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Comment By PAUL FATTIG MailTribune.com By PAUL FATTIG Posted Sep. 13, 2009 at 12:01 AM By PAUL FATTIG Posted Sep. 13, 2009 at 12:01 AM » Social News ASHLAND — When Leo DeMarinis joined the team of top American scientists whose mission was to put the first man on the moon, he immediately began his homework. "I said to myself, 'Where do we begin? Nobody has ever been there before,' " recalled the retired rocket scientist who lives in Ashland. "So we had to study up on the moon and space travel. To get ideas, we read Jules Verne and Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic books." Books such as Verne's 1865 "From the Earth to the Moon," in which a moon gun blasts humans nearly a quarter of a million miles to the lunar surface, launched the scientists' imaginations in spring 1961. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in the space race. President John F. Kennedy had just announced the national goal of landing a man on the moon before the decade was out. The lunar module "Eagle" that DeMarinis helped design would land on the moon's dusty Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969. When astronaut Neil Armstrong made that first giant leap for mankind, he became lunar legend. "Looking back, it's mind-boggling that we did it, absolutely mind-boggling," said DeMarinis, 85, whose memorabilia from the Apollo 11 mission will be displayed at ScienceWorks Hands-on Museum in Ashland when the NASA Exploration Experience mobile exhibit arrives on Friday. "There were so many obstacles to overcome," he said. "Nobody had done this before." Hailing from the Big Apple, DeMarinis recalls as a child looking up through the city lights to gaze at the moon overhead. "I always wanted to fly but it just wasn't in the cards — we were from a poor family," he said, noting his parents lost nearly everything during the Great Depression. Yet he and his two brothers all would graduate from college. One sibling became a medical doctor, the other a dentist. But Leo DeMarinis kept his eyes on the sky, graduating from New York University with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering in 1947. After working as a stress analyst for more than a dozen years, DeMarinis was hired at Grumman Aerospace shortly after JFK announced the manned moon mission. The aeronautical engineer was selected to help design a lunar module. Although he worked on several space vehicles over his dozen years at Grumman, the Apollo 11 lunar module was the zenith of his rocket science career. He later taught structural analysis in college in New York City for 26 years before retiring at age 76. Noting that his laptop computer is more powerful than the computer on Apollo 11, DeMarinis said the Apollo 11 scientists didn't have the luxury of today's cyberspace tools. Many of the calculations were worked out with pad and pencil. The module, which would weigh 33,000 pounds on Earth, would be carried in the mother ship, disengage while in moon orbit, land on the lunar surface, then return safely to dock with the orbiting spacecraft. It was a tall order, he noted. However, since the moon's gravitational pull is a sixth of the Earth's, the lunar escape velocity required was only 6,000 miles per hour, well below the 25,000 mph needed to escape the planet's gravity, he said. When the module was being built, it was kept in a sterilized room that was pressurized to keep contaminants out. "To get into the room, you had to walk across a sticky mat, then into a small closet where you were blasted by compressed air to remove lint or dandruff or whatever," DeMarinis recalled. The scientists also put on a white gown and cap as though they were entering a surgical room. During the eight years the module was being built, all seven first-generation astronauts, including Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the three chosen for the Apollo 11 mission, periodically would drop by to check on the spacecraft's progress and chat with the scientists. One of DeMarinis' projects was designing the small jets used to control the module while it was on the moon. Using a model of the module, he demonstrated how the jets guided the vehicle. "For example, if you fired these two in the front, the whole spacecraft would move backwards," he said, noting that firing a jet in the front and one in the back could be used to turn it. "We could make it go in any direction." Inside on the instrument panel was a thrust-to-weight ratio gauge for the module's rocket engine. "When thrust equaled weight, you hovered," he said. "When thrust exceeded weight, you rose. When thrust was less than weight, you descended." After a rocket scientist observed the astronauts would be stranded if the module fell over while landing, they began working on ways to help them survive should a rescue mission be required. "We knew we would lose our astronauts unless we could provide them with food and oxygen for at least a week, allowing us enough time to get another ship up there," DeMarinis said. They studied Magellan's pioneering voyage around the world and his crew's steadily dwindling food supply. They knew the astronauts would not be too keen about eating leather trimmings as Magellan's crew did. However, because of space limitations, there wasn't room for a lot of emergency food. "One of the men (a physiologist) had a baby at home and was feeding it Pablum one evening," DeMarinis said. "He spilled some on the floor. It hardened by the next morning, so it gave him an idea." He took cornflakes and hominy grits, ground them up and pressed them into a thin panel. "It looked like Masonite," DeMarinis said. "We had an edible structure. We figured we would make the whole instrument panel out of that. "It was ideal," he added. "It was light. You could drill holes in it. It would hold the instruments. It was nonmagnetic." But the invention didn't fly. One that did was the landing gear the scientists created to keep the module from bouncing on the lunar surface. "We had to find something that would absorb the energy and not spring back, causing the ship to turn over," he said. After a scientist stepped on a Coke can during a lunch break, noticing that it didn't bounce back, the team decided to try aluminum honeycomb as shock absorbers, he said. But they quickly found that trying to use a lathe on the thin aluminum didn't work. "We got around that problem by filling the aluminum full of water and freezing it," he said. "We put it back on the lathe and it turned nice and round. The ice backed up the foil. "When it landed, it crushed the honeycomb and didn't rebound," he added. "It stayed put. Worked perfectly." Once the module was completed, the team had to demonstrate to NASA that an astronaut could climb up the module steps and get through the hatch wearing an inflated spacesuit and a backpack, he said. Since the spacesuit was not yet completed, the crew used a high-altitude inflated Navy suit. But the suit was too large for the test pilot. "So they took the crotch-to-the-shoulders dimensions and ran around Grumman looking for a fit," he said. Turns out DeMarinis was a perfect fit. "I was the first one to climb up those steps and get through that hatch," he said. Meanwhile, DeMarinis said little to his family about his work. After all, much of the work was top secret because the Soviets also were trying to be the first on the moon. His daughter, Sue DeMarinis, a longtime chiropractor in Ashland, thought of him as an average dad who mowed the lawn on weekends. "You would think someone whose daily routine was to figure out a way to get a man to the moon, that it would be the subject around the dinner table conversation," she said. "He never said much about what he did. "But I realized what he was doing when he brought the spacecraft models to school when I was in third grade," she added. "All the kids looked at me differently after that. They said, 'Your dad is a rocket scientist!' " During the actual moon landing, DeMarinis and his family, including his late wife, Virginia, were in San Francisco, bound for Japan. They watched a fuzzy black-and-white television image of Armstrong stepping onto the moon. "I remember being just amazed to watch the landing on the moon," Sue DeMarinis recalled. "But Dad was going, 'He's wearing my spacesuit. Look at how the shock absorbers are working.' He was seeing it from the accomplishment of eight years of work." The retired rocket scientist firmly believes that mankind will again return to the moon. "I predict that, when we screw up the Earth bad enough, we will colonize the moon," he said, adding the next giant leap for mankind will be Mars. He envisions scientists building a geodesic dome like those created by futurist Buckminster Fuller. "We will build the dome and have a tank full of algae," DeMarinis said. "Algae will consume human waste, give off oxygen and it is edible." He figures it couldn't be any worse than the edible panel the scientists created for the lunar module. Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected]. By PAUL FATTIG MailTribune.com By PAUL FATTIG Posted Sep. 13, 2009 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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