Word: falcon
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APOLLO 15 Astronaut Dave Scott was hardly exaggerating. As he stepped off the ladder of his moon ship Falcon to become the seventh man to walk on the lunar crust, Scott faced the most awesome terrain ever explored: stark mountains, treacherous gorges, strange mounds and craters. "I can look straight up and see our good earth there," he said. A quarter of a million miles away, the world looked up and saw Scott, his peculiar light-footed movements carrying him across color- television scenes of stunning clarity...
With a tug on a cable, the $12.9 million lunar rover folded slowly out of Falcon's side. Its hollow, wire-mesh wheels snapped into place, and the moon car was lowered to the ground. Like most earthly vehicles the rover had a problem: the front-wheel steering did not work. Nonetheless, a 25-yard test drive showed that it was ready to go with its back wheels steering. After a motherly reminder from Mission Control ("Okay, Dave, remember to buckle up for safety"), the astronauts clambered aboard, strapped themselves into place, pushed the control stick forward and moved...
...short time later Scott and Irwin crawled into Falcon, preparing to cast off from the mother ship?and encountered another momentary scare: As they emerged from the back side of the moon, Scott reported: "Houston, we did not get a separation." Falcon and Endeavour were still tightly latched together. Again the wizards in Mission Control solved the problem: telemetry showed that two electrical plugs had not properly connected, and therefore separation could not be accomplished. Worden closed the circuit, and Falcon at last was free...
When they get back to the landing site, Scott will park the rover 300 ft. from Falcon and 31 hrs. later, at 1:09 p.m., the car's camera should give the world its first live view of a spacecraft blasting off from the moon. By 3:04 p.m., Scott and Irwin should dock with the command module Endeavour (named for the ship used by 18th century English Navigator and Explorer James Cook). That will also reunite them with Worden, who will have conducted more scientific experiments than any other command-module pilot during his three days alone...
...example of sheer technological innovation, however, nothing aboard Apollo 15 quite beats NASA's new I.RV (for Lunar Roving Vehicle), more commonly known as the "moon rover." Tucked away in the side of Falcon, the collapsible, 10-ft.-long jumble of aluminum tubing, wire and rods might easily be mistaken for a Rube Goldbergian version of an old-fashioned foldaway Murphy bed. Actually, it is one of the most unusual and expensive cars ever built (cost of the moon buggy program: $37.8 million...