I asked Bernie Siegel, 99, about the progress in space travel.

by Dr. Marc Siegel

My 99-year-old father, Bernie, is a long-retired aeronautics engineer who worked on the Apollo moon landings for American Bosch Arma Corp., a subcontractor for Northrop Grumman. My father was responsible for quality control involving the lunar excursion module, which stayed stable in flight using simple gyros rather than advanced computers or artificial intelligence.

He was amazed when he learned of recent space-flight advances: “What we did with the LEM was crude compared to what they are doing now.” But there are still essential similarities. Dad worked on a system known as CWEA, short for Caution and Warning Electronics Assembly. “The idea was to let the astronauts on board know they had a problem. It monitored all of the instruments on the LEM. There were a lot of parameters. If everything worked, fine. If any of them went out of spec, it gave a caution. If they went too far, it issued a warning.”

CWEA helped save the crew of Apollo 13 when the LEM and its safety systems brought the faulty Saturn rocket safely back to Earth after an oxygen tank on the command and service module exploded. It was my father’s proudest moment as an engineer. His group received a national citation, about which he’s humble: “My work was just a small part of what happened.”

Fast-forward 53 years, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been chosen by NASA to develop a moon lander potentially for use this decade. The Blue Moon lander will be used for NASA’s Artemis exploration program, with manned use planned for Artemis V, in 2029.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX already has the contract for the lunar landing module (known as Starship Human Landing System) for the unmanned Artemis III and the manned Artemis IV. The SpaceX starship is a unibody construction in which the whole ship will land, while the Blue Moon lander is modular, like the Apollo LEM, with a lower propulsion unit and a logistics stage on top that can be used either as a cargo platform or a pressurized crew module.

My father said the Apollo LEM was far too cramped and called the 52-foot, four-legged Blue Moon lander a “big improvement.” He was fascinated to learn that Blue Origin beat a competing proposal from Northrop Grumman. “Now that’s a mistake,” he said. “Grumman has done it before and knows what they are doing, and their experience would help save on cost.”

When he heard the new lander contract is worth $3.4 billion, whereas the original LEM cost NASA some $50 million (around $425 million in today’s dollars), he laughed: “They don’t worry about money. It’s only our money.”

Link to article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-father-helped-put-men-on-the-moon-bernie-siegel-space-exploration-nasa-grumman-spacex-blue-moon-c1c48681