MANUFACTURING


 

 

 

The total story of how the LM was manufactured was a complex process involving too many steps to fully document on this web site. Suffice to say, that from the time manufacturing the initial ascent stage midsection started in plant 2, to when a LM was packed in it's pressurized containers and shipped to NASA KSC via the Super Guppy - two and one half years would have transpired.

  

Some of this effort can be illustrated by this transcipt between Tom Kelly (K) and R. Thruelsen (T) author of  "The Grumman Story".

T:

Well, essentially, you were building a machine to do something that had never been done before, so many times you must have looked down the road and said, 'What in God's name can we build which would do that?' That presents You with a completely original challenge, doesn't it?bb
K: The challenge was in the application of known principles and techniques. The other challenge was in the quality control. Even with all the money we were paying for this stuff, it was still very difficult to get 100 percent quality control. There was a real premium on hand-craftsmanship on the LM-as there was, indeed, on the entire Apollo spacecraft.

T:

Craftsmanship-that's always been one of Grumman's strong points, of course.

K:

Yes, and we proved to be strong here. But it didn't come easy. It took a lot of pride and conscientious workmanship on the part of the people involved.
T: In what way?
K: Well, some people seem to have the idea that space vehicles are made by pushing buttons and using automated manufacturing techniques and all that. Actually, it is quite different-quite the opposite, in fact. There is no real production involved in spacecraft. They are handmade. It's almost like the old cottage industry where an individual craftsman painstakingly molds or files or does something with great skill. It is much more like that.
T: An analogy: It is closer to the old XFF-l, the first Grumman plane, for instance. Where, at Baldwin and Valley Stream, they had an order for, originally, I think, two of the planes and they built them by hand.
K: That's right. Much more like that, except that this involved very high technology. Very sophisticated, very demanding equipment. Everything's got to be spotlessly clean, for example. If you contaminate it you mess it up in various ways. Then there are processes they now use that they didn't use back in those days. Like various kinds of welding and brazing which can only be inspected by X ray or ultrasonic techniques. And many of the materials that we used in the LM are much harder to work with and so forth.
T: You didn't use the electron beam welder on the LM, did you?
K: No, it was very new then and we didn't have it. We could have used that to good advantage, but we didn't have it. We did our tanks with titanium, but they were heli-arc welded-that's a very pretty process, and it has to be extremely clean, and the welding has to be very carefully controlled. The whole Apollo program was really a tribute to American craftsmanship. The LM part of it was a tribute to Grumman craftsmanship.
  

   The following link provides just some of the high lights of this large time critical effort.

MANUFACTURING THE LM
 

MANUFACTURING PICTURE SHOW


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