Duct Tape In SPACE! Apollo 17, a busted fender, a map and duct tape.

[dmccarty]

Last night, I watched a documentary on PBS about the Apollo 17 moon mission which was the last mission to the moon. The show was very interesting but what really got my attention was the use of duct tape to fix the moon rover! You can't make up stuff like this! :laughing:

The short summary, is that one of the astronauts broke a fender on the moon rover when he brushed up against the fender with a hammer that was in a pocket on his leg. This was very serious because the fender helped keep the moon dust off the buggy. With the fender gone, moon dust was covering the buggy, instruments and astronauts. The dust was dark in color which was causing batteries, space suits and instruments to over heat. The dust would also get into equipment causing other problems. What to do?

Cernan: "And I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to take some time to try to get that fender back on. Jack, is the tape under my seat, do you remember?" (He's referring to a roll of ordinary, gray duct tape.)
Schmitt: "Yes."

NASA packed duct tape on the lunar rover! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

The video in the documentary and in the link below, shows the astronaut ripping duct tape to repair the fender! :shocked: The repair lasted a few hours but then failed. The astronauts went to sleep and NASA worked on a solution over night. When the astronauts woke up they were told to use some maps they no longer needed and more duct tape to create a new fender. They did this and kept on driving! :shocked::laughing::laughing::laughing: You can see video and photos of the moon rover with the duct tape and map fender!

I found this link on the Internet that has the full story, Moondust and Duct Tape - NASA Science

Apollo 17 astronauts and moonbuggy in the Taurus-Littrow valley. [More] About 60 seconds after touchdown, Schmitt radioed Houston, "Batteries look good," followed by a brief pause, and "Oh, man!! Look at that rock out there!"

​

Cernan agreed, "Absolutely incredible."

Within hours the two astronauts were down the ladder loading a raft of geology tools and experiments onto their Lunar Roving Vehicle or "moonbuggy." Everything was going smoothly until

Cernan brushed against the rover; a hammer in the shin pocket of his spacesuit caught the buggy's right rear fender and tore half of it off.


Cernan: "Oh, you won't believe it. There goes a fender."


Schmitt: "Oh, shoot!"


Now, a moonbuggy in Alabama can go just fine without a fender, but in Taurus-Littrow a missing fender was a potential disaster. The reason is moondust. When a rover rolls across the lunar surface, it kicks up a plume of moondust in its wake. (Astronauts called them "rooster tails.") Without a fender, the rover would be showered by a spray of dark, abrasive grit. White spacesuits blackened by dust could turn into dangerous absorbers of the fierce lunar sun with astronauts overheating inside. Sharp-edged dust wiped off visors would scratch the glass, making helmets difficult to see out of. Moondust also had an uncanny way of working itself into hinges, latches and joints, rendering them useless.


Cernan: "And I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to take some time to try to get that fender back on. Jack, is the tape under my seat, do you remember?" (He's referring to a roll of ordinary, gray duct tape.)


Schmitt: "Yes."


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: "?ood 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.



Driving across a rough patch of lunar terrain, Cernan commented, "Man, you could lose the rear end of this thing in a hurry." And, indeed, the fender fell off again. Duct tape held it for a while, but moondust had reduced the tape's stickiness too much to hold on for a whole EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity).

Schmitt: "I think you have lost your fender. I keep getting rained on here (with lunar dust)."


Cernan: "Oh, no!"


Schmitt: "Look at our rooster tail."


Subsequent stops required considerable housekeeping. "Let me run around and dust!" radioed Cernan while Schmitt deployed the Surface Electrical Properties (SEP) experiment. In a post-flight briefing he noted, "The dust on the battery covers and everything else was thick enough to write in. With a working fender you'd always got a light film of dust; but this was 'dirt' dust."

Back at the Challenger, Cernan gave the parked rover a rueful inspection. "Oh, man, I tell you, it's going to take us half a dozen Sundays to dust. Look at that fender; that's terrible. Boy, that one fender just [creates] an order of magnitude more of a dust problem."


Back in Houston, NASA engineers understood the seriousness of the situation. If they couldn't come up with a solution while Cernan and Schmitt slept, the next day's exploration could be severely curtailed. The astronauts might even be limited to walking distance.



But they did come up with a fix and it called on, you guessed it, duct tape.


When Cernan and Schmitt woke up the next morning, mission control explained how they should tape four laminated maps together in the shape of the missing fender. "Just call me the little old fender maker," said Cernan as he tore off pieces of gray tape. This time the taping was done inside the relatively dust-free confines of the lunar lander, so the duct tape retained its usual stickiness. Clamped to the moonbuggy, the new fender held for the rest of the mission, which included another 15 hours of EVAs.

The link has some photos and videos of the dust and duct tape repair.

I will not feel bad about using duct tape to fix stuff in the future! If it is good enough for Apollo astronauts it is good enough for me! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

 

[2LaneCruzer]

Last night, I watched a documentary on PBS about the Apollo 17 moon mission which was the last mission to the moon. The show was very interesting but what really got my attention was the use of duct tape to fix the moon rover! You can't make up stuff like this! :laughing:

The short summary, is that one of the astronauts broke a fender on the moon rover when he brushed up against the fender with a hammer that was in a pocket on his leg. This was very serious because the fender helped keep the moon dust off the buggy. With the fender gone, moon dust was covering the buggy, instruments and astronauts. The dust was dark in color which was causing batteries, space suits and instruments to over heat. The dust would also get into equipment causing other problems. What to do?



NASA packed duct tape on the lunar rover! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

The video in the documentary and in the link below, shows the astronaut ripping duct tape to repair the fender! :shocked: The repair lasted a few hours but then failed. The astronauts went to sleep and NASA worked on a solution over night. When the astronauts woke up they were told to use some maps they no longer needed and more duct tape to create a new fender. They did this and kept on driving! :shocked::laughing::laughing::laughing: You can see video and photos of the moon rover with the duct tape and map fender!

I found this link on the Internet that has the full story, Moondust and Duct Tape - NASA Science



The link has some photos and videos of the dust and duct tape repair.

I will not feel bad about using duct tape to fix stuff in the future! If it is good enough for Apollo astronauts it is good enough for me! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

Wasn't Duck tape part of the fix for the Apollo 13 problem?

 

[Steppenwolfe]

Shucks... around these parts, we refer to duct tape as hillbilly chrome.

 

[Heywood Jannockitov]

Taping a map to the fender sounds like a "redneck navigation system"

 

[dmccarty]

I was only kinda listening to the documentary, but when they said the astronaut damaged the lunar rover with a hammer stuck in a pocket, that got my attention! :shocked::laughing::laughing::laughing: This is something that would happen around a tractor. Then they started looking for duct tape under the front seat and I was What The Heck! :laughing::laughing::laughing: They can't be serious! Then they showed the video of the astronaut ripping the duct tape just like I did Saturday.

Course, I was using the duct tape to cover the holes in my leather work gloves while the astronauts were fixing the lunar rover but we were both using duct tape!

It is too danged funny to see the photos and video of the rover with the duct tape and map repair...

Later,
Dan

 

[turnkey4099]

Wasn't Duck tape part of the fix for the Apollo 13 problem?

Probably. Some type of tape was used to a make a square to round adapter for IIRC the CO2 cleaner (or sumpin).

Harry K

 

[jerrybob]

Duct tape holds the universe together........:thumbsup:

 

[Gunny]

Everybody loves Duct Tape, between the house, garage, workshop, RV, it's hard to say how many rolls I've got on hand because you never know when it'll come in handy.

Now I'm wondering if they had a can of WD-40 stashed under that seat also!

 

[dirt ditch]

Everybody loves Duct Tape, between the house, garage, workshop, RV, it's hard to say how many rolls I've got on hand because you never know when it'll come in handy.

Now I'm wondering if they had a can of WD-40 stashed under that seat also!

Strap a can of WD-40 to a space suit with duct tape and in 0 gravity you have a Jet-Pack! :laughing:

 

[Gunny]

I was watching a show on History about the top 100 inventions and Duct Tape made the list.