salvage of jetsam?
As to the difficulty of returning it to Earth once retrieved, remember that it was able to survive the stresses of launch, which I believe are significantly greater than those of re-entry. You’d still have to enclose it in some sort of fairing, like it was at launch, but that would be doable if we really wanted to.
That doesn’t sound right. You don’t need heat shields for launch. You most certainly need them for reeentry.
Not just a fairing - you’d need to bring a proper ablative heat shield, like the Apollo return capsules had.
And I think the peak decel during reentry can be quite a bit greater than the peak accel during launch. During launch, the Saturn V maxed out at almost 4 G, whereas the Apollo return capsules experienced as much as 7G during atmospheric reentry. The lunar lander is of a similar physical size as the return capsule, but it weights a lot more - about 35,000 pounds, versus something like 13,000 points for the command module. If you’re going to get that lander decelerated to a reasonable speed for parachute deployment, your heat shield will have to be very large and very strong.
Speaking of parachutes, you’ll need those, too. Parachutes, plus some way to attach them to a vehicle that was never designed to hang from a parachute.
I’m not sure if this was (rudely) directed at me, but a fairing is not a heat shield. It maintains the streamlining and structural integrity of the entire vehicle package during launch through the atmosphere, but is not in any way designed to protect a package during reentry.
Sure, if money wasn’t an object, you could do it. As to how, I’d use a remotely operated probe that could attach to the craft and slowly null the spin and orient it for pickup, then use a larger unmanned craft to dock with it and basically cocoon it in some sort of reinforcing structure to support it for re-entry (assuming you want to being it back to earth…personally, I think a space museum would be cooler, i.e. move it into either a Lunar or high Earth orbit and put web cams and such all over it so folks could tour it whenever they want). If you shim up the structure and you provide a heat shield for re-entry and parachutes, maybe deceleration rockets, you could bring it back without destroying it.
It would cost a hell of a lot, but you could do it if someone really wanted too. Not sure of the legality, but an earlier poster posited it’s jetsam, which at least at sea means you can legally salvage it.
<nitpick>
Surely, since it is still ‘floating’ in space, it would be flotsam. More properly it is the goods inside (if any) that would be flotsam; the craft itself is derelict - a vessel found entirely deserted or abandoned without hope or intention of recovery - fair game for anyone who comes across it.
It might become jetsam if it crashed back on earth, in which case it (or what is left of it) would remain the property of NASA.
Outer Space Treaty
Article VIII gives NASA and the United States full rights to salvage, but they could choose to not assert that right if they so wished as I believe they have done in some cases of Skylab debris in Australia.
(For some reason I can’t properly quote your posts)
I realized later that I misread your post–you were saying that the return would require a heat shield that wasn’t needed at launch–I read it as you disputing that a fairing was needed at launch and conflating it with a heat shield.
Would it meet that definition? A craft that is being actively searched for and is in a place which is ‘safe’ for that craft to be long term. It seems to at least have some hope of recovery.
Not that the space shuttle is a thing anymore, but how does the size compare to the dimensions of a shuttle’s payload area? Just as an idea for “realm of the possible” with some future craft that might improve upon the shuttle.
I would imagine the shuttles underwent fewer Gs on landing, no?
I was saying that it’s jetsam on the basis that it was deliberately ejected from another vehicle for the sake of survival of that other vehicle. Flotsam, I think, is specifically wreckage from a damaged or destroyed vehicle which is floating, and Apollo 10 suffered no such mishap.
The fact that the mission was launched with the plan to jettison Snoopy might mitigate against this, though.
It was also ‘ejected’ for scientific purposes and studied in this mode, so it was being used as a unmanned probe and was useful for that purpose after ejecting.
According to this NASA site, the Shuttle’s cargo bay’s dimensions are 18.3m by 4.6m. According to Wikipedia, the LM is 7.04m tall and has a diameter of 4.22m when the landing gear is not deployed. Without more specific dimensions, it seems possible.
damn space lawyers.