What is fiction and what is true in the blockbuster "Armageddon", or How the miners helped NASA to conquer the moon

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The fantastic Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon, filmed in 1998, had a lot of truth at its core. It's not about saving the world, of course. Back in the sixties of the last century, NASA hired a group of miners to carry out a certain mission. The space department desperately needed the experience of miners in order to implement its ambitious project to master the moon.

At the time, NASA had just completed one of its largest projects, the giant Saturn V rocket. It weighed nearly three thousand tons. On this spacecraft, it was planned to deliver the first people to the moon. But how to implement the delivery of such a monstrously bulky object to the launch pad? Then NASA engineers turned their attention to the mining industry as a source of inspiration for this critical issue.

In the beginning, of course, more prosaic options were considered. First of all, the most obvious one is the railway. The use of a barge and a channel specially dug for this were also discussed. Only such a project provided for many engineering difficulties. Among other things, in order to provide a heavy rocket with reliable stability during transportation, some kind of platform was needed.

The choice of space engineers fell on the lifting mechanism that was used on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. They went there to study it in the most thorough way. It was necessary to understand whether it was possible to use something similar to transport Saturn V.

At that time, the American company American Machine & Foundry Company was already involved in the implementation of the project. They were the largest manufacturers of a variety of equipment in the United States. The company produced everything: both garden tools and yachts with nuclear reactors. The idea was that on rails, on barges, the missile would be delivered to its destination. The project was in the active stage of development when a certain Barry Schlenk made a fateful call to NASA.

Barry was a spokesman for Bucyrus-Erie, a mining equipment company. He learned about the problems of space engineers and decided to offer his help. Barry phoned the deputy head of Future Launch Systems Research and then emailed him photographs of the tracked excavator. This equipment was manufactured by the Schlenka company. It was used in coal mining in Kentucky.

In February 1962, a group of engineers from the Launch Operations Directorate (LOD) traveled to Paradise, a small town in Muhlenburg County, Kentucky. There they wanted to look at this crawler excavator up close, to see firsthand how it works. The engineers watched with bated breath as the track loader loaded a mountain of coal and gracefully carried it away. The working platform of the excavator was stabilized by hydraulic cylinders at four corners and practically did not move. Nearby, NASA workers were able to observe the operation of another tracked excavator. Its carrying capacity even exceeded the weight of the rocket and all the necessary equipment!

The LOD representatives were so impressed that they immediately decided to strike a deal with Bucyrus-Erie. The company was supposed to start building crawlers for NASA. There were some difficulties. A certain Ohio company objected and demanded competitive bidding. The company was called Marion Power Shovel Co. They offered NASA a $ 8 million contract, a whopping $ 3 million less than Bucyrus-Erie. Marion won.

When it came to appointing a manager for such a large-scale project, the choice fell on the representative of the competing company, Bucyrus-Erie. This man's name was Philip Kering. It was his name that went down in history. But the price at the end of the project even exceeded the very eleven million that were originally announced to Bucyrus-Erie.

Marion built two huge tracked transporters for NASA. The weight of each was two thousand seven hundred tons. The dimensions could impress even the most sophisticated engineer. Each device was a four-entrance nine-story building. The excavators had eight tracks each. In the work of these machines, a laser guidance system was used. Their speed with a load was about one and a half kilometers per hour. It seems very small, but considering the size of the colossus and its load, it is simply amazing! The vehicles are equipped with sixteen electric motors powered by four diesel engines.

For the safe movement of the tracked conveyor along with its precious cargo, a unique roadbed was designed and built. After all, the road had to withstand an unprecedented load.

In general, these tracked transporters are unique machines. These are the largest land vehicles in the world. Since 1965, they have transported everything from Saturn V rockets during the Apollo missions to the Skylab and Apollo Soyuz programs. The transporters were nicknamed "Hans" and "Franz". After the lunar landing programs and Skylab projects ended, the crawlers continued their work. They have been delivering space shuttles to their launch sites for three decades.

NASA expects these vehicles to continue to serve in the coming years. They are pinning their hopes on the implementation of the Artemis program. Also, this machine will have to carry the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which will one day be able to deliver people to Mars.

Humanity has always dreamed of conquering space. Read our article on who was the first in this and changed history forever: curious facts from the biography of the first cosmonaut, which the public did not know: unknown Yuri Gagarin.