Duct tape saved Apollo 17 moonbuggy, while on the moon.
On the NASA website today, a tale in praise of the many merits of duct tape when one is on the moon with a busted buggy:
The date was Dec. 11, 1972. Astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt had just landed their lunar module Challenger in a beautiful mountain-ringed valley named Taurus-Littrow on the edge of the Sea of Serenity. (...)Link. Image: The Apollo 17 moonbuggy fender repaired with duct tape.Cernan: "Okay. I can't say I'm very adept at putting fenders back on. But I sure don't want to start without it. I'm just going to put a couple of pieces of good old-fashioned American gray tape on it...(and) see whether we can't make sure it stays."
In spite of his thick gloves, Cernan managed to unroll and tear off the needed pieces, but moondust foiled his first repair:
Cernan: "…good old-fashioned gray tape doesn't want to stick very well." (At a post flight briefing he explained: "Because there was dust on everything, once you got a piece of tape off the roll, the first thing the tape stuck to was dust; and then it didn't stick to anything else.")
His second attempt succeeded, however. "I am done!" crowed Cernan. "If that fender stays on ... I'd like some sort of mending award." And with that, they were off.
the latest
latest episodes
We salute you, duct tape.
Gaffa's better.
What won't it fix?
#2: Whaddaya, some kinda wiseguy commie?
What I really want to know is how much time he had to spend filling out insurance paperwork when he got back.
Those steel mesh tires with the riveted on titanium treads are still one of my favorite pieces of tech ever. Total spacepunk.
The shadows are all wrong in this picture. Another sign of a NASA conspiracy to lull us into the belief that we actually went to the moon, this time through the soma of duct tape.
If soma can be made of duct tape. Which it probably can.
This picture is so perfect, it hurts...
Ironically, the one thing duct tape is awful at holding together is ductwork. Really.
#2! It's "gaffer's" tape. And yes, it sticks and holds amazingly well . . . it also costs about 5x as much.
All hail the mighty grey tape! Affordable means of fixing everything . . .
Wasn't duct tape used in the Apollo 13 recovery?
...What isn't specified but implied is that, once the dust was removed by the first tape strip, the second strip stuck just fine. There was concerns in the back rooms at JSC that duct tape's adhesive properties *might* be compromised in a vacuum, but as it turns out for short-term use it works just as well as in a 1G, 14.7psi environment.
...Long term's a different story. General concensus is that, barring how tightly Geno wrapped the tape around the fender and the map they used for the patch, the fender has probably long since fallen off due to the adhesive "drying out" from vacuum-exacerbated outgassing. Tests done on Earth have provided similar results along these lines.
Welcome back, OM. Long time no hear.
I wonder what Richard C. Hoagland will have to say about this?
What kind of cameras were they using up there? Wow.
how can be dust in space? if there is no wind... and once you take it of.. should came back... i guess...
I've got a little more info on this subject over at my blog. I posted about Duct Tape & the Lunar Rover a while ago, and I've got tons of links to the actual NASA transcripts - plus some background not given here.
http://www.mitchross.com/blog/index.php?itemid=24
I was just the right age to fully appreciate the spectacle of the the Apollo moon landings (13-15 years old). I will never forget the experience of watching some of my fellow earthlings walk (bounce around) on another celestial body. I have a fear that I won't see it again.
I remember Apollo 17 when the fender was busted by the guy with a hammer in his pocket, I didn't, at the time, even think about how they fixed it. I just assumed they would. The fact that they used plain old duct tape makes it even better.
duct tape will never fail in an emergency .... unless its raining ....or under water....
Why did it need to be fixed, why do you need a fender on the moon? Is it not just dead weight?
What was duct tape doing with them anyway? Gotta love that space exploration budget.
duct tape on the moon, gotta love it...
the most useful thing on sol 3 and its associated moon
how did they open the duct tape with those huge gloves on? it's hard enough trying to use your nails let alone with "space" gloves on...
Hey where are the tracks? How did the moonbuggy get to where it is situated? When you look at many of the moonbuggy photos, the there are no tracks leading from anywhere to where it is resting. It's as if a "crane" was used to lower it into the scene.
You can see in this photo, no tracks what-so-ever are near the tires...
And of course it is on YouTube. Why wouldn't it be?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1CwJ8FAYE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7PHtNq0Hq8
You may not want to hear this but you have the date horribly,unforgiveably WRONG or maybe you don't care. The moon walk by astronauts was 1969, yep,or does it just not even matter? Having been alive 64 years does have its benefits, like pointing out incorrect dates. I know by the stamp on my passport.
I watched the landing, the "one giant step for mankind" real thing in Paris, outside a store, through the window,on some famous boulevard.I was
Ms cool thing because I thought it was boring.Later that year, I got pregnant in Hawaii,and my son Noah emerged in San Francisco at French Hospital, on September 4th 1970 when the planet Jupiter was in the mid heaven(?)and all the other planets were above the horizon; or was it Saturn? Us MOMS date everything by the irrevocable BIRTHDATE of each child. At least good moms do. Reply to saamleexxx3@yahoo.com I am not convinced that you will not spam, since you didn't even get the date right in the first sentence of your article.
Grandma Spammy Annie
eamous date you based your blog on, or whatever you call it
@Moonrising I assumed the lack of tracks was from the astronaut disturbing the soil around there while working on the buggy. There are other pictures with tracks around the buggy.
But then it makes sense. It is much easier to move it with a big crane inside a small soundstage than for the people playing like they are on the moon to just push it into place. That or install a motor on it and save money on the effects when they make it look like it is driving.
Re Bernbaum April 21, 2008 2:36 PM:
[Duct tape saved Apollo 17 moonbuggy]
What won't it fix?
Ducts!
A. Theisen
I'm only "Anonymous" because I don't feel like generating yet another Pass Word!
MrIntolerant, I remember the strange, not-entirely-unpleasant feeling of intellectual vertigo I had the first time I heard the "moon landing never happened" conspiracy theory. As these things go, it has to be the sweetest and most benign of all conspiracy theories. I think it's kind of beautiful. It's the kind of irrationality that can't hurt anybody, and might even be good as a myth to have around in our culture - at some point in your life, you hear it, and it temporarily fills you with wonder and makes you think about epistemology.
Though I guess it does play on people's fear of "the government," so I guess it could be harmful in that sense.
I think it is possible to use duct tape on any vehicle, when it it not traveling in space!!!!! really does the world actually know that HOLLYWOOD film the first space event........Youtube is going to open the real america
1) The lunar surface is covered in soil (proper term: regolith) formed from the ejecta of several billion years of meteor impacts. When Apollo landed on the moon, the tv images showed dust streaking away from the landing site driven by the exhaust from the rocket.
2) Videos of the space buggy show it bouncing across the surface. No doubt leaving gaps in its tracks.
3) When the buggy was first driven it threw up a roster tail of dust some of which landed on on the buggy. They stopped and repaired the damaged fender with grey tape and a map sheet.
4) The guy with the hammer is Jack Harrison-Schmit, the only scientist (geologist) to go to the moon in what was supposed to be a program of scientific exploration. Even then he only got a ride on the last trip.
5) There were multiple moon landings. As I've said Apollo 17 was the last.
Yeh, that was the first moon landing..
This was the 11th.. in 1972.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17
Sorry, 11th man-mission, 6th Moon landing..
Alan@8
The reason for that is "duct tape" is from a mishearing of "duck tape", as in tape made from duck canvas. It was never indended to be used on ductwork in the first place.
There was a LOT of dust on the Moon. The astronauts drug a lot of it back into the lunar module after EVAs despite their best efforts.
The main problem was it was so fine grained and so dry that it would stick to things electro-statically. They had brushes to try and clean themselves off, but it was pretty futile.
The critical part about that fender was without it dust would spray up everywhere on the rover. There were mirrored surfaces on the battery covers, intended to reflect sunlight and keep them cool. When dust built up on them they would start to heat up. So one activity they'd have to do (even after the jury rigged repair) was to dust the battery covers after each stop.
Of course brushing mirrors off that are covered in very fine powdered rick is really not a good way to keep them shiny, but it was better than nothing. And the repaired fender was better than no fender at all.
Ark,
I think that the issue might not be so much 'dates' as 'meds', if you catch my drift.
@moonrising
"Hey where are the tracks?"
In order for there to be tracks, it has to be driven first.
"How did the moonbuggy get to where it is situated?"
It was assembled on the spot.
The main problem was it was so fine grained and so dry that it would stick to things electro-statically.
...That's what was originally thought. After the initial studies of the dust were conducted following A11 and A12, it became apparent that the dust's adhesion wasn't due to any sort of static cling, but to the fact that the dust was so damn coarse from having even smaller micrometeoroids impacting into it that each grain basically developed "teeth" and latched onto the fibers of the EVA suits. This was the reason that brushing not only didn't work too well, it actually ground the dust deeper and more firmly into the suits.
And yeah, that's an issue that'll have to be addressed when we return for longer stays, because those fabric suits aren't going to last too damn long under those conditions...
====QUICK SIDE NOTE====
...Thanks to those who've noted my sudden lengthy absence of late on Boing Boing and Sci.Space.*. In a nutshell, things turned a bit sour with my right leg, and they ended up having to amputate just below the knee. The good news is that I'm a prime candidate for a prosthethe...prosth...oh, frack it, a fake leg. The better news is that I'm going to be a gimp that's pimped, with the leg in everyone's face having been lit up by LEDs! Which means no doubt I'll get featured on BB when I finally figure out what combination of LED kits and power source I want to install. In the meantime, I'm considering these two t-shirts to wear:
"My Other Leg Is A Lexus"
"My Leg Is Currently Rented To Lee Majors!"
OM, that's shocking news, and it's amazing you are in as bright spirits as you appear to be.
Pimp it up brother, pimp it up!
But stay away from Boston.
OM-san, I be very proud and privileged to help in this engineering project in any way. Publish some specs and I'll help you find parts.
To anyone who believes that we actually landed on the moon, I have some prime beach front property in the mohave desert I'm looking to unload. :)
I've actually been hearing the fake moon landing conspiracy theory pretty frequently in the last few years. That's strange, because I assumed it went away. The people who have told me this all seemed to believe it deeply, were otherwise reasonable and functional adults and were all of Arabic or Chaldean background. If tha tsounds odd, it's not. Detroit has a HUGE population of more or less well integrated individuals of Middle Eastern extraction for reasons I've failed to discover.
ANYWAY with this odd belief belonging predominantly to one general racial group I wonder if there isn't some cultural reason for the belief or influential entity that's promoting it. When I ask, all I get is "Oh, everyone knows that"
Strange...
simple truth: it easier to go to the moon than fake it and keep it secret
RossInDetroit, when you're a first-gen, I think you look inside your own community for verification, and then the second-gens look more to their peer groups in school rather than their parents - depending on how isolated the community is, of course. Imagine going to another country - wouldn't you tend to look to other ex-pats to help you interpret confusing events?
I'd love to read a serious folklore history of the "moon landing hoax" conspiracy theory, but all the books seem to be either promoting the hoax theory, or debunking it. Not enough folklorists to go around, perhaps.
Takuan, that's what "they" want you to believe, my brother.
@44: I've been told the Fake Moon Landing Myth by college graduates and successful business owners, though it seems to prevail in working class circles from my experience. It may be an attempt to minimize or disparage American scientific accomplishments. That's my best guess.
KidDork,
"The shadows are all wrong in this picture."
Would you mind explaining why you said that? I can use Photoshop so please provide details.
Mike
The shadows are all wrong in this picture.
They photoshopped out the Blessed Virgin's image? Moonsquatch? Ben Stein?
This seems as appropriate a time as any to mention The Lonely Astronaut, one of my favouritist web-series ever.
http://www.twistedmojo.com/la.html
MSCIR
isn't KidDork just lampooning the conspiracy theorist's viewpoint? They always cite inconsistent shadows, which i guess makes it even funnier cause the shadows in this picture are all consistent. This must be one of the better fakes.