Good Morning Everyone,
[/size]
[/size]Thank you for your responses.
[/size]
[/size]The article appeared on our company's intranet, and it is not accessible from outside. I apologize, but I cannot provide the article.
[/size]
[/size]The article was not very well written, and did not provide dates of when the discussion with Shepard occurred. It may have been very early in the U.S. space program when all aspects and contingencies of a moon landing were being contemplated...perhaps even prior to LOR, when the plan was to use the Direct approach, landing the CSM. This might explain the concern about landing in the dark. Whether they intended to use chem-lights or another design, I do not know, but would be interested to find out.
[/size]
[/size]As Antiquark notes, for weight and perhaps lack of necessity as the mission evolved, these lights were deleted if they were ever part of the early LM design. By the time the LM was designed and built, I believe the LM descent profile kept them in sunlight from un-docking until the landing.
[/size]
[/size]I have to wonder who had thought through an emergency landing on the dark side using drop lights, whether it was engineers or the astronauts. As several of you indicated, a landing would be one of the worst solutions to an emergency, with little or no hope of rescue. Dropping the LM Descent stage, and aborting back to the CSM was a much better plan, but they may not have been visualizing "LM" at the time of the drop light discussion. That was my main purpose for this thread...to document some of the problems / solutions worked through prior to a voyage to the Moon. In this case, the problem and solution became a very minor (though interesting) footnote.
[/size]
[/size]Cheers from Texas
