Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas J. Kelly

list were IBM Selectric typewriters—the new design with the removable type ball—which were in short supply at Grumman.Most of the engineers we needed had worked on our proposal for the Apollo spacecraft in 1961 and on LM studies since then.
    Al, Erick, and I assembled the dozen or so LM proposal engineers in our work area and passed the word. Al promised to find space and desks for another two dozen people in Preliminary Design; the remainder would have to work at their “home” desks and visit us as required. A large conference room in the mezzanine would be available for our daily proposal meetings, which would begin as soon as we had the request for proposal.
    The next morning Joe, Al, Erick, and I joined a standing-room-only crowd in the plainly furnished conference area within Preliminary Design. Saul Ferdman, Grumman’s space marketing director, passed out copies of the RFP and summarized what it contained, having read it on the plane from Houston. It was a drastic departure from NASA’s usual RFP, which normally provided a detailed set of mission plans, spacecraft specifications, and technical requirements and requested that contractors respond with their preliminary design of spacecraft and systems to meet the requirements, their plans for building and supporting the spacecraft to a NASA-specified schedule, and their bid price.
    For the lunar module NASA considered both the mission planning and the technical requirements too uncertain to buy a proposed design. Instead they decided to base contractor selection on an evaluation of which company’s design team was most knowledgeable about the LM’s mission and requirements and had plausible approaches to its design. The company’s manufacturing capability, financial stability, and record of quality would also be considered, and the estimated cost for the program was requested as a means of determining the contractor’s understanding of the program’s scope.
    The RFP was more like a graduate examination in an aerospace engineering design course than a typical government procurement specification. It posed fourteen technical questions and required discussion of five management areas, to be answered in one hundred pages of carefully specified format, even to the type size and line spacing. The technical questions “probed the most exacting technical requirements in the LM mission,” as we told NASA in our response. 1 Summarizing some of them:
1. Discuss the flight mechanics and other considerations of near-Moon trajectories and of lunar launch and rendezvous.
2. Describe your approach to the design of the following LM systems: onboard checkout, propulsion, reaction control, flight control.
3. To what extent do you consider backup methods of control and guidance necessary? Describe your approach to this issue.
4. How do visibility requirements affect LM operations and design?
5. How would you accommodate micrometeoroid and radiation hazards in the LM design?
    The RFP encouraged contractors to submit a conceptual design of a lunar module with their proposals, as a means of focusing their answers to the questions and demonstrating their competence in manned spacecraft design. However, NASA was not buying the contractor’s design; after the winner of the competition was selected, NASA and the contractor’s engineers together would develop the preliminary design of the LM.
    We already had three conceptual designs prepared against our own estimates of the mission requirements and the space environment. Our major tasks were to compare NASA’s official requirements with our estimates, to determine the impact of differences on our designs, to select a leading candidate design, and to refine and improve that design until time ran out for the proposal. In parallel we drafted answers to NASA’s questions and analyzed them for possible effects on our conceptual design. Within a couple of days we were deeply immersed in this process.
    We ultimately submitted a design